Y2KRAP
Why Battlefield Earth, Blair Witch 2 and all those Mars movies make 2000 a year to forget.
      by Sarah Kendzior

Before I explain that, however, I wanted to share this really cool idea I have for a movie. It's about this working-class single mom named, um, Emily Dawidowicz who discovers that a company has been poisoning the residents of a small, uh, Oregon town with toxic chemicals. Together with her boss at the, oh, banking firm she works in, she outwits the evil corporation and becomes a national hero. And oh yeah, this idea has absolutely nothing to do with Erin Brockovich -- I mean, they are two totally different pictures. And any insinuation otherwise is an insult to my integrity!

House on Haunted Hill The Haunting

Right.

You'd have to be a real dumbass to buy that one, but studio execs do, and often for millions of dollars, so I figured I'd give it a shot (with apologies to the real Emily Dawidowicz, my grandma.) In recent years, the trend has become alarming -- Volcano and Dante's Peak I could understand, and even Deep Impact and Armageddon. But when Antz and A Bug's Life came along... I think we all knew who was being bugged. Then again, who doesn't have elaborate fantasies about animated insects? (Besides, of course, the obvious answer of No One.)

Last year's answer to this trend -- which seems to occur, disproportionately and unfortunately, in genre movies -- was the pairing of the haunted house horror remakes House on Haunted Hill and The Haunting (originally entitled The Haunting of Hill House), which were further united in the fact that they sucked. You'd think studios would have learned from this -- especially given that both movies earned less than original, interesting horror fare like The Sixth Sense -- but no. Of course they didn't.

The great spiritual leader Yoda once posed an interesting question: "Who is more foolish? The fool, or the fool who follows him?" In the previous instance I'd opt for the fool (Jan de Bont), but the dilemma becomes much more confusing when there are three players involved.

Red Planet Mission to Mars

I'm speaking, of course, of the Mars movies. Now I don't know who decided that Mars is the cool topic of the year (why not, say, the underexplored Pluto? Or another planet altogether... ooh, but then we might have Titan A.E., which is not really a good idea either) but apparently they were quite convincing in their pitch. The movies are called, in order of release, Mission to Mars, Ghost of Mars, and Red Planet. Of course, Mission to Mars was really called M2M, not to be confused with MIB or MI2 or MIB2 or the forthcoming IDGAS, which is an 11th Hour Production called I Don't Give A Shit.

Now we've already seen Mission to Mars, a Brian De Palma film that I can only describe as a blight to humanity. But this picture -- the tragic tale of Tim Robbins', Gary Sinise's and Don Cheadle's struggle to find signs of intelligent life in actress Connie Nielsen -- looks just swell compared to John Carpenter's Ghost of Mars, which is set to star... Courtney Love. Now I don't know about you, but unless Courtney is playing 1) a drug addict 2) a slut or 3) a drug addict slut, I'm not buying it. Then again, this is a John Carpenter movie, so maybe I'll have nothing to worry about. Rumor has it, however, that Kurt Cobain's wife will be playing... an astronaut.

Warner Brothers' Red Planet looks slightly better, but mostly by default. The thing is, it doesn't open until late this fall, and who in the world is going to care by then, especially if Ghost of Mars is half as bad as it seems? The topic will simply be exhausted. Of course, in a creative world, no topic would be ever exhausted because there can always exist endless variations on similar themes... but a creative world wouldn't allow three Mars movies to be greenlit in the first place.

And it doesn't end there. 2000 boasts not only three Mars movies, but two Scream parodies -- I Know What You Screamed Last Summer and Scary Movie, which was formerly entitled Scream If You Know What I Did Last Halloween. (And that's actually three parodies if you count Urban Legends, or four, for that matter, if you include Scream 3.)

Now I can certainly see why someone would want to parody the teen slasher genre. That is, after all, what the original Scream did so brilliantly in 1996. It is a sad state of affairs when a parody of a film genre sets off a stream of imitators which also aspire to be parodies, but are so clumsy and inept that they lead to the entire genre being spoofed again. Methinks there is a lesson that has gone unlearned here. As for the films themselves, Scary Movie is by the Wayans brothers, who generally are pretty funny (especially Keenan, who is directing), but I have it on good authority that the film includes a giant pair of testicles, a penis entering someone's ear, and the presence of American Pie bimbo Shannon Elizabeth, who makes up in other areas what she lacks in last name. As for I Know What You Screamed Last Summer, the script is rumored to be decent, but it was originally scheduled to open last summer, never a good sign.

Which brings me to yet another problem in year 2000 genre films: the millennium seems to have been designated the ultimate dumping ground for crappy sci fi and horror flicks. I mean, if you had a movie so awful that it might go straight to video, and it had Winona Ryder in it, wouldn't you want to get rid of it as soon as possible? Apparently not, and so Janusz Kaminski's Lost Souls has been moved from the summer of 1999 to the fall of 1999 to the winter of 2000 all the way to October 2000 -- if it enters theaters at all.

"Hey, do you think this haircut hides the lobotomy scars?"

The word on this one is that Winona's people didn't want Lost Souls entering public consciousness around the awards season (obviously a wise move, considering that prestigious Blockbluster Awards nomination she received). Another rumor is that it's terrible. Part of me finds this hard to believe, as first-time director Kaminski was the cinematographer on such fine films as Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List and Cool As Ice... oh wait, never mind. Did I mention that it has Winona Ryder in it? No further comment.

Another movie dumped on us was the utterly horrible Supernova, which both arrived and mercifully disappeared in January. Also disappearing were the real names of the writer and director, who, for some reason, did not want to be associated with the project. Now it's pretty much standard procedure to get rid of your bad movies in January, when everyone pretends to be too busy to laugh at you, but Supernova is really so awful it boggles the mind. It doesn't temporarily lobotomize it, as does The St. Francisville Experiment, but even for bad movies, this is bad.

Roman Polanski's The Ninth Gate is another film moved from a 1999 release date to the year 2000, and it's certainly the best of the bunch. I'm hoping the same will be true for Cherry Falls, the long-awaited Michael Biehn project (long awaited by Michael Biehn fans, damnit!) about teenage virgins who are brutally slaughtered and... Michael, what were you thinking? Such a subtle, tasteful name, too. I believe I received an email from sexxxygirl@cumhere.com last week with that phrase in the title.

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