what has been the worst film, to date, ever made? there are a number of contenders for this title, sadly. Die Hard Dracula must feature quite high on the list for anyone who has had to watch it. personally i would select something like Forrest Gump, mostly due to the horrific way in which it pushed a right wing agenda hidden behind the tale of a simpleton. on a similar celebrated bad film note, The Hurt Locker clearly started off life as a very bad "mockumentary" comedy and was somehow recut and passed off as drama, and do not get me started on the folly of The Godfather Part III or The Bonfire Of The Vanities, the latter somehow making a complete mess of arguably the greatest novel of the 20th Century.
leaving personal choices aside, however, there's a general, if not universal, consensus that the best attempt ever to make the worst film possible - especially mindful of the "almost impossible to **** up" source material - was 1997's Batman & Robin.
it is a film so bad that the one redeeming feature of it seems to be that both Warner Bros and just about everyone involved in making it has admitted it was a rushed, slammed together film made purely to try and catch the summer market and sell toys. it failed at every possible level, and killed the idea of any more Batman films being made for nearly a decade.
where and how did it go wrong? difficult to know where to start, really. "nipples on the batsuit" didn't help.
neither, really, did casting George Clooney as Bruce Wayne / Batman. or rather, the way in which Clooney was cast. Clooney famously got the part purely because director Joel Schumacher doodled the Batman mask on Clooney as he appeared on a poster for From Dusk Till Dawn and thought he "looked the part". well, that's what happened after David Duchovny turned down the part, at least.
you have to guess it looked something like this.
casting decisions and character "development" did not get much better elsewhere. Bane, at this stage quite a new character in the Batman universe, was a highly intelligent, exceptionally violent enemy for Batman in the comic books / "graphic novels". they somehow managed to turn him into a bumbling idiot serving Posion Ivy.
as for the main villain in the film, that would be Mr Freeze. exactly where does one turn when no less an actor and screen presence as Hulk Hogan has turned down the part? why, one gets $25 million and throws it at Arnold Schwarzenegger......
at least Schwarzenegger almost properly delivers an (awful) line of dialogue in the film every now and then, something that no one else involved in this movie does.
as bad as it is, it is possibly the Batman film i have seen the most. why? because our boys, for some reason, love it. it's tame enough for them to be allowed to see it, and they are at their young age not excatly bothered or horrified to hear the word "Cowabunga" being said in a Batman film.
it is only fair to them, then, that i made the effort to try and find Batman & Robin on blu-ray. why exactly Warner would go to the trouble of presenting one of the worst films ever in the best quality possible, but surprisingly they have done this.
i was kind of hoping that the price would be too high to justify the cost, but alas thanks to Kalahari having no restriction on the value of shopping to which a voucher they gave me for no reason, plus some sort of free shipping offer, it seems i have paid more or less the correct value to own the film.
at current exchange rates, this masterpiece of movies has cost me £0.70 (yep, seventy pence), or in
American money $1.14. actually, now that i have written it out, it still looks a touch over-valued by American standards. hey ho.
the fact that it is rather cheap almost makes up for the fact that this shall be in the collection.
it does not quite, however, make it any better that i shall be getting to watch the film again. and again.
ho hum, at least James and William will be very happy! and i suppose, if i am honest, i am kind of looking forward to seeing the deleted scenes included. the mind boggles as to what they made that was just so bad that it could not be part of the released film!
cheer kalahari!
be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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