In the Mouth of Badness: A Horror Story
Lazing about the house on a day off is often relaxing and a good way to re-center one’s self, especially if you’ve been busy, and have nothing to do at the moment. Unfortunately, there are hazards, and anyone who believes they can be at ease in the safety of their own home, anyone who believes that the cacophonous wailing of insanity does not await inside each of us, needs to heed my advice and be careful where they cast their eyes.
I stumbled onto one of these hazards the other day when I was innocently flipping through channels on the television, merely perusing the afternoon fare for trash with which to spoil my mind. I never imagined that my life would not, nay, could not ever be the same.
I am now a mere shade of the man I once was. My sanity eludes me, contained beyond my reach, beyond my consciousness, wavering in thin daydreams of what my life might have been had I not wandered into where no mere mortal should tread. I cannot sleep. I speak in stuttering yammers. I fear my doctor has become suspicious of my prescription drug use, and my friends must know by now that I am quite mad.
The worst movie I have ever seen used to be House of the Dead. Remember that arcade game they ALWAYS had at the theater–the one where you use a big orange gun to shoot zombies that run at you and throw axes and stuff? Well, they made a movie about that game. Now, video game movies are never worth the 50 cents it would take to play the actual game, but House of the Dead was particularly pathetic. Characters show up out of nowhere, disappear as quickly as they appear, and without explanation or conclusion. There are long Matrix-rip-off shots that are there to only kill time (ironic because the sooner the movie ended, the better). The special effects are laughable, and they must have taken the dialogue directly from a monkey’s typewriter (and not one of those smart helper monkeys either).
I’m not here to talk about the past though.
My new, “Worst. Movie. I. Have. Ever. Seen.” is now The Crow: Wicked Prayer. I wish I had the forethought to turn away from the television, to not take that last step into oblivion, but I stepped, thirsting for entertainment, into the wet throat of a gaping horror. Starring a combination of such star-power wash-ups as Eddie (now Edward) Furlong, famous for being the whiny kid in Terminator 2 and following it up with his ground-breaking role as the whiny kid in American History X, along side chronic nipple-slipper, Tara Reid (making her second video-game film after Alone in the Dark with fellow has-been, Christian Slater), David Boreanaz (who actually still has steady work leading on FOX’s Bones), and Dennis-fucking-Hopper (he directed and starred in Easy Rider for chrissakes. He was in Apocolypse Now!), this movie had less action than an afternoon in a Greek-Orthodox Mass, and less suspense than a box of Quaker Oats (what’s inside…oooh I can’t wait to find out. It’s OATS!! I knew it! I knew it!).
You must be asking, “Why, Josh, didn’t you just turn it off?” I know. I ask myself the very same question every time I close my eyes, every time I try to escape into dreamless sleep and fail, but I couldn’t, and now I fear I am trapped forever. You can cover your eyes, but what do you do when you can’t help peeking through your fingers? What is there to do but to try keeping down your last five meals? I was enraptured. How bad will this get? Can it get worse? Nothing can truly be this intestine-wrenchingly abhorrent.
Yes it can. Every second was worse than the second preceding, pulling me further into a lovecraftian journey of mind-breaking, mouth-agape-drooling, and eye-twitching. It wasn’t until the credits stopped rolling that I realized that I had been screaming.
I’ll spare you the spoilers. There are far too many things so wrong, so ungraspable to the human mind for me to detail them here. I could write a dissertation about them, being so numerous, but some things must go unspoken from one person to another, so you’re going to have to settle for the logline provided by IMDB.
“On his way to becoming an immortal demon, gang-leader Luc Crash (Boreanaz) orchestrates the murder of Jimmy Cuervo (Furlong) and his girlfriend, Lily (Chriqui [Entourage and Cadillac Records]). ”
It’s all bad acting, horrible editing, film-school cinematography and a script that makes you want to say “excuse me, where’s the toilet, and do you, by any chance, have some Ginger Ale? How about a cyanide pill?” If there were any justice in this world, Brandon Lee would come back from the dead, a-la the original Crow, get all painted up, and kill whoever thought to make this movie or took part in it’s creation. Now there’s a plot worthy of a Crow sequel.
What I’m saying, I guess, is please watch this movie. I don’t want to be the only one who has seen it. We could start a support group. If nothing else, we could teach other would-be TV watchers to be wary of where their remote takes them. For, from some places, you can never return whole.
