Monday, May 30, 2016

Entertainingly Bad

In the previous post I shared about the 1973 musical version of Lost Horizon.

Today I'll detail some fun the family had with a flick that isn't just bad, it's actually so far-fetched and poorly executed that it spawned (hint, hint...marine metaphor) a memorable comedy routine.

Of course I'm talking about Jaws: The Revenge.

The late Richard Jeni did a great routine focused on this movie.  Here's one Jeni clip from good ol' YouTube:



How can I improve on that?  I can't.  

But what I can do is introduce my teenager to the joy of poking fun at bad movies.  

Many months ago the entire Geofamily was home with nothing of significance to do on a Sunday afternoon.  (Sorry for what that says about us, we really ought to make an effort to live a more interesting life.)  

But anyway...TBS is showing, of course, aforementioned movie.  Even with television edits and commercial breaks I still thought we could enjoy this.  I gave Geoana a view of the Jeni routine and away we go!  

The movie did not disappoint, since we already knew (thanks to Richard) that it wasn't going to get better as it went along.  

Turns out the film was even worse, and therefore more fun, than I expected.  I was off on my prediction of whom would be the next person to become fish food and Geoana appeared quite upset/distressed from one intense scene in which the shark attacks an inflatable boat but I quickly redirected her with the typical parental "This is only a story" line.  She shook off the "trauma" and got right back into dissing what we saw on screen.  

Objective achieved!  We had fun.  

Granted, this was not a big stretch.  Jeni's routine laid a good foundation and it cannot be difficult to poke fun at celluloid that has a (at last check) 2.8 out of 10 rating on IMDB and a 0% freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes.  

Sort of like shooting fish in a barrel.  (Another reference to aquatic creatures!)  

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Anyone who blogs as a leisure activity can attest that entries sometimes become organisms in themselves.  I might sit at the keyboard with an idea but as it flows it has potential to move in a different direction than I intended.  The end product might be an entry about which I receive many hits and feedback or it might also stay in the "drafts" folder, never to be put out for public consumption.  

My last entry doesn't fall into either of these categories but as I watched several videos of "The Things I Will Not Miss" I realized it actually is a very good song and perhaps the only one in the whole movie that really bears the unique Bacharach-David style.  Too bad the timing was poor, in that the songwriting duo was already fractured and the filmgoing public no longer seemed interesting in sitting through musicals.  One wonders if this project had been about 8 years earlier the musical outcome would be as beloved as the songs from "Promises Promises."   

Too bad we will never know. 

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