dpenny

I take perverse pride in the fact that I saw 'Cutthroat Island' on the big screen (it's not really that bad, by the way) and soon I'm sure I'll have the same feelings about having seen 'Battlefield Earth' in a theatre. Bad films are released every week, but this one sinks beneath ordinary badness to become a genuine so-bad-it's-good movie.

Barry Pepper gets to make lots a big, faux-'Braveheart' speeches as Johnny, a cave-dweller who leads his people in a fight against the voracious aliens who have taken over Earth. He is aided in his fight by the aliens themselves, who helpfully teach Johnny their language and all the basics of science, leave him in an abandoned library so he can be inspired by the Declaration of Independence, and send him off unmonitored so he can take his people to a huge cache of US weapons left in a bunker, still working after 1000 years of neglect.

(By the way, it appears these weapons were never used...no wonder the aliens only needed 9 minutes to conquer the planet.)

John Travolta, who labored long and hard to bring this story to the screen (it's based on a book by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard), seems to be having a great time as Terl, the alien chief of security. (Forrest Whittaker, playing his sidekick, looks like he can't believe he's in this thing.) But the truly big laughs come from Pepper, who actually seems to be taking this seriously. And the swelling, "stirring" music. And the stunning plot holes. And the stupidity of the aliens. And the schockingly lame action sequences by director Roger Christian. And the laughably fake matte paintings meant to evoke post-invastion Denver and Washington. Mark my words: 15 years from now, this movie will be a staple to midnight showings, complete with people coming dressed as Terl and shouting things at the screen. It's such a fascinating guilty pleasure that, God help me, I'm giving it 6 out of 10.

"The Kentucky Fried Movie" has some genuinely funny scenes, but I have the feeling this movie was a lot funnier in 1977 than it is today. Many of the targets - blaxploitation films, Bruce Lee movies, the oil crisis - are hardly relevant today...the result is like watching a mediocre mid-1970s episode of "Saturday Night Live". That said, Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker's distinctive sense of humor is evident throughout, and there are some truly inspired moments (especially a public service announcement for America's number-one killer: death).

There have been many films which argue that war is hell, but only a handful which argue that war is sheer lunacy. This short list includes Apocolypse Now, Three Kings and Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, one of the best movies of the 1980s. In the first half of the film, Matthew Modine's character can only look on helplessly as one of his fellow recruits, an overweight misfit, is slowly driven crazy by military life. The second half is made up of a series of short vingettes showing the dehumanizing effects of war but also the bizarre reasoning people use to justfy it. In one scene, a military journalist orders his men to use a more mundane phrase instead of "search and destroy"...without getting into a debate over whether the Gulf War was justified, it certainly shows that some things never change.