A couple of Saturday mornings ago the family was lounging in bed. Kaelyn was reading some books and Kelly and I were trying to see if there was anything on television that could occupy our attention. After three or four cycles of flipping through the channels, we noticed Stephen Baldwin in a movie.
Believe it or not, this was enough to stop us in our tracks.
Besides his well-known born-again Christian lifestyle, the only exposure we had with the youngest Baldwin was his stint on Celebrity Apprentice. His appearance in the Trump's reality show [and, yes, I will DVR the newest edition of the show as I find it train-wreck-like fascinating] made us wonder how this guy can claim to have an acting career. Since The Usual Suspects was carried by an amazing script and Kevin Spacey, and since we missed out on Bio-Dome [or did we?], Kel and I decided to give this movie a try.
It took as a commercial break to determine what we were watching. It was actually on the Sci-Fi channel, a 2007 movie entitled: Stan Lee's The Harpies. If you are unfamiliar with Stan Lee [you probably have a life], he is the creator of such iconic comic book characters as Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk and the Fantastic Four. So you'd have to figure that even if Baldwin didn't have the acting chops, a Stan Lee script could redeem the film, right?
No. Not at all. In fact, I would have to nominate this as one of the worst movies ever.
Yet even though the blessing of digital cable provides us with almost 150 channels of entertainment, Kelly and I chose to watch the entire flick. We could not look away. It was so horrendously bad that it was thoroughly compelling. Do you doubt me? Feast on these clips from the movie here and here and become a believer.
It reeks of a rip-off of Bruce Campbell's Army of Darkness, as Baldwin's security officer character is teleported back to the mythological Middle Ages. He has access to a pistol and sawed-off shotgun, which he wields in a way that testifies to his unfamiliarity with firearms. His goal: to get back to the future. Of course, along the way, he's forced to fight an evil overlord and his harpies, which are described by someone somewhere [sorry, no citation] as flying Amy Winehouses. SPOILER ALERT: he makes it back and wins the girl.
While the CGI is painful to watch, the constant overacting by the cast and underacting by Baldwin overpower the lack of technology. Seriously, I've seen middle school plays that contain better dramatization. In short: it has everything needed to be deemed the worst movie ever, especially as it was somehow created to be a serious film.
Enticed? The block out 90 minutes of your life and watch it on Japanese YouTube here. I'm sure the subtitles could get annoying, but the quality of this movie's presentation will naturally cause them to fall by the wayside. I'd be delighted to hear from others who have seen this cinematographic masterpiece.