The Great Movie Suckoff Marathon, Round 2: (Insert Star Trek Fight Music Here)

[annathepiper]

Ladies and gentlemen, the unthinkable has happened: a bad movie defeated us. solarbird and I could not last more than 32 minutes, 20 seconds into Decoys 2: Alien Seduction. We did, however, make it all the way through Incubus. Which means that Decoys 2 wins this round by default.

Breaking it down by the numbers:

Decoys 2--or at least, as much of it as we could stand to watch--let us know we were in for some pain even before the credits rolled, when we got some Extremely Naughty Tentacle action going on. But that was only the opening blow in a continuing salvo that included the main character from the last movie (looking broody and angstful), blonde alien babes trying to propagate their species (via the aforementioned naughty tentacles, though we do get a flashback of their actual and much uglier forms, presumably from the first movie, which presumably had a bigger budget), a side "plot" (and by "plot" I mean OMG MY EYES) involving horny college boys trying to set up a five-day competition about who could score the most babes, and an extremely bored-looking Tobin Bell (the only name in the credits recognized by spazzkat).

It was the scene with the horny college boy hitting on the girl reading Titus Andronicus that did us in. We're talking eye-gougingly bad here, people. We're talking Boy Has Sprayed Himself With What He Thinks Are Sex Pheremones bad. The poor girl he was hitting on was not only glaring daggers, she was radiating an entire armory of loathing and contempt for the entire movie, focused on the unfortunate schmuck who thought it was a good idea to put his hormones on display. Me, I don't blame her in the slightest.

And after all that, Incubus, in the words of solarbird, was a refreshing after-dinner mint.

Seriously, it was much less awful than y'all had led me to believe. Sure, there's the WTFery of an entire movie being filmed in Esperanto--which in turn of course means that all the actors delivering these lines tend to sound extremely stilted, since they're clearly frantically trying to remember exactly what syllable comes next. There are also long stretches of mood shots in which very little happens besides people wandering around in the woods, and one laughable goat-head costume at the very end.

The bones of a halfway decent story are here: young war hero has come home to recuperate from wounds sustained in battle, and is getting looked after by his sister. Only there's this blonde succubus babe who starts stalking him, as she's desperate to score herself a noble soul to pull down to Hell--desperate enough to ignore the warnings of an older succubus-type that truly good people are too powerful for them to take down. This is a plot we've certainly seen crop up in modern-day urban fantasy novels, and as a concept, there's nothing wrong with it.

Problem is, the way the story's implemented is boring. There are way too many mood shots and not enough character or plot development. The cast clearly has issues with the dialogue being in Esperanto. Though, here's the shocking part: William Shatner actually handles his lines most naturally out of anyone in the entire cast, and by and large is the only person who manages to come across as if he's actually talking rather than delivering lines memorized by rote out of a script. This doesn't stop him from going into a bit of truly Kirkian emoting at the end, mind you, but hey, this is Bill Shatner we're talking about here. ;)

So, yeah. Decoys 2 is the undisputed winner of this round. Last up: Mammoth vs. Shark Attack 3, which will bring us Summer Glau vs. John Barrowman. This promises to bring some lulz.

Comments

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Esperanto? Esperanto?! You're not exaggerating, are you?

The movie I'd recommend, in case you do any more rounds, is The Forbidden Zone, which features Herve Villechaise as the King of the Eighth Dimension, a couple of Neo-German-Expressionist performance artists as a sort of Greek chorus, and Danny Elfman playing Satan in a white tuxedo and filking the Hell out of "Minnie the Moocher." Score by The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, before Oingo Boingo made it big.

[annathepiper]

I am NOT exaggerating. The entire movie is in Esperanto. Even the credits.

Re: The Forbidden Zone, har! That sounds fabulous. ^_^

Esperanto!

[brian-barker.livejournal.com]

Just to let you know that Bill Shatner was not the first Hollywood star to use Esperanto.

Charlie Chaplin used it in one of his films, as well as Laurel & Hardy who used Esperanto in their film "Road to Morrocco"

You can check detail on http://www.Esperanto.net

Re: Esperanto!

[annathepiper]

Cool, thanks for the information. :)

[akadriver.livejournal.com]

If you have the copy with commentary, listening to it is actually a hoot and a half. You can tell when they did this that Bill does not remember much about the movie at all, and he's making stuff up left and right to fill the gaps. Like M&M's being named after Milos Milos.

He also talks about the curse associated with the movie, which actually may have a grain of truth to it. The story can also be found

here (http://archive.salon.com/ent/movies/feature/2000/05/03/incubus/index.html).

[annathepiper]

I've already returned the rental, unfortunately! I did note that there were commentaries on it, but we didn't listen to them. I did read the bit in the extras about the curse, though.