IMDB Bottom 100: No's 46 & 45 (Kinda) - Surf School and Danes Without a Clue

Number 46: Surf School (2006)

Yeah, brah. It’s teen surf comedy, brah. How could you not like that, brah?

Well, if you have half a brain actually. I’m sure surfing is great fun and all but it doesn’t make for the best movies. Couple it with sub-American Pie ‘humour’ and you get a real shit pile on your hands.

I don’t know why, but every time I watch a new film I always think ‘Well, it has to be better than the last.’ Which is idiotic, since I’m going down the list from 100. I’ve already seen the best IMDB’s Bottom 100 has to offer but somehow I live in hope that I’ll find some hidden gem, really undeserving of its placing. Surf School is not that gem.

I’ve already alluded to American Pie, so now let’s tackle that head on. American Pie was a decent enough teen comedy released in 1999. The problem is that it was a massive success. There were teen comedies before that of course but they weren’t quite as explicit as American Pie. In Hollywood, if something works once they’ll try and make it work a hundred times over. So films like Road Trip, Van Wilder and American Pie’s own sequels all came out in quick succession. There was an idea for a while American Pie could become the new National Lampoon, a whole glut of films only loosely related to each other. That experiment died quickly but Surf School was the latest in that line but probably missed the boat by a couple years.

So you get the usual horny teen jokes throughout. Sisqo is probably the biggest name involved in this but I’m pretty sure that’s just to make one joke. They’re on a beach looking at a woman in a bikini and he says ‘I could make a song about that thong.’ Ooh the irony (and pain) of it.

So story, Jordan moves to California in his senior high school year but finds himself pushed to the social fringes with the goth girl, the nerd, the horny punk kid and there’s no good way to put this, the black guy. I’m sure that’s not the intention but that is the only thing that marks Sisqo’s character out from the popular crew.

The bullies are surfing champions and are competing in a competition in Costa Rica. Jordan and his gang of misfits decide they are going to compete as well, despite the fact none of them have ever surfed before.

They fly out to Costa Rica where they stay in a hostel run by a hippy couple keen to espouse their hippy wisdom to their young minds. And we get, goddammit, more singing. I’m sensing that’s turning into a thing with these films. Bad movies have bad songs.

It turns out Goth girl is a good singer. Not as good as the film characters make out but decent enough. She goes on an arc where we find out her black hair is actually just a wig for her blonde hair and she is at heart a Valley girl. Superficiality wins again.

Jordan and his gang meet a guy called Rip, a former surfing champion now alcoholic, who is going to teach them to surf. It turns out he’s actually a good teacher and they are quite good at surfing. And that’s a problem. It is all too easy for them. Surfing from what I gather is not an easy thing to do and they all pick it up really quickly. Just going to Costa Rica was way too easy, no one had to worry about how they were going to pay for it or if they were going to be given permission. There’s no real hardship to make their eventual triumph mean something.

The competition comes, they struggle at the start but come back, blah, blah, blah. You already know they’re going to win, its typical Disney stuff in a non-Disney movie.

Predictable story, puerile jokes. Just like an American Pie spin-off movie. Brah.

Number 45: Danes Without a Clue (1997)

Forget about those clueless Danes, let me tell you about what I’ve had to go through here.

I wanted to find the 100 bottom films but it can’t be done. I have spent days searching for this and I just can’t find it anywhere. I’ve found a couple clips but nothing substantial. I searched under both its English and original Danish titles with no luck.

I thought I could maybe import a DVD copy of it but no luck there either. So, I’ve come up with a solution: a substitution.

I first started this list on 31^st August 2015 and that is the list I work from. But the IMDB Bottom 100 exists in a state of flux, with new entries coming in all the time so I’ll take a film from there that wasn’t on my original list and swap it with Danes Without a Clue. A compromise maybe but I will still have seen 100 of the worst films.

You got lucky this time, Denmark but I don’t want to see you around here again.

So, without further ado…

Number 45: Troll 2 (1990)

As a delightful treat, Troll 2 has made its return into the IMDB Bottom 100. Currently number 93 on the list, this is too good an opportunity to pass up.

A long time holder of the uncoveted number one spot, Troll 2 has quite the cult following. It is the subject of its own documentary, Best Worst Movie. It has an awful director, terrible actors, a horrible script and a ridiculous story. It’s as if someone was playing The Producers in real life.

To start with what’s wrong here you only need look at the title: Troll 2. There are no trolls in this movie, this is actually about goblins. Goblins disguised as people, as is well established in goblin folklore.

Story is about a family who go to take a vacation in a town called Nilbog (its Goblin spelt backwards, you see? Isn’t that clever? Well, it’s the cleverest thing you’ll see here). The goblins are turning people into vegetables and eating them. Again, as is well established in goblin folklore. Just like Tolkien used to write.

But this isn’t about the ‘story’. Because you’ll be spending most of the time trying to decide just who the worst actor in this is.

The kid, Joshua, is bad but child actors are pretty terrible in general. The mum doesn’t have much going for her. The Dad is pretty bad but does at least have some memorable moments (‘you don’t piss on hospitality’). For a while I was convinced it was the teenage daughter, Molly. But there was a clear winner, it couldn’t not be this guy:

There are some hilariously bad moments amongst the just generally bad acting on display. Moments such as:

-         - The above scene where people are turned to vegetables and eaten

-         - A man being dragged across the floor in a flowerpot

-        -  A guy being drowned in popcorn

-        -  The family holding a séance and then having it dawn on them that none of them know how to hold a séance.

There are too many things to list here but I fully recommend you watch this. It is the perfect example of a ‘so-bad-its-good’ movie. You’ll laugh so hard until you realise it’s not a comedy.

George Hardy, who plays Michael, the father in the family, has said that when they were making this the actors would often talk to each other about how strange the script seemed to them but they trusted the director who told them it would all make sense. Their trust was clearly misplaced.

I wasn’t supposed to be watching this but thank you Denmark. I can guarantee that whatever your film was about, it wouldn’t have been as much fun as this was.

When Does a Bad Movie Become Good?

I recently watched the documentary, Best Worst Movie and frankly, it’s bizarre when you think about it.

The documentary centres around the 1992 film Troll 2, widely regarded as one of the worst films ever made. Twenty years on, the film has gained a massive cult following and is playing in packed out cinemas across America. And it’s spreading, Troll 2 is gaining a following across Europe as well.

The story is ridiculous, the actors are terrible, the dialogue is worse, direction is non-existent and there are no trolls to be seen. Yet people love it? Why? Why are people lapping up this rubbish?

It makes no sense. If you were asked to choose between watching a good movie and a bad movie, you’d choose the good movie wouldn’t you? Yet no, these people are choosing to watch Troll 2 instead. In the time it takes to watch Troll 2 you could have watched Citizen Kane, widely regarded as one of the best films ever made.*

The charm of Troll 2 seems to stem from the fact those involved didn’t seem aware they were making a bad film. It falls into that old cliché of being ‘so bad it’s good.’ But when does that occur exactly in the film making process? The Twilight films for example, will never have to worry about falling into this category.

To become ‘so bad its good’ a movie has to fail on every level. The run-of-the-mill bad movie will usually get at least some elements of the film right. The success of a film is built on lots of different facets such as the acting, casting, dialogue, direction, editing, sound, music, etc.  The SBIG movie will mess up on almost if not all of them.

But again for it to really succeed (or indeed, fail) it needs to appear that those involved don’t know the film is terrible. Ed Wood, director of Plan 9 from Outer Space, was said by those around him to be unaware how bad a director he was, so consumed was he in his ‘art’.

It’s tempting to think this comes down to an issue of budget as many films proclaimed as being SBIG are typically low budget. There may be some truth to this but on the flip side this argument ignores the many good films made on small budgets throughout cinema’s history. Kevin Smith’s first (and best) film Clerks was made for $30,000 (largely self-funded) with a cast of unknown local actors. This only equates to about an eighth of the budget given to Troll 2. It’s perhaps ironic that it was when Kevin Smith was given a budget to work with and able to cast well-known actors in his films it all started to go a bit pear-shaped (I’m looking at you Affleck).

There is a growing market for bad movies. When making Mystery Science Theatre 3000 in the 90’s, a TV programme based around the idea of making fun of bad movies, the producers would be inundated with requests from directors to show their films as they knew an appearance would increase their sales.

In modern times, Asylum pictures lead the way in bad movie releases with titles such as Megashark vs Giant Octopus and Sharknado. This trend is even shifting over to mainstream Hollywood with films built around ludicrous premises (Snakes on a Plane anyone?).

But where these films fall down for me is in that we’re supposed to think these films are bad, everything is played with a knowing wink and a smile. They are not true SBIG movies. The SBIG movie does not know how awful it is.

There is a theory that some film makers have deliberately tried to make their films as bad as possible to achieve SBIG status. A good analogy for this would be The Producer’s, where they deliberately try to make the worst musical ever but inadvertently become the biggest hit on Broadway.

Birdemic is a film often cited as an example of this. I don’t buy it. If you were to ever watch Birdemic (there are clips on youtube), you would realise that to have deliberately made a film as bad as this would have taken a lot of effort. And if you are going to put that much effort in then you might as well try and make a good movie.

I don’t believe anyone sets out to make a bad movie but through factors such as bad stories, bad actors and just sheer bloody incompetence they do it. And I, and many others, love them for it.

*you may have worked out, I spend a lot of time watching bad movies when I could be watching Citizen Kane. Yet I’ve never seen Troll 2.