To me The Killer Shrews is the most boring movie The Mads ever sent to the SoL. The sight of dogs wearing carpet remnants is funny for awhile, but the lead guy is SO BLAND he barely exists. It’s a struggle for me to get through that one, even with the pretty good riffing.
Interesting, like The Starfighters, it also had a great poster!
The Starfighters gets lots of attention in this forum, and I can certainly understand why, but it’s one of my favorites. It’s among movies like Monster-a-Go Go or The Beast of Yucca Flats where the utter lack of forward narrative momentum actually acts AS MOMENTUM to keep me watching in a state of unbearable suspense as to whether or not the “filmmakers” have the ability to make an entire movie with… no narrative momentum.
Outside MST3K, I’d like to nominate my pick for Most Boring Movie In History, and that would be Jane Wagner’s Moment By Moment with John Travolta and Lily Tomlin. Literally. Nothing. Happens. If you put a bucket of molasses in the theater seat, it would scream “MAKE IT GO FASTER! IT MOVES TOO SLOW!”
The ONLY action that happens in the movie is entirely off-screen when Strip (yup, that’s Travolta’s character’s name) gives Tomlin’s insufferable Trish occasional updates on his friend Greg the Drug Dealer’s adventures; Greg is into “the heavy-duty stuff,” and after what sounds like an exciting drug bust, ends up released on bail by a judge controlled by the Mob so that he (Greg) can be bumped off by a drug kingpin (who made it look like Greg overdosed) so he (Greg) can’t be called as a witness in said drug kingpin’s federal-level trial.
It’s all told second hand, we never get to actually see or meet ANY of these characters.
And I’m like “Wait a minute… why isn’t this movie about Greg!? He’s a hundred times more interesting a character than Strip and Trish combined! HE’S the one who lived… moment by moment!”
I think Fu Mancu is in a class of its own here. Other movies are more dull in a standard, nothing happens sort of way, but somehow Fu Manchu has things that should be exciting and is still almost impossible to watch. It’s like it’s from the Elemental Plane of Boredom and actively sucks the excitement out of everything it touches.
I don’t know if it’s the MOST boring…but “Rocket Attack, U.S.A.”, even considering that one dancer section and the attempted sabotage one, doesn’t really have much going for it in excitement.
The movie has it both ways: there’s a lot of nothing, and the time that it HAS something (all hell breaking loose at the castle, the water getting loose, etc.), it feels like nothing.
It’s like the movie emits an endorphin-deadening chemical directly into one’s brain or some such awfulness.
I really want them to riff Blood of Fu Manchu, which has the same primary cast, and is most definitely awful, but nowhere near in the same class as Castle.
I agree that there’s something almost supernaturally boring about Castle, where it’s got some sort of built in perception filter that prevents your mind from actively paying attention to the movie, even when there’s an action sequence happening.
We are currently in an era where length is seen as an award-worthy quality. Movies are bum-numbingly long, yes, but TV shows especially are padded out to many times the length needed to tell a story.
I suppose when the likes of NetFlix says “nice plot, but you only get the cash if you can spin it out to twenty one-hour episodes”, people have to follow the money. Cue many scenes of characters staring off into the middle distance for bloody ages.
I hope posterity judges these flabby creations harshly. Or, even better, releases them as expertly-edited shorter versions.
I’m waiting for the day that everyone freaks out when a director rediscovers filming things without an annoying filter, embraces this thing called editing, and works from an actual script instead of stock tropes scribbled on cocktail napkins (kill off at least half the cast pointlessly if you want it to be “serious”) to make an enjoyable, well-paced 90 minute film that doesn’t cost more than the GDP of most nations on earth to make.
Or another trope (that I think maybe started with Lost) that I could really do without:
The wistful montage of characters just being themselves set to some trendy weepy pop single. “That’ll chew up a good 3 1/2 minutes at the end, push the plot point right into the next episode, yeah!”
Hamlet was on the live stream this AM and I watched a good chunk of it. I found it hilarious, but I understand why people find it hard to watch.
A combination of the German accents, the general muffled quality of the audio, and the seeming complete lack of understanding on the part of the actors of the words coming out their mouths, make Shakespeare’s dialog, which can always be a little hard to get into, a bratwurst flavored word salad. I think if you know the play a bit, then it can be very funny because it’s so weird and bad, while the source material is obviously so iconic.
