The premiere of #1302 last week was notable to me for the addition of Drake to the long list of awful movie “heroes” featured on MST3K. It was like they made Shawn Levy’s spaghetti-tossing punk from “Zombie Nightmare” into an action hero. But is he the absolute worst hero ever to appear in an experiment? I put together a brief list of other candidates:
Paper Chase Guy, “Warrior of the Lost World” - For being an apathetic mercenary with a jive-talking motorcycle. (And he killed Megaweapon.)
Deathstalker, “Deathstalker and the Warriors From Hell” - For being too cool for school approximately 1000 years before school was a thing.
Max Keller, “Master Ninja I/II” - For thinking one weekend of ninja training made him the world’s biggest badass.
John Agar, any movie starring John Agar - For being the walking avatar of mansplaining.
Rowsdower and Troy, “The Final Sacrifice” - For answering the question, “What if Batman and Robin were a drunk and a weenie who didn’t actually like each other?”
The Dipshit Gundam Crew, “Atlantic Rim” - For being the world’s worst Maverick wannabes in addition to the world’s worst love triangle.
Nick, “Time Chasers” - For immediately selling the secrets of time travel to the first jerk in a suit he sees on TV, getting his girlfriend killed and almost destroying the space-time continuum. (Also pretty snooty about going to Castleton.)
Have I missed any? Do any of these feckless losers hold a candle to Drake and his ickiness? Keep in mind, “hero” doesn’t necessarily mean “main character.” For the purposes of this discussion, the hero of the movie is a protagonist that the movie wants us to identify with and/or root for. So while the the Great Vorelli may have been the main character of “Devil Doll,” he’s definitely not the film’s hero because the movie knows he’s a jerk.
Almost every bad-movie hero is terrible. The list of good ones would be far more manageable.
I still think Mike from Manos is the bottom of the barrel, especially when you factor in outcomes.
Keller is more on the bland end of the spectrum for me. Sure it shoulda’ taken him at least a decade to acquire even serviceable Ninja skills, but that’s on the people who make action TV, and not him. At least he didn’t smarm all over his various girlfriends to the extent that so many of the other guys do.
Jodie in The Touch of Satan was pretty awful. He literally sells his soul to the devil to save the life of a woman he thinks he’s in love with after knowing her for 48 hours. I also gotta wonder about a dude who wants to get busy after watching an old lady burn to death. Yeah, she was a witch, but still there was probably charred grandma smell in the air.
It pains me to say this, especially since she was the best character in the film, but Rose Hood from Gunslinger. Why? Because while she did take out all the villains, as the bots and Joel kindly pointed out, at the end of the movie the whole damn town is dead. Like, all of it. There’s only one guy left, and I think he only survived out of pure luck or because he hid under a desk somewhere.
I do kind of like Rose, but good gosh, you gotta admit that she sucks at her job. Her motives for taking the role of sheriff were purely selfish, she didn’t know what she was doing, she couldn’t control the populous, half the “town” wanted her dead, and the half that didn’t want her dead ended up dead at the hands at the half that did. And then, to top it off, after just about everyone is good and dead, she leaves. She doesn’t help rebuild, doesn’t explain herself to the new guy, hell, she doesn’t even help bury the dead. She just rides off down the road as if it were any other Thursday.
Has to be that @#£&(#( from robot wars?? Less tact than a nuke, less charm than a sewer, less brain cells than the average tomato. He actually annoyed me as opposed to being ineffective or laughable. Apologies for my use of such punctuation above if there’s any kids watching.
A little bit Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk, a little bit Rick Moranis’s Barney Rubble, and a whole lotta sleaze.
Cabot’s buddy is the kind of guy with a whole shelving unit full of amateur casting couch porn DVDs in his living room that he offers to loan to people who did not ask.
Batwoman and Ator and Cabot are the heroes I didn’t deserve. No one deserves them. The person I admire the most, however, was William Sylvester. He didn’t leave Robert Denby alone, even though his dentist told him too, and with Ben Murphy’s help, he defeated Denby’s villainous plans. And Bart Fargo and the Agent from H.A.R.M. should start a super team with Neil Connery and Roy Thinnes.
