The Insanometer: Batman and Robin

Part of me wants to say, "This movie isn't insane, it's just awful." And certainly, "awful" is a big part of it--nobody explained to Joel Schumacher that Batman could be other things besides the campy 60s series (not even after the seriously terrible "Batman Forever", which you'd think would have tipped some people off) and he set out to direct a movie that Adam West and Burt Ward wouldn't be out of place in.

(As an aside, I've never really liked the 60s TV series. I know some people say, "Hey, if you manage to set aside the pernicious and detrimental effect it had on Batman as a character, super-hero comics in general, and the reputation of the medium as a whole, it's actually got some funny bits," but every time I watched it, all those funny bits seemed to revolve around the idea that the people making it knew it was crap, instead of thinking they were doing something worthwhile.)

In any event, "Batman and Robin" is terrible, yes. But it's not just terrible...or at the least, it's terrible in such a way that you can't imagine how any sane person could have made it, which is the same thing for our purposes. The film opens smack-dab in the middle of what it laughably calls action, as Arnold Schwarzenegger's Mister Freeze steals a giant fake diamond with the aid of his evil hockey team and ice gun. Although honestly, I think that most of the security guards he froze solid probably preferred the icy chill of death to his constant ice-themed puns.

This is actually one of the strangest things about the movie. They keep the deadly-serious motivations of the villains, for the most part--Freeze is still trying to save his dying wife while trying to find a cure for his own condition, and Poison Ivy is still a madwoman who wants to wipe out the entire human race--but the actors play their characters like the comic relief B-villains. While Bane, who could probably sustain a movie in his own right, is reduced to being the comic relief C-villain...but plays his part relatively straight.

In any event, Batman and Robin spend what feels like forty years trying to stop Mister Freeze, only to fail miserably and get into a fight about how Robin is too impetuous and Batman doesn't trust him. (Hint: This will be a Theme.) Meanwhile, Michael Gough's Alfred tries to play his part with dignity, which is hard to do when your entire role consists of mouthing bland platitudes and then grimacing in pain after everyone else leaves the shot. (See, Alfred is dying. Just in case you didn't get that, the movie takes great pains to drive the point home with wince after wince of anguished pain. After a while, you start wondering if maybe he shouldn't eat an all-burrito diet.)

Then Alfred's hot niece comes to visit, played with role-destroying vapidity by Alicia Silverstone, and then that sub-plot stalls for time until we find out she's actually a rebellious kung-fu biker chick underneath her schoolgirl exterior, but a nice rebellious kung-fu biker chick who would love to channel her energies into vigilante crime-fighting if only she stumbled into the Batcave and found out that her dying uncle had made her a skin-tight spandex outfit. Hypothetically.

Then we cut to plant researcher Pamela Isley, who's insane. But not nearly as insane as her boss, Jason Woodrue, played with enjoyable scenery-chewing skill by John Glover. (Don't get me wrong, everyone chews the scenery in this movie. But Glover at least does it with some panache, and he's playing a mad scientist who's actually meant to be over-the-top.) Woodrue is using her research to create a super-steroid called Venom, which he uses to make a super-soldier named Bane. Then he tries to kill Isley, but only succeeds in turning her into Poison Ivy, which allows her to make a rather more successful murder attempt on Woodrue. (Uma Thurman, by the way, delivers all her lines like she's channeling Kim Cattrall in "Big Trouble In Little China".)

Meanwhile, Bruce Wayne helps a bunch of scientists build a "telescope" which is actually a giant MacGuffin for whatever the plot needs to do in the third act, and we find out that he's got another girlfriend (continuing the streak of having a new "serious girl" every movie. Given that both Vicki Vale and Chase Meridian found out his secret identity, and that both of them vanish without a trace in the next film, it might be worth investigating some of those bottomless pits in the Batcave. Just saying.) Oh, and he announces a big charity auction with lots of diamonds involved, which he's planning as a trap for Mister Freeze because his freeze-gun uses diamonds for fuel. (Despite the fact that synthetic diamonds have been around for fifty years, super-villains who need to use them to power giant lasers always seem to need the real thing. Go fig.)

Batman and Robin show up at the charity auction, because the best kind of trap is always the kind that involves dozens of potential hostages! Poison Ivy shows up too, planning to, um...I guess, something maybe with money, or...maybe she wants...um...in any event, she shows up and uses her pheromones to turn Batman and Robin against each other. This takes the form of them bidding on the right to date her, leading to Batman pulling out the Bat-Credit-Card in what had to be the exact moment where audiences lost their patience with the entire franchise so badly that they wouldn't make another live-action Batman film for eight years, and that only after replacing the director and all the actors concerned.

Then Mister Freeze shows up, and after a brief, embarrassingly perfunctory fight scene, he's captured and sent to Arkham. Poison Ivy decides to break him out so that they can team up and destroy the human race. Because nothing makes a more natural team than a plant-themed villain and one who wants to freeze the entire planet in sub-Arctic cold! Oh, yeah, that's Freeze's new motivation, because Ivy murders his wife and blames it on Batman. Which creates conflict, because Bruce finds out that Alfred is dying of the same rare disease that was killing Freeze's wife, and Freeze is the only one who knows how to save him!

During the break-out, Robin gets hit with another dose of Poison Ivy's pheromones, and decides to strike out as a solo super-hero. Which is somewhat ironic, as this movie was so terrible it actually acted as a speed-bump for his acting career. Playing a character who wants to be more ambitious and stop living in other people's shadows, even as the part winds up forcing him to take supporting roles for a while? Yeah, that qualifies. I think. In any event, Batman and Robin are totally on the verge of breaking up their partnership, and it's certainly not the kind of problem that can be solved by a wooden, unconvincing speech delivered with an utter lack of interest by George Clooney. So there's that, then.

Then we get into the third act. It turns out that by sheerest coincidence, Bruce Wayne's "telescope" can be used to beam freezing cold all over Gotham City, and Freeze plans to do exactly that! Robin tricks Poison Ivy into telling him by pretending he's still under her spell, then Batgirl defeats her in an awkward, stilted, hideously sexist sequence that neither actress will ever live down. By the way, this is the point where the script remembers that everyone already knew Barbara was going to be Batgirl.

Then it's just a matter of defeating Freeze and beaming heat all over the city to melt the ice, which can apparently be done with Bruce Wayne's "telescope". It is really damned hard to escape the conclusion that Bruce Wayne built a gigantic, obvious super-weapon as a lure to maniacal super-criminals all over the world just to give himself something to do. Afterwards, they show footage of Ivy confessing to Freeze's wife's murder, reveal that she's not quite dead yet after all, and offer Freeze facilities in Arkham to cure his wife if he'll only save Alfred. It's sort of like a plea bargain, except that the actual law doesn't get a say in the matter. Freeze agrees, handing over the cure and saying, "Take two and call me in the morning." That's this movie's Mister Freeze in a nutshell--no matter how bleak his life and his outlook, he still has a sunny quip for every occasion!

So the movie ends happily. Alfred is cured, Poison Ivy is in jail (with Mister Freeze as her wacky cell-mate), and Batman and Batgirl and Robin go off to fight crime. And we're happy, because the movie actually ended. As bad as the description of the plot sounds, it doesn't do justice to the terrible performances, the bizarre art direction choices (every set looks like it was decorated by a twelve-year-old girl and then lit by blacklights) and the incompetent action sequences. The film itself? About an eight on the Insanometer. The fact that everyone concerned, at every step of the process, thought that this was going to be a quality summer blockbuster with the potential to set up a fifth film, "Batman Triumphant"? That's got to be an eleven. Maybe even a twelve.

The Insanometer: Hell of the Living Dead

At this point, I'm beginning to feel like I owe you folks a little bit of an accelerated posting schedule for a while. After all, I did skip a post...or two...it wasn't any more than two, right? In any event, I'll try to speed things up a little for a while, give you some extra bang for your free. Today, it's another test run of the Insanometer as we run it over a good old-fashioned Italian zombie flick from 1980, "Hell of the Living Dead"! (Also known as "Zombie Creeping Flesh", "Zombie Inferno", "Cannibal Virus", "Night of the Zombies", and "Zombi 2: Ultimate Nightmare", on the grounds that you might actually see it six times if you thought it was six different movies.)

Of course, this might be a film from the year 1980, but it looks easily a decade older. The production values on this weren't high to begin with, and most of them went towards gore; decent cameras, films, crowds, actors, and everything else weren't high on the list. In fact, they weren't on the list at all. This is a movie that looks like it was made somewhere around the dawn of color, and that's the remastered version.

The story, though, is a pure aping of whatever was topical and interesting at the time. So we have a zombie crisis ("Dawn of the Dead"), a group of Chuck Norris-esque tough-guy commandos (although they look more like Barry Bostwick in "Megaforce") and a sinister government conspiracy...but I'm getting ahead of myself.

The movie opens with a toxic spill on what looks to be a disused oil rig, but which is actually...um, either intended to be a disused oil rig repurposed as a top-secret lab, or a top-secret lab that the film-makers tried to represent on their budget by filming it on a disused oil rig. The spill creates a bunch of zombies, but destroys a bunch of tension later, because the whole movie is about a journalist teaming up with a group of commandos to find out what's behind the epidemic of zombie flesh-eaters in Papua New Guinea. Since we know from the beginning that it's ooze seeping off of the oil rig/lab, the film is really just an exercise in them getting to what we already know.

Oh, and in watching some of the most spectacular over-acting ever committed to celluloid. The commandos aren't just hard-bitten and gritty, they're borderline psychotic snarling maniacs who are "the best of the best of the best"...and yet do things like charging into a mob of flesh-eating zombies spitting ammunition at random and hoping for the best. Even so, they drop at a plot-required pace, in order of their degree of sympathetic character...um...ness.

They have to contend with zombies, terrorists, and unfriendly natives (the journalist wins over the natives by showing her familiarity with tribal customs. By stripping naked and putting on body paint. My reaction at the time was simply, "Well played, movie. Well played.") Meanwhile, back in New York City, the representative of Papua New Guinea pleads for aid for his beleaguered country to what has to be the most under-attended session of the United Nations ever. They clearly had the budget to rent a big auditorium, but not to get any extras. He's declaiming to maybe five people, tops.

Finally, after much gore and death and violence and blood and deathy bloody violent gory death, they reach the oil rig and find out the chemical was actually doing close to exactly what it was intended to do--apparently, rich people were looking for something to curb over-population, and their solution was a chemical that made poor people eat each other. It's a little bit over-enthusiastic, as seen in an epilogue where New Yorkers are consumed by sinister zombie hordes, but it's a genuine attempt to a solution to a real problem, and I feel like they deserve credit for it.

The plot summary probably makes this sound a little less insane than it is--much of the sheer craziness factor comes from the presentation--but it's still enough for a solid six on the Insanometer. There's a little more "bad" than "crazy" here, but there's plenty of "crazy" for your viewing dollar.

The Insanometer: Casino Royale

Someday, I pray someone will make a movie about the making of the 1967 Bond spoof "Casino Royale". Because while the movie itself is wildly uneven at best, the story of how it was made is an epic tale of clashing egos, dueling directors, and Hollywood excess that is absolutely riveting. For those of you who don't know, producer Charles K. Feldman managed to get the film rights to the Bond novel before the series of books became a wildly successful series of movies. He tried to make a deal with the people at EON Productions, but when that fell through, he decided to produce the film as a Bond spoof (since he couldn't get things like the theme music, Connery as Bond, the Bond logo, et cetera.)

Feldman's reworked film involved a baccarat expert impersonating James Bond in order to trick Le Chiffre into competing against him, and getting into difficulties when he had to act as a suave superspy instead of the bookish mathematician he really was. The screenplay was finished, the film was cast, shooting began...and it turned out that stars Orson Welles and Peter Sellers could not stand each other. It was hatred at first sight. Sellers either quit or was fired (accounts differ as to which) with the film only half-finished.

Feldman's solution was, to say the least, unique. He hired several other directors, had them film comic vignettes featuring random actors as Bond, and then put together a framing sequence where David Niven, the "original" Bond, put together a complex scheme to confuse SMERSH by setting loose hordes of fake Bonds!

The result is a movie that perfectly encapsulates the experience of watching AMC when you have a high fever. You'll be watching a scene, and it doesn't make any sense to you, and then without any warning or transition it'll become some other scene with totally different characters and you're not sure how any of it fits together, and you don't remember falling asleep but you figure you must have because you don't recognize anything that's going on and none of it connects with anything else and then it ends in something that you're absolutely sure has to be one of those nightmares you get when you're not quite sick enough to go to the hospital, but very very close. It's a movie that has to be seen to be believed, and even then I'm not quite sure I didn't dream it. I can't even actually summarize the plot, because it doesn't follow any kind of linear logic. On the Insanometer, this one is a perfect ten, and I'm strongly resisting the temptation to give it an eleven.

The Insanometer: Doomsday

Every once in a while, I watch a movie that I'm not quite sure how to review it afterwards. It's certainly not good, but at the same time, there's a certain verve, a wonderfully strange vitality to it that prevents me from hating it even while I notice its flaws. A movie that I can only call insane. And how does one measure these films? With an insanometer, of course! So let's calibrate this thing by turning it on the 2008 film Doomsday.

Doomsday was director Neil Marshall's third flick, following his breakout hit Dog Soldiers and his well-received horror film The Descent. For this movie, he decided to pull out all the stops and most of the cliches for a semi-post-apocalyptic movie set in a semi-futuristic Great Britain. Well, most of Great Britain at any rate--as the film opens, we see that a deadly plague called the Reaper virus has infected Scotland. Naturally, the decision is made to build a big wall across Scotland, as this will stop the plague from getting across. No, really. That's actually what they do. Apparently, everyone in Scotland politely waits for them to finish building the big wall, and only then do they decide to charge the big door in the middle to try to escape. (Boats? Pffh. Everyone knows that Scotland is land-locked.)

Sure enough, the British close the big door, sealing up all the Scottish people inside, whether infected or not. Oh, except for a cute little girl. Because everyone knows plagues don't affect cute little girls. That cute little girl grows up to be Rhona Mitra, a bad-ass super-spy undercover future-cop with a cyborg eye that records everything she sees. (And there's certainly no way that this will become a plot point later.) She works for hard-boiled tough-but-loveable Bob Hoskins, who is good in every damn thing he's in and this is no exception. And after an obligatory action sequence to show her bad-assness and her rebellious "I don't do things by the book" streak, she gets an important assignment from Prime Minister Julian Bashir. (Yes, yes, I know, he's actually Alexander Siddig. He's also actually good in this too. He's still Doctor Bashir to me.)

See, it turns out that somehow, walling off Scotland didn't stop the plague after all. It's popped up in the heart of London. People are dying. But they've been watching Scotland with satellites, and it turns out that in fact, lots of people survived the plague. The assumption is that they're immune, and Rhona Mitra needs to go in there with a team of scientists to find whatever makes them immune and bring it back. Oh, and there's a scientist who was working on a cure in there. He's bound to be dead, of course, but he might have left research. And he certainly isn't still alive and played by Malcolm McDowell. (This is 90% of the reason this movie works, by the way. It's just got so damn many good actors who aren't afraid to give it their all in silly parts.)

So Rhona Mitra and her crew of redshirts go into Scotland, only to fall victim to a civil war among the plague survivors. See, Malcolm McDowell's scientist character has decided that the only way to survive in the devastated post-plague Scotland is to set up his very own Renaissance Festival in one of the abandoned castles, while his son Sol (played with absolutely berserk gusto by Craig Conway) feels strongly that it'd be better to do a touring production of "Mad Max: The Musical". Sol and his ragtag band of vicious cannibals survives in the post-apocalyptic wasteland with only their wits, their weapons, and an unlimited supply of hair gel and tattooing equipment. Oh, and cars and motorcycles and stuff that they still have gas for after twenty years. And metric tons of sheep.

Meanwhile, back in London, Prime Minister Bashir's second-in-command is saying, "Hey, you know, we've got a little bit of an overpopulation problem...and we've got an incurable plague ravaging Britain. Why don't we let these two things solve each other before we distribute any hypothetical cure Rhona Mitra might find?" The Prime Minister is receptive, until a crazed plague victim breaks in and infects him, forcing the rest of the government to quarantine him in his own office. With no cure, and a potentially agonizing death awaiting him, Bashir is forced to end the holodeck program, if you know what I mean.

Back in Scotland, Rhona Mitra finds out that Malcolm McDowell never bothered to cure the plague--he found out that a lot of people, himself included, are just naturally immune. (Does this actually work with any virus outside of a movie? I mean, do people just happen to naturally be immune to yellow fever or cholera? I always kind of thought that the people who didn't get sick were just lucky enough not to be infected.) He decides to kill Rhona and the two or three surviving redshirts in a trial by combat. Unfortunately for him, Rhona is a main character, and the giant evil guy with the armor and the spiked mace isn't. And in movies like this, that's more than enough to even the odds.

Rhona escapes with her last surviving redshirt and one of the locals. After a truly spectacularly bizarre chase sequence with the Road Warrior rejects that ends in the death of Sol, she makes it back to the border, and tells the new Prime Minister (the evil second-in-command) that the local's blood contains the immunity factor they need. He says, "Oh, goodie! But of course, we won't distribute it until all those icky poor people are dead. By the way, is your cyborg eye getting my good side? I'd really hate to have my vicious evil speech captured on tape with my mole showing."

Rhona passes the disc with the recording on it to Bob Hoskins, thus ensuring that gruff-but-lovable will triumph over evil. But she tells him that she wants to return to her roots and stay in Scotland, where she doesn't have to deal with all the corruption and politics. Then she goes and finds Sol's corpse, hacks his head off, and presents it to the tribe of cannibals. They say, "Oh, God, no! You killed our friend and leader! He was a wonderful man, once you got to know him, kind and generous! He had five kids! What are we going to tell his wife? You murderous, murderous monster! What kind of people do you think we are, savages?"

Nah, I kid. They cheer her on and elect her as their new chief. This is, I guess, good?

On the insanometer, this one ranks quite high. Star Trek actor in vastly out-of-Trek-character role? Check. Inexplicable, unworkable post-apocalyptic society, complete with hair gel and tattoos? Check. Said post-apocalyptic cannibals playing Frankie Goes To Hollywood's "Two Tribes"? Believe it or not, check. Bad-ass hot woman as the hero? Check. (Said woman not played Milla Jovovitch? Happily enough, check.) Malcolm McDowell as a bad guy? That's a big check. Lots of scenes of people dying of hideous plague? Check. On the insanometer, I'm going to call this one...an eight.