WELCOME TO THE WACKY WORLD OF WILLIAM WHEATON

Here you will find musings from genre fan/writer William Wheaton. No not Wil Wheaton from “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” This Wheaton is the author of Electric Beauty and the Beast, Hollywood Wiretapping and Aeon Electron. What wackiness and weirdocracies will spew from the mind of Wheaton? One never knows, so stay turned to find out. - CCF

WHEATON'S TEN WORST FILMS LIST

Special to PollyStaffle.com

1. The Geek

This is a pornographic film about Bigfoot from 1971. No, I kid you not. About fifteen minutes at the opening of the film is people hiking. It’s actually a short so that’s a good chunk of the film. A bunch of hippies go out in the woods, they run across Bigfoot; he “rapes” the women, attacks the men and runs off. When he rapes the chick, she looks like she likes it. The Bigfoot costume is unconvincing. I think part of it might be a gorilla costume and a wig.

In order to like this film you would have to: A.) Be sexually excited by the legend of Bigfoot and B.) Not bored by watching footage of people hiking for fifteen minutes. Something Weird put it out just as an oddity I suppose.

2. My Dinner with Andre

This is an art house film that’s two people sitting at dinner. That’s not the worst of it, one of them monopolizes conversation entirely. You want to pay money to see that? My Dinner with Andre is all you baby.

3. Attack of the Giant Leeches

1950’s low budget sci-fi horror so slow it’s like watching wallpaper. This film has the dumbest scene in any film I’m aware of; the sheriff has to arrest the male lead. The male lead asks if they can have coffee first; they have coffee.

4. The Fall

Jonathan Whittle-Utter is a unique artist - he somehow manages to be the worst actor, worst director and worst writer I’m aware of. He is the Leonardo de Vinci of shit. The films he directed are melodramatic attempts at art house. They are filmed on digital on his own dime, apparently. He places a lot of importance on being an “artist” and “creativity.” Characters in his films talk about each other as being “starving artists” or “a literary genius” in probably the most overwrought tones you’ve ever heard in a film. On top of that, in two of his films he’s very into new age spirituality. The Fall is advertised as being the first feature film to deal with neuro-linguistic programming as a major theme. Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) is a fringe “technology” of psycho-therapy that some believe to be a form of brainwashing and others believe simply doesn’t work. In The Fall, a woman disappears, the boyfriend does some research and sees she’s been hiding a life of involvement in, you guessed it, NLP. When he talks about discovering her undergrad papers about NLP, he proclaims that “she must have been a literary genius.”

He’s young; there could be years of awful films from him. He isn’t getting that much in the way of attention, but I think he should. I found one movie page that listed one of his films at a half star out of five. It would be cool if he were ranked half a star everywhere.

5. The Conqueror

John Wayne plays Genghis Kahn. Sounds kind of funny but this film is very slow. For years I owned a copy, but I’ve never been able to sit through it all the way. Howard Hughes produced this one, a choice which may have been symptomatic of his insanity and dependence on painkillers.

6. Battlefield Earth

This is a science fiction film based on a book by L. Ron Hubbard because star John Travolta and others in Hollywood are strongly involved with the Church of Scientology, the religion Hubbard created. It’s something about a future Earth that 9-foot-tall aliens (the actors just wore stilts) with dreadlocks have conquered. It doesn’t have much to do directly with Scientology, so its not interesting from that angle. It’s difficult to sit through; there’s a whole lot of scenes of the dreadlocked aliens scowling at each other.

7. Mindwalk

This is another art film that is essentially a dialogue with no plot; only this time it’s a politician, a quantum physicist, and a poet talking about quantum physics. It was written by that dude that wrote the Tao of Physics. It drives real physicists insane. They fucking hate the Tao of Physics. It’s a hilarious how mad they get.

8. Silence Ca Tue!

Belgian film about a bunch of dudes in tuxedos that are filming themselves; they threaten a film producer who wasn’t interested in a script one of them wrote with a gun, he falls down a flight of stairs and dies, gotta hide the body, something. You know how it ends? I don’t know. I walked out of this Belgian piece of shit, and I have no interest in seeing how it ends, really. European film dorks with no budget and toy guns. There’s a lot cursing in French and a lengthy party scene with people doing some drugs, but nothing really going on. It was banned in Belgium apparently. Why? I don’t know. I didn’t watch the end. I don’t fucking care how it ends.

9. Three Men and a Baby

In this huge blockbuster film, three men find a baby on their doorstep and have to take care of it. Cloying sentimentality and lots of diaper changing jokes. It is not at all funny. Fuck this movie and the Look Who’s Talking films.

10. Stereo

This is truly perplexing - this film was made by David Cronenberg, who directed many excellent, excellent films; The Brood, Videodrome, Dead Ringers. I’m not sure how this could have possibly happened, but when he was young he made this short which is a bunch of hippies walking around what looks like a college dorm or library with a voice over explaining the details of the ESP experiment taking place in made up technical jargon. What? Yeah, he made a bad film early on, one of the worst I’ve ever seen. Its on the list. Do you have any understanding of how bad that makes it? These films you don’t fall asleep during, these films you get up and leave the theater.

- William Wheaton, August 2010

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