In Piranha II, you were likely to get killed by a carnivorous flying fish if:

• You are female and naked.
• You have sex unconnected to romance.
• You’re a somewhat ridiculous older woman.
• You are an ethnic side-character.

Also, if you’re ex-military, you’re instinctively evil, even when you try to be good.  if you’re a corporate person, you’re stupidly evil.

Things have gotten a lot better for naked or semi-naked women/aliens in Avatar, and only good people have sex, which is romantic as heck.  On the other hand:

• Military is still evil.
• Corporations are stupidly evil.
• Michelle Rodriguez? Dead.
• Sigourney Weaver? Dead. (well, she does get instantly recycled into a giant tree, so that’s something)

Bad movies can be like that.  Uwe Boll really thinks he can direct.  The actors in most Sci-Fi originals are putting what they have on the table.  There’s no money for effects, the director is probably wasted, and the writers cobble their facts and plot points from other movies.  But that’s because they believe in those other movies.  Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus has everything you think you want in a bad movie:

• Bad Special Effects
• Ridiculous physics
• Know-it-all scientists quoting 5th grade knowledge as if they discovered it
• Fake accents
• Sets that don’t match exterior shots
• Plot holes and over-dramatic story elements that don’t relate to the plot
• Lorenzo Lamas

But they’re faking it.  That’s not always bad.  A lot of bad movies are made better because the people making them were just having fun.  Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter is kind of awesome because Jesus teams up with a Mexican wrestler.  That’s just a genuine WTF.

Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus doesn’t have the crazy vision of JCVH, but it’s badness is guided by a conscious: “let’s do something stupid and the frat boys will laugh at this movie.”  Shark jumping 35,000 feet to take down an airliner?  No problem.  Scientists trying to solve problem by mixing colors?  Sure.  A submarine commander who got fired for running aground to avoid hitting a dolphin?  Why not?  It’s like they’re making the movie, throw in a clip of a battleship and say: “let’s call it a destroyer!”  “But it’s a battleship!”  “Yes, but the kids will laugh at us.”  Then the battleship fires guns fore and aft while the shark is attacking from the side.

We love bad movies because they make stupid mistakes, or because they try things nobody else will do, or just because that’s the best they could be.  But if someone cheats, if someone makes the movie a lot worse, because they’ve identified the market segment that likes to laugh at them, then the contract is broken.  It’s a cheat.  This movie, even with Debbie Gibson playing someone with a washed-up career, is a fake bad movie.  Which doesn’t mean it’s any good.

There’s “Snakes on a Plane” bad.  The badness is actually the genre, and the title tells us what to expect.  The genre has certain rules and expectations, and this kind of bad movie can be done well or poorly.  Snakes on a Plane hit all the right notes, so people called it bad.  By which they meant it was a very well done “bad” movie.

There’s “Crank: High Voltage” bad.  You throw plot out the window, along with a good dose of physics, probability, and narrative logic.  But what you replace it with is a bunch of crazy, unpredictable events that, somehow, fit.  The movie is considered bad because it doesn’t have the things a good movie is supposed to.  But it has so much other awesomeness stuck into every possible corner that it really doesn’t matter.

There’s Sci-Fi Channel original bad.  These movies are formulaic, yet fail to rise to the basic requirments of the formula.  Bad special effects, terrible acting, ridiculous scripting, and broken physics make you flat out angry.  Or you laugh.  But the movies are low-low budget, usually there’s at least a few actors who are trying hard.  If the bad guy/creature is evil enough, you cheer for them to get it, even though you know the whole thing sucks.

Then there’s Michael Bay.  Big-budget, crap gets blown up, plot-holes swallow whole planets.  Random stupid elements are stuck in, and CGI runs rampant.  You can sort of like Michael Bay because of that “awesome” commercial.  He’s a big kid who likes to blow things up, and he likes the piles of money we give him.  The first transformers movie, Armeggedon were pretty bad, but in a fun way.

But there are degrees of badness within the Michael Bay category.  Pearl Harbor was so bad they wrote a song about it.  And Transformers 2: ROTFL, hurt.  People say: “what did you expect?”  Well, the first movie was okay for a summer outing.  How did the second find it’s own special level?  The movie is not only rife with stolen scenes, questionable special effects, stereotyped racial robots, and random things-humping-other-things, it also laughs at us.  The viewers.  Michael Bay thinks we’re idiots.  He also thinks he can tell us he thinks we’re idiots, and we’ll still give him money.  We do.  This is a unique level of badness.  Nearly unique, Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull Disaster comes close.

The thing started coming up the carpeted hall, but fortunately I realized that if I kept spraying water it would lose its footing.  But I needed to have enough water.  (By this time the carpet had disappeared).  There was another, side hall, and the polar bear/ice cream truck would switch over and try coming up that side, but I quickly doused that as well.  It seemed clear that I couldn’t keep this up for long, though.  The only thing for it was to run.  But I’d left some of my clothes in an obscure locker somewhere and couldn’t quite get there in…

Everything changed.  The polar bear/ice cream truck that I had been keeping at bay was now a mobster.  He had invited me, and I was waiting around for the party to get going.  I didn’t much like this mobster, and he knew it.  He had some nefarious end planned for me, yet I couldn’t seem to leave.  Partly because my keys and suit jacket were now wherever those other missing clothes were before.  The party kept filling up with other sort-of-bad people.  I decided I would not go along with whatever they wanted, and failed to applaud when the bad hair guy won some kind of contest that involved matching air canisters with bottles of some kind of liquor.  He cheated by substituting a broken drill, but because he was a known mobster friend/important person, everyone clapped anyway.  Except me.  I knew, then, that I would have kill him, or he would kill me.

My friends didn’t understand the direness of the situation.  Mostly because, apparently, they hadn’t lost their car keys and suit jacket and could just leave.  I was not only trapped, but I had trapped myself.  I did not have the spirit it took to simply walk away from something that was going really badly, and could only get worse.  It was this overwhelming feeling of being trapped and yet being a contributor to my own state that woke me up.

Sometimes dreams don’t mean anything.  But a lot of stressful dreams go back to real-life situations.  There were clues here:

Whatever badness was happening, I had accepted it

I was surrounded by certain friends

Much of the dream was spent keeping something at Bay

The only thing that matched this was an unfortunate decision to see Transformer 2: Return Of The Friggin’ Losers (ROTFL).  Sitting through this movie violated even my normal willingness to watch trash.  After all, Michael Bay KNOWS IT SUCKS.  But he’s counting his money and laughing at us as we sit through it anyway.

There is one argument that this is actually a great movie.  It’s a great read, but it doesn’t require anyone to see the actual movie.  There’s another argument that this movie will doom future civilizations.  (Also a great read, but it does contain an inaccuracy about why someone went to the wrong theater).  But I think there’s a worse fate in store for us now.  We have willingly given up our money for something we knew would be bad, for something that turned out to be far worse than we imagined.  Now we will wait in our little cubbyholes while vast sums are dedicated to the making of Transformers 3.

Mongol loses points for being, essentially, a love story. We have lots of love stories. Anybody can be the subject of a love story. Complex love stories can also be woven into to tales of great human events. But love is not what’s interesting about Genghis Khan. Sure, he loved his wife. And liked his other wives. But he also united a bunch of nomadic tribes, conquered a whole bunch of Asia, and created an empire.

Genghis Khan was a great military tactician, master of alliances, a leader who could inspire loyalty in not only his own people, but in those who had recently defeated. He created an effective systems of administration, and helped create the Silk Road, which was important to several civilizations. The movie didn’t really get this. There were battle scenes, but they were personal. Genghis Khan was probably a good warrior, but that’s not what elevated him above all the other warriors of his time.

There was one large battle, but the movie attributed the victory more to mysticism and thunder than anything else.

The acting was quite good, and some of the sequences were compelling, but the geography quickly got lost. As action moved back and forth, over the years, there was no sense of how large an area was being covered, or of the relationship between the different locations.

But 30 minutes in, I turned to one friend and said: “Did we accidentally walk into ‘He’s not that into you?’” Because, up to that point, the movie was trying to establish characters and relationships, none of which were deeper than the shallowest made-for-tv emotion-fest. Actually, most of those are probably better. Liam Neeson plays a retired agent (CIA?) who LOVES his daughter. But DOESN’T understand her. His ex-wife left him BECAUSE HE PUT HIS COUNTRY FIRST. And she married a nicer, wealthier man who can give his daughter a horse for her birthday. If these people had ever seen a single “we separated because you did your duty” scene in any other movie, they should have just referenced it. Instead, they sort of walked through the stock quotes and stock feelings, piling cliche’ onto cliche’. And, while action movies are often cliche’-ridden, there were way to many relationship cliche’s and no action cliche’s. We get plenty of those later, of course, but why wait?

If the movie had achieved any kind of depth or quality, then a long build-up wouldn’t bother me. But sitting through tired scenes from old cop movies wasn’t building, it was just delaying.

Liam Neeson can never be entirely bad. But he tried so hard to be the clueless dad that he almost comes across as stupid. Then he goes nuts and destroys Paris, which was okay. But the over-the-top action could have been done just as well in a Vin Diesel movie. When you put better actors in place, you expect things to make more sense. Bullets are supposed to hit things, possibly even go through a couch, or car door, as they would in real life. But no, the action direction here is competent, but from the bullets-hit-everything-but-the-hero school.

Then there’s the utter lack of originality. Hang guy from pipe, guy breaks pipe. Of course pipe is filled with steam. I can’t recall one scene that I haven’t seen somewhere else.  Unlike, say, Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter, in which almost every scene was both stupid and original.  There’s something to be said for that.

This movie is mildly defensible, I suppose.  It goes through the summer fun roller-coaster fairly quickly, after that long first 30 minutes.  But it’s a waste of Liam Neeson.