Movies that Suck: Ashes to Ashes, Dumb to Dumb

Posted by Danny Gallagher (danny@filmschoolrejects.com) on January 29, 2008

There will come a time when our civilization will fall, crumble and turn into nothing but dust and fossilized remains for some future civilization to uncover and put in museums to help their people understand how far they’ve come as a species.

When that time comes, let’s pray archaeologists don’t excavate a 2 million year old Blockbuster.

I don’t know why other people spend so much time complaining about movies and the media. In the big scheme of things, it doesn’t seem like a very big cause to be championing. If the U.S. Department of Defense announced tomorrow they were pulling out of Iraq so they could launch a pre-emptive strike to keep Hollywood from making bad movies, I would be the first one to speak out against it, although it would take five seconds of arguing with myself and I’d need some time to set my TiVo to record CNN before the first missile landed.

Believe it or not, our music, our television and our films define who we are as a culture and as a people. When our media goes out into the universe and some foreign land that has never even seen our country on a map, that’s the closest thing we have to an ambassador. What comes out of the screen tells them a lot about us a people. In a lot of cases, however, that ambassador makes fart noises with his armpits, asks everyone he sees to pull his finger and tells other countries that “We’re number one” because we’re the world’s largest exporter of fart jokes.

Imagine what that image will be in 2 million years when archaeologists stumble upon a dusty laden copy of Meet the Spartans.

First off, he’d have no idea what the movie is about based on the cover. It is about giant fat hairy guys pretending to be robots? Is it about hot half naked chicks pretending to be hot half naked Romans? Is it about bald chicks falling in holes? He might think this is porn and if he watches it, he will be very mad at us, so there’s strike one right there.

Then when they take the time to study it and review it, they will have no idea what it is. It’s not a comedy because it’s not funny. It’s not a drama because it’s hard to take something so ludicrous so serious. They’ll stare at the screen like a dog watching a monster truck show.

After they watch all the movies it is referencing, they’ll still wonder exactly what its purpose was to the audiences who watched it. That’s when the idea will spark in their brains. The people during this time must have been complete idiots.

They’ll do some research and discover the same movie was the highest grossing film at the box office during the week of its release. They’ll also discover the number one show at the time was a game show where people would admit in front of their family and the nation that they stuff their underwear and secretly hate their parents for money, and the number one comedy album is by a man called Dane Cook, the only man in history paid to have epileptic seizures on stage.

They’ll present their findings to the National Historic Archive. They will give them a huge government grant to allow them to continue their research and they’ll unearth even more astonishing artifacts to back up their bleak findings: the Not Another Teen Movie, the Date Movie, the Epic Movie, the Scary Movies. Then they’ll present their findings in a special wing of the Smithsonian entitled, “The Du’h Ages: See What the World Was Like Before Brains.” A copy of Meet the Spartans will be featured right between the “jackass” memorial and the history of Scientology.

So go ahead, if you want to see Meet the Spartans because you think you’ll have a good time, don’t let me stop you.

Let humanity stop you.

Danny Gallagher is a freelance writer, humorist, reporter and fartist living in Texas. His website can be found at www.dannygallagher.net.