It seems like I often write about the topic of bad movies here on Dangerous Minds. Good bad movies, not bad bad movies. Nobody likes a movie that’s just plain terrible. A good bad movie has to have that something special, like The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, Santa Claus vs. The Martians, or The Room. Or just about any Elizabeth Taylor film after a certain point.

And then there’s Birdemic: Shock and Terror, which I posted about earlier. Tara and I went to see it with Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin this weekend and I must say, Birdemic truly lived up to its good bad advance hype. It was bewildering, but hilarious. Tim and Eric’s Tim Heidecker, co-host of the screening we saw on Saturday night, stared out at the audience when the film was over and after a dramatic pause, asked “Don’t you all just feel like assholes for sitting through that?” In a sense he was right, although Heidecker admitted this screening had, in fact, been his fourth.

I was telling a friend today about the dubious cinematic charms of the utterly perplexing Birdemic and he asked me had I ever seen Gymkata? I had not and he suggested I look it up on YouTube. Here’s a brief review of it, from Film Critic:

I’ve seen Gymkata three times. That’s not a boast. The first time I caught it was on videotape in the late ‘80s. The second and third times it was on some late night cable station and I was either too sleep-deprived or inebriated to turn it off. I know it’s cliché, but the whole car wreck analogy fits almost too well. When Gymkata is on, I just can’t turn away. And I’m not alone - - the net is littered with sad accounts of similarly affected individuals.

Jonathan Cabot (Kurt Thomas) is a U.S. gymnast sent to the backwater country of Parmistan to participate—and hopefully win—The Game, a dangerous, obstacle-laden decathlon. Why? Because the U.S. government needs to set up a “Early Warning Earth Station for the Star Wars program” and sending in troops to do it is “out of style.” Indeed. Thing is no one has survived The Game in 900 years. There’s a reason for that, too. As if the course weren’t hard enough, contestants must maneuver through numerous ninjas, crazies, and Parmistani thugs that try and stop them.

A cheap plot description can’t do justice to the inanity on display here. Perhaps descriptions of a few choice sequences will: the film’s crowning triumph is the Village of Crazies, an entire hovel populated only with cannibal psychopaths and screaming schizos who try and claw our hero from the sky as he swings and vaults through the decaying town. What, that’s not crazy enough? How about the fact that there just happens to be a convenient pommel horse in the center of the town?!? Still not doing it? How about clumsy ninjas wearing fur vests? Or a guy named Thorg with a red headband and silver He-Man arm braces? Honestly, I could go on and on.

Did you catch the part in the trailer where he just happened to have the gymnastics horse to fight the baddies with? How does that get explained?

Not sure I could sit though this one. Yes, I’ll watch the movie with the poorly animated CGI birds that shit fiery bombs, but even I have standards.
 

 
Gymkata on iMockery
Thank you, Scott Dallavo!