Scientific Greed and Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend (1985)

 

“Greed is good” is a quote popularized by Michael Douglas in Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street.  For the most part, his character of Gordon Gekko was wrong.  Greed is not good.  Greed causes people to be assholes, make mistakes, and ruin the lives of others.  It can get money but it can lose a whole lot more.  When it comes to the subject matter of a film’s story, however, greed can be a great tool for motivating characters.  It overshadows their thoughts and causes them to do increasingly insane things.

One area in which greed is commonly utilized in movies is in the field of science.  Whether the science itself can put people in danger or the desire for money endangers scientific subjects, greed is at the wheel.  Movies such as Jurassic Park, Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend, and King Kong involve people attempting to exploit science for their own personal monetary gain.  The characters expect to earn money by showing the world something that has never been seen by modern eyes.  Their plan eventually backfires, causing more harm than good.  It’s a classic tale told many times throughout cinematic history.

Between the movies I chose, it all started with King Kong, the 1933 monster movie classic.  A group of filmmakers travel to a distant island to shoot a film and discover the great animals that live there.  Upon discovering this unknown world, they decide to bring a giant ape back to America and use it as a tourist attraction.  They want to make money off of some of the world’s unknown nature.  When they return home and show the ape off to the public, disaster strikes and they end up with death and destruction.  The movie is a case of exploitation that teaches people not to use science for profit.  It highlights the problems of bringing something from an outside environment to the world of the big city.  It shows that people need to be wary with the unknown.  And it does this through greed.

Another film that uses scientific greed and exploitation of science to create a gripping story is Jurassic Park.  The 1993 film directed by Steven Spielberg is about a test tour of a new amusement park where scientists have brought dinosaurs back from extinction.  During the tour, things go wrong, the dinosaurs break loose, and people end up fighting for their lives.  Just like King Kong, this movie is about people trying to cash in on what has not been seen by modern eyes.  Unlike King Kong, Jurassic Park has another underlying moral to the story.  That moral is that people should not be playing God with their scientific discoveries.  Tampering with science to bring back an extinct species can have a devastating effect on the species that exist in the current day and age.  The only reason that the dinosaurs are brought back is money.  Money is greed.

The third movie I brought up was Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend, this week’s Sunday “Bad” Movie.  Baby tells the story of a mysterious dinosaur creature living in the African jungle.  Some people want to see it and study it, while others want to take it for themselves to build a fortune.  The struggle between the two sides of the conflict is what drives the film.  The deeper moral to this movie is how taking a rare specimen out of the wild can upset the ecosystem.  But really, the reason that certain people are trying to take the creature is so that they can get rich from showing it off.  That is greed to the utmost degree.  The people are willing to destroy an entire ecosystem in order to earn some money.

None of these movies are bad by any stretch of the imagination.  In fact, I’d say that each of the movies are good.  Even the one that was included in the Sunday “Bad” Movies wasn’t really a bad movie.  Most of what made them into enjoyable and good movies was the help of greed.  Without greed, the motivation and ultimate nemesis to the hubris of the characters in each movie would not be there.  There would not be the lesson of how terrible greed can be.  Especially when it comes to the scientific field.

As you can see, greed can sometimes be good.  The concept of greed can help to build great films.  But as you can also see, the good films involving greed tend to look at it in a negative light.  Even Wall Street.  I mentioned at the beginning how Gordon Gekko, as played by Michael Douglas, said “Greed is good.”  That is not true.  As Wall Street plays out, greed is shown to be a horrific trait.  Greed is not good in and of itself.  As a motivation, however, greed can be one of the best things to happen to storytelling.  That’s a good thing.

There are some notes that I have to drop in here before you leave the page:

• There are no actors from other Sunday “Bad” Movies in Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend.  You get off easy on my listing of actors, it seems.
• Another movie that involves dinosaurs is Attack of the Super Monsters.
• Other Sunday “Bad” Movies that touch upon scientific greed, even if only slightly, are Big Ass Spider!, Science Crazed and Shakma.
• This movie was suggested by @Turbeetle.
• If you have any suggestions for movies that I should watch for future Sunday “Bad” Movie posts, you can leave comments or tell me on Twitter.  Go right ahead.

Nazis in Movies and Nazis at the Center of the Earth (2012)

If a poll were taken among a group of random people asking what the most evil things were, Nazis would likely come in near the top.  They are the most universally hated group of people to ever live.  The people who were alive during World War II and weren’t German hate them.  Anyone born after World War II has grown up hearing about all of the bad things that the Nazis did.  Television, movies, and books have frequently used Nazi Germany as the source of antagonism.  Seventy years after the war, they are still seen as one of the ultimate evil forces.

Nazis at the Center of the Earth is a movie that doesn’t shy away from the fact that Nazis are one of the most sinister groups of people to ever walk the face of Earth.  Not only does it wear the fact that Nazis are bad like it would a badge; the movie brings them into the modern world with a menace as threatening as ever before.  The 2012 film, directed by Joseph J. Lawson, tells the story of a group of scientists who discover that a group of Nazis have been hiding under Antarctica.  The Nazis have been building an army of half man, half robot German soldiers.  There is a plan for the Nazis to rise again and take over the world.

My question is this: Why is it that 9 out of 10 times, the movies that use Nazis as the villains are terrible movies?  It’s a question that really bothers me.  Why are there so many more bad movies that utilize the Nazi threat than there are good movies using this source of terror?  There are a few ways that we can look at this question.

The first is something that I’ve already covered.  Nazis are one of the ultimate evil forces of human civilization as we know it.  There are very few people who don’t despise the Nazis and what they stood for.  Utilizing Nazis as the antagonist in a movie is an easy way to get the audience to sympathize with the protagonists because of the assumed hate the viewers would have for the Nazis.  If you are making a movie where you want likeable protagonists, the Nazis are a quick way to accomplish that sentiment.  Who out there wouldn’t want to see the Nazis lose?  Nobody.

Now we need to look at why the Nazis are as evil as they are.  The most obvious reason is that they initiated World War II and were (until the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor) the main enemy of the Allied Forces during that time.  They invaded Poland, caused the deaths of many people from around the world, and led to the destruction of a large amount of Europe.  Europe was still recovering from the death and destruction of the First World War when the second broke out.  But the fact that the war happened isn’t even the worst of it.  There was the Holocaust.  Maybe you’ve heard about it?  Hitler, the leader of Germany at the time, was rounding up Jewish people and ordering their deaths in camps around Europe.  I’m sure you all know about it.  It’s one of the worst genocidal events in modern history.  It’s still a heart-wrenching instance of human atrocity and one that causes people to hate the Nazis even more than they did before knowing about it.

So there’s all of that bad stuff.  But there’s one more thing that makes the Nazis into one of the perfect antagonists.  Let’s talk about their look a little bit.  Their uniforms are memorable and the swastika is an image likely burned into your mind.  As a mass force, you know what they look like.  Most of all, though, there is Hitler, a one man image machine.  Everyone knows what Hitler looked like.  That face with the combed-over hair and the most recognizable mustache in the world.  Most people have seen footage of him giving speeches.  That man is a perfectly imagined super villain and he was real.  Writers want a standout villain like that.  If you bring in Nazis, you already have that villain.

That’s all the stuff I can think of for the Nazi side of answering my initial question.  The other side of the question is examining bad movies.  This will not take long.  There is an abundance of bad films out there.  There are a lot of people who try to make movies but have no talent in the realm of film.  Their products don’t rise above mediocre and people do not respect them because they don’t earn respect.  They far outnumber the movies that fans and critics rally around and praise.  There are many more low budget films by untalented aspiring filmmakers than there are competent films by respected artists who are knowledgeable about the craft.  Mathematically, it would only be fair to say that Nazis are more likely to show up as the bad guys in a bad move than a good movie because there are more bad movies for them to show up in.

In the end, the answer to my question “Why is it that Nazis are the bad guys in more bad movies than good, by a lot?” all comes down to the fact that there are more bad movies in general, and how easy it is for a less experienced writer to use them as bad guys due to their inherent evil.  That solves that case in 900 words.

Nazis are an antagonist in many movies that you’ll see.  The actions they took and the recognisability of their look has helped to make them a legend in pain and suffering.  They are one of the most recognizable faces of terror.  Whether the movies are good or bad, they will always be known for their atrocities.  And that’s what makes them a great antagonist.

There are some notes that I need to toss in here, so here they are:

• Lilan Bowden and Jon Kondelik each made appearances in Nazis at the Center of the Earth.  They also showed up in Rise of the Zombies way back near the beginning of the Sunday “Bad” Movies.
• Christopher Karl Johnson was in this movie as well as Anneliese: The Exorcist Tapes.  That film was covered in the Paranormal Entity post.
• Jake Busey is one of the main characters in Nazis at the Center of the Earth.  He voiced a dog in Beverly Hills Chihuahua 3.
• If you have any suggestions for future Sunday “Bad” Movies, you can leave them in the comments or tell me on Twitter.  I like to hear suggestions because it gives me ideas on what movies to watch.
• Nazis at the Center of the Earth was suggested by @MySharona1987.

Science Crazed (1989 or 1991)

Horror is a genre that many people use as a place to begin their movie careers.  Whether acting, directing, writing, or doing effects work, horror is a starting point.  That’s because it is easy to make a horror film for cheap.  Good horror?  Perhaps not.  But cheap horror flicks are a good way to show the potential that a person can have when it comes to making movies.

When it comes to cheap horror, nothing gets cheaper than the movie Science Crazed.  Made in either 1989 or 1991, Science Crazed is a Canadian horror movie about a mad scientist who creates a monstrous serial killer through artificial insemination.  Ron Switzer directed this movie that was made for next to no money.  He cast Tony Della Ventura as The Fiend, and many other actors and actresses as nameless characters.  The movie was so cheap that they couldn’t even afford character names.

If you’ve seen a few of these so-called “No-budget” horror movies, you might have noticed one thing that many of the older ones try to do.  By older, I mean from the 80s and early 90s.  The pre-digital era of this style of filmmaking.  The common thread through many of them is a want to extend the movie to a running time of approximately an hour and a half.  Science Crazed is no different.  It may, in fact, be one of the worst offenders I’ve seen when it comes to lengthening the movie.  There are many sequences that use repetition of shots to add time.  From repeated workout scenes to recurring instances of The Fiend shuffling through hallways, the movie does its best to be longer than it needs to be.  Ron Switzer knew what he was doing when he kept playing certain bits of the movie over and over again.

The thing about all of the repetition is that it is difficult to look away from the screen.  There’s a feeling of awe that keeps your eyes glued to Science Crazed.  It is hard to believe that the movie would be as repetitious as it is.  I’m using variations of repetitious a lot, but it’s true.  The movie is unbelievable in how many times it repeats itself.  If all of the runtime padding moments were taken out of the movie, Science Crazed would be a good thirty minutes shorter than it is.  This would be a relief to the viewer.  At the same time, however, it would take away the magic of the film.

There is not much behind Science Crazed in terms of directing and acting talent.  No potential can be seen in the film.  But the inept nature of how over-extended the movie is transfixed me.  I could not stop watching because I wanted to know when the scenes will end.  Surely that was not the intention that Ron Switzer had when he wrote the film.  Surely it was not his intention when he directed the film.  Nobody wants their audience to sit through their movie waiting for it to end.  Switzer probably expected people to be invested in what was occurring on screen.  The magic of Science Crazed does not come from good characters or interest in the happenings of the people.  The magic is in the amateur repetition of the editing and direction.  That is what the viewer watches this movie for.

It is not often that I would recommend a movie that is as poorly made as Science Crazed.  Yet, there is something about this movie that makes me want to recommend it to anyone and everyone.  It’s similar to driving down a road and seeing a serious car accident on the opposite side.  You slow down and casually look toward the wreckage.  You cannot look away.  That is what Science Crazed is.  It is a movie that is so poorly put together that you just can’t look at anything else.  It is a must see no-budget film.

If you are interested in seeing Science Crazed, keep an eye out on YouTube.  The movie periodically gets updated to the video site in full.

There are some notes that I have to put in here, like I always do:

• Science Crazed was suggested by @Doug_Tilley, cohost of the No-Budget Nightmares podcast.  This is the second movie that podcast has covered that I have watched for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  The other movie was Rock, Paper,Scissors: Fall of the Original Six.  The movie featured Doug in a small role.
• Other Canadian movies that I’ve covered include Ice Soldiers and Repeaters.
• If you want to see a movie covered in the Sunday “Bad” Movies, leave the suggestion in the comments or send them at me through Twitter.