Opinion

So bad it’s bad

Last night’s premiere of Brian Trenchard-Smith’s Arctic Blast left us cold, but probably not in the way the filmmakers intended.

Isn’t the charm of ‘bad movies’ the fact that those making them were being absolutely serious and failed miserably? Isn’t a cult movie something that stands out from the crowd and has a special, almost undefinable quality that connects with a very specific, adoring audience? However, deliberately trying to make a ‘bad movie’ (or a B-movie, as many would rather label certain filmic abominations), is a recipe for disaster.

Arctic Blast is a film that screams ‘look at me, look at me, I’m so bad I’m good!’, only to be told ‘no, you’re so bad you’re bad‘ by an audience that lost at least five of its members, who couldn’t process all 90 minutes of this The Day After Tomorrow tribute – we were sitting by the door, so we noticed those who walked out and never came back.

This film proves to Roland Emmerich haters that as over the top as his disaster blockbusters may be, there is a level of sophistication to them, that not everybody can write – and recite- those cheesy lines with the same kind of conviction, and that VFX do make a big difference when it comes to mindless entertainment.

Mark Hartley’s documentary Not Quite Hollywood made Australia rediscover and appreciate its ‘Ozploitation’ cinema, and while it is understandable that Trenchard-Smith would try to capitalise on this newfound love for his old films (Turkey Shoot, etc), he does so without the originality that those films had back in the 1970s and 80s. His Arctic Blast is nothing but a mockbuster that’s six years too late.

You can’t intentionally make a bad film and get away with it.

You can’t manufacture cult cinema.

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