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the latest
latest episodes
I'm in!
"Respectfully Submitted,
ANNALEE NEWITZ
Totally not a legal expert in any way, except for whatever she picked up
from playing D&D with drunken civil liberties attorneys"
First sentence:
Oops! I like Ron Perlman a lot, but the guy is a B-Movie Master, he's done very little besides Hellboy and perhaps voicing Killer Crock and Clayface in DC animated cartoons to warrant any critical praise.
What surprises me more is that John Malkovich is in this movie.
She cracks me up. The best thing about the site is the comments people make.
This is to bad, the games it was based off of had potential. (Warzone was a 40k knockoff based in the same universe as Mutant Chronicles, my true geeks know what i am talkin about) I am willing to bet it was done on the cheep, as its source material ie the RPG has been out of print for a while.
The RPG world the movie is based on is fantastic. How they could bobble such a rich environment, shows the shit-producing awesomeness of Hollywood.
While I'll admit it wasn't very good, calling The Mutant Chronicles the worst SF movie ever made is evidence that Ms. Newitz has never seen anything that the Sci-fi channel puts out as straight to the little screen flicks (Barring Tin Man, which I thought was awesome).
@ENOCHREWT: Have you seen City of Lost Children or Chronos, not to mention the Beauty and the Beast TV series? Ron Perlman is the freakin' man!
Enochrewt: John Malkovich is willing to do all kinds of crazy stuff.
OMIGOD. RPG meets Nouvelle Vague, or something. How can that not be soul-crushingly bad?
Worst is relative, except in the case of:
Actium Maximus: War of the Alien Dinosaurs
Check it out from Netflix, if you really, really hate yourself a hell of a lot. Compared to Actium Maximus: War of the Alien Dinosaurs, The Mutant Chronicles is freakin' CITIZEN freakin' KANE. Trust me on this one.
What's even worse is that it's based on an awesome pen and paper RPG that was published in mid nineties.
After hearing it finally had been made into a film I set my expectations low, but after watching the trailer to this horrendous and butchered adaptation some weeks ago I could draw the conclusion that it was even worse than I initially had imagined, and that's saying a lot.
So I for one welcome any legal or nonlegal complaints that will be taken against this wretched thing.
Enter the Streisand Effect. I, for one, fully intend to see it now.
@#9: That one is now on my list too.
@Wormbaby
Mutant Chronicles is still spawning hobby products. There was a CCG a few years back, and Fantasy Flight is making a minis game due out any day.
One wonders if they were hoping for a movie tie-in....
The very idea of a movie called Mutant Chronicles not featuring an epic fight against Mutants and Ezoghouls (undead zombie horse things the size of a small house)...that does imply that somebody didn't get the message....
I read a novel called Frenzy based in the Mutant Chronicles world. I really enjoyed the book. And it made me want to see the movie.
I enjoyed the movie. It wasn't great, and had genre issues (not quite steampunk, but with some steampunky things; not quite zombie, but with zombie type things). Mostly, I think the thing about the Mutant Chronicles being this religious book with all the instructions is what muddled it. You really just want to see cool characters kicking mutant butt. But it was more stealth than action, which makes it more boring than interesting. :)
But worst ever? Not by a long shot.
Sorry Annaleeze, but you've just not seen enough bad SF. Mutant Chronicles the movie bears little in common with the complex and detailed Gameworld of MC
but to say it's the worst SF movie ever is a bit rich. I can name a few which definitely deserve the title:
Ice Pirates (Ron was in this too sadly)
Circuitry Man
Lawnmower Man 2
Starship Troopers 2
I totally agree with QUINBU, RP is definitley the man, check him out in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. Also his IMDB has 150 entries which seems like the man is in demand.
Enochrewt: Don't forget Quest for Fire
Starship Troopers 2 was indeed bad, and the new Starship Troopers 3 looks like it is borowwing alot from their miniature game so it will probobly be no good as well,
@13:
Starship Troopers? FTW?
That movie was great! It was only very loosely based on the book, which was also great, but if you can put Troopers on your list you can also put I, Robot there too.
Oh, Starship Troopers 2. Never caught that one. Was it worse than Creepozoids?
"Oops! I like Ron Perlman a lot, but the guy is a B-Movie Master, he's done very little besides Hellboy and perhaps voicing Killer Crock and Clayface in DC animated cartoons to warrant any critical praise."
Don't be dissing the Perlman. He's been a cult fave of mine all the way back to Quest For Fire. And how can you forget his time as Vincent? Whatever he does, he does it well. Even if the script is crap.
io9 is a terrible site. They know so little about science and science fiction, and yet they claim to be experts.
As many people here have already said, Mutant Chronicles is nowhere close to the worst movie or worst sci-fi (sorry Harlan) movie ever made. The trilogy of books that are out there (In Lunacy, Frenzy & Dementia) are actually pretty great for mindless entertainment. The movie seems to be a pallid rip-off of Frenzy, which is too bad, since that's the best of the three.
#5 - with you on the greatness of the MC universe, but this actually wasn't a Hollywood product, or at least not a big studio one.
Overruled on grounds that Battlefield Earth is still the worst movie ever made.
"Don't worry boys, Lynryd Skynyrd is here, and they brought the Harrier jump jets!"
Mustn't forget Battle Beyond the Stars (if I remember correctly, and I don't necessarily want to, Ice Pirates used all of the spaceship scenes from this movie).
BOBA
If you've read the book, they did a pretty good job on it. Shame the book is so bad.
This would get thrown out of pretend court simply on the grounds that it's a movie called "THE MUTANT CHRONICLES".
The warning is right there in the title.
This is the same author of the "con" piece about YA science fiction. I'd suggest they highlight more GOOD science fiction books, movies, art, comics and such. We have enough highlighting the mediocre, more GOOD!
I take it she didn't see Starship Troopers 2. Tch, tch...
I mean sure they all butchered Heinlein's original classic but ST2 took it to a level beyond Skinemax corniness.
@ #23, iO9 Often DOES have pieces about the "good" science fiction. Books, movies, comics, television, plays, board-games, games, japanese pornography, you name it!
Until it's carefully compared Manos, the Hands of Fate, any claim of "worst movie ever" is unsubstantiated.
The mutant chronicles was at least visually interesting, and hinted at a world with more depth than the movie shows. What about Starship troopers 2, or 3?
You choose to whine about this one?
And here I thought Santa Claus & The Ice Cream Bunny was the worst of all times. I mean, it puts Manos and even The Star Wars Holiday Special to shame.
Oh. It's not Sci-Fi? Really? I need to go adjust my dosage then.
2 words: Wing Commander.
The worst movie ever made? Not even close. Try anything by Ed Wood or his modern equivalent, Uwe Boll. Or "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians;" "Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever;" and, of course, "Showgirls," just to name a few.
io9 rocks for this.
@Samf, re:Wing Commander
WINNAR!
did i just see mark borchardt and mike schank?
Heh. My first thought, seeing the post title in my iGoogle feed:
"What, The Mutant Chronicles?"
Click.
LULZ.
Please - have none of you seen The Terrornauts? This movie, scripted by John Brunner from a Murray Leinster novel, was dreadful in ways that don't bear repeating.
Okokok, There may have been a few gems that Ron Perlman did that I've forgotten about (Ice Pirates? Wow that takes me back), and yes, Ron Perlman is the freakin man, but he's not know for being in Oscar-worthy flicks, that's all I'm saying. Don't hurt me!
I'll be the odd man out and say that my memories of starship troopers are good, though it was quite obvious that they had a budget smaller than what the first one spent on catering.
Of course, "good" here means "I watched it together with someone else that also likes B-movies, and we had an enjoyable hour or two". The movie itself wasn't impressive, but it wasn't provokatively bad or boring either.
Uhm, correction to my previous post: "My memories of starship troopers _two_ are ..."
#2: he was in Quest for Fire
and mutant chronicles wasn't that bad
@Crimeshark -- as far as I know, Paul Verhoeven is the only other person on the planet to agree with me on this, but imo Showgirls is a pretty good movie. Its main problem was that it was marketed wrong.
The worst movie I have seen to date is Omega Doom.
Starship Troopers (1). Hmm. Where to begin. For a start, and you can listen to the director's commentary to confirm this, the humans are the bad guys. They are Nazis. Or they represent Nazis. Did anyone but me notice that there were no hispanic people in Rio de Janerio? Or that the two main characters are prime examples of the "hump of death"? (if you have sex with them, you will die in a grizly way) Or that Doogie Howser clearly represented Doctor Mengele? Did you see him in the floor length leather duster, wearing the peaked cap? Did he have a riding crop? Probably not, but I'll remember it that way if I want to. It's not a bad movie, but all the fanboys seem to miss the point of it. A world where you can't be a citizen until you EARN it? What a nightmare.