These routine, sell-by-numbers operations inspire a certain nostalgia for the promotions of yesteryear. We look back with fondness on the horror movie posters stating ominous admission policies (no one admitted during the last five minutes, no pregnant women allowed at all) and begging the weak-of-heart to stay away. We remember a Hollywood where the studios launch much-publicized world-wide searches for the perfect unknown, and find, in the case of “Gone With The Wind,” Vivien Leigh; where producers like Michael Todd promise ever bigger screens and more colorful film techniques and smaller promoters counter with Aroma-Rama; and where William Castle sells titles like “Macabre” by taking out an insurance policy on each viewer, in case they die of fright, along with other inspired gimmickry (my favorite is the “Coward’s Corner” designated for any customer too afraid to watch the finale of 1961’s “Homicidal”).  If today’s marketing machine represents the steady adult hand at work, then the barker with a megaphone in front of the nickelodeon would be this craft in its infancy and William Castle and his shenanigans would be the flowering promise of youth.

Less well remembered are the stumbling embarrassments of adolescence. What about these promotional duds, these misfires for non-starters?

On a hot summer day in 1983, a dozen couples gathered in a soundstage in Burbank to take part in a group wedding. One after another, they walked past a pair of futuristic soldiers in fanciful armor, down a red carpet flanked by strangers in folding chairs, and up to an altar made of faux stone. These were the lucky winners of a national contest sponsored by Columbia Pictures. They had penned the winning statements describing, as the studio’s press release states, “why their ‘Fantasy Come True’ would be to have a ‘Krull’ wedding in Hollywood.”

If you’re not familiar with the film, you’re not alone.  The ambitious “Krull,” with a production budget somewhere between $45-50 million was one of the biggest flops of 1983, netting a meager $16.5 million. The more modestly budgeted “Flashdance” made nearly $100 million. The teen comedy quickie “Spring Break” brought in $24 million.

It’s difficult to describe just how bad this film is. There is something essentially off about it. Maybe it’s the clear calculation behind the characters and plot elements; maybe it’s the queasy feeling of watching a British film shamelessly masquerading as American. Whatever the reason, this is a film that even most film nerds cannot love.

For those few who’ve seen it, please forgive a brief description of the plot. On the planet “Krull,” civilization seems to have advanced to the middle ages, earth-time. Theirs is a feudal system ruled by a king. Horseback is the primary mode of transportation and the weapon of choice is the sword.  The planet itself is eerily similar to ours, with mountains and deserts and forests and so forth. The biggest difference is that its inhabitants are under attack from an alien race. These aliens, called Slayers, travel in a ship dubbed the “dark fortress” which looks like a large pile of rocks and materializes here and there without warning. Slayer soldiers dress head to toe in dark armor and carry lances which occasionally shoot lasers. Their leader is a giant beast known simply as “The Beast.”

On the wedding day of Prince Colwyn and Princess Lyssa, the Slayer army attacks, slaughtering most of the royal family and kidnapping the Princess. Colwyn sets out on a quest to rescue her. He learns from the wise seer Ynyr that he must first complete a number of tasks, most important of which is finding the lost Glaive, a five-pronged boomerang-like weapon of yore.   Along the way, he assembles a rag-tag army, including a cyclops, an inept magician, and a young boy named Titch. One of the few enduring points of interest is that the film features a young Liam Neeson in a small role.


If it sounds like Columbia Pictures was trying to mimic “Star Wars” and its attendant success, it’s because they were. (And they weren’t alone; MGM’s entry was “Clash of the Titans” in 1981, a film so poorly conceived it makes me think the only thing the filmmakers gleaned from “Star Wars” was the fact that Alec Guinness was in it.) Clearly a tent-pole film for the studio, “Krull” received the coveted summer release date of July 29th taking advantage of the summer movie boom kicked off on Fourth of July.

In rolling out this film, Columbia also attempted to mimic George Lucas’ groundbreaking marketing scheme.  ”Star Wars” had introduced a number of new tools into the marketing playbook, promotional toys and tie-ins among them. Lucas had effectively changed the game, and the off-balance studio responded with awkward attempts to marry old-fashioned marketing with “fresh and new” ideas.

On top of print and television ads, an Atari game based on the film appeared in arcades across the country.  And the weddings weren’t the only promotions that the folks at Columbia had dreamt up. The press-book sent to theater owners, a thin pamphlet filled with ad art and short articles to plant in local papers, outlines a number of interesting promotional gimmicks. One suggests approaching the local bakery about creating special pastries in the shape of the Glaive and dubbing them the punny ‘Krullers’. “Everyone knows what a cruller is…a tasty glazed donut. Now comes the Kruller…a tasty Glaived donut.” Another elaborate scheme involved acquiring a dark van and driving it around town (“like the Fortress, it’s apt to be anywhere”), improbably evoking the dark fortress from the film and, more improbably, inspiring passing motorists and pedestrians to rush to their local theater and plop down $3.50 for a seat. My heart goes out to the pimply theater manager, paid a quarter more an hour than everyone else, who it fell upon to put these plans into action. It’s heartbreaking to imagine the sad tableau of this kid trekking over to Dunkin Donuts and the local Chevy dealership to lay out these precious concepts. (The other tableau that comes to mind is less heartbreaking but equally pathetic, that of the half-drunken hack in the basement of the marketing department, churning out these ridiculous plans.)

But unlike these poor souls, the participants of the “Krull” wedding promotion were volunteers. And they had more at stake than a crummy job. You have to wonder what would lead these folks to cement one of the most precious days of their lives to a “Star Wars” knockoff sci-fi/fantasy hybrid.

Sure, there have been many “Star Trek” weddings since, but there are some big differences here. For one, the couple tying the knot in full Federation regalia would have actually seen the films and television series that inspired the theme of their wedding. The “Krull” weddings took place a full week preceding the release of the picture. How could these people have possibly known that a “Krull” wedding would be their ‘Fantasy Come True?’ The Trekkie bride and groom, it can also be assumed, are familiar with the characters of “Star Trek,” and in all likelihood even know them better than their creators. Our betrothed would not yet have had a chance to fall in love with the irrascalble Ergo and his back-firing magic spells, or shed a tear at the death of the noble Rell the Cyclops. Moreover, “Star Trek” (or “Star Wars” or “World of Warcraft” or any of the other works that have spawned fantasy weddings) exists as an important part of the lives of the couple, often even from childhood. It is possible that all twelve “Krull” participants were fans of the science fiction genre, and thus of “Krull” in a very general way, but that’s as close as we’re going to get.

To understand their decision to participate in this blessed union of disposable advertising and life-long commitment, we have to look back on this distant decade and remember that these people lived in a time when blockbusters were a relatively new phenomenon, and they seemed to happen at a fairly regular pace.  ”The Exorcist,” “Jaws” and “Star Wars” all went through the roof in the years before “Krull” hit the silver screen.

Imagine if you had been married on the set of the first “Star Wars” (or the fourth, depending on how you’re counting). You’d have bragging rights forever! Not only were you a part of something that big, but you were prescient enough (or lucky enough or blessed enough) to jump on that rocket ship before it blasted off into the blockbuster stratosphere.

Granted then, there was a speculative nature to these “Krull” nuptials. For all the couples knew, as they took their vows that day in Burbank, before God and a half-dozen soldiers in full Krullian armor, “Krull” could be the hit film of the summer and beyond, launching a multi-film franchise, a merchandizing empire, its characters and plot elements entering into the popular zeitgeist, more familiar than even the most well known fairy tales. And they weren’t alone in rolling the dice; the savvy folk who ran Columbia studios were betting it would be a smash, to the tune of $27 million. By comparison, 1983’s Return of the Jedi cost $32.5 (and netted a far more substantial $252 mil).

In the film, the wedding scene plays like this: Prince Colwyn and Princess Lyssa cross a grand room flanked by soldiers who pound their swords against their helmets in tribute.  A bearded man in a robe stands before a cauldron. The Prince takes a burning torch from an attendant, and dunks it in the water, saying “I give fire to water. It will not return except from the hand of the woman I choose as my wife.” Princess Lyssa then dips her hand in the water saying, “I take fire from water. I give it only to the man whom I choose as my husband.” She lifts a shaky flame from the water and holds it out towards Colwyn. As he reaches to take it, the Slayers attack the castle.

On that magical day in Burbank, there were no torches, no cauldron. The man performing the wedding was a city commissioner and wore a simple jacket and tie, not a cape, and the armored guard had been downsized to six.


The couples ranged in age from 18 to 66 years old. “A cross-section of men and women from the United States,” reads the press release. They included a nurse, waitress, U.S. Army Colonel, author, race car designer, plumber, electrician and baseball player.

As part of a promotional partnership, the brides’ identical wedding gowns were designed by Alfred Angelo — lacey get-ups inspired by the one worn in the film by Lysette Anthony (as Princess Lyssa).   The men were decked out in very 70’s white tuxedos with broad lapels from the requisite pre-prom destination, After Six tuxedo rentals.


After the ceremony, the promotional tie-ins truly kicked in, and the couples were whisked away on Western Airlines to San Francisco where they would stay at the Hilton for a week-long honeymoon. They were equipped with brand new Pegasus luggage and a Kodamatic Instant Camera to record their memories. A pretty meager pay-off for selling one of life’s most cherished events.

This promotion was largely ignored by the press. The film had a poor opening weekend and suffered dreadful reviews. Variety called it a “blatantly derivative hodgepodge of Excalibur meets Star Wars.”  The BBC chimed, “a sub standard space opera with pretensions to being a British Star Wars.”  The idea of running a feature on the “Krull” Weddings, and photos of the participants, next to a scathing review of the film seems downright cruel. It is probable that the studio realized that rolling out some photos of folks getting married in the manner of a scene in a film that no one saw wouldn’t do much to resuscitate ticket sales. The promotion was dropped.

In the aftermath, the now-wedded couples would find their nuptials forever linked to a flop. And worse, to a forgotten flop.  ”Krull” is no “Ishtar” or “Last Action Hero” — the subjects of ridicule, but also of persistent fascination. By illustration, imagine if you owned one of the model rocket ships from 1959’s “Plan 9 from Outer Space,” popularly acknowledged as one of the worst films of all time.  Those models are infamous in cinema history, and to own them would be pretty cool.  Now imagine you had one of the Glaives from “Krull.”  That is not cool. It will never be cool.

One day, I hope to track down the participants of these weddings. And when I do, I’ll be ready, for I have prepared a questionnaire:

*How do you explain your wedding photos to friends? Do you keep a VHS copy of the film handy?

*Do you secretly dread every visit from family, sure that this will be time that the little one asks “where were you married, Gramma?” Will you answer, “on the planet Krull?”

*If you were to do it all over today, what unseen potential blockbuster would you model your wedding after? The next Batman? Transformers 3? Marley & Me 2: Puppy Love?

*Are there elements in the plot of the film that you see playing out in your daily life? Do you have a sage mentor like Ynyr who offers you important guidance? Who is the Rell in your life?

And, of course, the obvious:

*What the hell were you thinking?!

As telling as their answers may be, a more thorough study may need to be conducted.   Should I fail in this endeavor, I suggest to future researchers that they examine the divorce rate among “Krull” wedding participants comparative to the general population. I’d also be interested to see the numbers on the average family size, to learn how long after the film’s debut their children were born, and how many of them are named Titch.

Many among us feel abandoned by pop culture, disappointed by the films and television series we have allowed into our lives on such an intimate level. To the fans of the early “Star Wars” films who disavow everything George Lucas has produced in the last decade, and the “Soprano” and “Seinfeld” fans who felt let-down by these series’ final episodes, I say this: look to the couples of the “Krull” Wedding!  Has ever a group of people been so betrayed, so completely abandoned?


In many ways, the “Krull” Wedding represents one of the last gasps of the grand gimmick promotion. In the years following “Star Wars’” mega success, the anticipation of each new installment was successfully built by rolling out the promotional tie-ins and products. “7-11 has Boba Fett slurpee cups! He must be in ‘Empire!’” In the seventies and early eighties, the tie-in was new and exciting; today it is a matter of fact. That a fast food outlet would do a toy-giveaway with “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” was a given, the only possible excitement was whether it would be Burger King or MacDonald’s.

With the proliferation of multiplexes, lining up at Graumann’s a month before the latest “Star Wars” chapter is no longer necessary, it’s just part of the experience for some, a nostalgic flashback to simpler times.

In a way, the promotion has become the product now. While William Castle or Dino De Laurentiis might have dreamed up sending a bunch of people to live on an island for a month to promote their latest film, the producers of “Survivor” have cut to the chase; doing it has become the event itself, packaged and televised and sold as its own entity. The premise of “The Bachelor” might sound like a gimmick, but that’s beyond the point. And when a couple was married live on television at the climax of “Who Wants to Marry A Millionaire,” the show wasn’t promoting anything other than itself.

Perhaps when viewed in this light, the “Krull” weddings, a promotion tied so tenuously to its product and ultimately severed entirely from it, can be seen as innovative after all.

For example: I often find myself writing things like, “The acting was atrocious, the script could have been written by a 3rd grader and the direction was all over the map, but at least the visual effects were spectacular.”  It seems studios are now focusing more heavily than ever on making something look cool to please the fanboys at the utter expense of character and story.  I’d be hard pressed to find a handful of blockbusters in the past five years, with the exception of last year’s “Star Trek,” to which I couldn’t apply that criticism.

And as hard as I try to infuse my criticism with as much creativity as possible, I fully expected my review of Louis Leterrier’s remake of Desmond Davis’ 1981 cult classic, “Clash of the Titans,” to contain a similar phrase.  And indeed, the acting is atrocious and the offensively bad script most probably could have been written by an elementary school student, but unfortunately for us all, this particular iteration of the mindless Hollywood action flick cannot even count an array of impressive visual effects among its redeeming qualities.  This criticism is not a slight to the design team.  I found some of the creature designs and landscapes to be quite good, actually.  But the technical execution of those designs felt thrown together, choppy and poorly incorporated into the fabric of a broader universe.  I could levy this blame on the technical craftsman who developed the CGI effects and who were responsible for assimilating the effects into a practical environment, but it all ends up on the director’s desk.  He is responsible for communicating his vision and molding the work of hundreds of individuals into a cohesive unit that tells a story.

“Clash of the Titans” feels like a hundred different little visions smashing into each other for 106 minutes.

I’ve never claimed to be a cinema elitist.  Sure, I love Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin” and Antonioni’s “L’avventura,” but also love “Back to the Future” and “Jaws.”  A good movie is a good movie whether it cost $100 or $100,000,000 to make.  And by every conceivable means of evaluation, “Clash of the Titans” is a terrible movie.

After scoring massive hits with the second and third “Bourne” installments, “The Bourne Supremacy” and “The Bourne Ultimatum” which made a combined $730 million worldwide, Greengrass managed to lure Damon to over to his pet project, “Green Zone,” which (very) loosely adapts Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s 2006 book “Imperial Life in the Emerald City,” about life in Baghdad’s Green Zone.

The pitch sounds interesting enough.  Take the international espionage, mystery, paranoia, intensity and frenetic energy of Jason Bourne’s fictional universe and insert it into one of the most disgraceful and costly scandals of the last hundred years — George W. Bush’s unscrupulous and illegal wars, both of which we’re still conspicuously mired in.  Considering the enormous and devoted fanbase of the Jason Bourne character and the monumental unpopularity of the Iraq War the combo seemed a match made in wish-fulfillment heaven.  Indeed, they might of just done away with the technicalities and called it “The Bourne Bewilderment: There Really Seriously Weren’t Any WMD and Only God Knows Why We’re Still Over There Wasting Lives, Bankrupting our Country and Breeding Anti-American Sentiment.”  But apparently Greengrass and Damon didn’t get the memo; the one that states that any film about the Iraq War will fail at the box office.  Even the winner of this year’s Oscar for Best Picture, Kathryn Bigelow’s universally beloved and admired “The Hurt Locker,” made a paltry $26.5 million worldwide.

Of course, a film’s financial returns are irrelevant in the context of artistic evaluation.  It’s one of the luxuries afforded to film critics that makes it so easy to deconstruct monstrosities like “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” and extol the brilliance of Ramin Bahrani’s films.  Movie studios, on the other hand, are businesses.  Profits are the prime directive while things like originality, artistic integrity and ambition straggle behind often never making the cut.  So given the perfect track record of Iraq War film failures, “Green Zone” must be one of the few instances of record wherein the creatively suffocating corporate studio culture is temporarily abated in favor of some enriching and meaningful contribution to the world of artistic cinema.  Right?  Not exactly.

Damon plays Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller, a good soldier with a keen mind tasked with hitting each site believed to be housing weapons of mass destruction immediately following the United States’ invasion of Iraq in 2003. The Iraqi military is overtaken quite handily but every site fingered as a hot-house by our intelligence is either full of pigeon droppings or outmoded mechanical equipment.  No WMD.  An understandably distraught Miller innocently raises concerns with his superiors about the trustworthiness of the intelligence but is immediately silenced, sparking his rogue mission to uncover a real-life conspiracy far beyond anything he imagined.

It should be noted that “Green Zone” is fiction.  It is a shaky-cam thriller meant to be consumed as entertainment.  There are ridiculous coincidences and invented scenarios, but it draws remarkably accurate real-life parallels and reconstructs the details of actual events with unrelenting attention to detail.  It’s thesis that neocons in the Bush administration (represented by an insufferable Greg Kinnear) fabricated intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq is hardly disputed anymore, a fact the film uses to construct an exciting and enthralling narrative.

With Greengrass at the helm you can be sure that “Green Zone” is technically sound. It is a remarkably well crafted work of cinema shot beautifully by director of photography Barry Ackroyd.  But a number of misgivings prevent it from achieving the larger portion of its goals.  Brian Helgeland’s script oversimplifies a hyper-complex string of events to the point of absurdity.  The nature of cinema often requires the distillation of ideas for the sake of pacing, character development or to serve the cohesiveness of the narrative, but Helgeland writes as if “Green Zone” is to be the latest installment in the “For Dummies” series of instructional books.

A poorly written script is occasionally buoyed when tackled by committed and gifted actors, but “Green Zone” enjoys no such benefit.  Damon is serviceable as the determined skeptic but he’s given little to work with.  His supporting cast is stiff, uninteresting and delivers the bland dialogue with the same energy with which is seems to have been written.

Hovering ominously over Johannesburg, South Africa is an enormous alien spacecraft.  Have they come to attack?  Abduct and carryout nefarious experiments?  Colonize the lovely city of Joburg?  Make peace?  When none of the above come to pass after an unspecified period of anxious anticipation, the local human authorities reluctantly send a team of helicopters to investigate.  Upon blasting their way into the ship they discover thousands of sickly looking giant alien lobster-creatures starving to death.  In an act of humanitarianism (or is it alienitarianism?) the creatures are transported to terrestrial homes in a temporary residential camp outside the city called District 9.  But the locals are not pleased.  Who can blame them?  The aliens, pejoratively dubbed “prawns” because of their bottom-feeder appearance, are grotesque-looking, often volatile (as to be expected considering their circumstances), and prove to be quite a nuisance.

In an effort to subdue the public outcry over the crime and squalor inevitably overrunning the government-instituted ghetto now populated with 1.8 million aliens, the government contracts Multi-National United, a private military and technology company, to evict the entire population and move them to District 10, a new holding camp farther from Joburg’s human population.  Wikus van de Merwe (Sharlto Copley), a dorky, naive but annoyingly irresistible character, a la Michael Scott from NBC’s “The Office,” is promoted and tapped to head up the operation.  Wikus’ dramatic character arc, via hazardous and unlawful eviction attempts and his deepening involvement in the affairs and culture of the prawns, is the pretense by which an entirely different story is told.

To say the film’s subtext is an allegory of South African apartheid would be inaccurate, as subtext suggests an implicit, underlying theme.  Blomkamp goes out of his way to expose that blemish on the country’s record as overtly as possible.  The moniker “District 9″ is an obvious reference to Cape Town’s famous District 6, the once relatively cosmopolitan home to enterprising non-whites, the Cape Malays and Cape Coloureds (as they were known in the 1960s and 70s), that was demolished and its residents forced to the undesirable Cape Flats several miles away.  Even the prawns’ language is reminiscent of a major dialect spoken by apartheid victims.  Clearly, subtlety was not on the menu for Blomkamp or his producer, Peter Jackson (“Lord of the Rings”).  So, why tell the story of District 6 through the lens of a summer sci-fi action flick?  Only to woo the holy grail of demographics: Males 18-24.  Replace the CG aliens with the real victims of racism and xenophobia and you can forget about cracking the top twenty at the box office.  Why does it matter?  Missed opportunity.  The film demands legitimacy in the opening minutes via its compelling cinematography capturing earnest interviews and realistic news stories documentary-style, and then squanders it with a second half that could only appeal to gamers and kids with ADHD.

Some ancillary themes can be gleaned if you’re not too distracted by the ridiculousness of the premise.  Man’s recurring primal tendencies and the inevitability of any moral species’ debasement in the face of annihilation are skillfully portrayed, but fail to overcome the narrative’s larger issues.

The visuals, on the other hand, are spectacular.  The hovering ship and the disgusting prawns are photo-realistic.  The fact that all of this was accomplished with a meager budget of $30 million proves Blomkamp’s resourcefulness and secures him financial independence and limitless professional options.  With any luck we’ll see this talented director break free of flimsy allegory and video-game sensibilities and apply himself to a project worthy of his skills.

Score: 3/5

Explosions!

2007′s “Transformers” was a mindless, tasteless, overly CGI-ed and under-plotted piece of explosion-driven schlock. Not a terribly good movie, but a reasonably good time nonetheless. It’s sequel, however, refuses to take its anti-intellectualism, anti-tolerance, anti-progress, anti-humanity, or anti-cinema lightly.

“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is the most aggressively bad movie I have ever seen. There may be passively worse films out there hampered by budget, time or resources, but no other film has ever managed to do so little with so much.

Director Michael Bay, not known for his subtlety, propels this mangled amalgam of badness to an unprecedented level of open disregard for characterization, emotional authenticity, basic continuity, moderation, balance, humanity or common sense.

If there was anything resembling a cohesive narrative this is the part where I would include a brief summary of the plot in order to set the stage and contextualize the critical evaluation to follow. But since I have so little to work with I’ll skip that part and attempt to explain my utter disdain for this piece of worthless refuse as clearly and concisely as possible.

The following are my categorized and enumerated arguments against “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen”:

1. Misogyny – Can you name one female character in this film that isn’t either unnecessarily and exploitatively gorgeous or a subhuman bumbling buffoon?  Yeah, neither can I.  It’s also readily apparent that Bay has never set foot on a college campus, despite what his Wikipedia page may claim.  Each female is a more grossly exaggerated adolescent male fantasy than the last.  And you’d be hard pressed to find any acknowledgment of the existence of textbooks.

2. Nationalism/Jingoism – This is the type of ignorantly nationalistic, America always knows best, type of film that will find it’s way into regular rotation in the collections of the likes of Bush and Cheney.  Other countries… what are those?  Well, according to Bay’s movie, if you’re not a white American male, the measure of your existence is only fulfilled upon being mercilessly ridiculed and subsequently destroyed.  And why did Sam Witwicky’s (Shia LaBeouf) parents go to France?  For no other reason than that it gives the filmmaker an excuse to make fun of the French, of course.  And why open your film with the indigenous inhabitants of an ancient underdeveloped nation?  So the giant space alien robots can have something insignificant to destroy, of course.

3. Racism -The two concept Chevy bots, Skids and Mudflap, don’t simply perpetuate black stereotypes, they revel in their mockery of what is portrayed as an idiotic and inferior race.  Their baffling inclusion in the film, combined with the fact that virtually all non-whites are either brutally murdered or depicted as savages, dimwits, or terrorists, culminates in perhaps the most explicitly racist film since D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” (1915).

4. Anti-intellectualism – I have no qualms with low-brow, action-driven concepts, or broad slapstick comedy. It all has its place.  But this piece of indulgent imbecility is an embarrassment to cognition.  Fart jokes, relentlessly crass and unfunny sexual references, and minorities being mocked and killed is what passes for comedy in this bizarro world.  “Revenge” is on such an elite level of awfulness that it may warrant inclusion in the Library of Congress as a singular catalyst of mass human de-evolution. It will likely be studied in film schools, and in anthropology and sociology classes for years as the top scholars in the world attempt to unravel the mystery of how one man’s demented vision can be so actively detrimental to the progress of life on earth.

5. Anti-humanity – Culture, after intelligence, is what scientists believe is the one great barrier between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom.  Art, language, mathematics, philosophy, and government are singular achievements in the history of life on earth.  We built the pyramids for crying out loud!  But Bay only sees these great religious and political testaments of mankind’s ingenuity and determination as nothing more than cool junk to blow up.  And following an unbearably cacophonous sequence of catastrophic destruction, mayhem, and unspeakable bloodshed, Megan Fox delivers one of the most inhuman lines ever uttered in the history of film.  Instead of having been rendered speechless, or commenting solemnly on the horrific and tragic loss of human life and history she can only smile and say to her boyfriend, “It took all this to say you love me.”  What?!  This is a protagonist?  Nothing human could utter something that insensitive in the wake of such mind-boggling destruction and horror.

Maybe it’s all a dream. Or better yet, maybe Sam and Mikaela are secretly decepticons.  Hello trilogy! It’s hard to say if “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” stands alone as the worst movie ever made, but it’s definitely in the discussion.

Click here to see the list

Despite scathing reviews and a general consensus that it fails to equal its predecessor, “Transformers: The Revenge of the Fallen,” Paramount-DreamWorks’ action-packed sequel to Bay’s smash hit, “Transformers” continued its domination of the box office Friday raking in $36.7 million and raising its running domestic earnings to a staggering $125.9 million over just three days.

“Revenge of the Fallen” is currently on track for a five-day worldwide box office record, but experts have estimated that its domestic earnings over the same period may be north of $190 million. Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight,” holds the five-day opening domestic box office record with $203.8 million.

“Revenge of the Fallen” is currently playing at 4,234 theaters, 169 of which are Imax.