It is difficult to overstate just how bad the upcoming movie with Brendan Fraser, Furry Vengeance is going to be if the trailer is any indication.
“Welcome to Rocky Springs,” says the narrator, “home to the greenest community ever built.” Brendan Fraser plays a construction expert who is attacked by animals bent on keeping their pristine nature home free of the grubby man-hands of the developers. Fraser’s son sums up the movie: “Dad, you’re building on a nature preserve, and nature’s ticked off … I think the animals are out for revenge.”
If this sounds like your type of movie, you are either a relative of the writer or Van Jones.
Which got me to thinking – what are the five worst environmentalist movies of all time? I’ll exclude documentaries here, since An Inconvenient Truth is perhaps the worst thing ever put on film; it’s as though Satan had explosive diarrhea on camera, and then the diarrhea talked at you for two hours (and don’t get me started on Winged Migration, which was literally pictures of birds, and which moved so slowly that time actually began moving backwards – the movie was released in 2001 and after watching it, you found yourself back in 1955).
So let’s stick to dramas and comedies. Not all environmentalist movies are bad (see Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, the overrated-but-still decent The China Syndrome and Logan’s Run, the artistic-if-infuriating Wall-E or the vastly underrated Soylent Green, with the ever incredible Edward G. Robinson). But there are plenty that are. I’ve tried to avoid the most obvious picks (On Deadly Ground, anyone?). Here are my top five:
5. Over the Hedge: Think an animated film about animals fighting against the evils of urban sprawl. Ken Fox of TVGuide.com said this film was “a sly satire of American ‘enough is never enough’ consumerism and blind progress at the expense of the environment.” Sounds like a pleasure cruise! The humans, of course, are the bad guys. Even the house pets long to be free (Tiger, a Persian cat, joins the forest friends at the end of the movie). Throw in a few zingers about the evils of Texas, and you’ve got a movie to make the environmental left grin in pleasure. The cast is huge: Bruce Willis, Garry Shandling, Steve Carrell, Wanda Sykes, William Shatner, Avril Lavigne, Nick Nolte, Eugene Levy. Too bad the movie is trite and silly (and no, it’s not okay to be trite and silly just because you’re animated – that’s why the folks at Pixar are so rightly heralded in the industry).
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4. The Happening: I’m not sure just what happened to M. Night Shyamalan that turned him into a dud. I liked The Sixth Sense; I liked Unbreakable; I’m even one of the few who liked The Village. Then he did Lady in the Water, and followed up that horrible piece of garbage (I mean, really, one of the worst movies of all time) with The Happening. The premise of the movie is simple: thousands of people suddenly begin committing suicide. Why? You guessed it: the environment is taking its revenge on humanity. The trees are releasing a neurotoxin that causes people to kill themselves, because people have become too much of a threat. Unfortunately, the movie did not feature Al Gore smiling and clapping idiotically in the streets as the humans died off, leaving nature’s beauty intact. Watching this crap from the audience, you’re left hoping the neurotoxin will hit the theater.
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3. The Thaw: Val Kilmer is a good actor. I loved him in Tombstone, I liked him in Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. Batman Forever, not so much. But in the last few years, he’s gone totally off his rocker, making film after film about the threat of global warming. In 2009, he starred in The Thaw, where he played a scientist who discovered that thaw caused by global warming had released a parasite from a defrosting woolly mammoth. Seriously – a thawed woolly mammoth threatens civilization. And here, I only thought they make nice throw rugs. Then, the same year, he starred in The Chaos Experiment, a horror movie in which he played a deranged man making predictions about the imminent destruction of civilization due to global warming. To prove his point about global warming, he locks six people in a steam room to show that they will tear each other apart – which they do. The left loves to accuse the right of oversimplifying “climate change,” but movies like this make it hard to argue that the left doesn’t do the same thing as a scare tactic.
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2. The Day After Tomorrow: Big special effects? Random waves that swamp cities? Laughable dialogue? You can bet it’s a Roland Emmerich movie. The funniest part about this movie is the suddenness with which global warming takes effect. Even anthropogenic global warming supporters say that the sea levels will rise by inches over the next century. But that wouldn’t make a good movie – watching Dennis Quaid attempting to jump puddles isn’t exciting. Emmerich has hundred-foot tsunamis hitting New York City, then -150 degree hurricanes washing over the city and engulfing it in ice. I like disaster movies as much as the next guy, but if we’re going to have ridiculous disasters of this magnitude, what’s wrong with blaming the aliens a la Independence Day?
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1. Ferngully: The Last Rainforest: Yes, it’s Avatar in 2D. This movie was so bad that even as a child (I was 8) I knew it sucked (and yes, I also opposed Oslo at the time). Not just awful – holy crap awful. It is amazing that this piece of trash garnered so many big names: Tim Curry, Robin Williams, and Christian Slater all show up. Read the plot summary at Wikipedia and marvel that the human mind is capable of such monstrosities. It would almost be worth destroying the environment completely and ending human life on earth if the makers of Ferngully reunited for a third movie (it almost destroyed the universe when they got together for the sequel, Ferngully 2: The Magical Rescue).