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| I have been to the abyss. I have peered into its darkness. And I have survived. In the last two days, I watched R. Kelly's egoriffic epic Trapped in the Closet AND legendary science fiction mishmash Robot Monster. Where to begin? Both were submitted as the nadir of film in their respective genres by LJ pals whose opinions on film and culture I value quite highly. ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} ludickid turned me on to Trapped with the recommendation: "please understand the weight I place behind this statement: it was the single stupidest thing I have ever seen in my life." Robot Monster comes to me via tritium, who calls it "possibly THE most awesomenine movie of all time." What do these films contain that inspires such feelings of awe?Let's start with Trapped. Essentially, it's a sweeping dramatic interpretation of the modern world, filtered through the eyes of the truly insane R Kelly. It is split into 12 episodes, each about the length of one R Kelly song, which is really not a song at all, but a simple drum machine beat and jingly sound effect. The lyrics are all sung by R Kelly, which serves as both narration and dialogue for the characters who lip-sync all of it. So we hear the same song, over and over again, only with different lyrics (that rhyme all the way through! R Kelly notes this for us in the commentary). The story is mostly just a series of affairs between all the characters, only without any cohesion or predictable human behavior. R Kelly's storytelling prowess can best be illustrated by an example. While driving home to check on his wife, R Kelly is pulled over by a cop, who issues a ticket while very conspicuously SMOKING A CIGARETTE. R Kelly then arrives home, has a wildly uneven conversation with his wife in which he accuses her of having an affair, then he apologizes and they have sex, and since she actually enjoys it he again suspects something is wrong, then he discovers the actual evidence of an affair so they begin arguing again. But once the conversation runs out of momentum he suddenly smells CIGARETTE SMOKE, having for some reason not noticed it until that moment! Based on the evidence I have provided, can you guess who R Kelly's wife was sleeping with? Even if the utterly random connection between the three is without even the most tenuous logic? My personal favorite part is when R Kelly introduces a new character, the Narrator, also played by R Kelly, who comes on screen to tell us to pause the movie so we can prepare ourselves for the super-unexpected plot twist that's just about to happen! The Narrator then reappears on screen occasionally during the remaining chapters as evidence of R Kelly's limitless ability to create more screen time for himself. So many more highlights to share, which I can't capture any better than is done by Wikipedia, by ludickid here and here and here, and by tritium here. But what I think definitively sets this apart from other terrible films is the overwhelming ego of R Kelly. You cannot truly appreciate it until you watch the film a second time with the commentary. Unlike traditional DVD commentary in which you hear the voices of cast or crew dubbed over the scenes, we instead witness R Kelly sitting in his chair watching the film. Also unlike traditional commentary, where the persons who developed the film explain their choices or share interesting anecdotes, R Kelly uses the opportunity to explain to us what is going on in the film. Even though the lyrics explain everything that the actors are doing anyway, while they are doing it.  R Kelly discusses his film from his comfortable chair, while on screen, we see R Kelly as Narrator, with various other cast, including R Kelly as Sylvester. Sometimes we even see him commenting from different angles, or simply laughing and enjoying his own art. Ha, ha, R Kelly! Us too! Say what you will about Trapped, but does it contain robots, monsters, space apes, or dinosaur fights? No, it doesn't. At least not in the first 12 chapters. This is where Robot Monster is its superior. Also unlike Trapped, I loved Robot Monster for its pure storytelling, as if written entirely by an eight-year old boy dreaming of spacemen and dinosaurs. Which, coincidentally, is exactly how it is explained in the end. So we observe Ro-man, apparently a killer alien but ostensibly a fat guy in a gorilla suit with a space helmet, come to Earth and annihilate the entire population, save for one family and related characters. Ro-man's energy beam failed to kill them because either they took a super-serum they'd developed, or because of some miscalculation. Maybe both? I'm sure it's very complicated. Anyway, Ro-man spends the film trundling in and out of his cave alternately threatening the remaining humans or being chewed out by Great Guidance, the leader of the Ro-mans, for failing to make good on his threats. Perhaps what saved me from really getting my brain erased by seeing this right after Trapped was my penchant for classic science fiction. And this was perfectly terrible cheesy sci-fi schlock. There are lots of quaint lessons about humanity. "Hu-mans" are sort of compared to Ro-mans in choppy moral questions posed by Ro-man. And in the end, when Ro-man can't bring himself to kill the hot human babe (although he has no problem killing children with his bare hands), Great Guidance intervenes by unleashing killer dinosaurs. Killer dinosaurs! Having hopelessly written themselves into a corner, the filmmakers then expertly employ the most cliched ending in the history of storytelling. Young Johnny wakes up, no one is dead, Ro-man never existed...OR DID HE?? Anyway, it's challenging to describe what it's like to watch these two movies on consecutive days. I'm a changed man. Yet, I found Robot Monster great in that charmingly bad classic sci-fi way. For all its nonsense, it didn't make me angry at its stupidity the way terrible Michael Bay movies do. And while Trapped might be the most inept thing I've ever watched, it was mostly just stupid: I didn't actively hate it the way I hated the 2001 version of Planet of the Apes. That still stands as my most hated film. That may never change. | ||||||||
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