While skimming channels the other day with a girl friend of mine (note the space, friend first, girl second), she alerted me to an intriguing phenomenon by asking me, “Why are you stopping here? This movie sucks.” The movie in question was “2 Fast 2 Furious,” a ferociously bad movie that would please only the truest auto-maniacs. The reason I had stopped was not due to an aesthetically pleasing automobile, nor was it the witty back-and-forth dialogue between esteemed singer/actor Tyrese and Paul “the guy who was in the first ‘Fast and the Furious’ not named Vin Diesel” Walker.
No, it was the simple fact that as I lazily moved through the channels, catching a quick glimpse of a scantily clad female suddenly made my brain think, “Holy crap, I might get to see a hot chick in this movie.” Despite the PG-13 rating, despite me fully knowing that TBS would never show nudity and despite astoundingly awful dialogue, (including such gems as “Damn Suki, uh … when you gonna pop my clutch, huh?”), I was hooked.
Why is it that guys, knowing that there are billions of magazines, posters, movies and Web sites—more than half the Internet, according to most experts—devoted to naked chicks, decide to expose themselves to dialogue worse than that of most snuff films?
To find an answer, I embarked on a research project. In what some have called “the greatest scientific experiment of the 20th century,” I searched through the years, trying to find a movie which had so little cinematic value, so little reason to exist, that the film would not have been made in the first place without the aforementioned part of the male psyche keeping it afloat.
To be frank, some of the movies I watched were downright embarrassing. I watched “Epic Movie” just to see Carmen Electra try her hand at playing a satiric version of Mystique of “X-Men” fame. I watched “BASEketball,” just to see if “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone could coerce Yasmine Bleeth or Jenny McCarthy to slip into something a little more comfortable. I watched “Cyborg 2,” the first role Angelina Jolie ever took, playing a life-like robot whose mission is to use the art of seduction to infiltrate a rival headquarters and self-detonate. Yet, like Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill and the rest of the pot-addled gang in “Knocked Up,” who watched every movie and documented the exact time a celebrity was naked in a film, I labored on. Finally, I found the greatest waste of film, the movie which truly would not exist without its titillating star.
The movie was “Barb Wire,” a Pamela Anderson atrocity from 1996. Anderson starred as Barb, an exotic dancer/bounty hunter extraordinaire, who gets wrapped up in the highest levels of government scandal. The movie poster features Anderson leaning against a gun, wearing nothing and looking like she means business. At the height of her “Baywatch” fame, Anderson was every teenager’s dream come true, and this film, with little else to offer, was an answered prayer. Yet there can be no doubt that beyond the allure of Anderson, “Barb Wire” would never have seen the light of day. My research complete, I vowed to return to good movies, heading to AMC to watch “Dirty Harry.” But first I had to take a gander at VH1. After all, “The Girl Next Door” is a classic.
If you have any titilating movie selections for Kevin e-mail him at kslane@wisc.edu.
