Every year, instead of going out and dining en masse with other annual romantics, Rob and I get a pizza, open a nice bottle of wine, and watch what we hope is the best worst movie of the previous year. If chosen correctly, the movie we watch is so horrible, it’s good. So awful, it’s hysterical. So ridiculous, we give it 5 stars on Netflix and totally mess up their algorithm for making recommendations based on previous ratings.
It inadvertently started back in 1994 when we rented “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” I count Paul Reuben’s (aka PeeWee Herman) dying scene among the best moments in modern cinema. The next year it was “Shakes the Clown.” It starred Bobcat Goldthwait as an alcoholic party clown. Florence Henderson had a cameo as a make-up smeared one-night stand. It only got more spectacular from there. Other favorites have been “Showgirls,” “Glitter,” and “White Chicks.” A couple purely awful selections were “Barb Wire,” “Baby Geniuses,” and “Pluto Nash.” Last night we really hit the jackpot. Yes, among our top 3 or 4 best Valentine’s Day Movie picks ever: “Balls of Fury.”
The general premise of the movie is a humiliatingly defeated Olympic hopeful returns 19 years later to help the FBI take down a powerful Chinese mafia guy. The sport in question? Ping pong.
The two best features of the movie, aside from the inspired plot line, are the creative casting and the rapid-fire one-liners that are pure gold when it comes to movie quotables.
In the line-up for Best Comedy Ensemble:
- George Lopez as the FBI guy.
- Kerri Kenney (Reno 911’s Wiegel) as a Reno Peppermill showgirl.
- Thomas Lennon (Reno 911’s Dangle) as the German arch nemesis from the 1988 Olympics.
- Aisha Tyler (from Talk Soup post-Skunk Boy) as eye candy and chief blowdarter.
- And pure genius: Christopher Walken as Feng, the Chinese mafia guy. Yes, Walken as a Chinese hitman. He delivers his lines in a heavy accent. Brooklyn, of course. And he dresses as something between Vegas Elvis and The Count from Sesame Street. Perhaps my favorite Walken moment: when he head-bops to the Taiko drums during the opening ceremonies of a to-the-death ping pong tournament.
“Ping pong. Or, as the Chinese say: Ping pong.”
“You killed him!” “Well duh, what part of ‘sudden death’ didn't you understand?”
“Less talkie-talkie, more ping-pong.”
“Maggie! Your temper brings dishonor to my happy mu-shu palace.”
“The joke's on you, pretty boy. It's not cologne, it's Lady Speed Stick.”
“Ping Pong is not the Macarena. It takes patience. She is like a fine, well-aged prostitute. It takes years to learn her tricks.”
We’ve already started our list of hopefuls for Valentine’s Day 2009. Hard to imagine “Meet the Spartans” or “Over Her Dead Body” will match the glory of “Balls of Fury.”
4 comments:
Wait a minute. A movie that's so bad it's good? Then Buffy the Vampire Slayer doesn't count. That's actually a good movie.
Oh, we absolutely agree with you. "Buffy" was good enough, we bought it. We also made a mistake with "The Wedding Singer." That year, we were out of town and narrowed our choices to two movies that were playing in local theaters: "The Wedding Singer" and "Blues Brothers 2000." We chose incorrectly and ended up loving TWS completely independent of the Valentine's Day theme. So I guess technically, the tradition started with "Shakes the Clown."
Pete wants to know where "Dodgeball" fell in the voting...
Ah, that's the year we watched "White Chicks." We've never seen "Dodgeball" -- so sad that there's only one Valentine's Day per year. "White Chicks" was fantastic, however; hard to imagine even "Dodgeball" could beat it. Not even "BASEketball" (released in 1998) was as good/bad as the Wayans Brothers masterpiece.
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