I have a confession. I love terrible movies, and this shelter-in-place, stay-at-home or safer-at-home order we have going on has given me the perfect excuse to indulge.
And if I’m being honest, these bad movies are also helping keep me sane.
Normally, movies help relax. I’m talking about movies like “Ishtar,” “The Postman,” “Battlefield Earth,” “Showgirls,” “After Earth,” “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes,” “Green Lantern,” and my list can go on and on.
I enjoy watching actors like Tom Cruise (a favorite or mine) deliver lines like, “I mean to beat you to death and drink your blood from a boot” without laughing.
But these are not normal times. Right now, pandemic movies are “my jam” to quote a 1990s, so-bad-it’s-good movie “House Party.” Much like the fluffy, silly and high-spirited movies calmed me in the past, today, the depictions of social collapse, martial law and apocalypse that skimp on scientific fact deliver a catharsis for me.
Watching all my COVID-19 anxieties play out on-screen in the 2007, 2009 and 2016 movies titled “Pandemic” helped me to maintain a sense of order in the world.
In the 2007 “Pandemic” Hallmark television mini-series, the bird flu takes center stage, but it’s Eric Roberts’ terrible acting that brought me joy.
Besides Julia Roberts’ older brother, who looks like a televangelist and George Hamilton rolled into one, the two-part series stars the great television thespians Tiffani Thiessen of “Saved by the Bell” and French Stewart from “3rd Rock from the Sun.”
The teenage cheerleader Kelly Kapowski from “Saved by the Bell” has grown up and the extra-terrestrial Harold from “3rd Rock” received no transmissions from the Big Giant Head throughout the pandemic. In the series, they’re both doctors with the CDC, who help save the world.
This 2007 pandemic show shouldn’t be confused with the other movie titled Pandemic II that was made in 2009 starring Kristi Culbert as a veterinarian, who has an aversion to gloves when she’s examining large animals, who she claims are carrying a viral disease.
The innocence and ignorance of the time made me feel superior because of what I’ve learned thanks to this COVID craziness. It also made me forget how much I still don’t know.
My relief comes in the numerous laughable moments of these films. In this 2009 classic, there were too many to count but I’ll try to quantify them.
The number of times the vet touched her face and hair while getting blood on her hands from an infected animal–100. The number of errors on the military uniforms that the US Army wore as it locked down the town–100. Percentage of time the vet drove through town in her truck listening to music to keep her head on straight–50 percent.
I was drawn to this movie because of an eloquent review on Rotten Tomatoes that stated, “This film feels like garbage someone put in a candy wrapper and stashed in the vending machine.”
The 2016 movie titled “Pandemic” drew me in because it has zombies, which is my all time favorite genre. I can’t get enough of the ever-expanding canon of survivalist undead cinema.
It was the best of the lot. Watching the actress Rachel Nichols trying to find survivors in New York City during the worldwide pandemic was frightening, sporadically gory, tension-filled and ridiculous. It had all the makings of a bad movie that’s good for the soul.
Whereas, a movie like the 2011 thriller “Contagion” hits a little too close to home for me to enjoy. I couldn’t sit through the Steven Soderbergh directed film, because it followed the spread of a virus. This virus was transmitted when sick humans touched surfaces that others touched and then caught the virus and was complete with frantic attempts by public health officials trying to identify and contain the disease. It’s too much like the plot I’m in the middle of.
I’m sticking to B pandemic movies to calm my nerves for now and when those run out there’s always “Sharknado.”
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