Master of Disguise, comments by Andy

Yeah, this will be a hard section of movies to get through. And it's sort of anticlimactic for me. I just finished the last of the AFI 100 movies (the 1998 & 2007 list), so moving onto a list of movies that are particularly bad is going to be a bit of a drag. The problem with bad movies is "bad" is so difficult to define. "Bad" is way too broad. What makes a movie "bad" is often times what makes it so great, or at least a cult classic.

In analyzing Master of Disguise, I'm sort of tempted to just say that Dana Carvey and other SNL actors just can't make the transition from SNL to movies with the characters they play on SNL. Dana Carvey was hilarious, and he's a great stand-up comedian, but his prowess seems to be in short skits, not long movies with a running story and theme. Maybe what makes the skits for which he is famous (think "Church Lady") so good is how terrible they are. Can you imagine two hours of "well isn't that special?" The floors at the cinema would run red from the blood spilt of the suicidal movie-goers.

But then the argument for SNL actors making it on-screen would have to include Chris Farley and Adam Sandler (yes, I know there are several others; Jane Curtain was always funny, but I stand firmly behind the statement that Mike Myers career was a push). Both of those guys had several movies that incorporated a lot of their SNL stuff, and audiences loved it. Maybe the difference is that their characters were themselves only doing bits when reverting back to SNL material, whereas Carvey was doing a whole movie based on his characters. I don't know. Maybe it's as simple as Farley and Sandler were funnier. It makes me sad to think that might be true because I really like Carvey.

Here's the other strange phenomenon. Really bad movies are not hard to find, but the worst ones are very hard to rent. I've been waiting for three weeks now for either "Plan 9 from Outer Space", "Killer Clowns from Outerspace", and "Megalodon 3", and they are all listed as "very long wait" on Blockbuster. That is shocking to me. How bad can these movies be if they're so demanded and impossible to rent?