Concerning awesomeness...

I saw the movie 'Mammoth' today. (Well, yesterday, really). Judging by it's rating on IMDB, it should be a really, really sucky movie. But no, no. After all, IMDB has been known to be wrong before.

You see, people just doesn't understand what awesomeness is all about.

The Matrix? Special effects that starts out as bordering on cool but gets progessively worse as the movie (series) goes on, lame and pointless religious symbolism, Keanu Reeves trying desperately to look cool in a trenchcoat? That's not awesome, it's retarded.

Pathfinder? Giant vikings from hell? With huuuge spikes on their longships? Maybe it's awesome for people who really, really, really get off to Warhammer Chaos. Just maybe. Actually, it's just stupid. And even worse; it's a remake, so it drags its predecessor, that was quite a unique and good movie, down with it. Please, no.

10 000 B.C.? Don't even get me started. It could have been somewhat awesome if they had done more with the Atlantis-Giza-connection, like involve some Dänicken theories more blatantly. As it stands, maybe it has one or two scenes that are slightly cool, but nowhere near the exalted state of awesomeness.

But 'Mammoth'? It has a rampaging, undead woolly mammoth possessed by evil extraterrestrial energy. Now that's filmmakers with an almost boddhisattva-like understanding of what awesomeness really is.

There are only a precious few films like this, with concepts that are so godawesome that they surpass everything else and turns an otherwise horribly bad movie into something worthwile. (Of course, 'Mammoth' also has Summer Glau, but it would take an almost godlike amount of hotness to compensate for the general suckyness of a really bad movie. She is neither God nor Li Xiaolu, so she doesn't cut it. An undead extraterrestrial mammoth does).

Mammoth has it's flaws. The script is bad, the plot is worse, the sound editing is awful, the mammoth is way too heavy and a little too big to be believable, the computer animations are bad, character development is almost non-existent...

but the dialog is funny at times, the acting isn't horribly bad...

and there's a goddamn undead mammoth!

You just gotta love it.

'Frontières' is a bit like this. The plot is bad, the characters are shallow, the gore is overdone, and it's french, so the female main character is of course weak and passive compared to her male companions, and pregnant too boot, and of course the bad guys wants her baby, and wants her for a penis insertion device.

but the bad guys are patriarchal, cannibalistic, inbred redneck nazis. Not somelame neo-nazis here, no, the real kind, having endured in the french countryside since the war. And they have a veritable slaugtherhouse in a cave complex downstairs, and butcher visitors like pigs. Also, a pair of them keep their deformed offsprings crawling down there in the darkness. And the patriarch of the family, who is old enough to have been in the NSDAP, screams "Arbeit macht frei" while he clips people's heel tendon off.

The only way that could have been more awesome is if they were worshipping Cthulhu.

And, of course, the "we want your baby"-trope can be done in a good way. Look at 'L'interieur', another french film. 'Hey, I'm nine months pregnant and my husband just died in a car crash so I'm all alone, and I wake up one night with a woman trying to clip my stomach open with a scissor, and I panic, so she slashes me in the face and cleaves my lip. I kick her away, get up, clumsily of course, and stumbles to the toilet where I lock myself in, cry and pee myself while I desperately examine my swelling stomach to see if the baby is okay. And when I feel it kicking I slide down on the floor sobbing from relief, and then I hear someone slashing at the door, trying to get in...'

L'Interieur isn't really a bad movie in any way though, so albeit it's awesomeness, it isn't one of those films that get good from pure awesomeness alone. 'Mammoth' and 'Frontières' are two rare examples of films that can claim that. There are others, like the old Hongkong movie 'The Seventh Curse' as it's got flesh-eating fetuses and bizarre sacrifical cults hidden away in the jungles of Thailand, worshipping undead vampiric lords. And, of course, 'Dagon', it seems you can almost never go wrong with Lovecraft.

But still, it's a group for a select few, indeed. Congratulations, 'Mammoth', you just qualified.

Now I'll just have to see if the remake by Lukas Modysson is half as awesome...