Bad Movie Club: Thunderstorm: The Return of Thor

2011 superhero movie

Bad Movie Rating: 4/5 (Amy: 1/5; Fred: 2/5; Libby: 1/5; Ozzy: no rating; Johnny: 3.5/5; Josh: 4/5)

Rating: 2/20

Plot: Some devil worshipers led by a bald guy who overacts have to collect the Dragon's Crotch in order to summon Hel, a mean woman. It's up to a cop and a guy with a plastic superhero suit to save the day.

Libby: "Does this movie come with complimentary lube?"

This seems less like a movie and more like a group of people getting together to pretend to make a movie. It's endearingly cheap. The female baddie's name is Hel, so apparently they couldn't even afford that second L for her name. Her outfit appeared to be grabbed from the Halloween clearance shelves at a dollar store. Thor's hammer seems to be made out of the exact material that those jumbo wiffleball bats are made from. I mean, just look at these fuckers:

Do any of those people look like they belong in a movie? Do they even look like they belong on a community theater stage? The guy on the right is Jody Haucke who played the leader of the people who summon Hel, played by a wonky-eyed Emanuelle Carriere, a woman with the worst evil laugh I've ever heard. Haucke threw everything he had into his villainous enunciation. The hero was played by Ray Besharah who was too lame to be an actual superhero, something that worked in his favor since he was only accidentally a superhero anyway. After all, he wasn't Thor. Thor, or more accurately Thor's head, was played by writer/director Brett Kelly. Besharah played the guy who wore this:

I'm not even sure that picture makes the costume look all that cheap. His friend's bad hair and bad posture probably distracts you. But the bottom half of the costume is just a pair of black tights, and we suspected that Thunderstorm wasn't even able to move his arms in that suit.

Oh, but the piece de resistance:

That is a stop-motion dragon thing, and it's a work of art. It's a stop-motion creation that would make Harryhausen shit himself. The appearance of this thing in the final act of the movie elevated it from bunch-of-people-with-fifty-bucks-and-a-camera-hanging-out-and-making-a-movie-mostly-in-the-director's-garage to something close to award worthy. I'm not sure what awards those might be, but it's worthy of them.

You'll have to get past a 10-minute introductory scroll that is also read to us in a voice made inaudible by a loud soundtrack, but this is a fairly entertaining good-bad movie. There's some terrible fake blood, horrible writing, lame comic relief, henchmen who say "Yeah!" in unison way too much, about 1,000 uses of the word Ragnarok, my favorite line ever ("Whoa! Easy, fella!") following a death scene, and some of the worst fight scenes ever. You almost want to applaud the effort of the people involved with this because they're clearly having some fun; most of you, however, just wants to tell them to stop.