Sunday, October 14, 2012

The Helix... Loaded


You know a movie is bad when after you walk out of the theater that just played said travesty there are representatives of the filmmakers standing outside waiting to give you gifts for “sitting through it”.

IGN was hyping up a The Matrix parody entitled The Helix... Loaded big time, and being a fan of those films I decided to check out what they had to say about it.
It looked kind of funny due to the name changes (Morpheus/Orpheus, Trinity/Infinity) and the sight gags. Shit, even Vanilla Ice was in it. The guy who played the Neo role had his Keanu Reeves impersonation down pat, as did the Agent Smith actor. What they didn't show you was the annoying perpetually stoned Asian guy, a bald dude who talks like he has poop in his mouth and that the rip of the Switch character from the first film is now called Swatch (who wears a watch around her neck, derp) and has dialogue that would be right at home in an 80s After School Special.

I took a look at the list of theaters that would be playing this film in the US and out of the 10 listed one of them was not 10 minutes from my house! Man am I pissed I spent that 10 minutes traveling to the theater, let alone the $7 to get in the door. This film was so damned unfunny it was staggering. 95% of the jokes fell flat/felt like in-jokes among the actors, it was painfully slow and way too long (nearly 2 hours) and pretty much nothing in the film, from the actors to the "bullet time" moments, worked at all.
I giggled maybe twice and snorted once. Mainly because Vanilla Ice keeps saying in interviews that he wants to get as far away from his pop star image as he possibly can, then in this movie he quotes lyrics from "Ice Ice Baby" and dances like he did in the music video. Plus the Oracle/Orafice performs a pretty humorous dance move.

The film isn't about a virtual reality life simulator that is used to suck the energy out of humans to fuel a race of machines, it's about a drug (in the form of Gummi Bears) called The Helix that will “enlighten” you if you take it. So if you place some of the drug on your head you think you're doing all this cool stuff, like the fights from The Matrix, but in reality you're jumping around like a tripped out idiot. Agents want to stop the flow of The Helix, but a group of stoners want the drug to become enlightened and find out which of them is to be "The Other One", which is never explained.

It's juvenile, poorly thought out, horribly photographed with piss poor lighting and a crappy HD transfer, the greenscreen effects are so bad that parts of people's heads are missing when they are obviously standing in front of one, the music is garbage and... well everything is just CRAP! I have a feeling that just as every bad sci-fi/action/epic that comes out is compared to the equally god-awful Battlefield: Earth, this will be the comparison to all bad comedies/parodies.
If this film comes to a theater near you avoid it at all costs. Not only will you be wasting some of your hard earned cash and travel time, but your brain cells will disappear as well.

Be warned.

0 out of 5


*written 3/26/05

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