RT Reviews for EPIC MOVIE

Why didn't they screen this one for critics? This LINK to the Rotten Tomatoes page for EPIC MOVIE, and what you'll read there, may explain...

After having a little more time to digest the horrors I saw and suffering flashbacks all day, I can further expound on what it was I saw yesterday that disgusted me so much:

Sadism.

EPIC MOVIE was excessively violent, with characters being hit, beaten, stabbed, bitten by snakes, having body parts graphically knocked off or torn out, or just be crushed to death.  Many movies, of course, are equally violent or graphic, but there usually is a decent or even passable reason for this.  It would be one thing if these people were dying for a cause, or to establish that a character was a merciless tyrant, or to show us the deadly nature of the environment the story is set in, or even because these were villains and they were getting their well deserved punishment in the end.  This wasn't even the kind of senseless suffering rained upon someone dumb enough to pull out the photograph of a loved one in a war zone, or redshirts in any dangerous situation, or even lovable sidekicks.  Instead, these torments were without exception part of the alleged humor and nonjokes that passed for entertainment in this film.  The violence and suffering (usually very crude and degrading) rained down indiscriminately, the brunt of it falling on the four characters the movie revolved around.  Rather than advancing the story, the torments only existed for themselves, as if the makers of this disaster delighted in torturing their characters mercilessly like a brat burning ants with a magnifying glass.  Even Daffy Duck in his worst sufferings gets better treatment than this.  Given the utter contempt with which every character was portrayed (jerks, nitwits, mere sex objects, or all three) and the joy with which the writers humiliate and curse them, it suggests the writers are psychopaths and sadists with no compassion for other people whatsoever, much as anyone reading Robert A. Heinlein's work gets the impression he was something of a perv.

Additionally, whoever at the MPAA rated this movie did a horrible job.  The violence, gore, and Carmen Electra alone should have merited this thing an R rating; for sadism the rating should have been NC-17, and for being so overwhelmingly stupid and awful they should have invented a new rating, "N" for "nobody," meaning viewing should be restricted to people no longer having a pulse.  Putting a rating like PG-13 on this tripe suggests the content is something far more benign than what actually appeared on the screen; I'd be far more comfortable with children seeing R-rated movies that actually taught something or encouraged people to love and care about each other or even left the viewer with something interesting to think about.  To suggest this waste of celluloid was something suitable for teenage viewing was at best misleading and more realistically outright dishonest.

Enough of this rant.  I really should have drunk more last night.