The Best of the Worst

So, Cheddar was in the local Chinese laundromat last Sunday afternoon, working on a couple months' worth of dirty clothes. It was Code Red on a lot of classes of garments, to be sure. One of the heavier bags I've ever carried, my quarters were getting taxed like the Jersey Turnpike, I was getting dizzy from looking at the dryers ... not really a proud moment.

In any case, I'm minding my own b-i, folding some underwear, when all of a sudden, onto the fuzzy T.V. set tucked into the corner of the room comes an old movie. Eager to take a break from the drudgery, I pop my head up to take a gander.

It was the old Jean-Claude Van Damme joint, "Timecop."

Now, the intent of this post is to get some feedback from you, the Y2K readers. Maybe you've seen "Timecop," maybe you haven't. For our purposes, it doesn't really matter. The salient point is that "Timecop" is an absolutely awful movie. Just terrible. Sample line from a conversation between Jean-Claude and his wife (played by Ferris' Bueller's girlfriend):

Mia Sara: Will the TEO be dangerous?
Jean-Claude: I don't bake cookies for a living.

So, yeah. But at the same time, the opening scene to the movie is actually pretty cool -- it contains the germ of an idea that could have, in other hands, turned into something. In other words, some kind of rose grew out of the manure field that was the motion picture as a whole. More on that scene later.

Maybe this is an idea that nobody else finds interesting, but it's been eating at me for a couple of days. Can you think of good scenes in bad movies? Scenes that were completely out of character for the rest of the piece, of such different quality that you remember them fondly? I don't necessarily mean scenes from "good" bad movies like "Face/Off" or "Sorority Boys," movies that reveled in their awfulness; I'm looking for quality from crap, something that threw you off it was so out of place.

Again, a little esoteric, and maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree entirely. Maybe the presence of any scene good enough to impress is sufficient to drive that film out of the "awful" range entirely, which would make this exercise quite the fool's errand. But I've got something in mind, and I'm interested to see what people think about this.

Timecop

Now, Jean-Claude is one of the modern masters of the "good" bad movie, and there are enough cool scenes from intentionally cheesy stuff like "Sudden Death" or "Hard Target" to fill this list many times over. But "Timecop" was just a disaster all around -- overwrought, awful acting, a complete waste of the halfway decent time-travel premise.

And indeed, the opening scene promised more. A group of Confederate soldiers carrying a wagon train full of gold encounter a shrouded stranger on the road. He greets them, and asks for their treasure. They laugh, inform him that they outnumber him completely, and he quietly gives them several chances to surrender. Finally, as a tense confrontation comes to a head, they pull their Winchesters (or whatever); the stranger whips out a pair of automatic guns with laser sights and proceeds to blow the shit out of the entire party.

That's a highly solid scene. It plays on the classic, Western-style showdown, tweaking it with dramatic irony and futuristic weaponry. It might not be genius, but it's Bill Shakespeare compared to everything else that follows. And these type of outlier scenes are tougher to come by than you think.

Now, it's possible to cheat and propose something, like, say, Halle Berry's nude scene from "Swordfish." Which was, unquestionably, of higher quality than the movie as a whole (god-awful, and not knowingly). In fact, that scene was so much better than the rest of the movie that Jackman and Travolta openly pimped the shot of Halle's chest during junket interviews, in magazines, at the MTV Movie Awards, etc ... It was intended to be different, and it was. That's not really cricket.

There have been bad prison movies with pretty decent escape scenes -- I'm thinking of Sly in "Lock Up" or Christopher Lambert in the utterly creepy (in the molester sense) "Fortress." Then again, it's tough to make a truly bad escape scene. In an entirely different vein, you might argue snorers like "Solaris" or "Meet Joe Black" have scenes that stand out from the general tedium (the opening scene in the latter film, for example, suggests a sense of humor that never again manifests itself ... plus, any scene where Brad Pitt is bounced off the front of the bus deserves some type of recognition).

Look, it's the off-season. The Mets haven't done squat in a while, the Knicks are too depressing for words (Isiah's thinking championships and legacies ... I'm thinking of paging the asylum), Johan Santana is still chilling somewhere in Venezuela, I wouldn't stoop to write about the Giants even if they hadn't embarrassed my Bills a couple weeks back, and unless you want to hear my thoughts about the big NYU-Buffalo State men's basketball game this Saturday (get your tickets now!), sports aren't much in season at the moment. Man U lost to West Ham again. There. Hope you're happy. Next week, after I catch Clemens on "60 Minutes," there'll be more relevant material forthcoming.

In the meantime, this good-scene-bad-movie thing has been eating away at my brain tissue for the better part of a week now. On the off chance someone else in the Y2K family has caught the same disease, I'm putting the question to you.

Anyone able to help a brother out? Leave your own suggestions/observations/idle obsessions in the comments.

UPDATE: Apropos of A.F.O.M.G.'s post from Monday, Mia Sara (the actress who played Ferris Bueller's girlfriend and Jean-Claude's wife in "Timecop," including a genuinely hot sex scene) turns out to be a native of Brooklyn Heights. That's what I'm talking about.