King of Kong

This movie showed me that OCD and complete dedication can be a dangerous thing. The dedication of Steve Wiebe to achieving the high score is completely insane, yet due to the douchebag known as Billy Mitchell, I found myself pulling for Steve to absolutely destroy Billy. My friend summed up the movie as “a message board in film form”, and that is exactly what this is. Billy Mitchell has an attitude that can, no, it will make anyone dislike him and root whoever is going up against him. Almost equally insufferable is his cohort, Brian Kuh, who successfully upstages Steve’s accomplishment as a proxy for Billy Mitchell, who for some reason felt he didn’t need to show up to the competition. However, he felt completely fine about ruining Steve’s big night long distance-style.

Douchebag!

This best quote from the movie is from Steve Wiebe’s daughter, Jillian:

Jillian Wiebe: I never knew that the Guinness World Record Book was so… I never knew it was so important.
Steve Wiebe: I guess a lot of people are… yeah, a lot of people read that book.
Jillian Wiebe: [while directly looking at Steve, her father] Some people sort of ruin their lives to be in there.

Some of the things you see in this film are similar to some situations you may see in an episode of Tim and Eric Awesome Show. So, I have to recommend this movie, for all the wrong reasons really. Lots of unintentional comedy and the drama between Steve and Billy make for a great hour and a half.

Terrible Movies: They are awesome.

I’ve seen a lot of terrible movies in my life, though I didn’t realize until recently how many I had actually seen. When you are young any movie is usually a good movie, no matter how poor the acting or the quality of the script and all those things that go in to film-making. As I grew up I was fortunate enough to not subject myself to poor quality movies, and I do regret that to some degree based on my experience in the past several years.

On a nondescript summer night in 2004, I was playing a poker game with some friends at my home, and with that comes the required low quality film. Previously it had been House of the Dead, but this time around we were in for a double-feature that changed my views on bad movies from that day forward. The fateful selection was Ankle Biters and You Got Served.

Including of losing my nickels and dimes to miracle straights on the river, I felt as if I was losing my mind while trying to comprehend the torture that we all were enduring at the hands of Ankle Biters. The trailer doesn’t really do the whole movie justice but here it is anyway:

As you can see the music is seriously awesome, and back flips off of stacked up wooden pallets are really cool. Up to that point in my life I had never watched a movie that was so blatantly terrible. It was blatant, and clearly that’s what they were going for, and it worked. This experience significantly effected my viewing experience of You Got Served, considered one of the worst movies ever made, rightly so.

So, having survived Ankle Biters, we plunged face first in to the pool of mediocrity that is a movie about a dance group trying to win a dance contest to secure the required funds to open a recording studio. This was either the most intelligent or absolutely worst thing I could do. I’m still on the fence about this.

You Got Served felt like a masterpiece in comparison to Ankle Biters. A fucking work of art. I was overwhelmed with confusion, mostly because at the time I felt like I was enjoying this piece of garbage. The production value and gloss had tricked me temporarily in to thinking I was happy to view this movie. Luckily I did snap out of this at some point, but they had me for a little while. By the time it was all over I realized this movie was no better and possibly worse than Ankle Biters. Even when watching it after a film with plastic toothed midget vampires, I could still see through the glare and see a truly terrible movie. I realized I would never watch You Got Served again, and that I would watch Ankle Biters again in the future.

What followed was the viewing of some of the most reprehensible movies ever seen.