So some time ago, me and my intrepid colleague Liz got in a little bit of a go-round about who could stomach the lowest-end movies available. Naturally, I was convinced that she was a whiny little prat who probably thought that Herr Doktor Uwe Boll was the lowest thing on the food chain when, in reality, he’s actually somewhere around rodent. Rodents will occasionally in some cases eat other living things.

Which led me to smirk in Liz’s general direction and tell her she was totally full of it, that I knew where the true king of the lousy movies was and, just because she’s seen a couple episodes of Mystery Science Theatre 3000, this does not qualify her as an authority on bad movies.

Thus, Liz took it as a personal challenge, and so we set it up for this our first ever Bad Movie Duel. We each took a week and tried to figure out the absolute worst mvoie we could get our hands on. There were rules, of course–the movie had to be available via video stores or Netflix so that each could watch the other’s pick. It had to be bad of its own merits, and not because of a certain director or actor or genre. I hate romcom with a passion, you see, but none of them really qualify as the WORST MOVIE EVER because I can’t distinguish among them. Why would I want to throw one of those dull slopfests at a woman who might well enjoy it?

No, no…I needed a real winner. I’ll fill you in on my top five picks later…but this post is about what that horrible woman threw at ME–La Llorona, the Wailer. I can’t believe she actually dredged up a movie about a Mexican legend. I REALLY can’t believe I spent eighty minutes watching Mexican horror. But thankfully, it was not so bad as to overwhelm my previous ranking titles. As bad movies go, La Llorona is a mere blip.

The Wailer is, basically, about a half-dozen college kids who find themselves in Mexico for beer, cocaine, loose sex and fun on the cheap who run afoul of a legendary figure called The Wailer, the ghost of a woman who drowned her kids back in the dark days before electricity in Mexico so this could have been set like two weeks ago. Seriously though, the college kids in question now have to survive a run-in with a ghost lady who really wants them dead because apparently she’s just got a problem with kids in general or with people being around her house or some such poorly explained something or other.

The Wailer’s worst crime is that it’s boring. The entire first half of the movie nothing really happens, and by the time it stops and remembers, oh yeah, we’re supposed to be a low-rent slasher movie!–they end up wedging everything into the last half and to hell with logic. They could’ve cut the first forty minutes and no one would have noticed, except to wonder why a horror movie is only about a half hour long. I have to agree with that one guy who said that things were getting scary because he couldn’t find the beer. Yes, that’s about the scariest thing about the first half of The Wailer: not being hammered. You have to be, frankly, because when it’s not boring, it’s just balls-out stupid. That bit with the cigar in the cabin, for example. Eeeyipes.

The second half, however, does manage to pick up somewhat, mostly because they’re trying to fit half a dozen murders in the space of somewhere in the neighborhood of forty minutes, and with that kind of average you can’t help but have at least a little excitement. Of course, the problem here is that they’re so desperate to get the cast killed off in a budget-conscious fashion that they’re reduced to random ghostie appearances and fake blood. Not to mention mammoth logic errors; doesn’t it take a special kind of dumbass to carry a revolver around in a first-aid kit?

Though I definitely can’t say The Wailer even gets on my top-five worst list, it definitely qualifies as a bad movie. Perhaps worse news comes in the fact that there’s a sequel to this nightmare–The Wailer 2. I saw it on, once again, Netflix.

And whether you like them good or bad, the best in horror movie trivia is always available on Kwanzoo.

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