The Worst Script I Ever Read
September 23, 2008
It had everything you want a bad script to have to be the kind of bad that at least entertains (since you have to read it either way). It was wonderful in its awfulness, and reading it, I could feel the universe opening in front of me with infinite possibilities for badness and goodness since, if someone could think of something this ridiculous, someone out there on the other end of the bad/good spectrum probably has the capacity to think of a peace bomb or a racism vaccine or something else wondrous. Infinite monkeys at infinite typewriters. One of them made Shakespeare’s plays and now one of them has made a screenplay with this logline:
Alien monsters (I won’t specify further since, though bad, this is nonetheless someone’s intellectual property, but picture something all big and overblown like you’re supposed to get in creature horror) invade a Nazi concentration camp and the prisoners and guards have to put aside their differences and fight the REAL enemy.
You realize, of course, that this means that there are people out there who think there’s something scarier than the fucking holocaust.
“I can haz Obersturmbannführer?”
Not sure how you can call a script that obviously has a plot the worst script you’ve ever read.
I’ve read some bad scripts. Corny ideas. Plain bad over-the-top, sappy shite. Non-existant characters.
–but the worst script I ever read was indecipherable. I couldn’t for the life of me tell you what was going on, what was supposed to happen, if we were in reality or some fantasy, who the characters were, who they were in relation to the main character — the main character had multiple names and it kept switching…
I couldn’t tell you what time, place, year, planet any of it took place on. And I couldn’t even tell you what was taking place.
To top all that off, I’m not sure the writer even spoke English.
Try writing coverage on that.
i agree with you. in fact, when i sat down to write this blog, i had a whole paragraph or two on how there are different kinds of bad scripts and some are indecipherable and some are just regurgitations of other ideas and that some, while they adhere to structure and are original in their way, are audaciously, operatically bad in a way that somehow crosses over into being awesome, and that this one was in that category. i just feel like most of my blogs are not true blogs because they are 1000 words long and have a huge preamble and a bunch of qualifications and this really didn’t need that stuff. so i deleted it.
but you’re right. 1,000 times over i would rather cover this script than the one that could be in gibberish for all that it makes sense. so in that way it’s not the worst, but in another way it’s my favorite worst script ever.
Regardless of the script, that’s a pretty excellent logline. It’s everything a logline should be, at least…
oh dear god… alien monsters invading a Nazi concencration camp? I wonder how a lot of Jewish Americans would feel about that….
yeah I agree with James. “good” and “bad” is subjective. I HATED the Spiderman movies, but a lot of of other people like them.
I guess everyone got different tastes. I mean, look at John Waters’ movies. They’re wonderfully strange, absurd, wacky and eccentric, and I happen to like ‘em. other people dont, though.
Huh, it sounds like a grand metaphor our country as it stands right now.
FWIW, MY scripts must be the worst of them out there, I mean, since they never get read or selected to be be made into 100MM movie-pictures.
(please read the sarcasm in that)
P
I like the concept. A voracious, flesh-eating monster invades a concentration camp, and reveals something about the human condition:
Jew, Nazi, whatever… we all taste like chicken.