Chronciles of Riddick, an awesomely bad movie

This may be the most awesomely bad (and enjoyably so) movie ever made.

Unlike the first movie, which was actually good, mainly because they had no budget and no idea how people would react, and as such didn't try to punch upon moments in all sorts of peculiar ways, Chronicles of Riddick is ambitious. Embarassingly so.

First some things that are honestly positive:
- the design, while often absurd, is really fantastic and compelling
- Graeme Revell delivers a very nice score
- the ending (which is apparently a big twist, although I didn't think so) is exactly what it should be

But oh the bad stuff!

First of all, if they had just renamed all the races and planets, we'd be miles ahead. But we have people delivering lines (which are awful in their own right beyond the proper noun situation) containing things like "We must stop at Crematorium before heading to Helion Prime." NOTE: I am not making that up. Those are planet names. Also: "There was a prophecy that a Furion would destroy the Necromonger race." Say it with me kids, Ne-cro-mon-ger.

Now tell me you aren't howling with laughter.

The whole movie is like this. And often worse, even as it remains astounding for its never-ending collection of oddities. There's inexplicable religious subtext, spikey dogs that purr, terrible Russian accents, a mention of child-prostitutes, ugly goth silver claw rings, bimbos is faux snakeskin dresses and Judi Dench wandering around -- all to varying degrees of effect, point and relevence.

One of the weirder things about this film (and oh there is a lot of weird... some good, some bad, ninety percent of it beyond my descriptive powers) is that it manages to make direct reffereneces ot almost every sci-fi movie ever, and I suspect it doesn't realize it's doing it.

There's a really tough fighter guy with a big black ugly mohawk (Karl Urban, I didn't know you were in Highlander).
A blond guy gives a speech in which he says "I've done things you can't even imagine." (but have you seen troop ships on fire off the shores of Orion?)
Lots of Dune and Fifth Element references in the design.
Blatant Star Wars and Star Trek references
inevitable Matrix rip-off fighting
... and so on ad infinitum


It's truly one of the most awful things I've ever seen. But I howled with laughter for two hours, and you should all go, because it is that... astounding.