THE BAD BATCH (2016)

Imagine if you had an interesting visual concept for a 6-minute long music video and then stretched that concept out to 118 minutes.

Set in some kind of low-budget dystopian future, THE BAD BATCH opens with a pretty chick with a killer body, Arlen (Suki Waterhouse), being locked behind a huge fence in the desert.  She turns and wanders off into the wasteland.  Within a day, she's kidnapped by cannibals and sections of her right arm and right leg eaten.  Soon, the real horror starts when the cannibals start listening to Ace of Base!  Arlen can't take it anymore and escapes.  She eventually shows up in a town full of tweakers and dorks called Comfort.  From there on, more things happen, but honestly...I didn't give a shit.  The story was dumb as fuck, slow-moving and illogical.

The only thing I knew about TBB going into it was it was about cannibals and it starred Keanu Reeves.  That sounds awesome!  In my handsome brain, I was visualizing BILL & TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE versus CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST.   That didn't happen.

Style over substance storytelling, very little dialogue, lots of music video-style photography, Jim Carrey showing up from some unknown reason, snail's pace, multiple things that brought to mind EL TOPO, zero nudity, very little violence, promising opening act, weak middle act and a lame as fuck ending.

If you need me, I'll be in my room playing Borderlands.

JOHNNY MNEMONIC (1995)

I've heard some pretty negative things about this film over the years.  That's probably why it's taken me 20 years finally watch it.  So...were all of those negative comments accurate?  Yeah, pretty much.

Set in the year 2021, Johnny is a data courier who stores data in his 80 gigabit hard drive enhanced brain. On the way to meet a customer in Beijing, he uses a "doubler" to increase his capacity to 160GB. Unfortunately, the package is 320GB so Keanu concentrates really hard and crams that 320GB into the 160GB hard drive.  As a result the data starts "seaping" into his brain and causing him to react violently to bright lights...just like a Mogwai.  Even worse, is right after he downloads the package a group of hitmen bust in and start killing everybody (one of the killers uses a thumb laser lasso!).  Johnny escapes and now the gangsters are after him.  The only person that can save him is a cyborg dolphin in New Jersey. Of course.

I was hoping that JOHNNY MNEMONIC would surprise me and be actually good or maybe silly to the point of being funny.  Sadly though, it's so bland that it's difficult to have much of an opinion about it one way or the other.  The story comes off more confusing than it actually is, the future looks like shit, the CGI is ridiculous, zero nudity, TV show level action scenes, Henry Rollins as a doctor, an "eye phone", Keanu Reeves acting like he just saw the lines for the first time 30 seconds before they yelled "Action".

Good for a few chuckles, but honestly, outside of morbid curiosity or campy train wreck thrills I can't think of much reason to waste your time watching this movie.