Awesomely Bad: Merc Force

I've seen a lot of bad movies. Not necessarily the awesomely bad kind, but just bad ones in general. For a long time my "Worst Movie Ever" had been taken up by Manos: The Hands of Fate. Manos was one of those really bad psychological horror movies from the 60's that neither made you think, nor got you scared of anything more than a sequel. It's a movie of so little merit that the only reasonable way for the modern movie goer to get a hold of Manos was as a Mystery Science Theater 3000 movie. Yes, Manos was the absolute worst movie I had ever seen...until I saw Merc Force.

Supposedly Merc Force has a story. Supposedly it is an epic sci-fi adventure about a rag tag crew of space mercenaries who try to get one over on the man, even though I have no idea who that man is supposed to be, and hijack a..umm..something, before other people try to steal the..stuff...really I have no idea how to describe it, because the people making the movie didn't seem to have a clue. What Merc Force boils down to is a student film or YouTube drama gone horribly, horribly wrong. It is shot on the worst yard sale cameras one could find, with what could only be friends and neighbors as both the cast and crew. Despite being made in 2003 (but not release until 2005), the movie's special effects look like something from the early 90's with what looks like hand done matte work (not using a green/blue screen, but actually masked off by hand in post). The are, for no real reason, a bunch of little floating robots and levitating tanks that look more like a 10 year old got a hold of some of daddies graphics software. Even the soundtrack sounds like they got a garage band, though honestly not a bad one, to record some completely unrelated songs.

I initially found Merc Force on Netflix, and found it interesting reading through the reviews as it seems that presumably the director and another member of the crew actually tried to defend and rebuke the film by stating it was their first movie and they only had a budget that was somewhere between $4000 and $10,000 (IMDB claims $3k). The budget would actually excuse a lot of Merc Force's problems. The bad effects, camera work, and even the riotously bad acting could be excused if the story at least made sense. Even a first time script writer should have been able to come up with something more cohesive and logical than what ended up on the screen. Considering the movie was written, directed, produced, and edited by the same man, James Panetta, there's really no excuses for the horribly written, shot, and cut piece of shit that goes by the name Merc Force.

Final Verdict: It's shit. Simply put, the movie is shit. But, considering it is bad enough for me to consider it the worst movie I've ever seen, and the fact that I'll probably never forget this movie, I can't say I regret watching it. It did more to confuse than entertain, and it made me shake my head more than laugh. It's one of those movies that I'm tempted to buy and keep in my collection just so I can force it on some unsuspecting friend, maybe former friend after the movie, and watch their brains reel in horror.

1/5 - Absolute and total shit.