Once a month, the historic Brattle Theatre opens its doors to a gaggle of misfit hipsters, weirdos, and tired businessmen so that they can all sit together as one in the Church that is Cinema and collectively hate-watch a terrible movie. It is a community tied together by a love for Narragansett and post-ironic media consumption and it is — in its own peculiar way — beautiful. I’m talking, of course, about TRASH NIGHT.
I don’t know who orchestrates TRASH NIGHT but I know it is put together by some truly committed bastards. They don’t take the concept behind their title lightly. TRASH NIGHT is repertory series of, simply, the worst movies ever put to celluloid. Movies so bad they don’t even loop back into being good (most of the time). Movies that are genuinely hard to sit through and are, often, cringe-y. To wit: Trash.
So, fair warning, if you like to watch the so-bad-they’re-good classics like The Room or Troll 2, you might be let down by TRASH NIGHT. These flicks are worse than your standard fare. However, just because TRASH NIGHT films are truly awful doesn’t mean they aren’t enjoyable. In fact, their recent screening of Max Knight: Ultra Spy was some of the most fun I’ve ever had in a theater. And their last screening — which, for legal reasons, I cannot disclose — definitely had it’s moments! (Although I fell asleep at one point).
The most recent film in their series — Fatal Error — is one I find myself pressed to say I enjoyed any bit of. Much like my experience at Theodore Rex or during that other time I went and they screened a dreadfully paced 80’s Highlander rip-off about a cop (I cannot for the life of me remember the title), this is just one of the most boring, terrible movies I’ve ever seen.
I don’t want to personally write up the plot so here I am quoting the event page:
“FATAL ERROR is a late-90s techno-thriller starring Nick Baldwin (ANTONIO SABÀTO, JR., GENERAL HOSPITAL), a rogue EMT whose refusal to “heal by the books” and play by the rules cost him his doctor’s residency. He stumbles, literally, upon a grisly and inexplicable tableau — a conference room full of dead people! — and some of the worst CGI I have ever seen, and meets disease specialist Samantha Carter (JANINE TURNER, NORTHERN EXPOSURE), who recruits him in her search to find an explanation for a rash of similar mysterious deaths.”
Honestly, this movie takes more from ‘bad TV’ than it does ‘bad movies.’ The camerawork is so stilted and terrible looking, and everything is lit in that really blandly all-encompassing ‘TV’ way. I’m not surprised by this — but it’s still a chore to watch. Also taken from TV is that Fatal Error features both a doctor and a police person – both of television’s most overplayed roles – coming together for a daring mystery involving… technology! Spin the trope roulette once more, please!
The techno-paranoia is definitely the most enjoyable part of the movie. It’s so exaggerated, but definitely feels like it’s coming from a real place of terror on the writer’s part. My favorite scene, bar none, is the one of an old person watching television, but his TV Box corrupts him with some digital virus, and he dies — in the same weird way everyone in this movie dies.
Their skin cracks and turns white — they, like, freeze, I think? — and they fall to the floor and shatter. The CGI is humorously bad (see above), and every time this happens it never failed to produce a laugh from me. Also, I think on set they just put baby powder everywhere to convey the flaky-white-skin. This too is profoundly funny.
Not funny is the story. It basically could have been churned out by an A.I. and written by a monkey using a phone with corrective text. I dissociated for long stretches of this flick.
Ugh. Honestly, this movie was so shitty — and the bad CGI is not enough to justify any of you ever watching it.
Please don’t.
A selection of FATAL ERROR frames, courtesy of Google!
But TRASH NIGHT doesn’t live and die by the quality of the movie! In fact, it’s sorta perversely fun when the movie is as bad as this one because TRASH NIGHT is a community! And not a quiet one. This ain’t a theater full of old huffy-duffies trying to politely keep their rage to themselves. Instead, taking a note from MST3K, these folks love to talk shit.
Now look, obviously not everyone is a comic genius — and there are quite a few truly dumb jokes made at every screening — but the quality of the jokes isn’t really the point. Maybe I’m alone here, but did any other weirdos reading this have a friend in middle school who you weren’t really similar to at all, outside the fact that you were weird, but you clung to them like sap to a tree because you were desperately alone in a frightening world?
That’s how TRASH NIGHT can feel. Like you’re hanging out in mutual weirdness with someone or rather a big group of fellow oddballs. There’s a camaraderie — the Narragansett helps.
My face after a couple Narragansett beers.
And, it should be noted, these aren’t the bad kind of weirdos. I feel like, personally, as a connoisseur of “weird” comedy in a post-ironic meme-world, I’ve seen a terrible culture war develop. In middle school, when I found Tim & Eric, the scene seemed largely bipartisan, or, perhaps, apolitical. Yet, now we have the Alt-Right who have formed their own fascist version of Tim & Eric via Sam Hyde and Million Dollar Extreme. These chaotic ‘weirdos’ seem to live to bash any form of “political correctness.” This is a very long-winded way of saying that I really appreciated when the presenter of TRASH NIGHT said that it’s cool to joke but please no racist, transphobic, homophobic, misogynist, etc. comments. Sorry if that was not related enough to bad movies, or too ‘political,’ but it’s an honest, emotional appreciation.
Also, the puppet masters behind TRASH NIGHT do intend the night to be fun! They are always sure to cut away from the movie at certain points and play an amusing array of commercials or other odd esoterica culled from the depths of YouTube. Sometimes these videos are the highlight of the screening — especially during something like Fatal Error.
Anyways, I don’t recommend any of you seek out Fatal Error on your own. I’m not even sure you could find it. But if anything I said sounds like a place you’d like to find yourself, you should go to the next TRASH NIGHT. December 20th: See you there!
Here’s like the only YouTube video I could find featuring the movie.
Fatal Error
1999
dir. Armand Mastroianni
91 min.
Part of the ongoing series: TRASH NIGHT
