CeruIean

I guess I'm just not a fan of "lost footage" fake documentaries. This was the closest I've ever come to liking one, which I guess says something in its favor. This movie purports to be the footage of a college film crew investigating a local disturbance involving a bear poacher. When they begin following him, they discover that he is not hunting bears, but trolls. The proceed to follow him around as he goes troll hunting, camera shaking all the way. And that's pretty much it. They seem to be going for understated comedy, which they pull off well in many places.

Hans, the troll hunter, is played perfectly. He treats troll hunting like a boring office job, and casually dresses up in an iron armor suit with a giant syringe to get a troll blood sample, moaning all the while about how he hates his job. He's almost a cross between Bill Murray in a Wes Anderson film and Marvin the robot from the Hitchhiker's Guide. The parts about Hans are great. Unfortunately, lots of the film consists of pointing the camera at random objects, scenery, or other crew members. They seem to think we care about the film crew, when we actually just want to see more Hans.

And the shaky cam. Oh god, the shaky cam. If you don't like shaky cam, look elsewhere, because every time the trolls show up, it's basically watching someone run through the woods with the camera. You see lots of ground and trees. I would have liked this movie a lot more if they had went with the mockumentary style using a regular filming method rather than going for the fake documentary angle.

In short, the parts with Hans are great, but are only about a third of the film or so, and the rest isn't very good at all. Overall, I'd recommend it only if you like the fake documentary style.

I was going into this hoping for a so-bad-its-good type movie, but for the most part it's just plain old bad. There are some of the ridiculous moments I was hoping for, like the horrific CGI superhero rescuing people, random atomic artifacts that give superpowers or blow up, and out-of-left-field plot contrivances, but they are rather sparse in a movie that is essentially Thai Magneto vs. Osama Bin Laden. It drags badly in several places to the point that my friend and I were seriously considering just turning it off, but every time it would drag us back in with a slow motion leap over a random couch or the hero sliding down a rope from the top floor of a burning building on his fire axe. In the end, though, I wouldn't recommend it. If you're looking for a movie to take seriously, this one has too many CGI, plot, and dialogue problems. If you're looking for a fun bad movie, it doesn't have enough of them. It's stranded in that limbo between good and bad that is worse than either. If about an hour of plot dialogue had been cut out of this nearly two hour movie, it would be decent, but as it stands, it's not worth your time. If you're looking for a good bad superhero movie, Condorman or Return of Captain Invincible are better. If you're looking for a good Thai martial arts movie, stick with Tony Jaa. Either way, stay away from this one.

I pride myself on being a connoisseur of bad movies. I have purposely watched hundreds upon hundreds of terrible movies with my friends, ranging from classics like Manos: The Hands of Fate to foreign 80's conan ripoffs to the contemporary Sci-Fi Channel and Asylum cheese fests. But not even those can prepare you for the abomination that is Nukie. It is, without doubt, the worst movie I have ever seen. By worst I do not mean least enjoyable; there are horrifically boring movies that are less enjoyable than Nukie. By worst I mean it causes more pain. To be honest, I can't put into words exactly what that is. There are movies that are more ridiculous. There are movies that have worse costumes. There are movies that have more annoying characters (though perhaps not many). There are even movies with stupider plots. But somehow, by some inexplicable alignment of terribleness, all these things have combined like an evil, mutated Captain Planet into Nukie, which has the power to punch your soul and beat it until you lose all faith in humanity and the universe.

Nukie is a movie about two alien light beams which inexplicably speak English and crash land on Earth because they are ungodly stupid. Upon landing on earth they transform into hideously disfigured E.T. knockoffs that are, for reasons unknown to anyone who has the slightest claim to humanity, expected to be seen as cute by the audience. One of them is named Nico and is captured by American scientists, who apparently operate out of a low-rent apartment building in Miami. The other is named Nukie, who lands in Africa and is so stupid he never considers just flying over to America even though he has no trouble flying anywhere else. Nukie and Nico spend the first fifteen minutes of the movie yelling each others names back and forth by bouncing their voices off of the moon. Yes, that makes just as much sense written down as it does in the movie. Nico is experimented on by scientists before being helped by a sentient computer who wants to turn scientists into clowns and have disco dance parties in his laboratory. Meanwhile, Nukie tries to convince the African natives to help him get to America by terrorizing them, breaking their things, crashing a helicopter, and causing two little boys to be cast out into the wild. For some reason, this doesn't make them want to help him, so Nukie is forced to wander through stock footage and before befriending a talking monkey who has a fondness for candy and stupidity. Nukie finds the children and celebrates by flying around in the sky, not going to America, and doing a disco dance scene in the African wilderness.

I have now seen this movie four times, and every time it takes a piece of my soul back to hell with it. There are no words that can adequately describe what viewing this movie does to you. Some have said it is like watching a train wreck, in that you have to keep watching even though it is horrible. It is more like watching the annihilation of humanity. Nukie is nihilism. Nukie saps you of the will to live and leaves you wandering though the void of nothingness, for after seeing it you know in your heart that there cannot possibly be meaning in a universe which contains Nukie. There are some things that happen to you in life that change who you are forever. Nukie is one of those things.