There can be something reassuring about watching a truly Bad movie.  Comforting, even.  The term “Bad Movies” has been applied to a growing canon of “so-bad-they’re-good” oddities with such wild abandon that a lot of so-good-they’re-great titles like Showgirls, Glen or Glenda, and Freddy Got Fingered have gotten swept up in the momentum, either because their intent is misunderstood or because they fail to meet arbitrary standards of objective, professional quality.  The further I’ve immersed myself in the deep end of iconoclastic, outsider-art filmmaking the more difficult it is to find any value in a Good vs Bad dichotomy.  If I had to come up with my own binary, I’d say movies are usually either Interesting or Boring.  So, it’s helpful to have a reality check like the 1995 buddy-cop comedy Theodore Rex to remind me that, yes, movies can be objectively Bad.  Everything about Whoopi Goldberg playing a future-cop who’s reluctantly partnered with a talking animatronic dinosaur sounds like the kind of nonsense novelty that gets me to overlook objective quality markers to instead find joy in the inane and the absurd.  And yet, there is no joy to be found in Theodore Rex.  It’s bad; it’s boring.  It’s more chore than art.

I mean “chore” in the literal sense.  Whoopi Goldberg was contracted to star in this 90s Dino Craze kids’ film though an oral agreement that she tried back out of once she smelled the stink on the project, then was forced to follow through on her promise via lawsuit.  As a result, most of the blame for its dead-eyed energy has defaulted to criticism of her performance, which is indeed a legally obligated sleepwalk.  The real shame, though, is that her T-Rex screen partner has no personality to speak of either.  His human-scale dino suit is cute enough to appeal to kids, but George Newbern’s vocal work as Teddy Rex is embarrassingly whiny & unenthused.  He spends the entire film mumbling to himself like a socially awkward nerd who just got dropped off for his first day at a party college (speaking from personal experience), draining all of the ferocious cool out of the T-Rex’s street cred and replacing it with generalized, unmedicated anxiety.  Worse yet, these two lifeless drips are investigating the conspiratorial murder of another T-Rex, so kids not only have to hang out with the least exciting dinosaur alive, but they’re also confronted with the limp corpse of their favorite dino in multiple scenes.  The whole thing plays like a cult deprogramming tape meant to convince children that dinosaurs are in no way interesting or cool.

If there are any signs of life in this dino-themed court summons, it’s in the production design.  Theodore Rex was one of the most expensive direct-to-video productions of its time, as it was initially budgeted for theatrical release.  That bloated scale mostly translates to big explosions, a thoughtful mix of animatronic puppetry & 90s computer graphics, and surprisingly engaged performances from recognizable names like Bud Cort, Carol Kane, and Richard “Shaft” Roundtree.  The money also shows in its intensely artificial sets, which take the “Once upon a time in the future …” framing of its sci-fi noir premise to a cartoon extreme where all the world is a DZ Discovery Zone.  However, you could just revisit the live-action Super Mario Bros movie or the TV-sitcom Dinosaurs for that exact effect without having to spend time with these dipshit dino cops.  They suck all of the fun out of every room they enter, and as a result the movie just kinda sucks.  There’s something especially painful about how every failed, flat punchline is punctuated with goofball sound effects to remind the audience that we’re supposed to be having fun! fun! fun!, so that our participation in this bullshit feels just as mandatory as Whoopi’s.  When it ends on a sequel-teasing title card that reads “See Ya!”, it reads like a threat.  Leave me out of it.

-Brandon Ledet