Move over, Eddie Murphy; here comes Jamie Kennedy

As you may or may not know, I am a Bad Movie Afficianado. I'm always on the lookout for the next Cool As Ice or Disco Godfather.

The best bad movies are bad from start to finish without letting up; they're fun to harmlessly mock; they serve as a reminder that, no matter how badly you mess something up, you're still not in any way responsible for producing From Justin to Kelly.

It seems to happen every so often; a studio spends a lot making a big movie, hoping it will be the next blockbuster, and for whatever reason, it just doesn't work. At all. And it's obvious, and there's no way to hide it. The more advertising and exposure the movie gets, the worse people think of it. Then the buzz just gets worse and worse, until finally the movie comes out, and nobody goes to see it.

Except me.

So far this decade (what IS this decade called, anyway?) we've had some great high profile stinkers: Glitter, Rollerball and Gigli probably being the most prominent.

And in the Realm of Bad Movies, of which I am King, there's... well, there's a lot of buzz around Son of the Mask. So far, based on the teaser and the trailer, it looks like the worst thing ever conceived by man.

If you saw Lord of the Rings III: Wrath of the Nerds in a theater, you may recall having seen the teaser before dozing off for three hours. It inexplicably features a poorly rendered computer generated baby, unconvincingly jumping up and dancing around. I seriously thought I was watching a preview for Ally McBeal Finally Goes Completely Fucking Crazy. Especially since nothing on the screen bore any resemblance to the likable original film.

In fact, neither of the then-up-and-coming players from that film (Jim Carrey, Cameron Diaz) are back for this sequel. If you're casting director, you clearly need a big name to replace Carrey. So they got Jamie Kennedy.

Yes, Jamie Kennedy, the star of... um... yeah. He was the geeky kid in Scream and had his own show on UPN for a while. Inexplicably, Malibu's Most Wanted didn't kill him off.

OK, fine, they're trying the up-and-comer route again (albeit with a talentless boob). But in the trailer, most of the focus seems to be on cartoon mischief between the poorly rendered inexplicably super-powered baby and a poorly rendered mask-wearing dog.

Seriously. What's up with the baby? Are there people out there who actually find these scenes funny?

"Oh-hoo, look Mabel! The baby's kicking that guy! That's adorable!"

"Aww, what's it doin' now... OHH, it's feet are runnin' without the rest of it!"

What a hoot.

Meanwhile, the otherwise likable Alan Cumming (Wyatt in Josie and the Pussycats and Nightcrawler in X2) looks uncomfortable as Loki, whom we all know from Thor comics as the Norse god of mischief.

Unfortunately, this movie may unleash ragnarok on his career.

So, all of this is funny and cringe-inducing enough. But then I read an interview with one of the movie's co-stars, Kal Penn (you may recall that he went to White Castle) that really... really... disturbed me. Seriously... this may keep me up at night.

?That?s a very over the top script,? Penn said. ?It was actually kind of fun to work on. It?s $100 million budget. I don't know how you spend $100 million, but I saw how you come close. It?s live action with a lot of animation and special effects in it. So every character is not one dimensional, but exaggerated. Jamie Kennedy plays The Mask and there are two or three guys that work at this animation studio with him, so I play this guy who is like an animator, special effects technician.?

Whoa, whoa whoa WHOA!

Whoa!

Back the truck up, Kumar!

One hundred million dollars?!?

That's what it cost to make this piece of crap?

Oy. Perhaps that money could have gone to better use... say, ending world hunger or something.

If that figure's accurate, and this movie flops as expected, then we're talking a monetary loss on the order of Andrew's favorite movie, The Adventures of Pluto Nash. That opus was made in 2000 at a cost of $100 million; it was released two years later and grossed just $4.4 million at the box office.

And yet, Son of the Mask could make that look like an unmitigated success.

Can't wait to see it!