Monday, March 11, 2013

Highlander II: The Thriftening

Usually when I feature something on Thrifty Terrors, it's an item so mind-blowingly weird, scary, poorly made, in awful taste, or just unimaginably bad that I feel no qualms about laughing at it.

Which is why when I found THIS treasure at Goodwill, I knew it had to go on the blog, if only as an honorable mention:
Highlander II: The Film Disavowed By Everyone Ever Involved In Highlander.
If you're not familiar with Highlander II: The Quickening, you should know that it's considered by many to be one of the worst films ever made.  (Don't believe me? Watch The Spoony Experiment's review.)  It's so bad that the rest of the Highlander films -- which, in spite of their cult action-movie status, are not exactly the highest form of cinematic art -- booted it out of canon and refuse to acknowledge its existence in the series storyline.  The movie's producers even re-edited the film and re-released it to remove all the [SPOILER] references to space aliens and flying stardust people, calling the new edit "The Renegade Cut."

But this is not that version.  This is the original film, in all its terrible post-apocalyptic, plot-holed, planet-full-of-inconsistently-immortal-aliens glory.  And it was still in plastic wrap, with K-mart discount stickers all over it.  How could I do anything BUT invest 99 cents in this... er... classic?

So I picked up the movie, thinking I had hit the bottom of the barrel for that particular store.  But that was before I discovered a whole cache of Christopher Lambert movies.

Nooooooooooooooo!
The postscript to this story is strangely appropriate:  Even though Highlander II was "new" in retail shrink wrap, when I finally opened it to show it to a group of friends, it turned out to be a used copy re-sealed in plastic. The previous viewer had stopped in the middle, and didn't even bother to rewind it.

(I can't really say I blame them.)

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