And I thought "The Book of Eli" was crazy.
It ain't got nothing on "Legion," the absolute bugnuts ride to nowhere of 2010.
It's a crazy bad-acid-trip of a film that given the actors involved you'd think no way this movie would get made.
Paul Bettany, a mostly respectable actor (he played Russell Crowe's second fiddle in "A Beautiful Mind" and "Master and Commander") playing the Archangel Michael, who in the movie's opening moments lands on Earth, slices off his wings, and stitches himself up, and blows up a building, in that order.
When the smoke clears from the explosion, he's standing in the hole created by the blast, a simple, perfect, geometrically-shaped cross.
And that's before things go haywire.
Michael, it turns out, was asked by God to kill an unborn child who would go on to end the apocalypse. Michael refused, and heads down to Earth to save the child, who God presumably wants dead for some unknown reason.
Cut to the desert just outside the middle of nowhere, where a collection of horror-movie cliches are gathering in a diner, as if to wait for the apocalypse to come. You have a lovesick redneck named Jeep (Lucas Black), his ne'er-do-well pops who owns the diner (Dennis Quaid), his religious cook (Charles S. Dutton), a family of spoiled yuppies (Kate Walsh and Jon Tenney), and their larvae (Willa Holland), who are stranded when their BMW breaks down, and a gangster poser who carries a gun but is afraid to use it (Tyrese Gibson).
But we haven't even gotten to the pregnant single teen mother-to-be (Adrianne Palicki) who waits tables, smokes, argues with her boss, and spends her time fighting off Jeep's advances.
They all have their problems, but it's all fun and games until a fallen angel shows up in a stolen cop car and pulls a bunch of automatic weapons from the trunk.
This film uses the current favorite horror standard of turning children and little old ladies into demon-figures, and the results aren't so much creepy as just silly. The oft-played sequence from the trailer where the little old lady starts attacking people quickly turns into a Mel Brooks film, complete with patrons wielding frying pans and deep-fryer baskets as weapons.
But we're not finished: there's a far-too-short sequence involving the ice cream man (Indianapolis native and Friend of the Yap Doug Jones), where a hapless confection salesman becomes a crazy spider creature.
That's about where things get loony, degenerating into a jumbled mess of gunfights, car explosions, and crazy angel-on-human (and vice versa) violence.
The acting is spectacularly bad, beginning and ending with Black's wet-cardboard performance. Dennis Quaid hams it up to a legendary degree, and Bettany mopes around wondering where his career went wrong.
Much like "Eli," "Legion" is full of logical fallacies. If it's so important for this unborn child to die, why doesn't God just will it dead? Why couldn't he level the entire diner?
The film' s climax is either the ballsiest or most brainless in recent memory (maybe both), and while it makes sense on one level, on another it's ludicrous.
It's b-movie bacon of the highest order, a virtual visual effects highlight reel with a completely incoherent story built around it.
It's got so much cheese Wisconsin dairy farmers are asking for some crackers and wine.