The “incomprehensible” movie Roger Ebert hated with a passion: “Almost awesome in its badness”
One of cinema’s oldest debates is whether it’s better to make a movie that’s so bad it’s good or a forgettably mediocre one. It’s not an argument that any director wants to be involved with when the intention is always to make something great, but Roger Ebert had the pleasure of witnessing a film so irredeemably awful that it almost tipped over into an entirely different realm of guilty pleasure.
As a professional who earned a living from analysing and criticising movies, Ebert didn’t trade in guilty pleasures. There are classics he adored, masterpieces he despised, and plenty of rampantly middling pictures he backed to the hilt despite being firmly in the minority. It’s not an exact science, although he wasn’t the only one to lambast the sequel to a cult classic as one of the worst ever made.
Russell Mulcahy’s Highlander wasn’t a very good film, and it wasn’t profitable either. The far-fetched fantasy about immortal swordsmen battling over fate and destiny flopped at the box office during its theatrical run and was largely panned. However, it gained a second life on home video and snowballed into becoming a certified cult classic, which emboldened the studio to turn it into a franchise.
Unfortunately, that’s when the wheels fell off. Highlander II: The Quickening was shot in Argentina right as the country’s economy collapsed, and financial problems saw its backers wrestle control away from Mulcahy and assume control of post-production, which didn’t help. Still, Ebert got a kick out of it, at least in a perverse hate-watching way.
This movie has to be seen to be believed,” he wrote in his review. “On the other hand, maybe that’s too high a price to pay. Highlander 2: The Quickening is the most hilariously incomprehensible movie I’ve seen in many a long day – a movie almost awesome in its badness. Wherever science fiction fans gather, in decades and generations to come, this film will be remembered in hushed tones as one of the immortal low points of the genre.”
In fact, Ebert thought it was so bad that it was almost extraterrestrial. He couldn’t figure out what The Quickening was supposed to be about, poked holes in its virtually nonexistent logic, and was left completely and utterly baffled by almost every aspect of its existence, which is fair.
“If there is a planet somewhere whose civilisation is based on the worst movies of all time,” he elaborated. “Highlander 2: The Quickening deserves a sacred place among their most treasured artefacts.” Mulcahy would agree, though, after he walked out of the premiere 15 minutes into its 100-minute running time when he discovered how badly the people who ripped the movie from his hands had butchered his vision.
Somehow, the Highlander franchise still exists and is getting a reboot, which boggles the mind when none of the movies have been anything to write home about. On the plus side, none of them will ever be as bad as The Quickening.
