Is this the worst film of all time? unpacking the Monstrosity of The Amazing Bulk
When it comes to films, there’s good and bad. Obviously, there is always a degree of subjectivity on what truly constitutes a good or bad picture because people’s tastes obviously differ. We may find one film interesting, another might find it boring, that’s a given. But then, there are special kinds of films which are so truly awful there is no debate about it, which leads us to the topic of this article: A 2012 Mockbuster known as “The Amazing Bulk“.
Created by amateur film director Lewis Schoenbrun, the Amazing Bulk was a “mockbuster” or parody of the Marvel Studios film The Incredible Hulk, which was screened in 2008. Typically, in the “Mockbuster” market, directors strive to deliberately spoof and create titles similar to the target film in order to piggyback on the given film’s publicity, popularity and brand identity. They use low budgets to do so the intention of making an easy profit.
Now while not every Mockbuster movie is doomed to be bad, although saying that not many tend to be good, The Amazing Bulk was a monstrosity of a film for reasons which were truly unparalleled. In making this film, Schoenbrun opted for the cheapest budget possible combined with the laziest methods of film making conceivable, all of which perhaps ironically succeeded in creating a picture which would be so bad it would gain a status of notoriousness and a cult following on the internet.
But how exactly? The Amazing Bulk, if one can truly call it a film, was made entirely out of awful green screens, outdated stock CGI imagery and 2D animation which were pre-emptively thrown together to create a mash of a story with Z-grade actors. It contains no real world locations whatsoever, and the characters literally shuffle in front of a green screen to pretend they are walking, or drive 2D cars which look as though they’ve been drawn in Microsoft paint.
The film attempts to follow the narrative of a young scientist, who under pressure from the military, seeks to create a “super soldier” formula which transforms him into a purple abomination known as The Amazing Bulk. The Bulk is sent to fight evil scientist known as “Dr Kurt von Kantlove” before he is betrayed by the general. The film’s finale chase scene, the most notorious part of the film, involves the creature running (or skipping) away to unfitting music across a series of completely random and out of context backdrops while being attacked by a completely of bizarre cheap 3D stock computer animations, including Robin Hood, Pirates, Zeus, a Flying Superhero Pug and so on.
The Amazing Bulk is a movie which does not make any sense whatsoever. With terrible acting and dialogue, awful effects, a ridiculous storyline, it has come to embody a parody not of any actual superhero film but rather so everything which could be possibly wrong with a film in its entirety. What is perhaps most surprising is that stores such as Microsoft actually continue to sell this bizarrety.
