Cherry 2000 - It has to be seen to be believed

I watch a lot of ‘so-bad-they’re-good’ films, but ‘Cherry 2000’ was actually quite different.  It was a ‘so-bad-I-don’t-know-if-it’s-real’ kind of film.  I literally sat there unable to believe my eyes at what I was witnessing.  It’s set in some sort of weird future where men can buy robots shaped like beautiful women who will wait on their every needs.  However, what one such man obviously never read in his ‘wife’s’ instruction manual was that you should probably never get them wet.

I won’t go into the hows and whys of how he gets his ‘Cherry 2000’ model wet (there’s a treat in store for you), but it totally blows a fuse and the local dealer seems to be out of stock in that particular make.  Therefore, the only thing he can do is set out into a forbidden wasteland where there’s – apparently – a robot graveyard full of perfectly-kept Cherrys waiting to be taken back to some lucky man’s kitchen. 

So he does.  Only he doesn’t do it alone.  He enlists the help of a ‘tracker’ – someone who’s familiar with the dangerous world they’re about to explore.  This particular tracker is played by Melanie Griffith.  And this is where the ‘fun’ starts.  That is if you call ‘fun’ really bad acting.  Melanie Griffith can’t act.  Or, to be fair, she can’t act back in this particular film.  I read online that she had just given birth weeks before filming, so perhaps I should cut her a bit of slack.  But she really is bad.  Every line is delivered like she’s reading if from a children’s comic (and not a very well-written comic either).

You could almost say that she ruins the movie, but that would be a little unfair.  The guy who’s hired her tries to ‘out-ruin’ the movie, too.  He’s possibly the least charismatic leading man ever.  Plus he doesn’t seem able to close his mouth – ever.  Therefore, with two such awful leads, you could imagine many people would have turned it off as soon as possible.  But that’s where its appeal lies – you have to watch it to see just how bad it gets.

Plus there’s the script itself.  Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino would struggle to act well delivering these lines.  It’s like the writers were students who had a good idea for a film, but none of the talent to bring it to the big screen.  The action scenes don’t make sense.  The dialogue doesn’t make sense.  The progression of the story from scene to scene doesn’t make sense and, finally, the character motivation doesn’t make sense either.

Cherry 2000 is a disaster, but one of those car crash type disasters that you just have to watch.  You need to know you are in for a bad experience when you sit down to watch this.  It is bad, but it is so bad you really do have to see it to believe it.

6/10 Should probably keep you awake if Freddy Krueger was haunting your nights