Better Living Through Bad Movies

By: Scott Clevenger, Sheri Zollinger

Narrated by: John Szura, Blanche Ramirez

Length: 9 hrs and 27 mins

Publisher's summary

We've all heard that you learn more from failure than you do from success. Which means that all those hours spent watching crappy movies wasn't a waste of your precious and ever-dwindling life span; it was an education! And Better Living Through Bad Movies can show you how to extract the profound, life-affirming lessons from films like Battlefield Earth, Coyote Ugly, and Indecent Proposal.

In over 50 hilarious reviews, the authors show how you can use the worst movies ever made to improve your sex life (it involves cardboard cutouts and clog dancing), apocalypse-proof your home (using the following materials: John Travolta, Kevin Costner, Sylvester Stallone, and more Kevin Costner), and win omnipotence and a Happy Meal by solving Satan's Junior Jumble. You will also discover how to forge a love that will last a lifetime (by dating the moribund), use films like Batman and Robin and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace as grief counseling, and conquer the world using common fruit bats and dry cleaning fluid. And, most important of all, you'll learn Hollywood's Ultimate Secret: why Beaches and Armageddon are actually the exact same movie.

©2006 Scott Clevenger (P)2016 Scott Clevenger

Terrible

The people reading this are obnoxious and condicendiing. They aren't as funny as they think they are.

Gigantic Dud

I've never listened to anything that had this many "jokes" that did not land, written by two people thoroughly convinced they are utterly hilarious/brilliant. Combine that with a bizarre choice to have really amateurish narrators, to the point where I was sure they did this themselves until I went back and looked, and you have a really disappointing and difficult listen. I've currently struggled thru 6+ hours of this while working and I haven't even cracked a smile despite a barrage of attempted one liners.

I am a huge fan of bad movies, particularly making fun of them and I realistically should be the target audience for something like this. But I can't recommend this to anyone who thinks they're going to get a fun or interesting listen because you are interested in the movies. The authors are not better writers than the writers they spend hours attempting to ridicule. Which kind of makes them worse since they thought they were so much smarter and funnier than these directors and writers that they could spend nine hours tossing "insults" at them. They also seem really sure that they are introducing us to all of these movies, no matter how obscure the movies really are.

Maybe if you think every joke is funny because it's sarcastic, not because it's actually funny? I'd struggle to find anyone who would find the humor to be their taste but would also be interested in hearing about movies like Never Too Young to Die, Megaforce & the like. Because it is low-grade, "so obvious you can see it from orbit" humor that you can almost fill in the "punchlines" by the 3 hour mark.

If you want a long day of groans and eye rolls or you're a fan of unwarranted smug writers who can't stop telling bad jokes, then I can recommend this. For everyone else, run.