Twenty-five years ago, on this very day, Ready To Rumble was unleashed onto the world.
I never watched this thing in theaters, but even back in 2000, I’ve heard about how bad this film was. Not just in terms of being a bad wrestling movie, but also just a bad comedy in general. It wouldn’t be until a couple years later that I’d eventually get around to renting a copy of Ready To Rumble from the video store and see for myself what I was missing. After pressing PLAY, I bore witness to what everyone else had been raving (or raging) about these past few years. Shortly afterwards, I opened up Frontpage on my computer, started a new document, and proceeded to write the words “Ready To Rumble is the worst film in human history.”
This would have been back in 2003-2004 when I was still renting videos and also when I was first putting up stuff on the IMDB site. At some point, I was going to post this little write-up on there until I realized that I had more than whatever the usual word limit was for IMDB user submitted reviews… and also there was more than a fair share of colorful metaphors… so it never saw the light of day… well, until the move to this blog, which you can find here.
About a decade later, I’d revisit the movie as part of my Slideshow Movie Review series and I’m not quite sure that I truly vocalized my disdain for this film. So now, here we are and… listen, I am not going to try and convince you that this is a misunderstood masterpiece. That much is obviously when the title of this post is “25 Years Later And Ready To Rumble Is (Still) The Worst Movie In Human History.” And to this very day, I have yet to see a movie that I would consider to be worse than Ready To Rumble. I’ve seen plenty of juvenile films in my day. I’ve seen plenty of utterly terrible films. But none of them were as bad as Ready To Rumble.
Hell, if the day ever comes and I break my long-standing moratorium on Ghostbusters 2016 to give that a watch, you know what? Yes, that movie is gonna suck, but I can guarantee you that it won’t be as bad as Ready To Rumble.
(Maybe that’s why I don’t want to watch that movie now that I think about it. Imagine the horror I’d feel when the possibility exists of a movie that is WORSE than Ready To Rumble. I don’t even want to contemplate that.)
Look, I’m sure there are movies. People can come up and tell me that the Deuce Bigelow movies are the nadir of comedy films. And yeah, those are bad… but you already know going in that those movies are aiming for the lowest common denominator. Ready To Rumble aims a little lower than that. It’s a terrible movie that is so unfunny and yet reprehensibly stupid that it somehow makes you stupider with each passing second that your eyes and brain are exposed to this vapid piece of garbage. Now would I have had this same kind of contempt for this film had I not been a wrestling fan? And the answer would invariably be yes. In fact, if I had not been a wrestling fan or if I had downright hated wrestling, I probably would’ve despised this movie even more.
Look, I just rented a painfully dull and unfunny film called Leonard Part 6 from Amazon for the expressed purpose of watching a movie other than Section 31. Yes, the one with Bill Cosby… and yes, it is every bit as bad as people made it out to be. But you want to know something? The worst thing that I could say about this movie was that it was BORING. None of the jokes landed. None of the bits worked. All the actors were phoning it in. It was deathly dull. And yes, I would have considered this a big ol’ waste of time… but on the flip side, I did not walk away from Leonard Part 6 with the same kind of contempt and utter bile that I got from watching five minutes of Ready To Rumble.
Some time ago, F4WOnline guy Bryan Alvarez teamed up with former wrestler Lance Storm and indy wrestler/former MMA guy “Filthy” Tom Lawlor to review this movie. Alvarez, a former wrestler and a normally intelligent fellow, had claimed that this movie is not the worst film ever made. When pushed to name a worse one, he admittedly couldn’t name one, but maintained that this was not as bad as people say that it is. This proves that Ready To Rumble has the capability of rotting brain cells of any person who willingly exposes them to repeated viewings of this thing.
Anyhoo… here we are.
Twenty-five years later AND STILL the absolute worst movie in human history… Ready To Rumble.
See you all in another twenty-five where we get to do this shit all over again.
dtm666 