My 100 Worst Movies of the 90's - 20 - Bio-Dome (1996)

Bio-Dome (1996; Weasel Productions)

This movie is only number 20.  That surprised even me.  I hated 19 movies more than this one.  Full disclosure: when I was younger, before I came to my senses, I actually (I can’t believe I’m admitting this) liked this movie.  I thought it was funny.  A few years back I watched it again and couldn’t finish it.  I managed to force myself through it and can honestly say, now, this is one of the stupidest, most senseless, idiotic, unfunny, incoherent, soulless, vile, disturbing, and all around pathetic films ever made.  I could not put a finger on a moment that I could say “I could see why I thought it was funny as a kid.”  It isn’t funny.  Not at all.

The stupid plot focuses on two slackers who mistake a giant science experiment (one where five scientists will live in harmony with nature in an unpolluted environment), for a mall and go inside.  They are locked inside for a whole year because they can’t open the doors without “compromising the scientific data”.  The fundamental flaw of the film is that these idiots were in the place for all of 30 seconds, they could just kick them out, and reset the clock.  But nooooooooo!  We get plot contrivance instead, and these two fools act like morons bringing chaos to the otherwise solemn experiment.

Bio Dome is bad.  It’s really, really, really bad.  If there was a movie hell, this movie would burn in it.  You have to think; somebody green-lit this.  This was a concept that somebody with deep pockets thought would make for quality entertainment.  I think back and wonder to myself what kind of brain damage I must have suffered that would have led me to like this garbage.  I can’t think of an honest reason.  I consider myself a reasonably intelligent person but I wonder sometimes when I look back at the films I used to watch.

So, in a film starring two of the most consistantly bad actors in Hollywood, how do the other actors hold up?  Well, every single person in this film is annoying.  Everyone overacts, everyone behaves like idiots, and Pauly Shore and Stephen Baldwin are the epitome of over-the-top here.  Nobody in the real world acts like this.  These two cartoon characters fill each scene with noise, strange sounds, silly faces and incessant shrieking and shouting.  Pauly Shore can’t act, so he subsidizes his lack of talent with antics, and Bio Dome is easily his single worst film.  It was actually the last major role of his career.  He still acts to this day but only in cameos, bit parts, and straight-to-DVD fare.  He is an afterthought, discarded with the rest of the waste from the very excessive 90’s.