When terrible movies become B classics it is usually because they are so ill-conceived and wrongly presented they transcend their genre and become comedy classics. These movies are not supposed to make us laugh. Usually they hope to frighten and terrify us. The worst ones are those that try to make us think. A “deep” movie that fails miserably can be the funniest movie of the year. Battlefield Earth is best remembered as “the scientology movie” that is also terrible. The moviemakers hoped to take a best-selling science fiction novel and offer it up as insight into a little understood system of faith. What they created is instead a comic masterpiece. This movie is arguably the greatest comedy of the last decade not simply because it makes us laugh at its preposterousness. Battlefield Earth is a classic comedy and should be treated as such.
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