Did a tongue in cheek post about Sharknado not long ago. Social networks loved it as an ultimate example of bad movie made good. The producer was a company called Asylum, which makes lots of bad movies for the SyFy Channel. I enjoyed it and said so. No redeeming value whatsoever. But I’ve just found a better/badder one. One that’s actually worth talking about, heaven forfend.

To set the scene, I was avoiding the news that Obama might or might not finally do something in Iraq. Who cares what he says? What he does will be invariably lame, too little, too late, and ultimately, however it sounds at the outset, ineffective.

So I found an Australian TV series on Netflix I’ve never heard of and watched two episodes of it. Typically somewhat slow, complicated, nerve wracking, and then, what the hell, not what I was in the mood for.

Not ashamed to say I plunged for the lowest common denominator, an Asylum production called Airplane Vs Volcano. Here is my report.

It beggars Sharknado in terms of violating every acceptable convention of disaster movies. There is no filmic sin in this genre it does not commit. It is, despite a ridiculous premise, almost entirely humorless. A commercial airliner stumbles over the airspace of a brand new population of Hawaiian volcanoes which could have and should have either burned it to a crisp in a moment or jammed its engines into shutdown with pyroclastic ash, also in a moment. The characters are undeveloped, the script many times mawkishly sentimental, the actors B-level at best, the CGI incredibly bad, the plot twists even more impossibly unbelievable than your worst imagination, the on board casualties carelessly excessive, the science and technology cited absolutely, unutterably laughable… Never seen a lower average User Rating for a movie at IMDB.com (uh, approximately zero.)

But, this morning, I enjoyed every minute of it. Yes, there was the standard SyFy plot structure of a lone senior military officer dealing with an apocalyptic event (ostentatiously eschewed by Sharknado, don’tcha know…) But this time there was also a lowly sergeant who gradually took over the movie by insisting that the passengers on a stricken plane were worth every conceivable sacrifice to bring home safely. The hero did not miraculously heal the rift with his wife and family. Mass civilian casualties were not averted.

Leave no one behind. Wrung out to the last drop in this otherwise atrocity. It used to be part of our cultural and military tradition. In the days of Obama it’s become a comic book fantasy. One I was willing to escape to on this August Friday.

I’ve reached the point where I’d rather have cartoon bubblespeak than a single other word from this travesty of a president.