fandomhighdorms | Fourth Floor Common Room, Sunday Evening

Joker and Eleanor were not on a date. Dates were lovely, but dates were private affairs, not ones where they set up in the common room and tried to lure other people into joining the activity. (Which would be a little odd, since most date-related activities involved kissing, anyway.)

This was, rather, a Bad Movie Night. Joker had discovered Eleanor's dearth of knowledge about horrible movies, and was seeking rectify matters. There was popcorn, there were fizzy drinks, and there was a miniseries that Joker had promised was going to be nothing short of abominable on all possible fronts: ludicrous science, half-hearted acting, wooden characterization, paper-thin plot. Super-earthquakes were coming, from super-secret faults! And only nuclear bombs could save the day!!!

"Okay," Eleanor said, frowning at the TV as she waited for the miniseries to start. "I'm still not following you. If it's so awful, why are we watching this instead of something good?"

(Joker modded with permission. But this is emphatically not a date, and this room could not be more open; if you so much as stroll by, you can be dragged in and made to experience fake science at its worse. PLEASE, COME WATCH A TERRIBLE MINISERIES WITH JOKER AND ELEANOR.)

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"How bad?" Cecil asked, delighted. "Throw things at the screen bad, or throw the TV out the window bad?"

"Oh, mainly point and laugh bad," Joker told him, as he put his hat back on. "At least tonight. I only throw things if I expect better from the movie. This movie is a fuck-up. It knows what it did."

"Those are the worst," Cecil answered, nodding his head somberly. "The unrepentant ones. Count me in!"

Joker held out his bowl for Cecil to grab from. "Popcorn? You are in for a real treat, I promise! Just the dialogue alone, or the special effects, or the basic premise, are each enough to make this terrible. Together, they are unstoppable!"

Cecil took some popcorn and grinned. "Thanks! So, what's the occasion? Is there one?"

"Does there need to be an occasion? Eleanor didn't understand the concept of movies that are so bad they're good, and that just could not stand!"

He pointed at the screen, where the seismologists were calling out numbers from their scientific-y measuring equipment as an earthquake's intensity increased. "I love this part. Oh no the numbers are going up! That is bad!"

"Definitely bad." Cecil nodded. "Hey, do they still have this sort of bad movie when you're from? Or where?"

"Some things are constant in this world, and bad movies are one of them," Joker replied. "But this television couldn't show them in all their three-dimensional badness, and I'd have to explain way too much as they went along. Besides, you really can't go wrong with the classics, am I right?"

"Is this a classic, then?" Cecil asked curiously. "I don't think I've seen it before."

"Well, 'classic' as defined by a few extranet message boards devoted to bad movies, but... yeah, pretty much. It's no ~~meta for~~ Plan 9 From Outer Space, but it's up there. It's only a few years old at this point, though -- totally missable if you didn't know to look for it."

"So we're early adopters! Or...early appreciaters?" That was kind of nifty.

"Is it weird watching things in only 2D?"

"We are at the cusp of a great cult following, yes," Joker agreed. "And 2D's not so weird, actually. Holos are great for certain things, but there's something about movies that just makes 2D work better."

"Do you still get new films made in 2D, like we sometimes get black and white films?"

"Oh, sure. And we get plenty of old films 'stunningly remastered'" -- he threw some air quotes on the phrase and rolled his eyes -- "in 3D. Or remade, or rebooted..." Joker shrugged. "Whoever it was who said there are only however many plots in fiction that keep getting re-used was right. In my century, we're pretty much scraping the bottom of the barrel."

He turned and looked at Cecil thoughtfully. "So, what are movies like where you're from? People get sucked inside them? Demons talk to people through them?"

"No more than usual." Cecil shrugged. "Well, not if you're careful."

It was possible Cecil's "usual" wasn't most people's. Joker was probably shocked.

Joker sighed and shook his head. "Yeeeeah, that's about what I thought. That sort of thing doesn't happen at all, most places."

Fourth Floor Common Room, Sunday Evening

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