air conditioning movie

noun North American

A term used to describe a type of film just released but not worth seeing other than for the temporary comfort provided by the theater’s climate control system during a heat wave.

“with the trailers indicating the film’s dubious quality, and its low Rotten Tomatoes score, he designated Wrong Turn an air conditioning movie.”

I’m not sure if the above term has ever been used before. If not, I’m coining it now.

There have been several points in my life where I’ve been forced to stay outdoors, or simply couldn’t stand being at home, while also being bored enough to waste my money on absolute junk films I had no real interest in seeing. All of which coincided with summer time heat waves.

Air conditioning movies serve an important purpose. One might even say a humanitarian one. They get you out of the murderous heat, at the cost of seeing a (usually) bad film. Often these films are matinees of movies that have been in theaters for a few weeks. Or they’re being shown at those dollar theaters six months after they premiered. So they often only cost a few bucks to see.

Fun Fact: One of the big draws movie theaters used in the past was air conditioning to get people in the door. Back before TV’s became ubiquitous in American homes, people would spend all day at the theater catching news reels, Three Stooges shorts, Looney Tunes, and movies, of course. It used to be relatively cheap, too.

Nowadays, you can’t sneeze in a movie theater without spending $100. And God help you if you’re seeing something in REAL ID 3D, IMAX, IMAX 3D, UltraScreen DLX, D-BOX, PRIME, RPX, Cinemark XD, DreamLoungers, attending a Movie Party, Dolby Cinema, ScreenX, 4DX, The Void, 70mm, or BigD.

Yes, you can now go to the theater to get your fill of BigD. No wonder dating is dead.

Here are five air conditioning movies I’ve seen.

Wrong Turn (2003)

Boy, if ever a movie had a perfect title to describe what it felt like to drive to go see it.

I remember little about this film other than it was part of the early 2000s resurgence of the “killer hillbilly” horror genre originally started by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre back in the ’70s and renewed with 2001’s Jeepers Creepers.

Oh yes, one other thing. The moment the group of young people split up to look for help after their cars break down in the woods, some girl immediately offers her boyfriend a BJ. Hey, I don’t recall reading anything about that in any wilderness survival guide. Maybe it’s only in the ladies version.

Unlike Chainsaw, which was perfectly plotless, perversely original and shocking for its time, Wrong Turn is your predictable paint by numbers teens-get-slaughtered-by-maniacs film, only this time somewhere deep in the woods. It came out not long after the Scream and I Know What You did Last Summer renaissance. Lacking neither the smarts of the former, nor the bosomy charisma of the latter, Wrong Turn premiered during a time when all it took to sell a horror film was to slap a hot teen girl in a halter top on the cover looking moderatly distressed.

Apparently, this awful but profitable 2003 release launched a direct-to-video franchise and even a freaking REBOOT. There’s a Wrong Turn 6: Last Resort that came out in 2014, followed by Wrong Turn in 2021. Hmm, I wonder if some producers weren’t inspired by the same name style Halloween reboot in 2018? We can only gue$$.

I rate Wrong Turn a perfect five out of five air conditioners.

Freddy Got Fingered (2001)

If you weren’t alive during, or don’t remember the time when Tom Green was everywhere on MTV, you sorely missed out. I’m still not sure his whole rise to fame wasn’t an elaborate CIA psyop designed to lower America’s IQ by ten points. Though to be fair, you could say that about virtually any social media star nowadays.

Freddy Got Fingered is a subtly brilliant meta deconstruction of the gross-out comedy genre. I know it’s hard to believe that about a film with a title about sexual molestation. But by the late ’90s, Tom Green had risen high enough to earn a blank check from MTV to make anything he wanted.

So what does he do? He makes a “film” with some of the most ridiculously disgusting gross out scenes ever put to celluloid. There’s a scene where he delivers a baby, and then proceeds to swing the infant around the hospital room by its umbilical cord. A scene where he gets sprayed by elephant cum. Then there’s a recurring gag about a young kid who keeps getting seriously injured.

And those are just some of the scenes I remember. I’ve suppressed the rest just like I did with all those Bill Cosby Jell-O commercials from the ’80s.

This so-called movie is essentially one man giving Hollywood the finger. Tom Green could have produced a solid high-concept comedy. He could have been like Mike Myers and done his own Austin Powers. Or like Adam Sandler and his many man baby comedies. He could have done a clever Shakespeare-inspired teen comedy like 10 Things I Hate About You. Comedy was easy in the ’90s and early 2000s, because you didn’t have to compete with the internet and streaming platforms. Seriously, there was a five-year period where Cameron Diaz having cum in her hair was the absolute height of yucks. Good times.

Instead, Tom Green made Freddy Got Fingered. For that, I feel he deserves some credit.

I rate Freddy somehow six out of five air conditoners.

The Dictator (2012)

Man, what a run by Sacha Baron Cohen. After his 2006 film Borat made fifty bazillion dollars, and inspired bad impressions at parties for years to come, he popped out this little satirical nugget in 2012.

The Dictator follows an evil despot named Aladeen from a fictional North African nation called Wadiya who fish-out-of-waters in NYC after escaping an assassination plot. Like Freddy Got Fingered, this too has some weird gross-out set pieces, including a scene where Aladeen and his new hippy girlfriend Zoey (played by Anna Faris) somehow share a handshake inside some woman’s birth canal. Don’t ask me how that event came about, it’s down there with Cosby’s Pudding Pops.

The film did make a few notable contributions to the national lexicon and the meme pool cyberspace. Including a clever bit about being HIV Aladeen, a gag about Gen. Aladeen wanting his rockets to be pointy because it makes them look scary, and Aladeen and an associate freaking an American tourist couple out during a helicopter ride over the city.

It feels somewhat loathsome to consign any film starring baby-faced Anna Faris to the lowly status of “air conditioning movie.” The Dictator is a servicable enough comedy, afterall. I actually saw it during a time when I was homeless and living out of my car. The film served as a vital escape and refuge in a dollar theater during a nasty July heat wave. Considering Faris’ lengthy career powered by such films as the Scary Movie franchise and 2007’s stoner comedy Smiley Face, The Dictator is high brow by comparison.

But if I’m being honest, I never would have checked this out had it not been for the fact that it was 100 degrees outside, the local library was closed, and I wasn’t about to sit in my car all afternoon listening to Carly Rae Jepsen sing Call Me Maybe for the umpteenth goddamn time. So off to The Dictator I went.

I rate The Dictator four out of five air conditioners.

Battleship (2012)

You know, I’m not quite sure of the precise moment when Hollywood slid into the barren wasteland devoid of creativity in which it currently resides. But if I had to pick a time, I’d say it was right around when it decided to make a movie based on the popular board game Battleship.

Now, at first glance you might be thinking if you were going to adapt any boardgame, Battleship makes the most sense. It’s got conflict baked into it. Besides, it’s not like you can do anything with Connect 4, Operation, or Hungry Hungry Hippos, right? With Battleship you’ve got war. You’ve got guns. You’ve got senseless action and explosions. All the ingredients you need for any successful summer popcorn film. Transformers was also popular at the time, so you had a similar toy-based property raking in billions. You’d be insane NOT to green light Battleship with a $200 million budget.

Well, there’s this whole thing called a “plot” that has to make some sense. And there’s these things called “characters” you need to have in your story in order for it to work. In Transformers, you have two sides — the Autobots and the Decepticons — locked in combat, and represented by two strong characters, the awesomely named Optimus Prime and Megatron. As silly as the whole franchise is, it kind of writes itself. Good robots smash evil robots. It’s like poetry.

But what do you have in Battleship? Nothing, really. So they had to concoct this whole cockamamie story about an alien invasion and the aliens using some cloaking technology that makes them hard to detect, in order to shoehorn in the whole gameboard conceit of having to guess which grid number to launch missiles toward. It’s all too complicated and stupid to comprehend.

Then you have quite possibly the dumbest opening to a summer “blockbuster” in history, with director Peter Berg ripping off that viral YouTube video about some guy crashing through a store ceiling of a convenence store. You’ve got Taylor Kitsch, the King of Flops, whom Hollywood was desperately (and inexplicably) trying to make a thing back then. Poor Liam Neeson must have been blackmailed or something. And Rihanna was in it too for some reason.

I don’t even recall this movie even being worthwhile even as a mild diversion. In fact, I think I even left early I was so bored. Yes, it was preferable to sit in the burning heat in my car than watch this turd of a film.

I rate Battleship two out of five air conditioners.

An honorable mention goes to Hannibal, the 2001 sequel to 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs. Except that was a film I actually wanted to see, and I recall it came out during the winter, so there were no heat-related considerations in watching it. I do remember about a third of the way through realizing that it was clearly going to fall far short of the original, in which case it’s the only film of these five that transformed into an “air conditioning movie” while I was watching it.

You know, we’re lucky to live in a time where air conditioning movies are largely a thing of the past. Like polio and lobotomies. You rarely have to go to a theater to see anything anymore. With movies streaming earlier after releasing, and video on demand, and good ol’ piracy, we can all suffer to our heart’s content at home.

Still, what are your “favorite” air conditioning movies? I can’t be the only one who’s endured here.

Thanks for reading.