Sharing Proud Family Moments
Every family has its share of occurrences that accrue, through many fond retellings, a trace of the legendary. There's the time my Mom sang so sweetly in church as a teenager that Uncle Alan suddenly wasn't embarrassed to have his sister singing in church. There's the time my sister brazenly clamped a bear-hug on the stiff-upper-lip principal during graduation. There's the time when I was nine that I ate so much at the Terrace House all-you-can-eat buffet they actually lowered the kids' discount age by two years shortly after. But no story batted around after dinner at Casa de VanWinkle pricks up the ears like the tale of the Movie So Bad Even Dad Wouldn't Watch It.

It happened one Saturday afternoon. Mom and my sister were out shopping, so the guys decided on a trip to the video store. I'd pick one, and my Dad would pick one. I'm not sure why I agreed to this arrangement, as my Dad is inordinately proud of his transparently wretched taste in movies. Not only did he thoroughly enjoy Swamp Thing, he thinks that the sequel got jobbed at the Oscars. I did have a plan. We'd watch my movie first, and golly, Mom and Jan are back, I guess Crustacean! will have to wait for another day. But I made the mistake of picking out something that (so Dad claimed) "Mom and Jan will want to see, too." Outflanked! And so it was this lapse in foresight that led us to attempt to watch Stranded.

MY EYES!!!
My memories of Stranded are mercifully few. Ione Skye, soon to be the lovely heroine of Say Anything, had the lead role. I remember watching the opening credits and wondering why there was no soundtrack. There was a rapid parade of ridiculous characters that made you think the script was playing $25,000 Pyramid. ("Beleaguered African-American sheriff in southern town... racist hick deputies... emotionless and sinister federal agents..." "Hollywood stereotypes?" BINGBINGBINGBINGBING.) Most strikingly, I remember my Dad, the man who waited patiently for the closing credits to see who the arachnid wrangler in Kingdom of the Spiders was, turning to me after twenty minutes of Stranded and saying, "Mind if we watch something else?"

In the roughly fifteen years since this astonishing event, I've come to doubt my own recollections of the incident. Twenty minutes? Could it really have been that bad? Seems like long odds. In fact, I've wondered more than a little if I've exaggerated the utter crappiness of Stranded in retrospect. Of course, since I've never seen a copy of this film anywhere else, I can only speculate, and three possibilities occur to me.

1. Stranded really was that bad. So bad, in fact, that the government rounded up all existing copies, lest the movie fall into the wrong hands. They're all stored in some musty warehouse, right next to the Ark of the Covenant.
2. Stranded was worse than bad; it was evil. Anyone who sees it dies a week later, unless you make a copy.
3. There is no movie Stranded. It was all a bad dream. I'm waking up right now, heading out the door. Oh no, someone's saying I'd be perfect for a small role in this science fiction film he's casting. He wants me to be Drunken Motorcycle Hick #2. Help!