{"id":3874,"date":"2012-08-02T09:41:59","date_gmt":"2012-08-02T15:41:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=3874"},"modified":"2012-08-02T09:41:59","modified_gmt":"2012-08-02T15:41:59","slug":"lowest-grossing-movie-ever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=3874","title":{"rendered":"Lowest Grossing Movie Ever"},"content":{"rendered":"

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In 2006, the top-grossing film at the box office was Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man\u2019s Chest, which played at 4,133 theaters across the United States during its five-month run and earned $423 million. The lowest-grossing film at the box office that year was Zyzzyx Road (pronounced zizz-iks), which played at a single theater in Dallas for one week and earned $30, or .000000071 percent of Pirates\u2019 take. (Actually, it only took home $20 after actor and co-producer Leo Grillo refunded the tickets purchased by Zyzzyx Road\u2019s makeup artist and one of her friends.) To date, Zyzzyx Road is the lowest-grossing film to ever appear on an American movie screen. And until Tuesday, it wasn\u2019t available on DVD in the United States.<\/p>\n

In 2007, Entertainment Weekly\u2019s Rob Brunner wrote the definitive story about the circumstances surrounding Zyzzyx Road\u2019s unlikely notoriety. Brunner points out that, while the movie did set a new low for recorded theatrical earnings, that record, much like Michael Strahan\u2019s single-season sack mark (nice one, Favre!), is highly dubious. In late February 2006, Grillo rented the Highland Park Village theater in Dallas for $1,000 because, as long as he gave his low-budget film a brief theatrical run, he could pay his actors less. Without any premiere hoopla or advertising of any kind, Zyzzyx Road showed at the Highland Park Village once a day, at noon, for seven days. It\u2019s no wonder that only six people saw it.<\/p>\n

But because one of the stars of Zyzzyx Road was a 28-year-old blonde named Katherine Heigl, who had just begun work on a television show called Grey\u2019s Anatomy, Zyzzyx Road didn\u2019t sink into oblivion like most low-budget fare. For a while, Grillo and producer\/director John Penney thought they would cash in on Heigl\u2019s rising fame and make some of their $1.25 million investment back. While Brunner\u2019s article claims that a domestic DVD release was \u201ca near certainty,\u201d it took six years for American viewers to catch up with all those lucky so-and-sos living in Portugal, Indonesia, and other countries where the film\u2019s foreign rights were sold.<\/p>\n

On Tuesday I looked all over the place for a hard copy of the Zyzzyx Road DVD because I wanted to read the back of the DVD case (and also to confirm that Heigl\u2019s name was misspelled on the front cover). No dice; I had to watch it on streaming video. Still, I had some reasons for optimism. First, there\u2019s not always a link between a film\u2019s popularity and its quality. Although plenty of atrocious movies earn dump trucks full of money, plenty of great movies don\u2019t make much money at all. Take the two best films by writer-director Mike Judge: Office Space was a notoriously low-performing theatrical hit in 1999, and Idiocracy was practically locked out of theaters in 2006, but those are now recognized as two of the best American comedies of the last 20 years.<\/p>\n

Second, from what I could tell, Zyzzyx Road is a psychological thriller that was supposed to head straight to video\/DVD. And for certain dudes of a certain age, \u201cDirect to video\/DVD \u2018thriller\u2019\u201d is code for something a little kinkier. Or, as James Naremore put it in his excellent 1998 book More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts, \u201cthe typical erotic thriller also functions a bit like Playboy magazine, providing luxurious backgrounds and masturbatory fantasies for lonely men with VCRs.\u201d<\/p>\n

That description is still true today; most direct-to-video thrillers implicitly guarantee a passport to Tittysburg. And although Katherine Heigl has taken a lot of roles that seem to typecast her as America’s Uptight Sweetheart, a lot of those parts feature one form of \u201chilarious\u201d sexual humiliation or another, whether it\u2019s being pleasured via remote control by an unsuspecting kid during an important dinner with Leonidas and Art Mullen in The Ugly Truth, getting handcuffed to a shower-curtain rod in One for the Money, or enduring any number of unspeakable horrors once Seth Rogen mistakenly raw-dogs her in the beginning of Knocked Up. But even though Heigl first appears onscreen in Zyzzyx Road sucking a cinnamon-flavored ring pop, this movie isn\u2019t the place to track down one of those poorly lit, poorly scored nude scenes that crouch in the back closets of many actresses\u2019 careers.<\/p>\n

So sorry, guys; there\u2019s no nudity in Zyzzyx Road. But there are scores of SPOILERS in the recap ahead.<\/p>\n

Zyzzyx Road\u2019s opening credits show glimpses of a freeway, a roulette wheel, a shovel, some fake IDs, and (perhaps in a nod to the most profitable low-budget film of all time) a teddy bear face-down on a couch like it\u2019s about to be punished by the Blair Witch. The first words in the film come from Grant (Grillo), a middle-aged businessman who\u2019s droning on in nice, detached film noir-y fashion about 401(k) plans and the difficulties of planning for your future. We soon learn that his real audience is his \u201cteenage\u201d (?) passenger, Marisa (Heigl). After speculating about Britney Spears\u2019s relationship with Justin Timberlake, Marisa reminisces about her first crush (\u201cI couldn\u2019t walk for, like, two weeks, I played with myself so much\u201d) and then brats it up as only a 28-year-old pretending to be a 17-year-old can.<\/p>\n

Grant and Marisa are driving into the darkness of the California desert, where they have a bloody payload to bury: Marisa\u2019s ex-something-or-other Joey (Tom Sizemore), who\u2019s been wrapped in a blanket and thrown into the trunk after Grant knocked him unconscious with one of Marisa\u2019s vibrators.<\/p>\n

Once Joey \u2014 who, remember, was recently brained by a sex toy as big as a crowbar \u2014 revives and escapes from the trunk, he spends the rest of the night menacing Marisa and Grant. The next morning, Grant finds Joey, who lures him into an abandoned mine shaft and tries to convince Grant that Marisa is not who she appears to be (\u201cThat thing out there? The one that\u2019s calling itself Marisa? I gotta tell you this \u2014 it\u2019s not human\u201d) At this point in Zzyzyx Road, I started to hope against hope that Katherine Heigl\u2019s last screen role before she struck it rich was that of a shape-shifting jail-bait skank from outer space that must be killed with a 20th-level Soulknife.<\/p>\n

Alas. The second half of Zyzzyx Road plays like a cautionary tale about the dangers of brain trauma and the perils of stepping out on your wife and family. (SPOILERS!!!!) See, Joey wasn\u2019t the only one to suffer a head injury earlier that day. Grant got quite a bump on his noggin as well, and it\u2019s caused him to hear voices and conjure up the image of Joey, whom he actually dumped in a motel closet before hitting the road. Marisa looks like a 25-year-old teenager because that\u2019s what he thinks she is in his jarred head; she\u2019s actually a classier gal (maybe a moderate- to high-priced escort?) who fell in with a cheatin\u2019 husband and is now running for her life as he debates with the air about how to kill her. Even a friendly meth-maker can\u2019t stop Grant\u2019s staggering rampage. Thankfully for Marisa, a passing truck eventually does.<\/p>\n

As schlubby Grant, Grillo is a decent, understated performer, reminiscent at times of Joel Murray, star of this year\u2019s truly loony God Bless America. He certainly holds his own in scenes with Sizemore and Heigl. But there\u2019s a reason why Grillo is more famous as an animal-rights activist than he is as an actor. His real-life humanitarian deeds probably explain the scene in which Grant confronts a menacing pit bull and then shows that it\u2019s a fine dog once you just calm the fuck down and act nicely toward it.<\/p>\n

First-time director Penney mixes up an awful lot of filtered footage, some flashbacks, double-backs, and leaps in logic for a movie that\u2019s only 76 minutes long. He really pulled out all the stops here. There are better movies out there, and there are much, much worse ones; Zyzzyx Road does not deserve to be mentioned alongside an act of cinema treason like That\u2019s My Boy. As a B-movie, it earns a B- or so. (Then again, my finely honed ability to grade sophomoric work is a bit rusty.) In any case, the film\u2019s secret is out; its mystery has vanished. How long before it fades back into the strangely lit night?<\/p>\n