Bio-Dome
Two slackers wander into what they think is a mall looking for a bathroom and get hermetically sealed into a year-long ecological experiment. Critics handed it a 1/100 on Metacritic — tied for the lowest score in the site's history; kids with cable memorized every line anyway. Bio-Dome is the purest specimen of the gap between what the industry decided and what actually lived on late-night rotation.
The real Biosphere 2 opened in Oracle, Arizona, in 1991 as a serious experiment in closed-system ecology: eight scientists sealed inside from 1991 to 1993 to see whether humans could live in a self-contained world. It went spectacularly wrong — oxygen problems, food shortages, infighting, scandal. Hollywood looked at the fiasco and smelled comedy.
Bio-Dome, directed by Jason Bloom and produced by Motion Picture Corporation of America on an $8.5 million budget with MGM distributing, arrived January 12, 1996. Pauly Shore is Bud "Squirrel" Macintosh and Stephen Baldwin is Doyle "Stubs" Johnson: two slackers who, desperate for a bathroom, wander into what they think is a mall and get hermetically sealed inside the Bio-Dome with five scientists for a year. Kylie Minogue plays one of the scientists, Dr. Petra von Kant; Roger Clinton and Patricia Hearst turn up in cameos; and in a footnote that aged better than anything else in the film, Jack Black and Kyle Gass perform together on screen as Tenacious D for the first time.
The production couldn't even get into the real thing. The producers wanted to shoot at the actual Biosphere 2, but permission was denied by Steve Bannon, then managing the facility — "We're not in the movie business," he told them — so the movie filmed instead at the Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in Van Nuys, California. A wastewater plant playing paradise turned out to be about right for the reviews: Bio-Dome grossed $13.4 million in North America, scored a 1 out of 100 on Metacritic — tied for the lowest in the site's history — is routinely cited among the worst films ever made, and won Shore the Razzie for Worst Actor, in a tie with Tom Arnold.
And yet. Every kid with cable in the late 90s could quote it, because Bio-Dome lived exactly where those kids lived: in endless rotation, at sleepovers, in the fog where bad movies become touchstones. Its most fondly remembered beat is a sequence set to Men Without Hats' 1982 hit "The Safety Dance," complete with a dancing little person in a nod to the song's original music video — a 90s movie gleefully resurrecting an 80s song, right at the moment cable was the delivery system for American childhoods. Critics reached for new language to bury it; the kids kept watching. That gap is the whole story.
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