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When I was a young boy, I was made aware of a legend.

Whispered throughout the halls of my elementary school was talk of what some were calling the Greatest Movie Ever. No, it wasn’t Star Wars. No, it wasn’t First Blood. And no, it wasn’t ET, or Conan the Barbarian, or 48 Hours or any of the so-called “blockbuster” movies released in 1982. The scoop on this remarkable new film was that all of my peers (males between the ages of 8-11) loved it, while their parents couldn’t stop vomiting. This was a good sign, as every child that age knows full well that grownups are stupid, and have no idea what’s Cool and what is Uncool.

Add to this the fact that, according to sources, the story concerned the exploits of an elite mercenary team, equipped with laser dune buggies and flying rocket bikes. Exact plot details were sketchy, but last time I checked, there’s no reason to have a flying rocket bike unless you’re kicking some dirty communist ass. Reports from select older siblings revealed that the cast of this movie - called Megaforce - included the Bald Chick from the first Star Trek movie, and the guy who played “Brad” in something called a Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Obviously, we all knew Star Trek and we damn sure knew who Rocky was. The only other part of that sentence that made any sense was that one glorious word - “Megaforce.” How could a movie with a name like that not be the greatest thing ever made? Although unfamiliar with the word as a unit of measurement, I and my friends naturally assumed that a “Megaforce” was somewhere between ten and infinity times more powerful than a regular, uncapitalized “force.”

I couldn’t imagine what kind of incredible villains they must have been fighting, this “Megaforce.” Were they robots? Aliens? Alien robots? No - Alien Death Bots! And were they ten feet tall or 20? And the man leading this “Megaforce”...this…”Brad, Fighter of Death Bots”...he must be quite a specimen. A guy like that would have to be part astronaut, part cowboy, part kung fu expert. He’d probably have a kickass beard, muscles on top of muscles, and if he and Bruce Lee got into a fight, it would probably be a tie. This is because Bruce Lee is awesome, and neither “Brad” nor his sweet rocket bike were to be fucked with. Ever.

Well, I never got to see Megaforce while I was young enough to appreciate it on name alone. Smash-cut to sometime around 1994. I finally caught Megaforce, in all its faded glory, on 3 a.m. TV after the kind of night where self-inflicted punishment seemed like a logical nightcap. I was already well aware of the film’s reputation as one of the most horrifically bad things ever to happen, and had long stopped thinking about it in boldface type, enclosed in quotes. As I watched, even in the condition I was in, I understood that reputation to be well deserved.

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