We Can Learn A Sad Lesson From The Decade’s Worst B-Movie

The B-movie, once the domain of double features, steamy drive-ins, and desperate Blockbuster customers, has never felt less essential. With every major streaming service offering a colossal barrel of content, why would viewers bother to scrape the very bottom? It’s difficult to imagine a modern director making a name for themselves in direct-to-streaming like Roger Corman did with his cheapie fare, let alone elevating themselves to the mainstream like many of Corman’s stars and acolytes. Yet the genre persists because, somehow, there is still money in it. And five years ago today, unfortunate audiences encountered one of its most cynical and controversial products.

Between 2012, when strong performances in Moonrise Kingdom and Looper hinted at a renaissance that never arrived, and 2023, when his family revealed a dementia diagnosis, Bruce Willis starred in 36 direct-to-video features. Seven alone came out in 2021, one of which was Cosmic Sin, a sci-fi “action” film co-starring Frank Grillo, perhaps best known for playing Crossbones and Rick Flag Sr. in the U’s MC and DC. In theory, it was the ideal B-movie arrangement, with Willis getting a hefty paycheck for a couple days’ work, and director Edward Drake getting to put Willis’ prominent mug on a poster that promised an epic adventure it absolutely could not deliver. Reality turned out to be more complicated.

Set in 2524, humanity has just made contact with a hostile, zombie-like alien species, and James Ford (Willis) is brought in to assess the threat. The ex-general was discharged in disgrace for vaporizing 70 million people by dropping a “q-bomb” on a rebel colony, but that sort of ruthless pragmatism is exactly why General Eron Ryle (Grillo) has called in his jaded predecessor.

In practical terms, what this means is that Willis, Grillo, and a handful of nobodies must strap on some armor stolen from Edge of Tomorrow and shoot themselves across space to battle the parasitic aliens across a variety of paintball arenas, determine the location of their home world, and q-bomb the crap out of it. It’s a passable premise with some decent special effects for its budget, but it’s let down by the clunkiest dialogue this side of an elementary school play and the, well, sin of making space zombies excruciatingly boring.

It’s an insane premise, really; our heroes go on a rogue mission to commit space genocide, and there’s no twist to suggest that it’s ever anything other than the right call. Tellingly, the production design seems more inspired by video games than movies — the villainous aliens dress like a species rejected from Destiny, while one of our heroes appears to be mashing up her Gears armor cosplay with Halo’s big ol’ sniper rifle. All three are franchises about the guilt-free slaughter of evil aliens, but even they added a little ethical nuance to the proceedings.

Cosmic Sin would have been forgotten about 30 seconds after audiences made first contact with it if not for the Willis of it all. In 2022, after Willis retired from acting and the public learned of his struggles with aphasia, The Los Angeles Times reported that he often appeared confused on sets, needing his lines shortened and fed to him via earpiece. It’s a troubling, ethically murky revelation. Willis was well-paid for his films — up to $2 million for two days’ work — but many people involved expressed concern for his well-being, and on one set, Willis allegedly discharged a blank-loaded firearm on the wrong cue, alarming actors and crew.

The irony is that Willis, much maligned for his performance in Cosmic Sin before the circumstances were revealed, still makes it clear that he’s one of the few people on set who actually knows how to act. It’s far from an overlooked gem, but even Willis at his worst still has a “holy crap, that’s Bruce Willis!” presence that makes him stand out next to soap stars, a professional wrestler, Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s nepo baby, and the movie’s co-writer pulling double duty as Ford’s drinking buddy. He was asked to play an exhausted, run-down man, and he does.

All of this puts the laziness and cynicism of the modern B-movie front and center. It’s not like Corman ever thought that his box office profits were just a nice side effect of his grand artistic statements, but when no one’s bothering to paper over the gaping plot holes or even ensure that their star is healthy enough to work, why should anyone bother to give 90 minutes of their lives to what feels more like a tax write-off scheme than a creative vision? If your aimless scrolling through a streaming library brings you all the way to dregs like Cosmic Sin, maybe you should just go outside.

Still, there’s a moment when Willis, for all his reduced capacity, hits the line, “The older I get, the more I just want to watch the stars with someone.” It’s a throwaway moment in a movie completely uninterested in exploring the statement’s implications for the character, but it’s a surprisingly moving line given what we now know about the context it was spoken in. And now that Willis has made his money and retired to his loving family, he can have exactly that.

Cosmic Sin is available on Prime Video.