We had a long holiday weekend and a pronounced need to purge our overloaded DVR with some of the uglier offerings taking up space. Under those circumstances, our household holds the belief that there’s one clear avenue to follow. We secured a couple of growlers of Pisgah Endless Summer Ale and settled onto the couch for the cinematic endurance test that we refer to simply as Bad Movie Night.

During the true heyday of this grueling ritual, we took great pride in developing shrewdly themed pairing for our double features, which, admittedly, wasn’t too hard when Hollywood was considerately release terrible volcano movies within weeks of one another. We’ve gotten a little lax on that front, so we looked at the gnarly nominees at our disposal and decided choosing two movies from last summer was theme enough. It turned out, though, that the two films were rife with connections: Disney Studios releases! Jerry Bruckheimer productions! Alfred Molina in showy supporting roles! All that and a shared reliance on dopey, nonsensical mysticism, too! Be still out beer-marinated hearts.

We started with The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (Jon Turteltaub, 2010), which at least one member of the household has been anxiously awaiting as a Bad Movie Night feature since the first moment Nic Cage was glimpsed in another one of those awful long, raggedy wigs he loves so much. The very premise of the film is built on the faulty notion that Mickey Mouse’s finest screen appearance should be repurposed as a jokey, live-action adventure romp for modern audiences. Thus a great simple premise of magic run amok gets embedded in a labored tale of ancient grudges among sorcery practitioners coming to a crest in modern New York City with the requisite put-upon nerd discovering that he, and only he, has the power to save the world, mankind, the universe or some ill-defined combination of the above. Hey kids, you like Harry Potter? Then you’ll love Dave Stutler!

The enchanted nerd in question is played by Jay Baruchel, giving it his best Justin Long Lite spin. He mostly has to stammer, moan and have piercing moments of self-doubt when the plot requires it. It also seems he was called in to do some post-production looping of weakly anguished moaning that could be inserted generously into coverage shots of sorcerer training sessions. His centuries-old mentor is played by Nicolas Cage, who is well on his way to putting the record for “Most Films Perfectly Suited For Bad Movie Night Viewing, Career” well out of reach for all who follow. Cage never met a line he couldn’t give a miserably off-kilter reading to. True to form, he manufacturers willfully awkward moments with the same thoroughness and efficiency that Hershey’s brings to dolloping out Kisses. As his primary adversary, Molina can do little but sit back and marvel, even though he has his own capability of boiling up ham.

There was a time when I thought Jon Turteltaub was the right script away from becoming a top-tier director. That prediction certainly hasn’t panned out, although I still maintain that he has a keen sense for the mechanics of a sequence. Scenes that seemed destined to be edited into oblivion–and surely would have been had Bruckheimer handed to project to any other director in his stable–are instead quite lucid. And the screenplay, credited to six different writers and undoubtedly with the fuzzy fingerprints of at least another half-dozen, has stretches when it’s actually fairly imaginative in employing the endless possibilities of magic. Eventually, it degenerates into ridiculously intense people standing tall and firing CGI lightning bolts at one another, as is evidently the sad, inevitable outcome of such stories.

That wallow in overcooked magical showdowns complete, we turned to Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (Mike Newell, 2010), which again offered the site of an actor who been the recipient of sincere praise for his acting abilities reduced to yowling about supernatural claptrap as special effects crowd in around him. At least Cage’s craziness seems a fine fit for boisterous trash; Jake Gyllenhaal looks as uncomfortable as the guy at the black tie affair who was under the mistaken impression that he was going to a costume party. Gyllenhaal is good in some movies and can be near-great when in the hands of a director who knows how to exploit the limits of his range, but he is clearly not the kind of thespian who can handle anything that’s thrown at him. His cockeyed, self-effacing grin and instinctive shell-shocked look can get him far in a wan dramedy, but when in action hero mode, his standard expressions only make it look like he doesn’t know what’s going on.

Of course, anyone would be fairly perplexed by the story in this film, which perhaps requires a few dozen devoted hours playing the video game source material to sort out the different ways the magical dagger can help its holder travel backwards through time. Or maybe destroy the universe. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. As far as what appears on screen, triggering the dagger’s powers seems to do little more than plunge the person holding it into the Uncanny Valley. Beyond that, the film is filled with dull palace intrigue, painfully anguished family drama, the necessary building romance between two characters who initially hate one another and Alfred Molina playing a sleazy ostrich racing magnate who spends all his time griping about taxes, which makes him a dark horse contender for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination. Sure, he’s fictional, but that doesn’t make him any loonier a choice than half the living, breathing humans currently jockeying for that honor.

Much as I’d love to report that Prince of Persia offered an ideal cap to the evening, it was mostly a really, really boring movie, which, as far as I can tell, has become something of a specialty of Mike Newell in recent years. Somehow, not even working on a film that requires a citation for Ubisoft in the credits drive home the idea that this material should be fun. Instead, sitting through the whole movie is about as enjoyable as choking down a bucketful of sand. Luckily, I had a cool beer to wash it down, and, hopefully, away.