Regret Watch: Bio-Dome (1996)

if seeing this make you feel white hot rage, that instinct is correct

Watched:  05/16/2026

Format:  YouTube

Viewing:  First - as it turns out

Director:  Jason Bloom

Fuck this movie.

No, seriously.  Fuck it right in the ear.  

I only kept watching to see how much more I could hate a movie as it went along, and as it turned out, I found -  lurking within myself - one of those mines that catch on fire and burn for a hundred years.  The one inside me is fueled solely by hatred for Bio-Dome (1996) and everything it stands for.  

I was positive I'd seen this piece of shit back in the 1990's as the young lady I dated before Jamie was an unapologetic fan of Pauly Shore (she did have positive qualities lest you think otherwise, but it was probably a sign).  However, the date of release was in the Jamie-Common-Era, so we cannot blame Anna, wherever she is now.  About twenty minutes in I realized - no, I'd seen the opening on cable or something and must have turned it off, realizing that this movie sucks donkey balls and I then ejected it from my mind.

The crimes of Bio-Dome are especially egregious as this is the rare movie featuring former-actor turned international pop sensation Kylie Minogue, of whom I am an avid fan.  Here, she is treated as someone to be manhandled by two dipshits.  She must follow the 90's formula of being a beautiful, brilliant capable woman who, thanks to Stockholm Syndrome, falls for her antagonist.  Which means in this film she must crawl all over Pauly Shore, and no one needs that.

The plot is that 90's rash Pauly Shore and perennial skidmark Stephen Baldwin are two slackers who date two hot girls from the local junior college (Joey Lauren Adams and Patricia Hill).  After going to extreme lengths not to join their girlfriends for an Earth Day activity where they will clean up a park or something, they wind up driving around and wander into a multi-million-dollar research facility where scientists, led by William Atherton, will lock themselves in for a year.  Rest assured, all of this set up takes 5x longer than necessary and sucks.

The door shuts behind them, and Shore and Baldwin are trapped inside.  Of course two of the scientists are Kylie Minogue and a model I've never seen before or since.  The other is a no-nonsense middle-aged lady (who then only gets two lines all movie) and an entomologist male who is treated like shit for no reason.

You can tell that whomever the dicks are who made this movie are the worst kind of assholes.  Everything about it is basically exploitation.  

It's exploiting a positive message about environmentalism while also basically shitting on science, scientists and environmentalists.  It's so misogynistic, it makes your eyes burn - playing up the idea that only soft-brained women would be so confused as to care about the environment and us dudes should pretend to care about the environment in order to get laid - an idea it both spits on and then fully supports through the actions of the leads.

It is a movie without protagonists - which is a rare feat that should be studied by science - for surely the two complete assholes seen in our leads cannot be a protagonist in any way as they ruin everything they touch.  They are not funny, they are not charming, they are not interesting, they are not worth watching or following.  They are, at best, two characters in a better two-dude-bros-have-an-adventure movie the actual leads would shit on during the course of their better movie.

This movie is exploiting the notion of two dude-bros with their own language coming to a greater understanding through their adventure as popularized by Bill & Ted, while trying on the nihilism of Beavis & Butthead, but forgetting that for this to work, at some point you need to laugh at what is happening on screen.  

This is a horrible mistake.  Pauly Shore, when he does work, works as a single element of chaos.  Adding a second Pauly Shore who is somehow stupider, and portrayed by the worst Baldwin - who is simultaneously so bad at acting he makes Shore look good at acting - just makes the movie the equivalent of watching the two stupidest guys from high school ruin everything for everyone else for 90 minutes.  And they are never, ever funny.  It's like watching inside jokes for morons for 90 minutes.

Beavis & Butthead manage to make the idiots thing work by merely moving through the world - but they're mostly ignored, or people deal with them expecting the bare minimum, which they, hilariously, cannot provide.  

The humor in this movie doesn't work because it doesn't understand the basics of a BioDome, and the humor that could have come from, you know, that whole situation.  When it does have ideas like "oh, the outside world has found out about the two dumb dicks in there and loves them" - it doesn't know what to do with that.  Instead, it thinks what's funny are the dumb bits where the movie stops so we can see Shore and Baldwin talk to each other in funny voices.  

Also - The plot of a film hinging on the idea that an experiment couldn't reset after three minutes is just fucking dumb.  And was so fixable.

But also - the driver for Shore and Baldwin is that hey have hot, college-attending girlfriends and for some reason these girls find these two ugly dumbfucks appealing.  Like, can't let go.  And... why?  They're fucking awful.  

Shore and Baldwin are 28 and 30 in this movie, and it is unclear how old they're supposed to be.  Thanks to a lifetime of whatever Shore was up to, he looks 35 here, so acting like teenagers is just a weird choice.

The two funniest people in the movie are William Atherton - who plays the lead scientist who goes nuts.  And the late, great Taylor Negron who plays a Taylor Negron character, which is kind of inherently funny.

Oddly, the movie has Henry Gibson (utterly wasted), Roger Clinton (yeah, the President's brother) and Tenacious D just before they were a thing.  And wasting that just makes me hate this piece of shit movie more.

But, yeah, it's a hateful movie made by hateful, stupid assholes.  

In conclusion - fuck this movie forever and sideways.

You did Kylie dirty.