The summer holidays are not much fun for parents of young children, and they are currently flop-sweating with anxiety over how they’re going to manage to hold down all their professional obligations while simultaneously entertaining the neediest human beings in their lives. But if the last few years have taught us anything at all, it’s that things can always get worse. And so it brings me absolutely no joy whatsoever to inform you that a Blippi movie is coming out this summer. You may know Blippi. If you have children aged 10 or under, there is a solid chance that you have endured long, joyless tracts of time watching Blippi on YouTube. For the uninitiated, Blippi is a sort of high-frequency idiot who dresses like a clown and spends his days feigning amusement as he visits the zoos, regional museums and strip-mall soft play centres of the US. His videos receive millions of views, there are Blippi NFTs on the market, and his creator is notorious for once making a pre-fame video in which he undressed and blasted explosive diarrhoea across the bare bottom of his friend. And now there is a Blippi film. At least in the US, Blippi’s Big Dino Adventure will be released in cinemas next month. USA Today has an exclusive trailer and, guess what? It looks just like any other Blippi video ever made. Blippi talks straight to camera in the sort of voice that unloving adults usually reserve for elderly relatives, and explains that there’s some sort of dinosaur egg emergency that needs to be fixed. How does he fix it? Judging by the trailer, by going down a children’s slide into a ball pit and then dancing around like he’s got threadworm. Classic Blippi. There are dinosaurs in the movie apparently, although they seem to exist entirely off-camera. And that’s because – unless this is the rare sort of trailer that saves all the visually interesting stuff for paying audiences – Blippi’s Big Dino Adventure may qualify as one of the cheapest-looking movies ever to be theatrically released. That is a very different thing from just being the cheapest, of course. A visionary director and a willing crew can take a minuscule scrap of money and turn it into Paranormal Activity or The Blair Witch Project or Eraserhead. But that doesn’t happen often. Sometimes a low-budget movie will struggle to demonstrate any production value whatsoever. Channel 5 and, increasingly, Netflix are filled to the brim with bad, cheap films that all look like they were shrugged into existence by an indifferent team. Some, however, go the extra mile. Superman IV: The Quest for Peace is notorious for its cost-cutting and its inability to disguise that on screen. The once-graceful sight of Christopher Reeves soaring through the air came off like a bad Doctor Who effect, and Milton Keynes stood in for Metropolis. A cheap-looking movie doesn’t necessarily need a small budget, though. If you’ve watched any of the recent Marvel movies, you’ll understand the speed at which a rushed post-production process can take something that cost hundreds of millions of dollars and make it look like a dog’s dinner. Look at the sludgy, weightless most recent Ant-Man movie, for example, in which Modok looks like the upsetting result of someone trying to change the size of some clipart without holding down the shift key. It’s awful. Crucially, though, none of these movies look like a cinema projectionist hit the wrong button and accidentally started streaming YouTube on to the screen. Blippi’s Big Dino Adventure, on the other hand, looks exactly like that. It looks almost unconscionably bad. My advice to parents is to do everything in your power to conceal the existence of this film from your children. Or, failing that, just sneak alcohol into the cinema with you.