When your faith in humanity has almost evaporated entirely, all you need to do is watch a truly terrible film. Really. It won't inspire you. It won't propel you to think deep thoughts or resonate with profound emotion. Yet, somehow it can still entertain you to your core. It's also cathartic. When you realize somebody financed millions of dollars and hundreds of people toiled away relentlessly and spent months of their valuable time on a film that is so devastatingly bad it might actually cause you brain damage to watch it... well, that's just failure of an epic proportion. Most of us, despite all of our human frailties and failings, never manage to submerge to depths THAT low. Suffice to say, bad films give us hope that each and every one of us could drink a bottle of grain whiskey, rip off all of our clothes, scribble illegibly with a dull pencil on a damp cocktail napkin inside an overcrowded public restroom and still churn out a script that is infinitely better than these poor, misguided cinematic apocalypses. But don't take my word for it. Rent them (don't you dare BUY them) and scream at the screen yourself. Please Note: The author of this article is not responsible for any negative health effects, including brain damage, heart attacks, eye bleeding and muscle seizures caused as the direct result of viewing the following films. 10) Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus (2009)  This is one of those rare films where the plot can be summed up by its title. In this case, both ocean-dwelling creatures fought millions of years ago (we all know that the shark and the octopus are natural, mortal enemies) before they became encased in ice and were preserved for several centuries. (Yeah, just go with it.) Now, they have thawed out and are ready to jaw it out. Sweet rapture ensues. On the surface, this seems like a pretty evenly-matched title bout, but clearly the shark's agent is much superior than the octopus's because he is the true star of the film. How else can you explain the fact that the super-sized shark gets to eat and destroy the Golden Gate Bridge in one scene AND leap out of San Francisco Bay several hundred feet into the air and take a bite out a passing jet in another? The latter scene is definitely the best "Holy Sh$t!" moment of the movie. But, I digress. The script is downright apocryphal on every conceivable level and the acting is so bad that I don't even see a point in wasting time coming up with suitable adjectives to describe it. I believe the whole movie was filmed using about a half dozen termite-infested sets. The only redeeming quality this film possesses is that it will make you laugh out loud increduously several times as you trudge through excessively cheesy special effects smattered in-between inane dialog exchanges that will inspire your eyebrows to scrunch in constant confusion. Sample Dialog: Those guys have been frozen in ice for millions of years. Wouldn't you be a little horny? 9) Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot! (1992)  Capitalizing on the tired and overused formula of a good cop humorously partnered with a kid/woman/dog/ghost/accountant who is not a cop, this film makes Turner & Hooch and Cop and a Half look like Best Picture winners. For some reason, some Hollywood executive thought it would be cinematic gold to combine the acting deficits of Sylvester Stallone and Estelle Getty to form an irritable mother-and-son duo who fight crime by forcing criminals to watch this film and subsequently commit suicide. Actually, that's way more interesting than what actually happens -- every cop cliche in the book is encountered and then overcome in unorthodox fashion by Getty as Stallone looks on with an expression that suggests he just finished drinking a gallon of barium. (Incidentally, audience members have the same glazed grimmace, except they appear to have gulped down two gallons of barium.) During one inspired scene, a loud-acting kid threatens to jump off a ledge down to the street below. Unfortunately, he opts for life. Why? Well, Getty shows up, grabs the megaphone from the police and relays a story about how she used to put her son in a wig and a dress when he was a toddler. Stallone contributes to the scene by delivering his "Aw, mom, do you have to tell that story again?" schtick as he tip toes for 45 minutes across the ledge to grab the boy. That's not even the worst scene. At one point, the overbearing matriarch actually points a gun at her son and says: Go ahead! Make your bed. I'm not even remotely kidding. But, that is still not the worst scene. That point is reached during a nightmare sequence when Stallone faces his mother in a standoff. She screams at him that it's time to be changed. The camera cuts away to reveal Stallone is wearing a pair of diapers as he whines: "I don't want to be changed!" It takes a lot to make a superstar long for his days as a young burgeoning porn actor in a movie called Party at Kitty and Stud's (1970), but there you go. 8) Howard the Duck (1986)  I first watched this film when I was 15 years old (and the proud owner of a brain that was woefully undeveloped). I also fostered a big-time crush on actress Lea Thompson who starred in this travesty. Despite all of that going for this movie, I still walked out of the theater feeling as if I had been lobotomized via cinematic osmosis. This movie is unlike anything I have ever seen before or since. It's rated PG, so that means it's targeted towards kids, right? Not exactly. It follows the misadventures of a pantless oversexed talking duck who hits on Lea Thompson constantly even though they aren't even of the same species. Beastiality jokes run rampant from start to finish and there is even glimpses of a Playduck centerfold picture and a nude female duck (with actual human-like breasts) bathing in a tub as she rubs near her abdomen and sings emphatically -- before the title credits even appear. I've seen some crazy #%@! in my time, but this film is in a class all by itself. I sometimes wonder if a pact was made with the Dark Forces of Hell in order to get this movie made, because no other explanation makes sense. On the plus side, the film manages to contain a complicated plot, albeit it's the kind that only sounds good to a five-year-old boy who just drank his first energy drink. An ordinary duck comes home from work, gets sucked into an alternate dimension where he meets a girl and then becomes the manager of her rock band. Throw in some villains called the Dark Overlords that look like giant gremlins on equal parts clay animation and steroid-infused crack and an idiotic-acting Tim Robbins (who is a scientist because he has glasses, bad hair and does a Donald Duck impression), and you've got a $36 million flop that was dead in the water during a time in history when sophisticated American audiences flocked in droves to see Crocodile Dundee and Back to School. 7) Battlefield Earth (2000)  Those who have suffered through this crime against celluloid realized in the first minute that they were in serious trouble. After all, the opening wording notes that it's the year 3000 and the humans are enslaved by "a cruel alien race from the planet Psychlo." Already this sounds like something I would have come up with in Kindergarten class after ingesting paste that looked just a little too much like pudding. Psychlo? Really? Is that the best three screenwriters could come up with? Oh right, it was based on an L. Ron Hubbard book. Never mind. Making matters worse, what's the main reason why the Psychlos have enslaved humanity? They want our planet's vast supply of... wait for it... gold. Again, three screenwriters worked on this and couldn't improve on the source material? As for how humanity is depicted, well, it's in the exact same way as 99% of all bad sci-fi films about the future: we have regressed to our idiotic cavemen ways. In other words, we have no Earth technology left but plenty of horses and loincloths. That wouldn't be so bad, I suppose, if humans of the future (namely Berry Pepper who never met an over-the-top dramatic gesture he didn't like) had not also forgotten how to act. Of course, the aliens are infinitely worse. John Travolta and Forest Whitaker are so stupid and foolish looking (what's with the ultra-thick eyebrows and the grossly untrimmed nails?) that you actually feel sorry for them when you first see them onscreen... at least until they open their mouths and act so over-the-top that you expect them to break into a chorus of "Greased Lightning" at any moment. Of course, THAT might improve this suck-fest. Battlefield Earth is the kind of movie where aliens believe humans are so stupid that they actually try to educate them to their language and technology so that, you know, they can revolt against them successfully by the end of it. At least one good thing came out of all of this. The film walked away with seven Golden Razzie awards in 2001 for its overall ineptitude (it was nominated for eight), so justice was ultimately served in the end. Sample Dialog: They told me this planet was ugly, but this has got to be one of the ugliest crap holes in the entire universe. More Sample Dialog: I am going to make you as happy as a baby Psychlo on a straight diet of kerbango. 6) Catwoman (2004)  Actually, there is probably one redeeming quality in the film: Halle Berry's Catwoman costume. It's a tight, skimpy black leather number that suggests a more fitting superhero name would be S&M Girl. Still, all the eye candy in the world couldn't save this movie from its designated place at the bottom of the litter box. Halle Berry is so bad in the title role that it makes you wish the Academy could retroactively revoke Oscars. She starts off in the film as mild-mannered Patience Phillips (apparently named by an alien from Psychlo), a woman whose personality could be described if only she had one. One day, she accidentally overhears her boss (Sharon Stone, at her worst, which is saying a lot) plan to market a face cream that reverses the aging process. It's addictive and it will cause irreversible damage (including facial disentegration if you stop applying it?!?). Anyway, the bad guys find out Patience is spying on them, become impatient and chase her down and kill her by literally flushing her out of the building (an appropriate metaphor if there ever was one). If only the movie just ended there, but no, a freaky fake-looking CGI cat walks on the chest of her corpse and breathes its life force into her. Or, possibly, he breathes CGI into her because 90% of the Catwoman scenes in the rest of this film contain really, really bad CGI. Patience now has a personality, unfortunately it's one that includes hammy acting and a lot of inexplicable purring and hissing. I was a bit unclear of Patience's new superpowers, too. They were all over the map: super speed, cat-like reflexes and jumping ability, overactive sex drive, the ability to squeeze through tightly-spaced cell bars (?!?) and an insatiable milk fetish. She also becomes quite handy with a whip (as most cats are) and has a tendency to spout off bad bits of dialog at inappropriate times (as most former Oscar winners do). By the time you reach the final, badly-choreographed catfight between Berry and Stone, you feel like the CGI cat might show up and suck the life force out of you. It's amazing that this film had a $100 million budget and almost nothing to show for it. There was no sequel or franchise to follow, which is rare for the genre of comic book films. Even the horrible Hulk movie had a sequel, but not Catwoman. She used up all of her nine lives in only 104 minutes of running time. Sample Dialog: Amateurs! You boys thought you could come in here and steal all these beautiful things? What a purrrfect idea! To Be Continued in Part 2 with the rest of The Top Ten Worst Films of All Time. |
Monday, February 27, 2012
The Top Ten Worst Films of All Time (Part One)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment