Worst of the Worst: #41, Zoom: Academy For Superheroes

When you mix Tim Allen trying to recapture the magic that he found in Galaxy Quest with producers trying to cash in on the success of The Incredibles, the result is going to be predictably bad. Allen plays a washed-up superhero who is ostensibly a drunk, though you only know that because he is unshaven -- not only do you never seen him drink alcohol, he makes a milkshake at some point and what was supposed to be alcohol came from a regular water bottle. When his former archnemesis -- it doesn't matter that it's also his brother, but it goes to show how cheesy the movie is -- threatens to return and do something bad, I guess, though they never say what it is, he is called into action to train a group of misfit kids with superpowers and form them into a team. After the requisite fart and booger jokes, the kids sweetly find acceptance within their own group -- now a family -- and have to fight the bad guy. "Sweetly" was sarcastic there.

This movie was a pure cash grab. The writing is horrible, with Allen cracking non-sequitir one-liner after another -- and practically looking at the camera as he does it. One great example of bad writing is at the beginning when, upon being told about the threat, Rip Torn says, "I speak Greek, not geek!" He doesn't look thrilled to be saying it. With such a bad script, the acting is bound to be weak as Allen and co-star Courteney Cox look as if they're giving almost no effort. Why bother, when what you're saying is going to be so poor?

It's not just the dialogue. They really do never explain why the bad guy is so dangerous and any confrontation with him is over quickly with a we-don't-know-what-we're-doing-so-pay-no-attention-to-the-actual-action flair. As with many kids' movies, the protagonist kids end up playing pranks on the grown-ups that may make them seem cool to kids, but to me it just makes them seem obnoxious. Throw a guy with no powers into a room and hit him with a tornado! Hilarious!

There are maybe one or two one-liners that connect and that, at least, makes this better than many of the other movies on the list. Because this is a kids' movie, I grade it on a lower scale, as well. Would I stick my kid in front of this movie when I need babysitting? I'd probably rather she watch Aladdin, but there are worse things out there. This isn't evil, it's just lazy.

The best example of the laziness comes in a scene when Kate Mara, as the teenage girl hero, comes into some sort of dance that the kids are holding. There are only four kids, mind you. She's supposed to be 17, but she was 23 when this came out. She's wearing a dress that Cox's character gave her and wants to look good for the teenage boy hero. Allen and Cox greet her at the door and when the boy comes over, they leave. As they walk away, Tim Allen absolutely looks back and checks out Mara's ass. They left it in the movie. I googled to see if anyone else had noticed it, but there's no mention in any other review that I could find. It's clear as day; I rewatched the scene three times. The cheesiness of Zoom makes it slightly enjoyable, but something like that is comedy gold.

Worst of the Worst: #23, The In Crowd

Nobody has ever heard of this movie. It is from 2000, right after teen thrillers were a really big deal, so someone decided to make a teen thriller. Girl gets out of a mental hospital and goes to work at a posh country club. The "it" girl at the club takes said former mental patient under her wing and brings her into an exciting life of playing "I Never" on the beach, drinking, date rape, and implied homoeroticism between hot women. The "it" girl has a dark secret that she uses to terrorize her friends. Mental patient is made to feel crazy because she starts to find the secret, but then exposes the evil "it" girl and saves the day before becoming friends with the less attractive (but still attractive, because it's a movie) friend and the guy with some sort of developmental disability played by someone who should never, ever play a guy with some sort of developmental disability (see: Holton, Mark; Leprechaun). The film makers couldn't find anyone famous to be in the movie, so the "it" girl sort of looks like Tiffani-Amber Thiessen, the mental patient sort of looks like Jenny Garth, and the cute and concerned guy sort of looks like Matthew Lillard.

As I'm sure I've said in the past, some of these movies work up hatred and anger, some work up puzzlement, some work up schadenfreude at the film makers' extreme failure. Some of these movies, The In Crowd included, work up absolutely nothing. I watch it and just wonder why anyone even bothered. Everything about it -- the music, the acting, the script, the plot, the direction -- is bad, but just bad enough to be flat and not funny in any way. The movie is flat and boring enough that I ended up turning it into my own MST3K; because the only way the poor actors could generate angst was through frequent dramatic pauses, I added my own dialogue. It didn't make the movie any more entertaining, but it did keep me from falling asleep. Until the end, that is, as I slept through the climactic fight scene. After realizing that I didn't know how the ending came to be, I went back and watched the scene. Meh. I wish I had just settled with sleeping through it. The In Crowd. Catch the excitement.

Worst of the Worst: #66, The Fog

Old people suck.

That's the gist I got from watching The Fog, the sixty-sixth worst reviewed movie of 2000-09 on Rotten Tomatoes. The movie is about an island near Oregon that is about to celebrate the centennial of its town's founding. The founding fathers had a dark secret that helped them to create the society. An island insulated from the outside world, the teen descendants of the founding fathers can tell that something bad is about to happen as their ancestors' secret comes due. Old people suck -- you never can tell when something your great-grandfather did is going to come back to really ruin your day.

The secret comes due in the form of a fog that covers the island, bringing with it ghosts. Okay, the fog only really comes in the last thirty minutes or so, but it is the name of the movie, so we'll pretend that it was really scary. These ghosts happen to be lepers that the town's founding fathers totally screwed over and killed so they could steal money to start the town. Old people suck -- you never know when leprosy is going to give someone dark powers so they can do stuff like tangle you in seaweed, throw knives, and burn you up. The leper ghosts also give someone leprosy at some point, so perhaps that person will in turn come back to haunt the leper ghosts and outfog their fog.

The script is miserable. The plot makes little sense. Why should anyone give a hoot about some isolated island? The acting is passable by the best actors (Tom Welling, Maggie Grace), really weak by worse ones (Selma Blair), and the token black character, portrayed by DeRay Davis (who was in last week's Code Name: The Cleaner), was so much worse than anyone else that he literally sucked the life out of every scene as if he were the fog. Perhaps the leper ghost, given leprosy by the original leper ghosts, who is trying to outfog the fog will in turn be outfogged by the fog of DeRay Davis' diseased performance. Maybe none of this makes sense because the movie, supposedly a horror film, is about as scary as paint drying, even if the paint is a really spooky color like grey. And all of this is made even worse because the movie is a remake of John Carpenter's second film. Sure, they changed everything, because why would you ever want to rely on anything that the GREATEST HORROR DIRECTOR OF ALL TIME decided to do? Old people suck -- John Carpenter doesn't speak to today's youth so we have to keep remaking his movies and failing. I'm looking at you, Rob Zombie.

This movie is so forgettable that my brain is now in a fog. Congrats, leper ghost movie makers. You win again.

Worst of the Worst: #33, Delta Farce

The formula for the success of a spoof movie is very particular. You need to go after a movie that people will recognize. Airport was a blockbuster, so people got what Airplane! was trying to do. You need to go after a movie that takes itself seriously. Nobody could successfully spoof Animal House because the spoof wouldn't be funnier than the original. You need to be poignant with your jokes. The ____ Movie films fail because they just throw loads of crap against the wall and see if any of it sticks (99.9% of it doesn't). Delta Farce fails on the latter two of these accounts, but it most egregiously misses on the second count. Delta Farce spoofs a spoof. Bad idea.

See if this plot rings a bell. Three goofy, but well-intentioned, men end up in Mexico. After fighting poorly, but winning by surprise, some locals ask the men if they will help protect a small village from outlaws. The men try, fail, but somehow muster the courage, with the help of the noble townspeople, to defeat the bad guys. If those three men are played by Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Chevy Chase, you're talking about The Three Amigos. That film was a spoof of The Magnificent Seven, and I probably appreciate it more through nostalgia than the film's actual quality. If those three men are played by Larry the Cable Guy, Bill Engvall, and a mustachioed DJ Qualls? Uh-oh.

The three actors (Qualls replaced Jeff Foxworthy, who couldn't make it because of scheduling conflicts) play National Guardsmen, who are called up to fight in Iraq. They are ill-prepared, but they joined up and they have to carry out their duties. Thanks to circumstances that make so little sense that I won't recount them, the men end up dumped in the middle of Mexico. Of course, they think they're in Iraq. The fact that people ARE SPEAKING SPANISH TO THEM doesn't change their minds. I think I can understand ignorance, maybe even racism. But confusing Arabic and Spanish? The men don't realize they aren't in Iraq, until one of the villagers tells Larry -- and he doesn't have a last name in the movie, so his uniform says "Larry" on it -- at which point he realizes that one of his other men is wearing a sombrero and he notices the pinatas everywhere.

Because one of the villagers is hot, the men decide to stay and fight. They drink and dance. The bad guy is played by the great Danny Trejo, and even he is horrible in this movie because the writing is so bad. The three main characters? Nobody ever confused Larry the Cable Guy with Chevy Chase as an actor, much less Steve Martin. A few hundred racist and homophobic jokes later and the men find a way to win, of course.

There is no denying the poignancy of the plot, no matter how off the jokes may be. Mexico is a very violent place right now and the people are terrorized. Everyone who tries to help seems to be getting murdered. Judging by their success in protecting the village, perhaps we should send Larry the Cable Guy and company to Mexico to bring peace. Whichever way it comes out, it's win-win.

Worst of the Worst: #37, Code Name: The Cleaner

In The Bourne Identity, Matt Damon played a spy who wakes up with no memory and has to piece together who he is and why he has the military training he has. He plays the part with subtlety and just enough intensity. Code Name: The Cleaner is exactly the same, minus Matt Damon, the subtlety, the intensity, and anything good in the movie. Much like in the Larry the Cable Guy movie, Cedric the "Entertainer" is incapable of showing anything through his acting and therefore has to narrate all of his actions so we can tell what the hell he's doing. "Who am I? I don't know what's going on. Let me look in this mirror. Oh, my head hurts. I don't know who I am." Not exact dialogue, but close enough. In addition, this movie is similar to Witless Protection in that both involve the main characters as a fish out of water, dealing with rich white people. Essentially the same bad guys, but whereas Larry the Cable Guy puts on a redneck minstrel show, Cedric puts on a black one. He tries to show the cultural differences to an extreme, but instead ends up making the character so unreal that he celebrates foolishness.

This is yet another movie that is more lame than purely awful. It's not funny in any way. Cedric is a bad enough actor, but Lucy Liu is also pretty bad here. The plot isn't even worth talking about. It's just lame and annoying.

The only thing worth noting is that the big bad guy is played by martial arts actor Mark Dacascos. I love when he's in movies. Not because he's a great actor, though he's just fine, but because he's the actor that plays the commissioner on Iron Chef America. I love watching that show and seeing him play up all of the drama while knowing that he co-starred in the Double Dragon movie. Seeing him cracks me up every time. If only Cedric had gotten the same reaction from me.

Worst of the Worst: #6, Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2

There are a few sequels on this list for which I have not seen the first movie, but that is not the case for this one. Superbabies bears almost no resemblance to Baby Geniuses. First, none of the actors return from the first, except for the main baby who plays an entirely different character. Second, the plot of the second is in no way related to the first, except in that babies talk, so it could also have been a Look Who's Talking movie. Third, the first movie received a 2% on Rotten Tomatoes, while Superbabies pulled the Blutarski -- zero point zero.

0%. The rare and magical movie that nobody liked. Even Battlefield Earth, the movie that I truly believe to be the worst movie ever made, didn't pull a zero because a couple of critics thought it was worth seeing due to its historical ineptitude. On the list of movies ranked by IMDB users, Superbabies is dead last.

It's awful to me because it squanders its immense promise as the funniest bad movie of all time. Here's the plot:

A former Nazi scientist in his seventies has developed some way to use TV to control kids' minds. He works with the owner of a day care center who doesn't realize anything nefarious is going on. In order to win, the scientist has to overcome his archenemy, a baby with superpowers. The day car center owner's baby son and friends help the super baby by taking on their own super powers.

Ok, dumb, but it has unintentional comedy, right? What if I mentioned that the evil scientist is played by Jon Voight, with thick German accent? Or the day care center owner is played by Scott Baio? Or the baby archenemy is actually the scientist's brother, who drank a fountain of youth potion when they were kids and the scientist has never forgiven him and the baby has no accent because, as it is explained, the scientist has more of the German side of the family in him? How can that not be funny?

Because the writing is bad. Bad like the writers of Saturday Night Live think it's too corny. Because the babies, as in the first one, appear in some sort of CGI Clutch Cargo way to move their lips to the bad dialogue, but the lips aren't quite right. Because the seventy-plus-year-old super baby does martial arts where the movie employs a stunt double (apparently, it's the little person that was in Pirates of the Carribean, who happens to be the fastest little person in the world) that looks way too big to be a baby doing martial arts. Because Jon Voight is not as bad funny as he is just difficult to watch. Because the idea of Scott Baio is much funnier than the reality of it.

I don't think it's the least entertaining movie I've ever seen, because a) Jon Voight's accent is good for a chuckle at first and b) I've seen Master of Disguise. It is pretty awful, though. My kid is never going to watch the movie if I can help it. It's to kids' movies for me what Brokeback Mountain or Bowling for Columbine is to adults' movies for a Tea Party member. It's not just the fact that I can't allow any movie, just because it's marketed to kids, regardless of the quality. And why does this one make sense for kids anyways, since it's about babies, who can't understand anything? I can't let my kid watch this movie because you have to be old enough to see Anaconda first, to understand the brilliance of the bad Jon Voight accent, before you're subjected to this.

Worst of the Worst: #69, The Cookout

As I go through this list, fifty-four movies down now with The Cookout, I'm finding more and more movies that are just sort of lame more than they are really awful. The Cookout is supposedly a comedy, though it has only one funny part, but the right sentiment is there in the movie and that means that it can only be but so bad. It's the type of film that you watch and know that somebody, somewhere, liked the movie. I'm not just talking about the 5% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but that someone in the audience liked it. Nobody liked Battlefield Earth. Nobody liked Master of Disguise.

The Cookout deals with a kid who has just been drafted #1 overall by the New Jersey Nets and grapples with his newfound money and what his family means to him. He moves into a house he can't afford with his gold-digging girlfriend and, upon learning that he needs an endorsement in order to keep the things he's bought, his agent sets up a meeting with a company. Of course, the company's representative comes over as the family decides to have a cookout. Hilarity ensues. It's all rather formulaic.

The main star is a nobody and the woman who plays the strong matriarch who keeps the family together is vaguely familiar, though not Tyler Perry. Ja Rule is top-billed, but thankfully barely in it. The supporting cast of Jonathan Silverman, Frankie Faison, Tim Meadows, and Danny Glover is just Terry Crews short of comedy armageddon. It's a little distressing to see two Wire vets (Faison and Reg E. Cathey) have scenes together, but they're okay and Tim Meadows is not horrible, as one would imagine.

Hard to get too worked up. Not good by any means, but not hate-worthy. I think I need a kick start with a really, really awful movie next week. We're going to go near the top of the list. Two words: Scott Baio.

Worst of the Worst: #68, Yu-Gi-Oh: The Movie

It's a cartoon and involves an hour straight of two characters playing a card game where the rules seem to be made up as it goes along. I didn't care and I'm not the target demo by a long shot so I'm sure the producers aren't concerned. I imagine they were able to sell lots of cards from this. It doesn't belong on a list of real movies. But it's on the list and, therefore, I had to watch it. Done and done.

Worst of the Worst: #53, Modigliani

Biopics are generally pretty boring because there can only be but so much really interesting drama in someone's life. Modigliani, to worsen the blow, is a biopic about the last days of an Italian artist who died in 1920. Not really my cup of tea. The film follows the artist's final days in Paris as he is about to die from tuberculosis worsened by drugs and alcohol. I learned lots of great stuff from the movie. He had a heated rivalry with Picasso (he didn't actually), the two artists entered into a great competition to see who was the best artist in Paris (there was actually no such competition), in said competition Picasso entered a portrait of Modigliani (he never actually painted one), Modigliani won the competition but was not there because he was being beaten by robbers and that led to his death (again, no actual competition and he actually died solely from the disease and was not beaten by robbers). So a truly factual and interesting biopic, albeit with direction that fed off of needless melodrama and looked like I might have shot it on my Nikon Coolpix. At least, with the movie taking place in 1920, all of the techno music during the montage scenes made sense. To be honest, I could barely pay attention to the movie because it was so boring. If they were going to make so much crap up, couldn't they at least have had him fight Godzilla or something?

Worst of the Worst: #54, Harry and Max

One of my least favorite type of movies is the one which deals solely with expository dialogue. There is no action, just a series of scenes between two characters -- sometimes the same two, sometimes a mix-and-match of the ensemble -- where they talk and talk and talk. The brilliance of FX's new show, Louie, has shown me that I can stand that style in short bursts so long as the dialogue is poignant and funny. Where the dialogue is poorly-written, as it is in this movie, or the plot is non-existant or confusing, as it is in this movie? Really hard for me to watch. When the barely-existant plot deals with two characters having erotic sexual exploration? Ugh. This specific movie deals with two pop stars who explore their feelings for each other through some sexual adventures and a lot of talk. Harry and Max should not be on this list because a) it was only released in one theater and made less than $15,000, and b) it is more boring than really bad. The acting is mostly not awful. So, Harry and Max is bad, but it is less horrible and more creepy.

Oh, right, did I mention that one of the pop stars is 21 and the other is 16? The part when you learn that they first had sex when the younger was 14? Or that the younger had a crush on the older since they were 7? Yikes. It made for an especially creepy part where the older goes to visit a 40-year-old former teacher of the younger who had also had relations with them. And the older pop star had no qualms in telling people about the relationship, which made the movie seem surreal in its inability to deal with the taboo of the subject, leading to a part where one of the older star's ex-lovers confronts them about why they don't understand that incest is so wrong.

Oh, right, I forgot to mention that the two pop stars were siblings? There have been a scary number of incest themes on this list so far (frankly, one is a scary number when it comes to that), but this one dealt wholly with incest and was therefore the creepiest. I'm not one to get offended, but I also don't think a movie can deal so flippantly with incestual pedophelia.

So by the time I tell you that both siblings are boys, the gay part of the movie really means nothing. It could be heterosexual incestual pedophelia and it would still be just as creepy. Unless you're Aaron and Nick Carter or Donnie and Mark Wahlberg watching it. Then, you might be extra weirded out.

Worst of the Worst: #40, Down to You

Down to You begins the second half of my quest to watch the one hundred worst movies of the last decade, according to Rotten Tomatoes. It is a poignant tale of two mentally-challenged students at a New York college who fall in love in spite of their obvious cognitive deficiencies. Their facial expressions and reactions to other people are good facsimiles of how a highly-functioning adult may act. They speak in cliches and cheesy monologues and, while their grammar is weak at times, they somehow manage to get their point across and socialize with others. They document the ups and downs of their relationship and even though some details are glossed over, one has to be impressed with how they have overcome their massive disabilities to lead normal, if relatively empty, lives.

The characters in Down to You aren't actually mentally-challenged. They're just written that way.

Freddie Prinze, Jr., and Julia Stiles star as two college students who narrate their hit-and-miss relationship. Their narrations are delivered in some of the worst monologues ever put on screen. When they are together, they speak in some of the most stilted dialogue ever put on screen. Not only is the writing bad, but the editing and direction are also very weak. Dialogue consists of a series of back-and-forth close-ups that don't last the right amount of time. Scenes end a second or two too late. To add to the other problems, the acting is pretty awful. Even with recognizable co-stars such as Rosario Dawson, Ashton Kutcher, and Selma Blair, I couldn't believe what I was seeing on the screen. Not even Henry Winkler can save the movie. Not even Henry Winkler!

All of this adds to the movie being funny bad. Actually, it's not just funny bad, it's possibly the funniest-baddest movie I've seen on the list to date. I laughed and laughed out loud as I watched the crap unfold. I yelled at the screen. I asked questions out loud about things that didn't make sense (for instance, Freddie Prinze tries to kill himself by drinking shampoo in his studio apartment where he lives alone, but ambulances come to get him immediately). In short, I just had a lot of freaking fun watching this movie.

Writer/director Kris Isacsson made his feature film debut with this one and has gone on to direct only direct-to-TV movies afterwards (including Husband for Hire, which had the scene of Mario Lopez dancing shirtless that was played so often on The Soup). He should be lauded for taking a movie that could have been simply inane or boring and turning it into a film that screams of schadenfreude-laden entertainment. Whether you like nonsensical side plots regarding budding porn actors or mullets or you like romantic scenes that are so creepy that they are legally prohibited from handing out candy on Halloween or you just plain enjoy seeing Freddie Prinze and Julia Stiles unload fake facial expression after fake facial expression, there is something for you in this movie. Down to You, a movie with a title that makes absolutely no sense until you hear some random song during the end credits. Such an abject failure that I am seriously considering buying it on DVD. Bravo, Mr. Isacsson. Bravo.

Worst of the Worst: #73, Gigli

For the last seven years, there has been one word that has stood for epically bad cinema: "Gigli." It was a movie that was pretty much doomed from the start because of all of the tabloid craze around the relationship between its two stars, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. To top it off, people revelled in how horrible the movie apparently was. Word of mouth led the film to be dropped from 97% of its theaters by the third week. All of its theaters in the UK dropped it after one week. It made only around $3.7 million in its opening weekend and ended up at just over $6 million total. It cost $54 million to make. Lopez made $12 million and Affleck $12.5 million. It remains the most celebrated flop in recent memory. So, with all that, how could it possibly live down to my expectations?

I know that I generally hate Affleck as an actor and, with the exception of Out of Sight, absolutely hate Lopez. The former tries to put on a tough guy New York mobster accent that sounds ridiculous even when little bits of Boston aren't creeping in, while the latter is not historically awful but not really good either. I could have easily predicted that they would have little chemistry. Of course, as the movie includes a sex scene that has less romance than anything in Basic Instinct. I didn't know going in that Al Pacino had a cameo, but had I known, I could have predicted that he would overact. Even hearing that it was a romantic comedy that is rumored to have been edited to remove a lot of violence and dark content, I could have guessed that I would find it boring. Still bad, but not bad enough to even touch my expectations.

The plot deals with Affleck as Larry Gigli, a low-level gangster who manages to screw things up all the time. When he is asked to perform a tricky job, his boss sends a lesbian gangster to help him. Hilarity and poorly-acted sexual tension ensue. What I could have never anticipated was what that tricky job entails and therein lies what turns the movie from merely bad to purely abysmal.

In order to help in a court case, Gigli is asked to kidnap the brother of a Federal attorney. Said brother is played by Justin Bartha, most famous for being Doug, the groom in The Hangover. Said brother played by Justin Bartha is mentally challenged. Boom. This calls for a quote from Tropic Thunder that I don't have to bother quoting. Bartha plays the mentally challenged brother in a performance that ranks somewhere between "Johnny Knoxville faking being challenged in The Ringer" and "bad impersonation of Rain Man for an Epic Movie-type movie." The concept behind said performance is so misguided, so impossibly stupid, that it propels the film into history. As if that isn't bad enough, the whole conceit leads to an ending that involves a poorly-played fully mentally challenged character dancing on the set of Baywatch. I'm not only not joking; I'm not doing the ending justice. It is one of the worst endings I've ever seen of any movie. Off the top of my head, it's Glitter and Gigli. That's it. That's the list.

Bartha has gone on to some fame in The Hangover (and in the National Treasure series). Lopez will likely be a judge on American Idol and be fairly competent at that. Affleck has become a very good director and his new movie, The Town, looks fantastic. Good for all of them. This movie is a tedious and infamous piece of garbage. It is a fitting movie to hit my halfway milestone. Fifty movies down, fifty to go.

Worst of the Worst: #17, Twisted

For many of the movies on this list, there is not much surprise that they are going to be bad. Master of Disguise? It's a wacky kids movie with Dana Carvey and Brent Spiner. Corky Romano? Stars Chris Kattan. Battlefield Earth? Someone let John Travolta make a movie of a poorly-reviewed L. Ron Hubbard book. But how do you explain a movie like Twisted? It stars Ashley Judd, Samuel L. Jackson, Andy Garcia, and David Strathairn. It's directed by Philip Kaufman, who, among many big-name projects, wrote and directed The Right Stuff and with George Lucas conceived of the story for Raiders of the Lost Ark. That group has four Oscar nominations between them. Nobody doubts that each of them is talented. What happened?

One major thing that went wrong is writer Sarah Thorp, whose only other major feature film was The Bounty Hunter, which at 8% on Rotten Tomatoes is one of the worst-reviewed movies of this year. Her script manages to straddle the line between inane and tedious. I found myself getting more and more bored as the movie dragged on and the plot became more and more ridiculous. It deals with Judd as a cop who, after some laugh-out-loud kung fu movies in the opening scene, gets promoted to Homicide. She drinks a lot and has sex with random guys and later, after blacking out from drinking, the guys turn up dead. She's not sure if she has been killing them and she has to get to the bottom of it all. After no apparent detective work is done, it's all resolved in a completely unbelievable final scene that includes cops showing up to a deserted pier after nobody actually called them.

Judd's performance is really bad. Garcia's isn't much better. Kaufman doesn't seem to care, turning his location shooting in San Francisco into a contest to work as many landmarks into each shot as possible. Besides, any mystery shot in San Francisco has to draw comparisons to Hitchcock and, thus, start out behind the eight-ball. None of the other actors are big enough factors to save the day, even with pretty good character actors like Camryn Manheim, Richard T. Jones, Leland Orser, and -- in a weird twist of casting considering this movie came out in 2004 -- Mark Pellegrino and Titus Welliver. You may know them as Jacob and the Man In Black. They don't have any scenes together, but their names are next to each other in the credits.

One usually assumes that big stars can carry even a mediocre movie to quality. Get a bunch of them together and one assumes the movie is can't-miss. How many movies like this with big stars either get released with little fanfare to DVD, are hidden in the middle of winter, or never get released at all? This one came out in February of 2004 and I had never heard of it before I watched it. At least it's boring enough that I won't really remember it.

Worst of the Worst: #90, Dragonfly

There's really not much to say about Dragonfly because it is really, really boring. Probably more forgettable than bad. It deals with a doctor, played by Kevin Costner, whose wife disappears after a bus accident in Venezuela. This happens during an opening credits sequence where Costner looks TV movie-ish melodramatic and you can't quite figure out if he's also in Venezuela or not. He grieves her and starts hanging out in the area of the hospital where she worked as a child oncologist. The kids, even those who didn't know her, start having near-death experiences or comas where they see Costner's wife and tell him that she has a message for him. He starts seeing visions of her and of dragonflies, which she told him is the animal she would like to be after reincarnation. The visions eventually lead him to go to Venezuela to confront where the accident happened, leading to an ending so cheesy that it has been outlawed in seven states.

One has to wonder about Kevin Costner. He's been in some great movies and even won an acting Oscar, but he can be so wooden. This is a movie about a guy who lost his wife -- who was pregnant, by the way -- and he has a really hard time getting the emotions across. The movie takes place in Chicago and he started out with either a really bad Boston accent or a worse Chicago one, but he dropped it after a little bit, to his credit, I guess. The Untouchables is my favorite movie of all time and it doesn't get there if Costner, as the lead, isn't a big part of that. But, he's been so bad over the last, what, decade? More? He's a non-entity as an actor now and it's hard to believe that anyone would have cared enough about this movie one way or the other to bother reviewing it to get it on this list.

Worst of the Worst: #74, Envy

When I watched Swept Away, I said that Guy Ritchie was the best director on the list. That was a mixture of assumption and not having reviewed the list closely. I was wrong. Assuming there are no surprise Spielberg movies on the list, the best director is actually Barry Levinson, who directed Envy. In fact, the pedigree of most of the people involved in Envy is quite high. The movie has five main characters, portrayed by Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Rachel Weisz, Amy Poehler, and Christopher Walken. How could a movie with those people involved make any list of the worst movies?!

There have been a couple of movies (Broken Bridges and Boat Trip come to mind quickly) that I've said haven't really belonged on the list. In each of their places, I have said that I would put the movie Year One. That is a movie that also has a strong pedigree -- written and directed by Harold Ramis, starring Jack Black, Michael Cera, Oliver Platt, and a ton of other greats like David Cross and Paul Rudd -- but just didn't work. There were no laughs to be found. Something in it missed the mark, as if the movie had jumped the shark before it even began. With each horrible second, the chances of laughing at anything got longer and longer. Just a big miss. Year One seemed to me to be one of the worst one hundred movies I had seen in the last decade.

Envy is a million times worse than Year One.

Stiller and Black play best friends who work at 3M and try to come up with new inventions. Stiller is more grounded than Black and a little more successful. When Black comes up with an idea for a spray called Va-Poo-rize that makes dog poop disappear, Stiller laughs at him. Black's invention is a rousing success, leading to him getting millions upon millions of dollars. Stiller gets jealous and it ruins his life. After losing his family and job, Stiller ends up in a bar, where he meets a vagabond (Walken) who befriends him and tries to help him... do something... I'm lost right there. There's a plot, but I never quite understood Walken's role. More importantly, not one person in the entire movie acted the way one person in the entire real world would actually act. It's fiction and it's exaggerated for comedy's sake, but it becomes so difficult to relate to anyone in the movie that you just wish that the movie would break and they'd leave you alone.

As you can tell from the above, the script is awful. Awful. It was written by Steve Adams, whose big previous jobs had come in the 1970s (Donny and Marie) and 1981 (Fridays, which also, granted, helped start people like Larry Charles and Larry David). Adams fails. None of the jokes are funny. The lines are so bad that they actually disprove the theory that you can give anything to Walken and he'd make you laugh just by his delivery. The movie tries too hard to be like a Farrelly Brothers movie and falls way, way short. Of the Farrelly Brothers. When poop is involved in a major plot point, you know you're in for a rough time (Andy Dufresne's escape through the sewers excepted, of course). The movie isn't as poorly-directed as others on the list, but Levinson has to take blame for a) none of the actors clicking with anything and b) the movie just flat-out sucking. No homages to Animal House or Strangers on a Train were going to fix that.

I had a discussion the other day with someone over School of Rock and whether that was all Jack Black or if it was more of an ensemble movie. That doesn't really matter when you take this movie into account, because this one is an ensemble that fails, making you wonder if Tropic Thunder was more the exception than the rule when it comes to comedies with Stiller and Black of late. Anyways, I bring up School of Rock because it plays into the only thing you really need to know about Envy. Envy was made two years before it was released. It had tested so poorly with audiences that it was planned for direct-to-DVD release. When School of Rock became a huge hit, the studio saw the opportunity to release this film and sell it on Black's name. The movie, which cost $40 million to make, opened with a $6 million weekend. Word of mouth was so bad that it lasted only three more weeks in the theater and brought in $12 million total. It flopped so miserably that the studio ended up releasing it straight-to-DVD in Europe after all. Later that year, Black and Dreamworks executive Jeffrey Katzenberg (Dreamworks made the movie) went to the Cannes Film Festival with A Shark's Tale. At Cannes, the mecca of international film, the two did something that few movie-makers ever do -- they publicly apologized for ever making Envy.

Worst of the Worst: #20, Crossover

When it comes to Chappelle's Show, I imagine that most people would point to the Rick James episode as the popular favorite. My favorite episode is the second-to-last episode of the second season, when Wayne Brady took over the show, leading to a) the line when Nick Cannon says to Dave, "Your son needs a working actor in his life," and b) the classic Training Day spoof as Dave and Wayne drive around LA. (Chappelle's Show is on Netflix Watch Instantly and I just took a break to watch that skit again. Back to the review.) The opening credits sequence of Crossover, the 20th worst-reviewed movie of 2000-2009, according to Rotten Tomatoes, involves Brady, as a street agent, driving around Detroit and collecting bets for a big streetball game later that night. He even has the goatee like he had in that skit. At one point, a cop pulls Brady over to give him some money and I was ready for Brady to jump out, sing "I Say A Little Prayer", and break the cop's neck. It's an unintentionally hilarious beginning to what turned out to be an unintentionally hilarious movie. Crossover is not only the 46th movie I've seen on the list, but it is the most entertaining.

The film follows two youngsters in Detroit, both with great basketball skill. One is working on his GED, having just gotten out of prison. The other just finished high school and is waiting to hear about a basketball scholarship to "California University of Los Angeles" so he can go to school and eventually become a doctor. (I'd be remiss if I didn't point out here that both the Saved by the Bell and Beverly Hills, 90210 kids went to a California University in LA, so there is great tradition there.) Brady, the agent, fixes streetball games in Detroit and is trying to get the high school kid to go pro so he can get a percentage. The kids lose a game, need to make some money, there's some drama with women, they need to play a big game to win their dignity, etc. All very cliched.

The true joy in this movie comes in two things: a lack of attention to detail by the director and a really, historically awful script. First, the lack of attention. As I've seen in a lot of these bad movies, the director tries to make the movie look cool by using really quick cuts. That's totally the way to make a movie awesome, since nobody ever raves about long shots like the one to open The Godfather. The cuts mean that there is a decent amount of back-and-forth between wide shots and closeups. The director didn't always make sure that people were in the same position during those cuts, so you end up with a number of scenes where it looks like somebody's body jerked two inches to the side. The two main actors themselves are too old to be believable in their roles. Anthony Mackie was 27 and Wesley Jonathan was 28. Brady himself was only 34, so they don't look younger enough than him. With those three actors, you actually have some talent -- Mackie broke out in a big way last year in The Hurt Locker, Jonathan was one of the main characters on the TNBC show City Guys (and therefore had a lot of experience), and Brady's talents are well-known. The rest of the actors in the movie are awful. So bad that I even sensed some misogyny as the female characters are portrayed poorly in the story and acted even worse.

Second, we have the script. I can't knock the overall story because there have been some very good movies (Avatar, Remember The Titans) that have been chock full of cliches. The fun here is in the details and in the dialogue. One dramatic scene involves a showdown at a shoe store where we learn that the main character can't add in his head. I'm not oversimplifying that. He is very embarrassed and it's supposed to be some huge moment. Another big plot twist is when we find out that one of the girls was lying about her pregnancy and that, instead of it being by one of the heroes, she was actually pregnant by the big villain of the movie. The biggest plot twist of the movie happens off-screen. As in, one scene the facts of the movie are X and then, in the next scene, one character tells the other that Y happened and the entire plot has changed. And then, of course, we have the dialogue.

Here are some actual quotes from the movie. I played them back and wrote them down. It was hard to remember them when I was laughing so hard:

• "Look, the World Series and the NBA Finals are the two most bet-on games in the country..." (Not only not true, that makes no sense)
• "But this ain't horseshoes, this is streetball. Want to know who the winner is? Count your paper at the end of the game."
• "Look, I can't front. I'm feeling you." "I can't front, neither. I can't speak to tomorrow or the day after, but right now, I don't want to be with nobody but you."
• "So she got you open like the freeway at four in the morning."
• "Cruise might not be able to play ball with a bad lung... but he sure as hell can be a doctor."
• "Vanessa's from the D, through and through. She was born with larceny in her heart."

There's more where that came from. Bad actors delivering awful lines is bad, but actors with even a little talent delivering them is laugh-out-loud funny. Instead of rolling your eyes, you actually get to appreciate the lines as written. Crossover has just enough good in it to make the bad stand out and that's what makes it so darn entertaining.

Worst of the Worst: #38, Happily N'Ever After

All of the past reviews have been posted, so we're on to the new stuff now:

As I watch these movies, it is easier to pass judgement on some genres than on others. For instance, I can confidently knock comedies and action movies. I've seen any number of these in my life and I get them. On the other hand, I don't like most romantic comedies, so I can't tell if I'm too tough on that genre. Along those lines, you wouldn't think that I could fairly evaluate kids' movies. I don't watch them often, if at all, and since I'm not the target audience it's not entirely fair to say the movie is bad if it fails to reach me. You wouldn't think that, but the quality of the best kids' movies, especially CGI ones, has been so high as of late that many adults -- me included -- have gone to see them. Rather than going to see Eclipse yesterday, I went to see Toy Story 3 for the second time (it definitely holds up, as an aside). I saw at least the first Shrek in the theater and have seen the others on DVD (besides the one that just came out, of course). I've watched every Pixar movie and own a number of them on DVD. I even pop in Aladdin and The Lion King every so often. The best kids' movies have been pretty good lately. The problem is that I'm only watching the best. In front of Toy Story 3, there are a lot of previews for movies that I had no desire to see. Disney apparently kicks out a lot of straight-to-DVD stuff, most of which I have to assume is fairly mindless garbage. So, there are a lot of weak offerings, but Happily N'Ever After, the 38th worst-reviewed movie of the last decade on Rotten Tomatoes, has to be among the weakest.

At least the first couple of Shrek movies were pretty good and Pixar puts out great film after great film. These movies didn't really have to be good, though. Maybe Pixar doesn't make $226 million in two weeks if Toy Story 3 isn't as ridiculously good as it is, but they could have made an awful lot of money by putting Woody and Buzz on the big screen and not really trying that hard to entertain. One imagines that the fact that the movie opened to $110 million was enough to make it a success financially.

Of course, Pixar has some built in capital with the movie-going public (and, of course, they refuse to squander that). Happily N'Ever After suffers from a complete lack of care in its execution. Even though it came out in 2006, it has CGI that is barely a step above Dire Straits' "Money For Nothing" video. The characters have no, well, character to them. The film is narrated by its star, Freddie Prinze, Jr., so there you go with that. It's probably good that the main song is forgettable, because I vaguely remember it being annoying and nonsensical. The jokes fall flat and the plot itself is lazy. In "Fairy Tale Land" there is a wizard who watches to make sure every story goes the way they are supposed to go. There are scales that balance between good and evil and if someone tips the scales towards evil, as someone obviously does at some point, things go horribly wrong. It is never discussed what happens if the scales are tipped towards good. Cinderella and Prince Charming's servant (who has a crush on her, the prince doesn't seem to really care or be any kind of dramatic factor) have to make sure the scales are put right. I'm unclear, if all of the fairy tales are happening at the same time in this world, why the scales even exist. Once the stories end with "happily ever after" nobody should have to watch over them. It's confusing, but I'll leave it. Not worth caring about.

That's not to say that there aren't minor disappointments. Wallace Shawn does a voice and it's sad because he's in the Toy Story movies. George Carlin did a little part; it was his last movie ever. Two theme songs were performed by They Might Be Giants and Squirrel Nut Zippers and you'd hope that they'd have the sense to know this was going to be bad. And again, you could tell this was going to be bad just by looking at it. Maybe Pixar is leaps and bounds in front of everyone else visually, but this one really doesn't stand up at all. Happily N'Ever After cost $47 million to make and brought in $15 million at the box office. It opened to $6 million and quickly dropped off. People could tell it was weak.

Are Pixar -- and Dreamworks, to a lesser extent -- so strong that nobody else can realistically compete in quality when it comes to animated films? Probably not, when a movie like Focus Features' Coraline could be so well-received last year. There's a lot of money to go around with kids' movies and there's room for films of great quality to break through. I may not be a kid anymore and I may not yet have one and, at that point, realize that anything with a talking pig in it is worth putting on TV to get the brat to shut up. So, I may not know kids' movies in total, but I do know lazy and that jumps across every genre. I'm happy that people can see through that.

Worst of the Worst: #35, Deal

Originally posted June 24, 2010:

Some of these "worst" movies are enjoyably bad and some of them are just plain bad. Some of them stand out in my memory and some of them are so forgettable that I'll have to refer back to the reviews to remember how I felt about them (case in point: #32, Deuces Wild, which I just looked at because I saw on the list that I watched it and couldn't remember anything about it except one actor and the setting). Unfortunately, Deal falls into the latter categories. I've pretty much already forgotten everything about this movie and I just finished it twenty minutes ago.

On the good side (sort of) for the movie, something this forgettable and boring doesn't seem to fit on the list. The movie is bad, no doubt. It cost around five million dollars to make and earned a whopping $57,000 at the box office, which is certainly more than it deserved. It's really bad, but it just doesn't seem that bad because it is so uneventfully dull. At one point, I threw a fit because I looked to see how much was left in the movie and it had only been on for half an hour. I thought I was at least an hour in.

That bad timing doesn't just come from boredom, it comes because this is one of the worst-paced movies I can remember. It clocks in at an epic 82 minutes before the credits and the measly story itself wraps up even more quickly, because the final half-hour is devoted only to the final table at the World Poker Tour championsips. Yep, it's a poker movie. And, like every poker movie in history besides Rounders, it's very obviously written by people who have never actually played poker. Every hand comes down to some monster like a full house or better. The tell is more important than any other factor in the game. All of the players say really witty things that don't make much sense and then make plays that make even less sense. The announcers and real poker players play themselves badly with awful dialogue. In this case, "the real poker players" refers mostly to just Phil Laak because the footage of Raymer, Nguyen, Negreanu, and company, looks like it was taken by someone who had hidden a camera and ran away as soon as they got a second of footage.

The camera work is maddening with its swooping motions and there is not one scene -- not one -- that doesn't include some sort of music or background noise that detracts from anything going on. It's okay, though, because the story is inconsequential. There is a young hotshot who is not yet as good as he thinks. A washed-up star who never won the big one takes the kid under his wing to teach him. He even ends up getting a prostitute to give the kid confidence, but the kid thinks the girl really likes him and then flips out when he finds the truth. Come to think of it, that's sort of the plot of Bull Durham, so I don't even have to say that this film sounds unoriginal because it actually is. Kid ends up playing teacher in the poker championship. They learn a lesson about what's important in life. They go home happy. I scream at the TV because none of the poker makes any freaking sense.

The only "redeeming" quality here is that the washed-up star is played by Burt Reynolds. I don't think most people realize what a big movie star Reynolds was back in the '70s and '80s. He's even had some decent roles as he's gotten older, such as in Mystery, Alaska and Boogie Nights. Granted, both of those movies came out over ten years ago. He was also pretty funny on My Name is Earl, though. He's kept the mustache and worn white hair pieces as he's gotten older (hard to believe he turned 74 this year). Well, wore his "hair" white except for in this movie. I can't tell whether he dyed his toupee or just dunked it in a vat of shoe polish, because it is eerily black. Like a doll's eyes. Like a strange blackness that can only be stopped if Atreyu succeeds in getting to the Ivory Tower in time. On top of the hair that actually sucked the light out of surrounding items, there is a little joy in one scene at the end that is so poorly acted that I squealed in delight and watched it twice. Awkward dialogue, weird close-ups, poorly-timed delivery.

If you needed any other reason to think that poker is just a game and not a real sport, look at the dearth of good poker movies. There are great baseball ones, football ones, basketball ones, even a great soccer one (Victory). There is one great poker movie. There is a good poker scene in The Sting, but only one scene and everyone's cheating anyway. If Hollywood is going to keep trying to use the drama of a tight card game, they need to find a way to write realistic poker. Otherwise, you'll just end up with this movie, which I can't quite remember the name of right now, but I'll eventually figure out when it comes on HBO at 2AM some night and I flip to it because it's about poker and then start screaming in agony because I'll remember I already saw it.

Worst of the Worst: #24, Texas Rangers

Originally posted June 22, 2010:

The story of the Texas Rangers is a long, sad tale that may be changing as we speak. Ever since they moved from Washington before the 1972 season, they've been mediocre at best, having only made the playoffs three times and only winning one total playoff game in franchise history. Tonight, however, they won their ninth straight game and they have some pitchers for maybe the first time ever. The greatest player in Rangers history is, of course, the overrated Nolan Ryan and the franchise is otherwise famous for giving A-Rod $252 million and being the hotbed of steroids during the Jose Canseco/Juan Gonzalez/Rafael Palmeiro days. A story like this makes for a depressing movie, but nobody said this was the "Most Fun Movies Ever" list.

Wait, what?

Texas Rangers is actually a western starring James Van Der Beek, Ashton Kucher, and Usher? They fight against Alfred Molina, who looks like he'd rather be anywhere else but in the movie? They're led by Dylan McDermott, who doesn't use a Southern accent, but speaks as if he did ("I reckon I better do this.")? Nobody, except for Randy Travis and Robert Patrick, uses Southern accents? Why would you do a movie about former Confederate soldiers in Texas in 1875 and not have any of them use Southern accents? That doesn't make sense! And the dialogue is so bad that you can't tell which is worse between the acting (it's always the acting in Kucher's case) and the script? And the camera work is among the worst in movie history, with so many cuts and shots that last fewer than three seconds that you get a headache and can't follow the action? And the movie is only 81 minutes long besides the credits and includes a scene where someone juggles for no apparent reason?

No, I must have put that awful, awful movie out of my head. Bring on Chad Curtis and Rusty Greer.

Worst of the Worst: #12, Killing Me Softly

Originally posted June 14, 2010:

Now, that's what I'm talking about! Killing Me Softly, the twelfth-worst movie of the last decade according to Rotten Tomatoes, is not only really bad, but it is really funny. Really, really funny. It's the kind of movie that begs for the MST3K treatment. It shouldn't be funny, though. Killing Me Softly was made by a legit director, Chen Kaige (Farewell my Concubine) in his English language debut, and has a couple of really beautiful shots. Chen maybe should have stuck to Chinese though, as he seems to be a bit lacking in the direction of English-speaking actors.

The prime suspect here is Heather Graham. She isn't a bad actress, but she is so robotic in this one that she makes it seem like Ingrid Bergman played the Jetsons' maid. The script does her no favors. I presume that it's hard to be but so good when there is a scene where you are walking around a house and saying, out loud, "I wonder where I can find a shirt." It's hard to take an actress' performance seriously when she gets a threatening note and reads it aloud, even though she's by herself. Graham is joined by the severely overacting Joseph Fiennes. Some of the great mockable moments occur as he swings his arms widely to show disbelief and anger, often knocking harmless knick-knacks around in the process. There is little time to enjoy the show, however, as Fiennes and Graham have various forms of sex for perhaps 98 of the movie's 99 minutes. The movie is worthy of Cinemax, but only barely.

The film is based on a novel, but it must be a pretty bad novel. The plot deals with an American woman in London who is in a boring relationship and then sees a mysterious man on the street. She follows him into a bookstore and, boom, sex. Now her sex with the guy she's living with is even more boring, so she leaves him for the mysterious guy in a scene in which she wears a skirt that goes down to just slightly past her navel even though it's snowing outside. Mysterious guy finds her outside his place and, bam, sex. After beating up a mugger in somewhat of a non-sequitir, he decides they should get married and, pow, sex. This time in a cemetery. He has a locked door in his house and, upon finding the key, she discovers he has letters from an ex who disappeared at one point after falling off of a mountain (the guy's a mountain climber, but whatever). Somehow -- and perhaps I may have missed something -- this leads her to believe that he's a serial killer. Menacing music starts playing while she runs away and hides from him in various places. I was never that concerned, though, because I never understood why I should be afraid of him. I suppose that somehow the erotic asphyxiation scene was supposed to be a hint that he could strangle people, but he didn't even use his hands (it was some sort of silk thing)! She runs from him and into the arms of his sister and it's at that point that I realized that the sister was, in fact, the serial killer. There was no hint of this, but it just seemed realistic. Of course, I should have also foreseen (since sex hadn't been discussed in thirty seconds or so) that she killed his girlfriends because they used to have an incestual relationship. It's my second incest-themed movie in the last three, and that doesn't even include any assumptions about Witless Protection!

Sorry I gave away the plot, but you would have guessed it anyway. This movie isn't worth seeing for the twists and turns. It's not worth seeing because Heather Graham's breasts practically make more appearances than her face. It's not worth seeing because the end involves someone inexplicably being shot with a flare gun. Frankly, it's just not worth seeing. But, if you must(!), see Killing Me Softly for the comedy, unintentional as it may be.

Worst of the Worst: #10, Witless Protection

Originally posted June 4, 2010:

Larry the Cable Guy's Witless Protection scored a full Blutarski on Rotten Tomatoes, 0%. 0%? Could no critic find anything redeeming about this wacky slapstick comedy? What's not to like about it? To wit:

• the movie celebrates stupidity, talking about how liberals are too wordy and having the main characters give their friend a funny look when he uses a word with three syllables;
• there are more fart jokes than any other kind of joke in the movie, until Larry the Cable Guy decides to just unleash one-liner after one-liner towards the end (example: "This is like Michael Jackson opening a day care center. It ain't right!");
• Yaphet Kotto co-stars and made me very sad that he would be in this kind of movie;
• Eric Roberts co-stars and has a Southern accent;
• Jenny McCarthy is in it;
• there are almost as many poop and vomit jokes as fart jokes;
• worst of all, the movie is explicitly racist.

Explicitly? Explicitly. Yaphet Kotto's character walks into a diner and asks for coffee, Jenny McCarthy gives him a look and replies, "Black?" Larry the Cable Guy makes a joke at one point implying that all Hispanics look like illegal immigrants. A scene involves Larry yelling at a Muslim motel owner, calling him "Omar" and "Muhammad," telling him he should go back to his training camp, accusing him of hating America, and using a wetnap to simulate wiping the counter for explosive residue. Add to that a superfluous scene where the good guys are watching a parade of troops and smiling about supporting them -- the only serious scene in the movie, mind you -- and you have this East Coast liberal elitist lumping everyone from Mississippi together as bigots.

Granted, I understand that Larry the Cable Guy doesn't in any way represent the majority of Southerners. Calling himself a redneck is probably as distasteful to many as his outward bigotry. His imbecility is probably as demeaning to the South as saying that homosexuals will struggle for equal rights as long as they are so exhibitionist in their pride parades or that African-Americans will always be looked down upon as long as gangsta rap exists. I understand that, but we all have some bias in us and mine gets perked up when I see ignorance being celebrated.

I have two more Larry the Cable Guy movies to go. Presumably, this is the worst of the three, based on rankings and reviews that I've read. I know Larry the Cable Guy is just an act. Dan Whitney grew up going to private school in Nebraska and only moved south (West Palm Beach, not like it was to Alabama) when he was 16. He tried doing regular comedy and then became famous when his "Larry" character got popular on various radio shows. In some ways, that exacerbates the problem. It makes this movie, with its racism that to me reflects more poorly on Larry and his culture than on the targets of the bigotry, into a sort of redneck minstrel show. Trying to avoid any mention of Sarah Palin or Rand Paul on a daily basis, I'm already fighting my bias against the red states. Witless Protection doesn't help.

Worst of the Worst: #51, Fascination

Originally posted May 31, 2010:

For comedy sake, I can't do better than the promotional synopsis on Rotten Tomatoes:

A thriller riddled with paranoia and distrust, Klaus Menzel's FASCINATION is an acute study of a man stretched to breaking point by an egregious set of circumstances. Scott Doherty (Adam Garcia) is both stricken and confused when his mother, Maureen (Jacqueline Bisset), announces the tragic death of his father, who drowned during a curious boating mishap while the couple was on vacation. The incident seems highly irregular to Scott due to his father's considerable athletic prowess. But Scott's eyebrows are raised even further when his mother returns from the trip with a new beau on her arm in the shape of the dashing Oliver Vance (Stuart Wilson). As the newly entwined couple make astonishingly speedy wedding plans, Scott looks on in horror, although this is tempered somewhat by the eye-catching presence of Oliver's shapely daughter, Kelly (Alice Evans). Equally suspicious of the impending nuptials, Kelly joins Scott in an investigation into the foggy circumstances surrounding his father's demise. While acting on the supposition that Scott's deceased parent may have been murdered to allow his mother's new relationship to flourish, Kelly falls for Scott, and they embark on a passionate relationship together. But as Scott digs deeper, suspicions plague him, and his waning trust in Kelly disintegrates into a deep suspicion of who she is and what she wants from him. Stylistically tilting towards the dusky shadows of classic film noir, FASCINATION plays an exquisite guessing game with its viewers, who should take nothing for granted in this inventive and stimulating movie.

As described in the clumsily-worded plot summary, the main character falls for the daughter of the man who marries his mother. He falls in love with his sister. If you think I'm being too simple about it, the very last image in the movie is of a CD of a song, written by the main character, called something like "Fascination: The True Story of a Love Between a Brother And Sister".

No, I had never heard of this movie before I watched it. There are plenty of movies that I never heard of before I watched them that turned into some of my favorites. Battle Royale is one that comes to mind. The mere fact that something is unknown does not preclude it from being epic. Sure enough, Fascination, a movie nobody has ever heard of, is the dark horse candidate for the worst movie ever made. The. Worst. Movie. Ever. Made.

In its summary of reviews, Rotten Tomatoes itself says that this film is the epitome of a so-bad-it's-good movie. There were parts where I laughed. There were parts that I had fun yelling at the screen. At one point, the lead female throws something that shatters a lamp and cuts up the lead male's arm. There is blood running down his arm. They immediately start having sex. During the sex scene, you can see the blood running down his arm. I yelled, out loud, at the screen, "Don't you want to bandage that? Isn't it going to get infected?" It gets even worse at the end of the movie when the two characters are in a car accident that is caused by no particular reason. They crawl out, injured and bloody. They immediately start having sex. It's supposed to be an erotic thriller, but Cinemax laughs at this movie.

From top to bottom, this may be the worst-acted movie I've ever seen. The great Coven (as seen in American Movie) was better-acted. Three of the characters have British accents and the fourth is American. He, the American one, is actually from Australia. He does a pretty good job of hiding the accent, but has major problems with the word "secretary." The lead female is from Britain, but tries to work a little South African into her accent. The accent ends up being so funny that I, out loud, did an impersonation of each of her lines by the end of the movie. It gets worse from there, as the supporting actors are so bad that you expect them to look at the camera after delivering lines.

So the plot is ridiculous and the acting is historically bad. What else? This movie may have the worst soundtrack of any film I've ever seen. I watched it on Hulu and someone had commented that they turned the movie off after one minute because the opening song is so unlistenable. It's true. Imagine Savage Garden mixed with Sanjaya mixed with an iPod made out of monkey feces. Now imagine that sounding five hundred times worse. So bad, in fact, that I can't even find the music on YouTube for a link. If something is too bad to make it onto YouTube, we're into conspiracy-for-the-betterment-of-mankind territory.

I am confident that Battlefield Earth is the worst movie ever. Everybody's heard of that one. Some of the awfulness that goes into Travolta's pessimus opus comes from the fact that one would expect better work from something that was so hyped and involves so many big names. There are still surprises in this world, though. You haven't heard of Fascination? Forget I even wrote this and be happy about it.

Worst of the Worst: #42, House of the Dead

Originally posted May 27, 2010:

The Prince of Persia opens tomorrow and one of my friends asked me if I thought it would be any good. Lucky for them, I had done some research into the matter of movies based on video games when I watched a previous movie on this list. That research showed that the video game movie agreed upon by most people as the best is Mortal Kombat, hardly a classic. The realistic high end of hopes on The Prince of Persia is probably somewhere around the level of The Mummy. But what, pray tell, are the odds of a film breaking out of its genre to even that extreme?

So, there's my review of a movie I won't see as preface to my review of the great Uwe Boll's first video game movie, House of the Dead. That game was a first-person zombie shooter with little plot to speak of, so Boll made his movie as a prequel to the game. I'm glad I read the Wikipedia entry on what the game was so that the end of the movie made any kind of dramatic sense to me, but plot doesn't matter in a Boll film; it's all about the violence and the bad acting. There's plenty of both in this one. Various limbs getting chopped off, a bunch of actors we'd never see again, Clint Howard cheesing it up and eventually becoming a zombie, Jurgen Prochnow acting all Jurgen Prochnow-y.

Since this was an early Boll movie, he seems to have actually cared about what he was doing, evidenced by the artistic shooting style. That's not quite right. "Artistic." There you go. Boll's dearth of talent means that his attempt at art falls just a bit short. As in he tries to intersperse scenes from the video game (mind you that this game is not new, so the graphics are not that good) with the movie. He uses clips as cuts between scenes and, in the grand ten-minute long battle sequence, he actually has the people shooting the zombies and the images of exploding zombies melting in and out with similar shots from the game. Flawless editing. He also uses slow-motion excessively, including shots during the big battle sequence where the camera pans around each combatant like in that crappy video that Van Halen shot with Gary Cherone. (Holy crap, that song was awful.) My favorite scene in the movie, the one I watched three times, is when the main character is watching his friend be killed by zombies. As she screams, the camera zooms on his face and he looks pensive and then begins to have memories of their time together. Those memories come in the form of a montage of various shots from earlier in the movie, set to techno music. As the beat speeds up, the images fly by faster and faster. Unfortunately, it didn't give me a seizure and knock me out for the rest of the movie, but I thought and hoped that it might. You can actually see that sequence at the 3:53 mark of this amusing video (with an amusing spelling error in the title) that also features some of the other "artistic techniques" I discussed.

Unlike The Prince of Persia, House of the Dead was made on a low budget. Low budget, like Boll emptied out his pocket and made the movie for $2.17, lint, a button, and a buy-one-get-one-free coupon from Rita's. With a bigger budget, the newest video game movie may be bad on an even grander scale! Maybe someday, someone will make an Oscar-caliber Crash Bandicoot film or Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo will each take home awards when they reprise their famous roles in Super Mario Galaxy: The Movie. Until then, we'll have Mortal Kombat and multiple Street Fighter movies and Uwe Boll. Thank heaven for small favors.

Worst of the Worst: #98, Cheaper By The Dozen 2

Originally posted May 20, 2010:

There are five sequels on this list of the 100 worst movies of the last decade and I've seen the first movie in three of those cases. Unfortunately, this was one of them. I was dragged to see Cheaper By The Dozen in the theater (not by my wife, to be fair to her) and hated every last second of it. So how excited was I to watch Cheaper By The Dozen 2? I checked back to my brilliant review of Big Momma's House 2 to see how I dealt with a movie I hated so much. Because, yes, I hated Cheaper By The Dozen 2. There are bad movies on this list that I find enjoyable, but this one was just not up my alley. Slapstick, slapstick, and more slapstick. Lots of Super Dave-ish shots of obvious stunt doubles of Steve Martin getting dragged through the water when trying to water ski or falling through weak railings into the water.

There are some good actors in the movie -- Bonnie Hunt has a nice scene, but only one -- but they are all wasted. The family with which Steve Martin's clan has a rival includes Taylor Lautner, who would go on to be a bigger star than anyone else in the film, but has Eugene Levy and Carmen Electra for parents. A weird dichotomy regarding Levy occurred to me while watching. He is great in the Christopher Guest movies, but if you are walking into a random movie and you see his name in the credits, the first thought is that you picked the wrong movie. How is it possible that he could be so good and so bad from picture to picture? As for Electra? I talked about her earlier in regards to the ____ Movie franchise and Jenny McCarthy's awful Dirty Love. Electra is in six of the one hundred movies and I've now seen all of them. Which is great, but I've yet to see any of the three that feature Larry The Cable Guy, who is probably dumber and certainly less pleasing to look at.

Worst of the Worst: #65, Swept Away

Originally posted May 16, 2010:

Who's the worst-acting musician? I've had reason to ponder this lately for a couple of reasons. When I went to see The Losers, I knew the movie was going to be weak during the previews because there were trailers for one movie that starred Bow Wow and one that starred both T.I. and Chris Brown. Of course, Glitter was on this list of the worst movies of the last decade. I also finally watched Precious the other night and that had Mariah Carey and Lenny Kravitz, both who did wonderful jobs. So who is the worst-acting musician? Off-hand, a few that occur to me are T.I. in American Gangster, Eminem in The Wash (he redeemed himself later in 8 Mile), and I've never seen From Justin to Kelly but that can't be good. It's at this point, for comic relief, that I have to insert Mase's acting job in the "Mo Money Mo Problems" video. I bring this up because I think, when you factor the greater implications of this movie, Madonna deserves more hate than any musician I can remember in the #65 film, Swept Away.

In a good premise, for which this film deserves no praise because it is a remake of a 1974 Italian film, Madonna plays a wealthy woman who goes on a private cruise from Greece to Italy with her husband and two other couples. She berates the boat's crew, particularly the fisherman, calling him names and constantly yelling at him. At some point, in an especially unbelievable turn of events, she and the fisherman end up stranded on a deserted island. Now that she is dependent on him for food, he turns the tables, essentially turning her into a slave. Once her will is broken (hello, disturbing rape fantasy), they fall madly in love and he wonders if she will still love him once they are rescued and back in regular life. Madonna deserves hate in this role because of her bad acting, for one. She starred in this movie after she had already begun to affect her fake British accent. With every "can't" that she turned into "cahn't" in this film, I kept wanting to yell at the screen, "You're from freaking Michigan!" She plays a character that is supposed to be hated and I hated her, all right, but when she's supposed to be more sympathetic later in the movie, I still hated her. More than the acting, though, Madonna deserves hate because she single-handedly ruined (or, at best, derailed) a promising career.

With this film, Guy Ritchie is the best director to appear on this list. When he made this in 2002, he had only made two feature films, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. Both are among the great post-Pulp Fiction/ post-Clerks independent films of the late-'90s/ early-'00s. Ritchie showed a talent for witty scripts and quick-moving plots with plenty of twists. And then he wrote and directed Swept Away which is neither witty, quick-moving, nor very interesting. I'm going to assume that Madonna, then married to Ritchie, led him astray in making a starring vehicle for her. You can see his touch towards the beginning of the movie in some quick-cutting scenes where the boat's crew laughs about the rich Americans, but the second two-thirds of the movie are very, very unlike Ritchie's style. It's hard to imagine that he would have made this film without her influence. Yes, I have no evidence to back up this claim other than a few press videos where he looked hen-pecked, but Lock, Stock and Snatch were so good. And after Swept Away? He's made a couple of inconsequential films and finally got back in the spotlight with last year's Sherlock Holmes.

In Swept Away, dealing with a bad actress (by my count, there are three actors in the movie that are light years ahead of her, as Bruce Greenwood, Jeanne Tripplehorn, and Elizabeth Banks, all have smaller roles), Ritchie goes out of his way to put his wife in a good light. She's famous for singing and dancing? Okay, we'll make some scenes where she can either sing or lip-sync and dance in fancy clothes as the fisherman has a fantasy about her. In juggling this whole mess, Ritchie's screenplay entirely misses the political and social points of the original film. In the end, I didn't think or learn one thing about gender or class roles. None of it makes a difference by the closing credits. It ends up as a way to mock rich Americans, throw in the only rape-to-consensual-sex scene since James Bond and Pussy Galore in Goldfinger, and generally confuse the audience as to whether it's supposed to be a comedy or we're just laughing because it's so bad.

There have been musicians who have done well at acting. Meat Loaf in Fight Club, Eminem in 8 Mile, Jennifer Hudson in Dreamgirls, and more. I don't want everyone to keep their day jobs, but I'll have a certain amount of trepidation whenever someone decides to switch careers. I mean, have you heard Scarlett Johansson's singing?

Okay, I'll be fair here before we finish. Ritchie uses a snippet of some bad Madonna song during the opening credits, but he has an inspired music choice later in the movie. As the two shipwrecked characters fall in love towards the end, a montage is graced with a much more palatable song that can't help but make you enjoy the moment a little bit. So I'll wrap this up the same way with that song, "Fade Into You" by Mazzy Star:

Worst of the Worst: #71, College

Originally posted May 9, 2010:

In which we wonder whether the bigger tip-off that this movie will not be good is the originality of the title or the fact that Verne Troyer plays himself.

I still watch reruns of Saved by the Bell, but when I was younger I used to watch a lot of the live action kid/teen shows. I watched the crap on "TNBC" like California Dreams, Hang Time, and City Guys. I'd spend some time with "TGIF": Full House, Family Matters. Even earlier, I would come home from school and watch You Can't Do That on Television, Hey Dude, and maybe a little Kids Incorporated, on Nickelodeon. In time, I got older -- I didn't say matured -- and refined my taste as it pertains to tasteless adult comedies. I'm not referring to Curb Your Enthusiasm adult, I'm talking about things like Animal House, Anchorman, There's Something About Mary, and Superbad. I see the shows that the kids watch nowadays on Nickelodeon like Hannah Montana, That's So Raven, and Drake & Josh, and I've wondered how these kids tastes will move towards the profane. If College, starring Drake Bell from Drake & Josh, is any portent, I'm frightened for kids' intelligence.

There's a high school buddy movie. It deals with a trio of high school losers. One is a totally average guy who seems to be the leader. One is an overweight foul-mouthed gentleman who talks a big game but is horribly insecure. One is a skinny nerd who is the butt of the other two guys' jokes. The three buddies decide that they're going to let loose, get drunk or maybe high, meet loose women, and go somewhere where nobody knows them and they can escape their stereotypical mediocrity. Superbad, right? Shoot, maybe it's even Dazed and Confused. No, this is the plot of College, which came out in 2008. And people thought Superbad, which came out in 2007, was derivative.

And the comparisons end there. The totally average guy is played by the aforementioned Nickelodeon star, who was 22 when the movie was made and looks every day of 28. Even dropping the f-bomb, Bell plays the character with as much Jonas Brothers panache as he can muster. The overweight guy, as opposed to the quick-witted Jonas Hill, is so stupid and unlikeable that they may as well had one of the "O'Doyle Rules!" kids from Billy Madison in the role. The skinny nerd is played by Kevin Covais.

Wait. What? Kevin Covais. Yes, that Kevin Covais.

I could stop there, but why? Because the high school students look like they are in their mid-twenties, the college students have to look like they are approximately 42. There have to be multiple poop jokes, even more binge-drinking jokes, and main female characters that are written with no personality. Remember in Animal House when we saw the Delta guys prepare for the parade stunt at the end? Preparation is a waste of important story time! In College, they show the guys putting together a prank that would take days to prepare in no more than ten minutes. And they don't even wake any of the bad guys up! How cool is that?! And so on and so on with the poop and the vomit and the masturbation jokes and the homophobic jokes and the comic male nudity and the straight-out-of-Penthouse-Forum sex scenes.

Having never seen any of the straight-to-DVD American Pie Presents movies, the worst "adult" college movie I've seen of late is Approved, with Justin Long and Jonah Hill. It had its moments, but it was very stupid. I like it more now. College can't hold Approved's beer-soaked, head-worn jock. College tries to be Superbad, but it only succeeds in being super bad.

Worst of the Worst: #30, Fear Dot Com

Originally posted April 30, 2010:

I don't believe in guilty pleasures because of a piece that Chuck Klosterman wrote in Esquire and re-printed in one of his books. The piece ends with this sentence: "These things that give us pleasure, they are guilty of nothing. And neither are we." For instance, some might describe my watching of these movies as a guilty pleasure, but I gladly accept -- and trumpet -- that I'm doing it. So, I can't knock anyone for liking anything. That's not to say that I understand everyone's taste. I don't like most romantic comedies, but I suppose I'm not "wired" to get them. I don't particularly like horror movies and I really, really don't get the love for movies like Saw and Hostel. I watched Saw when it came out on cable some years ago to see what all of the fuss was about. I braced myself for what I thought would be scary and ended up alternating between laughter and yawns. So you can imagine how I might feel about a movie that tried to be Saw and failed.

Fear Dot Com tries to use shocking imagery like Saw, but couldn't quite get all the way there. Even more, it is a nearly straight rip-off of an actually good recent horror movie, The Ring. I can't quite make fun of this movie without spoilers, but I suppose nobody will complain. There is a detective who used to chase some serial killer, but could never catch him. Now, people are turning up dead from a stroke exactly forty-eight hours after they visit the site at www.feardotcom.com. Seriously, that's the actual address of the site. When they visit the site (all through a browser that doesn't look like any web browser that has ever been invented, but rather through something like you might find as an interface for some old role-playing game), they see disturbing images and then they hallucinate the thing that scares them most until they eventually die of fear. Note: none of the death-by-fear scenes are scary in any way. The detective assumes it's the work of the serial killer, so he and an investigator from the Department of Health (not sure why she is working on this case once disease is ruled out at the beginning of the movie) are trying to end the hunt once and for all. The investigator becomes especially interested when her boss dies from the site and eventually figures out that the website actually is unleashing the psychic energy of the serial killer's first victim. She realizes that the only way to stop the site from killing is to get the serial killer to look at it so he dies from fear (note: that scene also not scary and actually quite indecipherable). This is pretty much the same plot as The Ring with only slight differences.

The writer spent so much work on the details of the plot that they forgot to include any reality to balance the unoriginal supernatural story. The cops routinely move evidence as soon as they stumble on a crime scene, including handling a newly-found dead body with their bare hands. The Department of Health is apparently in a dirty building where the staff is allowed to chain-smoke. The director helps out by leaving every scene so dark that you often can't actually tell what's going on. It makes the lighting on C.S.I.: look like the lighting in REM's "Shiny Happy People" video.

And, of course, the writer and director tried to bring a lot of disturbing gore, but they seemed to only be willing to go so far and stopped short of anything memorable. I don't like these movies that are only about showing people doing horrible things to other people, but I suppose I can't complain about other people wanting to see it. It's their right to watch crap. I just hope it's better-done crap than Fear Dot Com.