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.