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.