Originally posted April 25, 2010:
Every type of movie is represented in this list of the 100 worst movies of the last decade. There are dramas (Broken Bridges), period pieces (Pavilion of Women), gross-out comedies (Dirty Love), horror films (Thr3e), romantic comedies (Down to You), action films (Bloodrayne), sci-fi movies (Battlefield Earth), ___ Movie movies (thankfully done), Larry the Cable Guy movies (unfortunately haven't started on these yet). Beyond assuming the movie I'm about to watch is awful, I go into each with a preconcieved notion about the genre. For instance, I don't particularly like period pieces, so I was particularly dreading Pavilion of Women. Tonight, I watched my first movie from the list that fell under the category of courtroom drama and that brought with it a different bias.
I love courtroom dramas. I don't know if it's the inherent tension of the cross-examination or the idea that what is at stake is always immediately clear. A Few Good Men is in my top three favorite movies of all time and I go crazy for everything from classics (12 Angry Men, To Kill A Mockingbird) to even little court scenes at the end of movies (The Untouchables, Pleasantville). So I will be biased towards a courtroom drama and my review of this movie should be seasoned by that grain of salt.
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is a movie from July of last year, starring Jesse Metcalfe (some kid from Desperate Housewives), Amber Tamblyn (some kid from Joan of Arcadia), and Michael Douglas. I was surprised to learn that this was a remake of a classic 1950s film noir thriller, because the premise is ridiculous. In Shreveport, the DA (Douglas) is winning murder case after murder case and about to run for governor. A reporter (Metcalfe) is almost positive that these convictions are being won with planted evidence. In order to expose the DA, the reporter finds a random murder and frames himself so that the DA will plant evidence and the reporter can prove that everything is a fake. Meanwhile, he's dating someone who works for the DA and she has to decide whether he really committed the murder or not. To add to the intrigue, there are three major plot twists: one which is merely head-scratching, one which is pure deus ex machina, and one which is obvious from approximately the first minute of the movie.
Even though the movie takes place in Louisiana, not one character talks with even the slightest Louisiana accent, with the exception of a detective played by Orlando Jones, who acts so much better than everyone else in his few scenes that he seems out of place in the movie. To be sure, the acting is bad. The two main actors are too young to take seriously in their roles and Douglas displays a gravitas which is inappropriate for the rest of the film. The side actors, those with only one or two lines, really stand out for their failure to seem like they're doing anything except reading cue cards.
The real loser here is the script. There's a great moment in one of this past Thursday's 30 Rock episodes when Liz rolls her eyes so dramatically that they get stuck. That's how I felt with some of the back-and-forth dialogue here. The characters almost stumble over each over to deliver their bad lines, leading to conversations that involve a rapid succession of crap, as if someone had built a machine gun that fired cheese and had opened up on the audience. I love great last lines, such as in Casablanca or Chinatown, and Hollywood needs to create a special award for the last line from this movie (actual quote): "I don't have anything more to say to you. [pause] Oh wait, I thought of something. [Expletive deleted] you."
Having said all that (!), the movie is still a courtroom drama and I still get a little geeked up for the courtroom scenes, even if everything about them is weak. No doubt, it's a bad movie. I thought at one point that it wasn't so bad, only to realize that much, much less time had passed than I had thought. In addition, the worst part of the movie is the last third, so it builds you up to a point of relative pleasant surprise, only to make you crash harder. Granted that I understand that the movie's position on the list is based on its Rotten Tomatoes score and not some subjective ranking, but is it the 14th worst movie of the last ten years? Maybe it's my bias, but there's no way.
Friday, July 2, 2010
Worst of the Worst: #9, Redline
Originally posted April 18, 2010:
About a year ago, I happened to have a couple of hours to kill on my own and, looking for something that would require little to no thought, I decided to go see Fast and Furious. I had seen the first movie in that series and knew what to expect. After seeing the newer one, I remarked to someone that it was essentially "car porn." There were extensive scenes of racing as the camera lovingly hugged the curves of the cars, interspersed with short scenes of mediocre acting. I enjoyed myself because that's pretty much what I was seeking. If you're looking for porn and you get porn, you're going to like the porn. Unless you wind up finding some sick fetish film. Enter Daniel Sadek and Redline.
Meet Daniel Sadek and put yourself in his shoes for a second. Sadek was born in Lebanon and came to California, where his acute business sense helped him make money quickly, initially by buying some 7-11 stores. As the housing market boomed, he decided to start a company that took advantage of the consumer hunger for real estate by selling subprime mortgages. Sadek got rich. Millions and millions of dollars rich. He loved cars and used his money to start a large collection of exotic cars (e.g., the $1.1 million Ferrari Enzo that Eddie Griffin famously crashed when doing promotional work for Redline). Sadek became famous for gambling huge amounts at Vegas casinos and he parlayed his money into dating a ridiculously hot soap opera star. He was on top of the world.
So what do you do when you're on top of the world? You assume that everyone wants to be you. Why not? You have everything! So Sadek decided to finance a movie that would have everything that he liked, because if everyone wanted to be him than they would like that stuff, too. Fast, exotic cars. Karate. Loud rap music. Sexy shots of hot women. Millionaires throwing around money like its water, gambling on cars and playing poker with the likes of David Williams and Gus Hansen. Name-checking himself by having a wealthy character talking to him on the phone near the end. Shoot, we can even add some gratuitous violence against women because, hey, we're a man's man, right? And our hot girlfriend, regardless of any talent, can take the leading role. Put this all together and you have Redline, the fetish video of car porn. Very short scenes of a miserable script and really, really awful acting (I did say that Eddie Griffin was in it) that are meaningless next to the orgy of everything a young, obscenely rich man with no reason to control his impulses would like. You can watch this whole scene, but I want you to specifically watch from the 2:21 mark to the end:
I mean, that's horrible. And, even with Sadek's apparently enormous ego, people saw right through it. Sadek raised $26 million for the film and it made $6.8 million domestically, falling out of the theaters quickly. Things went south from there. As the housing market collapsed, the government cracked down on subprime lenders like Sadek. He lost everything. He's broke; he's under investigation from the government; he has ruined people's lives with his predatory lending and, as such, is vilified by numerous consumer groups; he owes hundreds of thousands of dollars to Vegas casinos where he borrowed money. Maybe his downfall didn't start with Redline, but the movie is people's exhibit number one in the effort to prove that the kind of lifestyle Sadek was leading is bound to lead to ruin.
I'm going to have to create new levels of bad as I watch each of these movies on the list of Rotten Tomatoes' worst 100 films of the last decade. I had ranked The Master of Disguise (#18) as the worst movie I had ever seen, but it might be better to call it the least entertaining. Battlefield Earth (#27) is probably the worst-made. Redline inhabits a whole new level of bad. It's a movie that truly never should have been made.
About a year ago, I happened to have a couple of hours to kill on my own and, looking for something that would require little to no thought, I decided to go see Fast and Furious. I had seen the first movie in that series and knew what to expect. After seeing the newer one, I remarked to someone that it was essentially "car porn." There were extensive scenes of racing as the camera lovingly hugged the curves of the cars, interspersed with short scenes of mediocre acting. I enjoyed myself because that's pretty much what I was seeking. If you're looking for porn and you get porn, you're going to like the porn. Unless you wind up finding some sick fetish film. Enter Daniel Sadek and Redline.
Meet Daniel Sadek and put yourself in his shoes for a second. Sadek was born in Lebanon and came to California, where his acute business sense helped him make money quickly, initially by buying some 7-11 stores. As the housing market boomed, he decided to start a company that took advantage of the consumer hunger for real estate by selling subprime mortgages. Sadek got rich. Millions and millions of dollars rich. He loved cars and used his money to start a large collection of exotic cars (e.g., the $1.1 million Ferrari Enzo that Eddie Griffin famously crashed when doing promotional work for Redline). Sadek became famous for gambling huge amounts at Vegas casinos and he parlayed his money into dating a ridiculously hot soap opera star. He was on top of the world.
So what do you do when you're on top of the world? You assume that everyone wants to be you. Why not? You have everything! So Sadek decided to finance a movie that would have everything that he liked, because if everyone wanted to be him than they would like that stuff, too. Fast, exotic cars. Karate. Loud rap music. Sexy shots of hot women. Millionaires throwing around money like its water, gambling on cars and playing poker with the likes of David Williams and Gus Hansen. Name-checking himself by having a wealthy character talking to him on the phone near the end. Shoot, we can even add some gratuitous violence against women because, hey, we're a man's man, right? And our hot girlfriend, regardless of any talent, can take the leading role. Put this all together and you have Redline, the fetish video of car porn. Very short scenes of a miserable script and really, really awful acting (I did say that Eddie Griffin was in it) that are meaningless next to the orgy of everything a young, obscenely rich man with no reason to control his impulses would like. You can watch this whole scene, but I want you to specifically watch from the 2:21 mark to the end:
I mean, that's horrible. And, even with Sadek's apparently enormous ego, people saw right through it. Sadek raised $26 million for the film and it made $6.8 million domestically, falling out of the theaters quickly. Things went south from there. As the housing market collapsed, the government cracked down on subprime lenders like Sadek. He lost everything. He's broke; he's under investigation from the government; he has ruined people's lives with his predatory lending and, as such, is vilified by numerous consumer groups; he owes hundreds of thousands of dollars to Vegas casinos where he borrowed money. Maybe his downfall didn't start with Redline, but the movie is people's exhibit number one in the effort to prove that the kind of lifestyle Sadek was leading is bound to lead to ruin.
I'm going to have to create new levels of bad as I watch each of these movies on the list of Rotten Tomatoes' worst 100 films of the last decade. I had ranked The Master of Disguise (#18) as the worst movie I had ever seen, but it might be better to call it the least entertaining. Battlefield Earth (#27) is probably the worst-made. Redline inhabits a whole new level of bad. It's a movie that truly never should have been made.
Worst of the Worst: #99, Glitter
Originally posted April 7, 2010:
When I first studied this list of Rotten Tomatoes' 100 worst movies of the last decade, three movies towards the end of the list jumped out at me for their ratings. Gigli (#73), The Adventures of Pluto Nash (#79), and Glitter (#99) are all more famous for being bad than the average movie on this list. One would think, considering the hoopla that went around the critics' bashing of the movies, that they would be a bit higher (lower?) in the rankings. For Glitter to only barely be on the list surprised me. The consensus on Rotten Tomatoes says that the film is bad (a 7% rating), but that it's not bad enough to warrant so-bad-it's-good status. I find that sentiment amusing since the movies I've seen at the very top (bottom?) of the list have been bad beyond any possible sense of sick enjoyment. I hit play on the remote, wondering if it would be funny-bad or just lame.
It's just lame. I suppose there are parts that could be laughed at, but only if you're really going out of your way to find something to laugh at. There is also one sequence that is simply baffling, but not really funny in any way. We'll get to that. I was surprised to see that only one of the performances was potentially funny, but a) it is not even slightly amusing compared to Chris Klein's comic brilliance in that Street Fighter movie and b) the performance is not, in fact, Mariah Carey's.
Mariah is actually okay in the movie. She tries hard to act and mostly succeeds. I have no complaints at all about her role or performance. She doesn't have a show-stopping moment like Jennifer Hudson did in Dreamgirls, but neither do most actors in a given movie. Carey did win the Worst Actress Razzie, but I think that's because they like to make a splash with big names -- for instance, this year's Worst Picture winner was Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, when that movie was Casablanca compared to All About Steve -- and the real criminals of the movie (we'll get to it) didn't win anything. The film also has one great actor in it, Terrence Howard, who essentially plays the same sort of role that he would later play so brilliantly in Hustle & Flow. All of the credit for this movie's failure goes to three people: actor Max Beesley, director Vondie Curtis-Hall, and writer Kate Lanier.
Max Beesley is a British actor who plays Mariah's DJ beau/ producer, who is supposed to be from Brooklyn. His fake accent in this movie, simply put, is the worst fake accent I've ever seen on screen. I can't find video of it on YouTube and I can only suspect that this is because any evidence of that accent has been wiped from the internet. The best way I can describe it is if you imagine a British accent that tries to add a bit of New York and somehow some Boston works its way in as well. There's more to it, but it defies description.
The script is bad with plenty of eye-roll-inducing lines, but it's mostly just a bunch of cliches. I like that someone is credited with the story on imdb, as if I couldn't predict everything that was about to happen every second of the way, down to even some of the actual words spoken. Maybe the cliches wouldn't have been so bad if the director had decided to give even an attempt at respectable film-making. The direction is awful. The shots are too choppy and city scenes are interspersed at inopportune times, giving the movie a frenetic feel as if you are watching it on cocaine, but cocaine that also bores you. Doesn't make sense? Neither does the direction! More than anything, the movie suffers from an incredible lack of attention to detail by the director and writer.
The movie takes place in 1983. Mariah's big song throughout the movie is a cover of "I Didn't Mean to Turn You On", originally recorded by Cherrelle and made famous by Robert Palmer. Cherrelle released it in 1984. At one point, the bad-accented DJ/ producer/ boyfriend is shown on the cover of Spin Magazine. Which was started in 1985. Maybe the director and writer didn't have Google when the movie was made back in 2001, so they couldn't look this stuff up. But wait, there's more! A city street shot in Glitter has some of the passers-by talking on cell phones. Towards the end, someone uses a wireless remote control with a modern-looking TV set. The DJ talks at one point about how Quincy Jones has won Academy Awards when he has a grand total of zero.
The greatest lack of attention to detail involves the end of the movie. It's perhaps the one laughable part, but only after you really think about it, which I don't recommend. I guess I need to put a "SPOILER ALERT" here, but you're not worried about me spoiling Glitter for you. I'm going to end this review with a recounting of the last fifteen minutes or so of the movie, with my commentary on it:
Mariah and The Accented Wonder have broken up because she feels like he resents her success and is jealous that she recorded a song with Eric Benet. Her record hits big and she sells out Madison Square Garden, which is a dream that the two had discussed when they first met at the beginning of the movie. On the day of the Garden concert, Mariah decides to write lyrics for a new song based on her life. At the same exact time on the other side of town, the DJ writes the music that would go with Mariah's lyrics. They never talked about this song. She goes to the Garden, but stops by his apartment on the way. He's not home, but she leaves him a ticket and kisses some sheet music, making a red lipstick stain even though she's wearing pink lipstick. She leaves and he walks in, having just missed her. He picks up the ticket and walks out the door, where he is confronted by Terrence Howard's character, who shoots the DJ because of some money that was owed. Mariah gets to the Garden to find out that the DJ is dead. She then goes on and sings the song that she and the DJ wrote together that afternoon (apparently psychically) and the band has all of the music to provide the background. When the concert is over, Mariah returns to her dressing room backstage to find a rose and a note from the DJ, talking about how he's happy she stopped by that afternoon and was looking forward to seeing her. Even though he was killed immediately upon getting the ticket and would never have been able to get anything to the Garden. He also says that he has miraculously found Mariah's estranged mother who was formerly homeless and drug-addicted and is now inexplicably living a clean and successful life in a country house in Maryland. She jumps in a limo and, never having changed, rides to Maryland (which apparently takes somewhere longer than eight hours because it's light when she gets there) and has a warm reunion with her mother. The end.
When I first studied this list of Rotten Tomatoes' 100 worst movies of the last decade, three movies towards the end of the list jumped out at me for their ratings. Gigli (#73), The Adventures of Pluto Nash (#79), and Glitter (#99) are all more famous for being bad than the average movie on this list. One would think, considering the hoopla that went around the critics' bashing of the movies, that they would be a bit higher (lower?) in the rankings. For Glitter to only barely be on the list surprised me. The consensus on Rotten Tomatoes says that the film is bad (a 7% rating), but that it's not bad enough to warrant so-bad-it's-good status. I find that sentiment amusing since the movies I've seen at the very top (bottom?) of the list have been bad beyond any possible sense of sick enjoyment. I hit play on the remote, wondering if it would be funny-bad or just lame.
It's just lame. I suppose there are parts that could be laughed at, but only if you're really going out of your way to find something to laugh at. There is also one sequence that is simply baffling, but not really funny in any way. We'll get to that. I was surprised to see that only one of the performances was potentially funny, but a) it is not even slightly amusing compared to Chris Klein's comic brilliance in that Street Fighter movie and b) the performance is not, in fact, Mariah Carey's.
Mariah is actually okay in the movie. She tries hard to act and mostly succeeds. I have no complaints at all about her role or performance. She doesn't have a show-stopping moment like Jennifer Hudson did in Dreamgirls, but neither do most actors in a given movie. Carey did win the Worst Actress Razzie, but I think that's because they like to make a splash with big names -- for instance, this year's Worst Picture winner was Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, when that movie was Casablanca compared to All About Steve -- and the real criminals of the movie (we'll get to it) didn't win anything. The film also has one great actor in it, Terrence Howard, who essentially plays the same sort of role that he would later play so brilliantly in Hustle & Flow. All of the credit for this movie's failure goes to three people: actor Max Beesley, director Vondie Curtis-Hall, and writer Kate Lanier.
Max Beesley is a British actor who plays Mariah's DJ beau/ producer, who is supposed to be from Brooklyn. His fake accent in this movie, simply put, is the worst fake accent I've ever seen on screen. I can't find video of it on YouTube and I can only suspect that this is because any evidence of that accent has been wiped from the internet. The best way I can describe it is if you imagine a British accent that tries to add a bit of New York and somehow some Boston works its way in as well. There's more to it, but it defies description.
The script is bad with plenty of eye-roll-inducing lines, but it's mostly just a bunch of cliches. I like that someone is credited with the story on imdb, as if I couldn't predict everything that was about to happen every second of the way, down to even some of the actual words spoken. Maybe the cliches wouldn't have been so bad if the director had decided to give even an attempt at respectable film-making. The direction is awful. The shots are too choppy and city scenes are interspersed at inopportune times, giving the movie a frenetic feel as if you are watching it on cocaine, but cocaine that also bores you. Doesn't make sense? Neither does the direction! More than anything, the movie suffers from an incredible lack of attention to detail by the director and writer.
The movie takes place in 1983. Mariah's big song throughout the movie is a cover of "I Didn't Mean to Turn You On", originally recorded by Cherrelle and made famous by Robert Palmer. Cherrelle released it in 1984. At one point, the bad-accented DJ/ producer/ boyfriend is shown on the cover of Spin Magazine. Which was started in 1985. Maybe the director and writer didn't have Google when the movie was made back in 2001, so they couldn't look this stuff up. But wait, there's more! A city street shot in Glitter has some of the passers-by talking on cell phones. Towards the end, someone uses a wireless remote control with a modern-looking TV set. The DJ talks at one point about how Quincy Jones has won Academy Awards when he has a grand total of zero.
The greatest lack of attention to detail involves the end of the movie. It's perhaps the one laughable part, but only after you really think about it, which I don't recommend. I guess I need to put a "SPOILER ALERT" here, but you're not worried about me spoiling Glitter for you. I'm going to end this review with a recounting of the last fifteen minutes or so of the movie, with my commentary on it:
Mariah and The Accented Wonder have broken up because she feels like he resents her success and is jealous that she recorded a song with Eric Benet. Her record hits big and she sells out Madison Square Garden, which is a dream that the two had discussed when they first met at the beginning of the movie. On the day of the Garden concert, Mariah decides to write lyrics for a new song based on her life. At the same exact time on the other side of town, the DJ writes the music that would go with Mariah's lyrics. They never talked about this song. She goes to the Garden, but stops by his apartment on the way. He's not home, but she leaves him a ticket and kisses some sheet music, making a red lipstick stain even though she's wearing pink lipstick. She leaves and he walks in, having just missed her. He picks up the ticket and walks out the door, where he is confronted by Terrence Howard's character, who shoots the DJ because of some money that was owed. Mariah gets to the Garden to find out that the DJ is dead. She then goes on and sings the song that she and the DJ wrote together that afternoon (apparently psychically) and the band has all of the music to provide the background. When the concert is over, Mariah returns to her dressing room backstage to find a rose and a note from the DJ, talking about how he's happy she stopped by that afternoon and was looking forward to seeing her. Even though he was killed immediately upon getting the ticket and would never have been able to get anything to the Garden. He also says that he has miraculously found Mariah's estranged mother who was formerly homeless and drug-addicted and is now inexplicably living a clean and successful life in a country house in Maryland. She jumps in a limo and, never having changed, rides to Maryland (which apparently takes somewhere longer than eight hours because it's light when she gets there) and has a warm reunion with her mother. The end.
Worst of the Worst: #44, Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li
Originally posted April 1, 2010:
Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li is the long-awaited reboot of the glorious Street Fighter film franchise. You may remember the original 1994 version as the fitting final feature film of Raul Julia and for John-Claude Van Damme's tour de force performance as Colonel Guile. The producer (note: also executive producer on Battlefield Earth) decided to make this new version because his kids liked the video game and wanted to see a movie of it. Always a good idea to trust kids' judgement with millions of dollars. This one focuses on the female fighter from Hong Kong as she tries to rescue her father from a crime syndicate in Bangkok. The syndicate's leader, Bison, is also being investigated by the Bangkok police and Interpol as the cops join forces with Chun-Li to save the city.
There are two cardinal rules regarding a movie based on a video game. Such movies should never:
Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li is the long-awaited reboot of the glorious Street Fighter film franchise. You may remember the original 1994 version as the fitting final feature film of Raul Julia and for John-Claude Van Damme's tour de force performance as Colonel Guile. The producer (note: also executive producer on Battlefield Earth) decided to make this new version because his kids liked the video game and wanted to see a movie of it. Always a good idea to trust kids' judgement with millions of dollars. This one focuses on the female fighter from Hong Kong as she tries to rescue her father from a crime syndicate in Bangkok. The syndicate's leader, Bison, is also being investigated by the Bangkok police and Interpol as the cops join forces with Chun-Li to save the city.
There are two cardinal rules regarding a movie based on a video game. Such movies should never:
- A) change the plot of the game in any way.
- B) exist.
Unfortunately, SF: TLoC-L breaks both of these rules. At the end, there's a setup for a sequel (oh, please, happen!) that involves a martial arts tournament, but the plot of this movie might as well be any crappy action film that just has some familiar character names plugged in. Kristin Kreuk (Smallville) plays the title character ("Chun-Li", not "Street Fighter") and is entirely unbelievable as an action star. Also, even though Chun-Li is supposed to be from Hong Kong and they throw some dumb bone about how she was born in San Francisco so her English is perfect, Kreuk is from Vancouver and her Canadian accent pops up weirdly in one of her many poorly-read voice-overs. Neal McDonough (Minority Report) plays Bison. McDonough is from Massachusetts, but seems to have some sort of bad Irish accent in the film, even though his daughter turns out to be Russian. Best to not worry about it. Michael Clarke Duncan continues his ability to show up in crappy films by playing Balrog. Some guy from the Black Eyed Peas plays Vega and thankfully he's barely in it.
That's it for the video game characters, but some extra attention needs to be paid to the "work" done by Chris Klein as the Interpol agent. Klein was pretty good as the goofy nice guy in American Pie and Election. Sure, he was in the awful Rollerball remake, but I don't remember him being particularly bad in it. None of that could have prepared me for this! Klein plays the stereotypical bad-ass cop. He has stubble, but they seemed to have neglected makeup because the actual beard never grew in and it mostly looks like he's trying to grow a mustache. He puts on a New York accent (he's from Illinois), but only intermittently, and somehow a little Southern twang works its way in at the end of the movie. After seeing Battlefield Earth, I had proclaimed that John Travolta's performance in that was the worst acting performance in the history of cinema. Klein seriously challenges that notion. The movie is pretty boring, but every Klein scene is laugh-out-loud fantastic. In fact, someone did an homage to Klein's performance:
Video game movies... Just remember as you see all of the trailers for Jake Gyllenhaal's Prince of Persia that no video game movie has ever worked. I'm not quite sure why that's the case, because some of the storytelling in games has reached the level of at least weak movie scripts, but it's the way things are. Maybe some day there will be a hidden treasure in Guitar Hero: The Movie or Paper Mario: The Legend of Princess Toadstool. Maybe some day...
Worst of the Worst: #5, National Lampoon's Gold Diggers
Originally posted March 31, 2010:
I seem to remember National Lampoon magazine as being that dirty magazine that, as kids, we'd look at in the library for a laugh. Don't know if it was actually funny. National Lampoon did present Animal House and the Vacation series, but what happened? Apparently, the company got re-formed around eight years ago to produce their own entertainment and it's been miserable. Supposedly their website is funny, but I follow their sports jokes on Twitter and they are horribly unfunny. In fact, I'm now going to unfollow them because of this piece of crap movie. I don't know that this was ever a great brand name, but it now stands for garbage.
The older brother from Boy Meets World and the Sherminator from American Pie (how's that for pedigree?) star as two loser friends who decide to marry two older women in order to steal their money. The older women don't actually have any money and marry the two younger men to take out insurance and kill them. What follows is such an incredible menagerie of failed gags that, by the end, I alternated between counting the minutes until the movie was over (out loud) and slamming the remote against the couch in frustration. I'm not joking; I did both those things. Garbage.
Somehow, this movie opened on 1,000 screens back in 2004 and it made around $400,000 in its first weekend and an additional $120,000 in its second and final weekend. $400 per screen. The average movie ticket price in 2004 was $6.21, so that works out to 64 people per screen. I don't know how this didn't go direct to DVD. I don't know how this didn't go direct to the toilet. One critic on Rotten Tomatoes said, "If you watch this movie, you are an idiot." Guilty.
I seem to remember National Lampoon magazine as being that dirty magazine that, as kids, we'd look at in the library for a laugh. Don't know if it was actually funny. National Lampoon did present Animal House and the Vacation series, but what happened? Apparently, the company got re-formed around eight years ago to produce their own entertainment and it's been miserable. Supposedly their website is funny, but I follow their sports jokes on Twitter and they are horribly unfunny. In fact, I'm now going to unfollow them because of this piece of crap movie. I don't know that this was ever a great brand name, but it now stands for garbage.
The older brother from Boy Meets World and the Sherminator from American Pie (how's that for pedigree?) star as two loser friends who decide to marry two older women in order to steal their money. The older women don't actually have any money and marry the two younger men to take out insurance and kill them. What follows is such an incredible menagerie of failed gags that, by the end, I alternated between counting the minutes until the movie was over (out loud) and slamming the remote against the couch in frustration. I'm not joking; I did both those things. Garbage.
Somehow, this movie opened on 1,000 screens back in 2004 and it made around $400,000 in its first weekend and an additional $120,000 in its second and final weekend. $400 per screen. The average movie ticket price in 2004 was $6.21, so that works out to 64 people per screen. I don't know how this didn't go direct to DVD. I don't know how this didn't go direct to the toilet. One critic on Rotten Tomatoes said, "If you watch this movie, you are an idiot." Guilty.
Worst of the Worst: #77, Date Movie
Originally posted March 27, 2010:
This was the last of the ____ Movie franchise that I have to watch. Thank God. I think it was the worst one, if it's possible to differentiate between varieties of crap.
This was the last of the ____ Movie franchise that I have to watch. Thank God. I think it was the worst one, if it's possible to differentiate between varieties of crap.
Worst of the Worst: #97, Boat Trip
Originally posted March 21, 2010:
You probably haven't heard of a lot of the movies on this list of the worst movies of the last decade, but you have probably heard of this one. Cuba Gooding, Jr. and Horatio Sanz star as two guys who go on a cruise to meet women. When they anger the travel agent, they are booked on a gay cruise, much to their surprise. Somehow they don't realize it at first, but then Gooding has to pretend to be gay to get close to the only woman on the boat, the dance instructor. She falls for him, he reveals he's straight, she's pissed, blah, blah, blah. Everyone knew it would be awful, to the point that I actually tried to rent it when it first came out on DVD. Funny enough, the box was mislabeled and I ended up with Daddy Day Care instead. Daddy Day Care, which had a few laughs thanks to Jeff Garlin and Steve Zahn, isn't on this list but Boat Trip is. So, much like Sam Beckett, I was given the opportunity to put right what once went wrong and watch the movie.
You know the premise is awful. Bad, to the point that the "Swedish Sun-Tanning Team" appears on the boat at one point to tempt Sanz' character. I googled "Swedish Sun-Tanning Team" to see if it actually exists -- yes, I already knew the answer -- and it only returned links for Boat Trip. Towards the end, the filmmakers inexplicably finish the cruise with no real wrap-up, just so they can just get the story over with. It feels like ten minutes were just cut out, which, believe me, I'm not complaining about. On top of the bad plot, the homophobic jokes are shocking in their extremity. Almost the entire movie is gay jokes and, while the gay characters obviously are the heroes in the end and the two main characters obviously learn that gay people can be real people too (actual plot point), the movie doesn't quite seem to shy away from stereotypes. It's on the list, we know it's bad, whatever. As you know, here's where the "but" comes in.
But...
I actually laughed a couple of times. Will Ferrell has a cameo towards the beginning where he ad-libs with Artie Lange and made me chuckle. There's a joke involving bodily fluids at one point that caught me off guard and made me chuckle. Horatio Sanz overall just kind of makes me chuckle. He's definitely lame but a) it's unfair to pin the crapiness of SNL on him as I think I even used to do myself and b) I can sort of tell why he gets these parts. He's not that funny on film, but I bet he's funny as hell in person. The kind of guy who comes to a bachelor party and makes everyone die laughing all night even though you wouldn't want to spend any time with him when alcohol and/or strippers aren't involved. Sanz tries too hard, which doesn't work in a good comedy, but works just fine when everything else around him is junk.
The movie was #97, so it barely made the list with a 7% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I know the list comes from the ratings, so it's not a completely subjective ranking of every film from the last decade against each other. I'm sure I've said before that there is one movie, Year One, that belongs on the list. It was a wide enough release and there was not one laugh in the entire movie. I could also make a case for last year's The Ugly Truth, which was also embarrassingly bad. I'm not sure I'd put Boat Trip on the list because at least I chuckled a couple of times. I come in to every movie on this list with low expectations, but for some, you can't go low enough. I went in to this one with expectations as low as the Dead Sea and I was (only barely) pleasantly surprised. Bravo.
You probably haven't heard of a lot of the movies on this list of the worst movies of the last decade, but you have probably heard of this one. Cuba Gooding, Jr. and Horatio Sanz star as two guys who go on a cruise to meet women. When they anger the travel agent, they are booked on a gay cruise, much to their surprise. Somehow they don't realize it at first, but then Gooding has to pretend to be gay to get close to the only woman on the boat, the dance instructor. She falls for him, he reveals he's straight, she's pissed, blah, blah, blah. Everyone knew it would be awful, to the point that I actually tried to rent it when it first came out on DVD. Funny enough, the box was mislabeled and I ended up with Daddy Day Care instead. Daddy Day Care, which had a few laughs thanks to Jeff Garlin and Steve Zahn, isn't on this list but Boat Trip is. So, much like Sam Beckett, I was given the opportunity to put right what once went wrong and watch the movie.
You know the premise is awful. Bad, to the point that the "Swedish Sun-Tanning Team" appears on the boat at one point to tempt Sanz' character. I googled "Swedish Sun-Tanning Team" to see if it actually exists -- yes, I already knew the answer -- and it only returned links for Boat Trip. Towards the end, the filmmakers inexplicably finish the cruise with no real wrap-up, just so they can just get the story over with. It feels like ten minutes were just cut out, which, believe me, I'm not complaining about. On top of the bad plot, the homophobic jokes are shocking in their extremity. Almost the entire movie is gay jokes and, while the gay characters obviously are the heroes in the end and the two main characters obviously learn that gay people can be real people too (actual plot point), the movie doesn't quite seem to shy away from stereotypes. It's on the list, we know it's bad, whatever. As you know, here's where the "but" comes in.
But...
I actually laughed a couple of times. Will Ferrell has a cameo towards the beginning where he ad-libs with Artie Lange and made me chuckle. There's a joke involving bodily fluids at one point that caught me off guard and made me chuckle. Horatio Sanz overall just kind of makes me chuckle. He's definitely lame but a) it's unfair to pin the crapiness of SNL on him as I think I even used to do myself and b) I can sort of tell why he gets these parts. He's not that funny on film, but I bet he's funny as hell in person. The kind of guy who comes to a bachelor party and makes everyone die laughing all night even though you wouldn't want to spend any time with him when alcohol and/or strippers aren't involved. Sanz tries too hard, which doesn't work in a good comedy, but works just fine when everything else around him is junk.
The movie was #97, so it barely made the list with a 7% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I know the list comes from the ratings, so it's not a completely subjective ranking of every film from the last decade against each other. I'm sure I've said before that there is one movie, Year One, that belongs on the list. It was a wide enough release and there was not one laugh in the entire movie. I could also make a case for last year's The Ugly Truth, which was also embarrassingly bad. I'm not sure I'd put Boat Trip on the list because at least I chuckled a couple of times. I come in to every movie on this list with low expectations, but for some, you can't go low enough. I went in to this one with expectations as low as the Dead Sea and I was (only barely) pleasantly surprised. Bravo.
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