Merin's Blog

Worst Movies: Part 2 - Technically Worst Films

10. Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector

Do I even need a reason?  Red neck humor is bad enough.  Piss-poor acting is bad enough.  Clichéd script is pushing things over the top.  Honestly, the things I'll subject myself to in order to spend time with family.

No, no, this is just REALLY bad.  Everyone involved in this movie should be barred from Hollywood.

9. Robin Hood: Men In Tights

I love Mel Brooks.  The fact that this is so NOT funny is a crime of almost "against humanity" proportions.  The jokes are so forced – they aren't subtle at all to start with, but then the film spends another few minutes reinforcing the "punchline" of the joke until you can't even smile anymore.

Poor Cary Elwes.  This is the second film in my life I wanted my time and money back from.  On my very small list of movies I saw in the theater that I wish I hadn't.

"We're Men – Men In Tights . . ." GAAAAH!

To make matters worse, my Senior Year Pop Concert had a skit where they sang that song.  While dressed in tights.  THE HORROR!

8. The Return of Texas Chainsaw Massacre

The fact that Renee Zellweger and Matthew McConaughey still have careers after this piece of trash is surprising – that the director, Kim Henkel, never directed another film isn't.

It's an absolutely ridiculous storyline.  The characters are all unbelievable and the acting is so ham-fisted it is really pathetic.  There are no scares, no suspense, though plenty of gore.  In a world of bad "slasher" films, this has got to be the worst ever made with "talent" and a "budget."

I'm realizing that I should be thinking twice before seeing another movie with the words "Texas" or "Chainsaw" in the title.

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7. Batman Forever

Many will look to Batman & Robin as the worst of the Batman movies.  I look at the film where everything went wrong first.  The first Schumacher film bridged what Burton did (weird enough) and what Joel wanted (as seen in the next Bat film, pretty ridiculous.)  This film is Frank Miller meets Adam West – and probably the worst aspects of both shine through.

Val Kilmer and Nicole Kidman put in some of the worst performances of their lives.  Their psycho-relationship (ha, a pun!) is completely unbelievable and non-compelling.  Tommy Lee Jones, an overrated actor already in my book, can't even be heard half the time as his dialog is drown out by explosions and his own mumbling makes it worse.  The Jim Carrey in this film is the Carrey I hate in film – utterly ridiculous and insulting to the viewer.

We get the nipple suit.  Thanks, Joel.

The cartoony goofiness goes through the roof in this film.  But it still tries to be dark, brooding, with deep characters.  Notice I said tries.  It fails.

Batman & Robin, at least, went balls-to-the-wall with the wacky.  It doesn't work there, either, but there is no real attempt at darkness nor depth – well, ok, Freeze and his wife – but Schumacher turns this into family fun-hour for selling toys and cheesy values "We're Family" crap.  It's a bad children's movie, but it is a children's movie.

Batman Forever is still partially a comic-book geek movie, and that makes it all the worse.  I'm not a big fan of the Burton Batman, but it was a decent franchise and Batman Forever forever dismantled it.  The damage was done before Batman & Robin.

6. Phantom Menace

Similar to Batman Forever, many will wonder why Episode 1 and not Episode 2.  I think, overall quality wise, it IS debatable which is truly worse.  That aside, also like Batman Forever, Phantom Menace is the film that destroys the goodness that came before.  I'm a little more a fan of the Original Trilogy of Star Wars than I am of the Burton Batman films, so this hurts a bit more.  I really wanted to like this film.  I saw it multiple times in the theater TRYING to like it.

And it DOES have a killer light saber battle.  But there's a reason the light saber battle is so remarkably good in this miserable film – there's NO dialog!

But there is so much wrong with this film.  The wooden acting, especially from actors who are so much better than this (Liam, Natalie, I'm looking at you two in particular.)  The horrible dialog.  The needless exposition.  The gungans.  The excessive focus on CGI.  The mindless, pointless action sequences.  How there are too many things happening at once: best example – you have the robots fighting the gungans (CGI vs. CGI, whee), the space fighters fighting the drones, Anakin let loose in the mother ship, Padme charging the palace, and the Jedi dueling the Sith.  TOO MUCH to switch between, and no on cares about at least 2 of those (I personally only cared about 1.)

You have this movie starting the retconning of the whole series. "I don't seem to remember owning droids."  "I met your father during the Clone Wars, he was a great pilot."  "Midichlorians."

You have Anakin Skywalker, some of the worse child acting I've ever witnessed.  The whole Pod Race was a big gag, one that was just not funny.

Other than the lightsaber duel (which itself is weakened by the too many things happening at once), the only thing of any worth in this film is Ian McDiarmid.  He must have been paraphrasing his dialog and ignoring Lucas's directions.

This film, and the rest of the prequels, have made it next to impossible for me to enjoy New Hope or Empire anymore.  Yes, I could try and forget they exist, but anytime I even hear "Jedi" or "Skywalker" I cringe.  Involuntary reaction.

It didn't kill my childhood – I hadn't seen the originals all the way through until either I was 18 or 20, I'm not sure.  I was never a big Star Wars fan, but I did appreciate the films and the fantasy they represented.

Not so much anymore.

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5. Transformers

Unlike many, I do not have the knee-jerk reaction of thinking Michael Bay is a horrible director.  I do think he's a one-trick pony who has many failings as a director, but I have enjoyed his work and don't automatically dislike a film just because he's attached.

That said, Bay is pretty bad.  You know what you are getting with his films, and this adaptation of a cartoon created to sell toys is about as bad as you could imagine it being and yet still have a large following entertained by it somehow.  This kind of thing still amazes me – not that action entertains people, even in a bad film – but that BAD action in a HORRIBLE film will find MANY entertained.

This movie takes mindless action to a new level – into confusing, hard to follow, mindless action.  With a pro-US military slant so blatant that it took me awhile to extract the American Flag that had been shoved down my throat.  Seriously, the action is so over-the-top, so pointless most of the time, and so difficult to understand that I found myself longing to see Con Air again.  Yes, that bad.

Transformers has been accurately dissected by so many before me that I feel I have little to add that hasn't been beaten to death – but here goes:

The robot designs are atrocious.  You cannot tell who is who, especially in action sequences.

The action sequences are poorly done.  Not only is there no real connection between action sequences and story (story?  sorry, forgot, this is Michael Bay) but the scenes themselves are so shaky and blurry (when they aren't in slow motion) that I could not even understand what was happening half the time.

The human characters are unbelievable, unsympathetic, and inconsistent.  Shia has some talent, but you wouldn't know that by this performance.  Megan Fox is a young girl thrown into revealing clothing to try and get young boys all hot and bothered.  Anderson and Mac are tossed in with Tuturro to try and add some comedy, but none of it is funny.

The story, if you can call it that, is ridiculous.  We have as plot that two warring factions of alien robots have come to earth after the McGuffin, er, All Spark cube thingie.  For story we follow a beat-up robot as it bonds with the grandson of an explorer who discovered Megatron, the bonding so the robot can get access to a pair of glasses that have information encoded on the lenses, and then the government and military get involved and we get Area 51 and more stupid insulting nonsense about how humans didn't invent anything but we stole all our technology from alien civilizations (sorry scientists and inventors – you aren't smart enough to figure things out on your own – oh, and aliens built the pyramids too.)  Are you still buying this crap?

The robots themselves are written as if by a ten year old.  They play hide-and-seek in the backyard; they pee on people; they think parents are stupid.  Is the audience insulted enough yet?

The editing is terrible.  The choppy sequences, the jumps between plot points, the horribly unwatchable fight scenes . . . this is really, really bad folks.

Listening to and reading all the people who enjoyed this movie somehow, I keep thinking back to the film Idiocracy.  I think Judge may have been prophetic.

4. An American Haunting

Admission time – I enjoyed Dungeons & Dragons.

Acceptance time – after seeing An American Haunting, also written and directed by Courtney Solomon, I realized I should be ashamed of that fact.

My childhood / young adult love of all things D&D made me like a really bad movie.  But I argue that Dungeons and Dragons, for all the bad dialog, poor casting choices, low-grade SFX and over-acting by decent actors (looking at you, Thora and Jeremy), there was something ok about the film.  On the C- to D+ level of ok, sure, I'll admit.

But this isn't about D&D – this is about the most unscary, most unwatchable, the most miserable excuse for a supernatural thriller that had a major release with a pretty good cast.

I don't even know where to begin, let alone how to structure the complaints.

The film isn't sure what it wants to be – a supernatural horror film a la The Exorcist?  A suspense thriller about family abuse?  A period piece about societal values, practices, and mores?

The bookending of the film with a modern day tale is pretty lame.  This kind of technique is not easy to pull off, and this film's strength would have been it's time period of the story.

We get the clichéd, horrible "there must be a rational explanation" guy getting humiliated by OBVIOUS supernatural phenomenon.  Why are skeptics always the butt of jokes in paranormal stories?

There's the relationship between adult teacher and very young school girl that is even blessed by the very religious family.  Its hard to swallow – this is An American Haunting, not A Medieval Haunting.

The editing.  Oh my word, the editing!  The film jumps all over the place, time passing without a clear reason, going from location to location or event to event with little to no bridging nor explanation.  I was literally screaming at the tv "Why the hell did we just jump to this?"

The "reveal" of what is really causing everything destroys the intro – the whole "there is only 1 reported case of a ghost killing a person" or whatever – and I won't "spoil" it here, but just warn that its misleading in the least.

The narrative is disjointed.  If you could call hacked into pieces so mutilated that they don't even fit together "disjointed."  We go from no narrator to diary to no narrator to memories to – oh, nevermind.

Dialog.  Plotholes.  Horrible acting.

Pause – Rachel Hurd-Wood did an amazing job, all things considered.  A diamond in the rough, if you will.  Better yet – she's the Ian McDiarmid of An American Haunting.

Unpause.  This movie throws basically every horror and suspense film cliché at us.  The slamming doors.  The creaky noises.  The attempted exorcisms.  The shaking beds.  The GODDAMN CAT.

There's only one other movie I have ever seen that was directed and edited worse than this one – and that's at number 1.

Go listen to Roeper here - http://tvplex.go.com/buenavista/ebertandroeper/mp3/060508-american_haunting.mp3

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3. X-Men: The Last Stand

I considered forcing myself to leave this (and Transformers) in my Personally Disliked lists.  Then I thought longer about it, and decided that I really believe these films to be horrible beyond my own personal tastes.

This will be fairly brief, all things considered.  I've covered much of this in a blog on Mania here - http://www.mania.com/Merin/blog/217.html

Briefly I want to address how this is bad because it (in my opinion) destroys a franchise.  As Batman Forever did.  As Phantom Menace did.

This movie basically tears apart everything that came before it.  It does this so well, so effectively, with such apparent spite, that one has to wonder if the director or the studio wanted to get back at the departing director (Bryan Singer, off to do the much superior Superman Returns.)  There is little consistency between the previous installments and this film.  There are major character changes that have little to no motivations shown.

This film also, like Transformers and Phantom Menace, uses many action sequences that have no heart, no soul, no point.  I think some action scenes were dreamed up and a patchwork pile of crap story was sludged around these scenes.

My Mania blog says most of what needs to be said, however.  This film had me pissed off as I left the theater.  Truly and utterly pissed off.  I left the theater livid.  If you've read my previous piece about my Personally Disliked films, and saw that two other films had me very angry afterwards, you might think I'm an angry person.  Let me assure you this isn't the case.  These three films (Signs, Magnolia, X-Men: The Last Stand) are the only films that have ever had me leave the theater upset.  I mention being pissed off because it is so unusual for me.  This film, however, is the only one on the "Technically Worst" films list that I left angry from.

Ratner wasn't meant to direct this kind of film.  Its not all his fault, but he is partially to blame.

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2. Date Movie

Disgusting.  Uninspired.  Parody that never works.  Not funny.

Poor Alyson Hannigan.

Really, this film is really, truly, ubelievably bad.  Humor is tough.  Satire of other films may seem easy, but to do a whole film that is basically just stringing together scenes from other films you are mocking is hard to do well.   Date Movie wasn't done well.

Date Movie was done horribly.

What more can I say?  Don't watch this if you haven't.  If you have, my condolences. 

The worst kinds of humor.  Done piss-poorly.

NOT.  FUNNY.

And since all it was trying to do was be funny, it has failed as a film utterly.

I haven't seen Epic Movie, so maybe that's worse than this, but honestly there is only 1 film I've ever seen that competes with the awfulness that is Date Movie.

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1. House of the Dead

Uwe Boll has a horrible reputation.

This movie is almost exclusively why.

Alone in the Dark, his second "based on a video game" film was a 1000 times better than this film.  And Alone in the Dark was one of the worst movies I've ever seen.

That said, I think this movie should be required viewing for all film students, whether they are writers, actors, directors, or whatever.  This should be forced  on kids even in Film Appreciation classes.

If you haven't seen this film, please do so.  Watch it, even if it is for no other reason than to stop you from saying "X was the worst film ever made" where X isn't House of the Dead.

We have some of the most god-awful filming techniques known to man used.  A spinning camera for action sequences.  Scene changes bridged by graphics from the video game – graphics from the "no blood" setting of the game which changes all the blood to green, for crying out loud!  Why do we even need transitions in this kind of film.

The lamest of set-ups for a plot.  Yes, this is a zombie movie and that doesn't sound like much, but trust me – a rave on an island that ends up in a massacre is worthy of a Broken Lizard film, not a horror or action movie.

Wretchedly badly conceived and portrayed characters.  I cannot even describe this, you must witness it.

Resident Evil looks like Apocalypse Now when compared to House of the Dead.  Really, Uwe Boll single handedly confirmed for all critics that movies based on video games MUST suck.

I don't know if Erica Durance stopped going by Erica Parker due to this film, but if she did it was a wise career move.  To have done a nude scene for such a wretched film would have to be the kind of thing you'd want to cover up by doing a porno or leaking a sex tape with you doing cocaine in it.  I like nude Lois, sure, but I wouldn't sit through this film for that.

I'm not kidding.  Watch this film.  If it isn't the worse waste of celluloid you've ever experienced, I want to know what else you've seen that had a budget and was widely released in theaters.

(dis)Honorable Mention: Mortal Kombat: Annihilation

Mortal Kombat was surprisingly good.  This movie was about as bad as I had though Mortal Kombat would be.  It's all the worse because it's predecessor was so decent.  I can't remember much of this except I had been excited to see it and left disillusioned and wondering if the first film hadn't truly been horrible.  No, Annihilation was just that stupid.

(dis)Honorable Mention: Saving Silverman

I find Jack Black, Steven Zahn and Jason Biggs very funny.  I find Amanda Peet very attractive.  I found this tedious and juvenile film insulting and inane.  Another example of how far I go to spend time with my family.  No, really, this wasn't funny at all – it was actually often kind of sick.  Overall it was just immature.  Don't bother with it.

Worst Movies: Part 1 - Personally Disliked

10. Signs: As I watched it I was really into the story.  It was the last half-hour or so, with the convoluted plot coming together and the "God" message that ruined the whole experience for me.  I left the theater pissed off.  That RARELY happens.  This gets on this list for having been such a well made film that tried to brainwash me into believing in fate and/or God.

9. Lost World: Not a Spielberg fan. *pause while I wait for people to wrap their minds around that* Jurassic Park was ok.  This movie was an indulgence for a paycheck.  Honestly, I don't remember it that well – I just know I almost walked out of the theater (I never have) and it was the second movie in my life that I regretted having seen, and I wanted my time and money back.

8. Very Bad Things: This movie was just painful to watch.  No redeeming characters, disgusting plot, and a whole bunch of twisted, violent depravity.  Did I mention it's supposed to be funny?  I know what it is trying to do – I wouldn't have liked it if it had succeeded, but that's irrelevant as it fails miserably.

7. Pulp Fiction: I feel bad putting this on my list, but I really don't like this movie.  I've come to really appreciate more recent QT work (Kill Bill, Deathproof) but Pulp Fiction both bored and annoyed me.  Violence for no real point, overly convoluted dialog that tries to be hip and fails, and disjointed story pacing make this a film I just can't help but dislike.

6. Requiem for a Dream:  None of the characters do I feel any sympathy for – must be because I'm drug and alcohol free and have always been (unless you count caffeine) – nor does the subject matter interest me.  The directing style, with all the speed-ups and slow downs and "trying to get the audience to experience what the characters are" just left me cold.  Subject matter is probably the biggest turn off for me, and this is probably a film I should have never seen but due to hype I did.  Poor me.

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5. The Godfather:  Yes, the Godfather.  This is one I actually was excited to see as all you hear is praise.  I was at a great second-run theater, one that served food so I was happy, amidst the company of my girlfriend and many friends (some of whom had seen it already and loved it) – the situation couldn't have been better for seeing a movie that's often number 1 on lists of Best Movies of All Time.  Technically, I guess this film is well made.  Theoretically I can reason the story must be told well.  In actuality, I was bored.  Above that it was this film that made me realize with certainty that not only do I not like films where bad people are the main characters, or crime is glorified, but that I really dislike films about gangsters especially where the mob are almost the entire cast and they are the protagonists of the story.  Yeah, I really didn't like this film.  At all.

4. Anchorman: It probably isn't fair that I include this here.  I didn't see all of it.  I was so stone-cold bored and as far from laughing as I could get without crying due to sheer depression, I turned it off maybe twenty to thirty minutes in.  Just.  Not.  Funny.  It was here that I realized that I don't find Will Farrel nor Steve Carrel entertaining.  At All.  This has saved me from wasting time and money on Tallawhatzajigger Nights, 40 Year Old Who Gives A Rat's Ass, and other such gems as Evan Not So Almighty.

3. Texas Chainsaw Massacre - The Beginning: I like horror.  I really do.  I like slasher films.  I don't mind gore nor violence if I have some redeeming characters and an interesting story or plot.  This had nothing but gore, violence, and hopelessness.  I did almost feel for Jordana Brewster's character, but not nearly as much as I did for Jessica Biel's in the far superior Texas Chainsaw remake.  This prequel has nothing but sadism going for it.  It was probably the first "horror" film I saw in the theater that I felt uncomfortable, even dirty, after seeing it.  NOTE – I didn't watch House of 1000 Corpses nor Devil's Rejects in the theater, but they gave me the same feeling.

2 Your Friends and Neighbors: If you've noticed themes in my personal dislike of some movies, one major one would be characters that are worth something.  That you can care about.  That have, as I've often put it, some redeeming value.  Through most of this cynical, dark, mean-spirited film I sort of felt that Amy Brenneman's and possibly Aaron Eckhart's characters were – but his character fails part way through, and even Amy's character loses any respect or feelings of sympathy I had for her when she slept with Jason Patric's.  Some may argue that these stories are interesting, or realistic, or deep.  All I'll say is I want my movies to entertain me on some level, not leave me feeling sick and hating people.

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1 Magnolia:  To start, let me say I really like Boogie Nights and not just for Heather Graham.  It was an interesting and well made film.  Magnolia is NOTHING like Boogie Nights.  At least not overall.  In the theater for this film I was really into the characters and story for the first hour or so.  The acting was compelling and the situations the different people were in I found very interesting – I wanted to see the connections and where it was going.  I felt the movie was drawing to a close during he quiz game, a natural closure – but then the film rambled on for another hour or more! Silly me – I didn't pay attention close enough at the beginning of the film, where the stupid little anecdotes were given that explain the whole point of the film – stuff just happens for no reason.  Sometimes frogs fall from the sky.  The whole point of this film was to have no point. WTF?!?!  I not only want my time and money back from this waste of my life; I not only wasn't entertained; I not only left the theater pissed off like after Signs; I really do want Paul Anderson drug into the center of Hollywood and horse-whipped.  And then I want him to be FORCED to use EDITORS who'll cut down his monstrously self-indulgent pieces of crap into manageable, watchable films.

(dis)Honorable Mention: Matrix Revolutions for capping off a trilogy that started unbelievably strong and faltered to such a whimper and undramatic of endings.  At the end the status quo is returned so what's the point?  There were endless boring CGI battles and we followed not the main characters from the story but side characters who were never well introduced or developed.  Yawnfest.  Are these the same guys who gave us V for Vendetta?  Hard to believe.