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What are the WORST films you have seen?


Niners Fan in CT

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From Justin to Kelly is too much of a gimme, but it's hilariously awful.  It's a good thing Clarkson can sing, because act she cannot.  Guarini actually came across as somewhat charismatic, despite the terrible plot.  But it's so funny to watch whole scenes that don't tie together at all.  The hovercraft race on the beach must be seen by everyone.  GAME OVER!

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So I'm the only person here who actually saw The Garbage Pail Kids Movie in theaters?

SO JEALOUS

I watched that movie a couple thousand times. It's my dream to see it on the big screen. You lived my dream.

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The Happening. I'm not buying Shymalan's whole "It's supposed to be a B-movie" bullshit either.

That's a pretty good choice.  Ludicrious plot, inane dialogue, atrocious acting.  I remember one character saying "We've got to stay ahead of the wind" and going "How do you stay ahead of the wind?!  Seriously.  Tell me that.  Run really fast?!"  And that scene where they stay at the old woman's place and Mark Wahlberg says everything in a tone that conveys sarcasm "What? Why would you say that?!" but isn't supposed to is one of the unintentionally funniest scenes I've ever seen.

 

There's a lot of good MST3K ones that would likely apply: Time Chasers (nerdy guy develops a time machine and battles a giant corporation that buys him out and has its headquarters located in a public library); Space Mutiny (Awful Star Wars knock-offs that is so poorly edited that a dead character is later spotted working on the bridge); and the Coleman Francis trilogy Beast of Yucca Flats/Red Zone Cuba/ Skydivers.

 

But, the one that immediately comes to my mind is 'The Life of David Gale'.  One of the rare films Roger Ebert gave a 0 star review to.  It's a movie that purports to support the abolishing of the death penalty (Which is fine, filmmakers are allowed to have a point of view) but does so in such a way that it seems to support the death penalty.  There is some weird awful plot points (Like college kids partying with their professors), bad movie cliches (someone shouting leading to birds flying away) and Kevin Spacey playing drunk which might be the single worst bit of acting I've ever seen done.  I mean, has Spacey ever been drunk?  Because the way he plays it comes across like he's just guessing at what to do.  Then a stupid ending.  Awful.

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In this thread, a lot of movies I actually like/didn't mind.

 

A lot of the lowest ranked things on my Flickchart are comedies that failed to make me laugh at all. Of those the one that I both found unfunny and also quite offensive was Adam Sandler's I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, which is just... uh, never mind.

I didn't think INPYCaL was all that bad.  I certainly didn't really find it offensive, save for maybe Rob Schneider as an Asian dude.  

 

Nacho Libre and Blair Witch Project are the first two that come to mind.

Nacho Libre was okay.  A priest moonlighting as a luchadore.  Nothing wrong with that.

 

Drive

One of the best movies of the 2010s.

 

The Missing.

 

Hands down the shittiest movie I've ever seen. So, so, so, long and horrible.

I don't mind 'The Missing'.  There's a pretty king-sized Tommy Lee Jones performance in there.

 

Oh man. Both NACHO LIBRE & NAPOLEAN DYNAMITE are spectacularly awful. I'm glad NL seems tto have killed that creative team's career.BLAIR WITCH PROJECT is boring as fuck, but still has one of the best endings ever.

I love 'Napoleon Dynamite'.  So bizarre, so funny, so perfect.

 

Dark Knight Rises might be one of the worst Big Budget movies I've ever seen.

 

I don't get what was so special about Brokeback Mountain.  

TDKR was excellent.  I have no idea how one could hate it, unless you're diametrically opposed to superhero movies.  It was way better than the more lauded Avengers.

 

Fuck Nacho Libre but Dark Shadows and Chernobyl Diaries are so unrelentingly horrible without charm that they've replaced all my standard go to movies

Dark Shadows was way better than I thought it would be.  Just a silly, dark Tim Burton comedy.

 

BROKEN FUCKING FLOWERS.  I love Bill Murray, but Jim Jarmusch is just such a pretentious twat that I wanted to break everything in a ten-mile radius after that ending.

I like Broken Flowers.  Bill Murray being himself visiting all his ex-girlfriends trying to find out which one gave birth to the son he never met.  Great Ethiopian jazz soundtrack, great nudity, and a great Jeffrey Wright performance.  The ending is kinda off-putting at first, then kinda grows on you when you think about it.

 

I'm not counting direct to nowhere negative budget type films, just things that got a moderately wide release at least.

 

I normally go to the movies by myself but some of the few times I went with other people I've ended up seeing something that was utter crap and unable to walk out of.  Godzilla (the 1998 version with Jean Reno) and Mission Impossible 2 immediately come to mind.

'Mission Impossible 2' is great.  Best of the series.

 

I love a lot of "bad" movies, So when I think of what qualifies for worst movies I've seen, it's either a film I've developed an irrational hatred for, or one of the rare films that compel me to walk out. First type would be something like Mosquito Coast. Harrison Ford is such a convincing D-bag, I found it impossible to believe he was that good an actor. My loathing for that character makes me hate a film that is probably merely mediocre.

 

As for movies I've walked out of, L: Change the World, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgandy , and Daredevil.

Anchorman?!  Pffft, get out of here!  Probably the best comedy of the 21st century.

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There's a lot of good MST3K ones that would likely apply: Time Chasers (nerdy guy develops a time machine and battles a giant corporation that buys him out and has its headquarters located in a public library); Space Mutiny (Awful Star Wars knock-offs that is so poorly edited that a dead character is later spotted working on the bridge); and the Coleman Francis trilogy Beast of Yucca Flats/Red Zone Cuba/ Skydivers.

 

 

 

NIGHT TRAIN TO MUNDO FINE! RUNNIN HARD AND RUNNIN FAST!

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Bucky Larson - Somehow I never saw an ad for this so I didn't even know what the premise was but I remember picking it to watch because all I had heard about it was how bad it was.  And it was indeed bad.  Simpleton with a tiny penis trying to become a porn star should at least elicit a few chuckles along the way but it wasn't even so bad that it was funny.  The title character looking so ridiculous didn't help either.  I don't even recall there being a lot of nekkid ladies in it either so it doesn't even have that going for it.  And all the names in the cast just made me think that a film exec owed his drug dealer a lot of money so he traded in his debt so his dealer's cousin could get his screenplay produced.

 

GI Joe: The Rise Of Cobra - It's not just that the characters weren't true to the ones I grew up on but it's not even a good action film either.  Bunch of wooden green screen acting and half-ass looking CGI effects that resemble lime Jell-O.  Wouldn't go so far as to say it raped my childhood but it definitely spit on it.

 

Tron - First movie my parents took me to see was Bambi back when I was in the single digits.  Trailer for Tron played before it.  Scared the hell out of me.  Fast forward to last year and I saw an episode of the Tron cartoon and thought that looked pretty cool so I sought out the original film.  No idea what I was so scared of.  It's stupid looking with the characters' spandex and cardboard outfits and it's so boring.  Can't believe they made a sequel and cartoon series from this.

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But, the one that immediately comes to my mind is 'The Life of David Gale'.  

 

Then a stupid ending.  Awful.

Oh MAN, THAT ENDING.  The whole movie is a dumb pedantic piece of shit, but that's one of the most incomprehensible, most counter-intuitive endings I've ever seen in my life.  

Sending the full, uncut video to the reporter is the absolute worst thing Spacey could've done. It PROVES his entire "innocent man wrongfully executed" thingy is a deliberate fraud, perpetrated by a couple of suicidal psychopaths. Why the hell would he EVER do that, since it allows the entire country to safely dismiss his point and make both of their deaths meaningless?

 

And I agree with caley on most of these... except,

'Mission Impossible 2' is great.  Best of the series.

What.  No.  No it was not.  It was the dirt-worst of the series by a huge fuckin' mile, as well as being the single worst film of John Woo's entire career by a pretty comfortable margin.  Lousy plot, lousy villains, lousy superfluous girl sidekick, and the action scenes were such a massive Fuck You to logic and physics that it even offended a guy like myself who considers things like Hard-Boiled to be a masterpiece.  

 

If only Joel & the 'Bots could work their magic on Ron Burgandy.

You're pretty much a majority of one on this one.  

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I saw a double header at my local $1 second run theatre consisting of Supercop (which was fine, fun Americafied version of a Jackie Chan flick from years earlier) and THE CROW: CITY OF ANGELS.

 

 

I kinda doubt the original even holds up but oh my fuck I hated that piece of flaming garbage with vomit on top. If Courtney Love isn't automatically the worst part of a movie* it's gonna be a long day.

 

 

I also think HOT ROD is pretty shite, but it tried pretty hard and I never mind Isla Fisher and her hilariously awful American accent so yeah.

 

 

(* Besides The People vs. Larry Flynt, but I think that movie was spectacular in spite of her)

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And now... fuck it, let's bring the content~!  Here's some old C&P'ed reviews of the very, very worst films I've ever seen (or, at least, seen and reviewed).  

 

SPOILERED BY REQUEST for too-epic length: 

Alien vs. Predator: 0/10
I think that Fox could've taken the $45 million they spent on this movie, cashed it out in one-dollar bills, piled it up with bulldozers into one giant stack, and then set it all on fire and film the carnage and it STILL would've been a better movie than the piece of shit they actually released. 
 
I've been the world's biggest fan of the Alien franchise for going on two decades now, and man it gets tiring having all my hopes and expectations crushed once again every single time I stumble sheep-like into the movie theater and shell out my money to see the latest installment of this once-great series. This film is like a master's class in How To Make A Really, Really Shitty Movie. It boggles my mind to think that, after FIFTEEN YEARS of rewrites and stops and starts and development hell, this was the best Fox could come up with?! I can't even count all the mistakes, all the idiotic decisions, all the insults to our intelligence that this waste of celluloid gleefully lobs our way. I'd be here for hours. So let me try to squeeze it all into one big paragraph: 
 
First of, the script sucked ballz. The plot sucked, the dialogue sucked, and ho boy how the characters sucked. This movie is a painful example of what happens when you write towards the lowest common denominator and have characters who are all stereotypes (that is, painfully one-dimensional walking talking cliche's) rather than archeytpes (like the various marines in Aliens, who were all recognizable "types" but still lived and breathed with an identity of their own). The bloody wanker stupid worthless screenplay contains many gigantic mistakes, and they are legion, far too many to go into detail here. Let's just say that it almost seems like they were TRYING to avoid new ideas, interesting situations, plausible thrills, or anything that makes a sci-fi thriller worth seeing. Both the backstories of the Alien and Predator franchises are blithely pissed on, as the "rules" of previous movies are ignored and the filmmakers pretty much take any liberty they damn well please regarding how and why the creatures function the way they do. The cast fares no better, as they're all (with the sole exception of Lance Henrikson, who must've just really needed that paycheck) just a bunch of generic MTV-generation prettyboys/girls with all the ruggedness of Ryan Seacrest, and after their completely unimaginative death scenes you'll be completely unable to remember the name of either the character or the actor playing them. Even the movie's entire reason for existing, that is bigass fight scenes between the titular xenomorphic heavyweights, seem generally dumbed down and almost designed to piss off longtime fans of either monster. Everything in this film SUCKS, from its boring-as-hell beginning to its dumbass "shock" ending. 
 
Apparently the movie's reeking awfulness was SO bad that even the normally thickheaded Fox executives caught a whiff of it. They took one look at the finished product in preview screenings and ran screaming for the parking lot, clutching protectively at their wallets the whole time. Desperate action obviously needed to be taken to save this movie; unfortunately, the previously mentioned thickheads, God bless their predictable stupidity, decided that the only way to save this film was to make it EVEN dumber, drastically shortening it to a mere 89 minutes, cut out all the gore, and released it with a PG-13 rating in an effort to market it towards the teenybopper fanboy crowd. Maybe it worked, I dunno, the movie just barely made its money back, but in aesthetic terms it took a film that already pulsed with all the artistic life of a brain-dead coma victim and then violently yanked out the feeding tube. And then shot him in the head. And then performed emergency surgery, applied shock paddles and CPR and somehow managed to get his heart beating again once more. And then shot him in the head again. And then burned the body, pissed on the ashes, and buried what's left in an old haunted Indian burial ground. 
 
Maybe you think I'm being unfairly harsh in my review. "Aw man, that Jingus, he sure comes up with some zingers," you scoff, "but seriously, it couldn't have been THAT bad, could it?!" Well, I challenge you all, go watch it yourself and then report back to me. And then try to explain to the good folks at your local Blockbuster what happened to their DVD when you went on a drunken rampage at 2 AM with their copy of Alien vs. Predator and your trusy shotgun. (2013 DVDVR EDIT: can you tell I wrote some of these reviews several years ago?) According to the neighbors, they heard you screaming "PULL!" followed by gunfire. And to be completely fair and honest to the movie, it wasn't completely bad. The special effects team, headed up by the invaluable Tom "Alien Suit Guy" Woodruff managed to put together their usual fine real-live-FX job that's so sadly lacking in this modern CGI age, and thanks to them there are a couple of creature-related moments that don't completely suck. In fact, their involvement is pretty much the only reason I let the movie off lightly with a mere "0/10" instead of inflicting a negative score. 
 
PS: If for some ungodly masochistic reason you decide to subject yourself to watching this vile pile o' excrement, make sure to get the DVD version, because you owe it to yourself to hear the filmmaker's commentary track with director Paul "No, not the guy who did Magnolia, but the guy who did Resident Evil" Anderson and actors Lance Henrikson and Sanaa Lathan. It's pretty clear that they aren't terribly impressed with the final film, but they must've been under studio orders not to say a single negative thing about the movie the entire time. Seriously, check it out, it's one of the most surreal things I've ever heard. You can almost picture Fox's lawyers sitting next to them the entire time, pens raised threateningly. So they barely even talk about the film; they instead talk about this premiere that Sanaa is going to that night, about a couple of funny stories about stuff that happened on-set, discuss the previous movies in the series, talk about the frigging SANDWICHES they're eating, anything but actually discuss the movie that they're probably not even watching. Henrikson especially can barely hide the contempt in his voice for the shameful thing he was involved with; you could make a drinking game out of it, taking a shot every time he vacantly says "Yeah, that's great stuff..." except don't blame me if you die of alcohol poisoning before the movie's over. Why not, the actors themselves are drinking while they're making the commentary (one of the funnier moments is when Anderson accidentally reveals this, which was apparently a no-no). If you're gonna watch this brainfucked little wet cuntfart of a movie, doing so with the commentary on is the only way to go.
 
 
Fear Dot Com: 1/10
In a word: bullshit. This dumbass "thriller" represents everything that's wrong with the modern Hollywood horror movie. I'm so, so desperately tired of watching this movie; it's the same shit every time, just with different actors and character names. 
 
Alright, just so you get a sense of things, here's the plot: a Cop On The Edge is still haunted by The One Case He Never Solved, which was a Beautiful But Troubled Woman who was murdered by a Brilliant Serial Killer. However, lately her Vengeful Ghost (who manifests as A Creepy Little Girl) has been popping up and killing people In Unknown And Inexplicable Ways, and it's up to our cop and his Beautiful Forensic Scientist Partner to find the killer Before It's Too Late. 
 
Everything in this movie is a bad cliche. Everything. From the hard-boiled cops with unshaven stubble to the godlike mastermind psycho killer, from the generic hallucinations to the idiotically contrived plot swerves. All the men are corpses waiting to happen, all the women are beautiful but helpless damsels in distress, all the interiors are badly underlit, all the serial killer's lines sound like bad Nietschian philosophy, all the female victims' breasts are lovingly exposed, all the cops follow procedures that don't even vaguely resemble real-life police work, all the higher authorities are unwilling to listen to our heroes, and I hope I'm not spoiling anything for you if I reveal that the serial killer gets his comeuppance via an evil supernatural Deus Ex Machina at the end. And the WORST part is that the stupid hypocritical script not-so-subtly condemns the audience that paid good money to watch this piece of shit by making the sorta murky argument that anyone who even accidentally or unwillingly witnesses a crime is just as guilty as the criminals themselves. 
 
God I hated this fucking movie. Hated hated hated hated HATED it. It's the kind of movie where I want to track down the filmmakers and ask them a bunch of pointed questions. Like, do you guys have an original idea anywhere in your heads? Why the stupid necrophilic misogyny of showing all the female bodies naked? Did you actually expect those "dream" sequences to scare anyone who's seen a single Nightmare on Elm Street flick? And would you mind explaining what the FUCK was supposed to be happening during the ending, which seemed to break all of the previously established rules of the movie? 
 
Christ, this sucked. Don't watch it. There's not a single redeeming moment. It's not even entertainingly bad. And yet the marketing people had the gall to compare this piece of shit to The Ring on the back of the video box. In my mind, that's like comparing The Texas Chainsaw Massacre with Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers

 

 

Assisted Living: 0/10
Boring, depressing, exploitive so-called "comedy" that barely clocks in at seventy-five minutes but feels like it goes on longer than the entire Peter Jackson Unabridged Film Collection. It's about an idiot pothead who works in a nursing home, and spends his days amusing himself tormenting the elderly people there with really cruel pranks. Brian Monsignore is the nurse, and he confuses "acting" with "staring at the screen like a zombie on ritalin". 
 
The worst part about this movie is that it uses real nursing home patients as its actors. These poor old fuckers don't even seem to realize that they've got a camera pointed at them, and I'm sure they were never paid a dime for their participation. The movie can't make up its mind whether the alzheimers-ridden victims are objects of condescending "oh what a shame" type of pity, or merely fodder for a variety of brutally manipulative jokes, because hey, it's not like they KNOW how sad they are, right? Also, the lead hero is supposed to be sympathetic because, despite how sick his emotional abuse of them is, he supposedly "really cares about them deep down" unlike the other employees at the home. 
 
I'd call this movie a waste of film if it weren't shot on cheap digital video. It's so bad that you can't even laugh at it. It's not entertaining, not informative, and morally reprehensible, making it the triple-threat of suckitude. This is the kind of worthless piece of shit that makes you want to find the director and give him several swift kicks to the balls. 
 
 
The Ghost Galleon: 0/10
This film is the third in the Blind Dead series, a string of Spanish-made 70's horror flicks about ravenous animated corpses of blasphemous Knights Templars who hunt down their victims by sense of hearing. (It's also known as Horror of the Zombies and a bunch of other names, like many foreign horror flicks of the period.) Despite what the credits say, I do not believe that Amando de Ossorio, the director of the other Blind Dead movies, actually directed this. 
 
Based on the evidence presented here, I'd say that Ossorio had some junior-level intern who somehow scraped up enough cash to rent a few sets purporting to be an old Spanish galleon, hire a few desperate actors who really needed that next paycheck, borrowed exactly four of the Blind Dead costumes, and then shot the whole flick over the weekend, then slapped Ossorio's name on the finished product in order to sell it to the distributors. 
 
I hope it didn't make a dime, cuz this movie is BAD. The other Blind Dead flicks were crude examples of moviemaking, but at least they were real movies and could pass as serviceable entertainment to horror fans. This piece of shit cannot claim that. This movie reeks of having been made by people who never made a movie before, and with any luck never made a movie again. 
 
We're talking full-on Manos: the Hands of Fate level badness at times, folks, seriously. Don't believe me? Here's my synopsis of the ENTIRE plot: a couple of swimsuit models are crossing some unnamed ocean as part of an unexplained "publicity stunt". They run into The Ghost Galleon. One of the models goes aboard to look around, and the Templar zombies kill her (offscreen). The other model goes onboard to look for her, and the Templars kill her too. The businessman who was funding the "publicity stunt" takes a crew out to the boat to look for the models. Then they all die one way or another. That's it. That's the WHOLE movie. I'm not skipping anything. And it's all filmed in such an incredibly slow and drawn-out manner (probably to pad the length out to 90 minutes) that it could put even the most hardcore of bad-movie-lovers to sleep. 
 
There's no nudity, basically no violence, nothing even vaguely resembling entertainment. And the hilariously awful English dubbing is one of the worst jobs I've ever heard, it makes kung-fu flicks from the same time period sound like Shakespeare in comparison. Even the old Speed Racer had better dubbing then this, it's so incompetent it has to be heard to be believed. But even that isn't enough to make me recommend this movie to anyone except the MST3K people, as evidence that there is still a great pressing need for that show to come back on the air.

 

 

Slayer: 1/10
Has this ever happened to you? You walk into Blockbuster and see some obscure little straight-to-DVD horror movie. You recall hearing about a recent vampire flick by the name of "Slayer" that's been playing the festival circuit and supposedly pretty interesting. (Sadly, they are not the same film.) It's got halfway decent cover art and actors you've actually heard of. Oh yes, having Casper Van Dien, Danny Trejo, and Lynda Carter all in the same movie probably isn't a good sign, but at least it's not some rapper, a former playboy bunny, or a wrestler. I mean, it's got Ray Park playing a dual role as kickboxing vampire twins. There's gotta be SOMETHING redeeming about it, right? 
 
And then you get home and pop that sucker in... and it's not a real movie. It's shot on video. It's not lit properly, or even competently. Even the very real jungle that was shot on location (in Puerto Rico) somehow looks cheesy and fake. The dialogue is some of the most inane 80's-type crap you've ever heard. All the blood is a weird shade of pale orange. The special effects seem to have all been done on a first-generation Mac. The general placement of the camera and pacing of the cuts is so amateurish that it's a wonder these monkeys had enough intelligence to say the word "action" at the beginning of every shot. It looks like it was filmed over a weekend with a budget of tree-fiddy. 
 
Yep, it's a Sci-Fi Channel Original Picture alright. That'll teach me to look more closely at the boxes before I pick something up. Don't pass this on to Blockbuster, but as soon as I ejected this monstrosity from my player I immedietely took my pocketknife and gouged a nice big scratch right across the disc, knowing that this was the store's only copy of this outrage. I'm not kidding. Art that is executed this badly doesn't deserve to be watched. 
 
 
Just My Luck: 2/10
Sometimes, I realize that I'm watching a really bad movie. Usually, this doesn't take long; most bad movies proudly proclaim their badness within the first few minutes. With Just My Luck, that realization struck me around halfway through the opening credits. But oddly enough, I don't change the channel. The movie beckons me with promises of truly sucking even worse than I could imagine. Trance-like, I follow, unable to look away. Damn MST3K ruined me forever. 
 
This is one of those movies where they spent the entire casting budget on Lindsay Lohan and then didn't hire any other stars. Oh, some of the other actors are familiar faces from being in tiny roles in a hundred various movies, but you don't know any of their names. (Except maybe Tovah Feldshuh and Faizon Love; those are hard-to-forget names.) Not that the actors matter: you could take a time machine, kidnap Meryl Streep off the set of Sophie's Choice and Marlon Brando from Streetcar Named Desire, bring them back here, and force them to play the leads in this movie, and it would STILL suck the meat missle. 
 
Just My Luck was made by people even more cynical than me. The director, Donald Petrie, is a great example. He started his movie career making the wonderfully offbeat Mystic Pizza, a movie which singlehandedly started both Julia Roberts' and Lili Taylor's careers. Then he made Grumpy Old Men, which was decent. Then Richie Rich... starting to see a trend? Then My Favorite Martian. Then How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days. Then Welcome to Mooseport. Now this. Clearly, he's a living example of Quentin Tarantino's theory that most directors get worse, not better, as they get older. I would blame the writer to0, but, which one? There are FIVE credited screenwriters for this movie. Five different people were needed to write this plot: "Lindsay Lohan is a successful young professional woman who seems to lead a charmed life. That all changes when she kisses a cute loser... and her lifelong great luck is transferred to him! Watch and laugh as she gets arrested, assaulted, electricuted, and even rubs cat shit in her own eyes in this inspiring and uplifting romantic comedy!" 
 
Yeah, so Lohan is really lucky til she kisses this dude, he steals her luck, and her life turns to shit. There are a LOT of scenes in which all kinds of bad stuff happen to her, over and over AND OVER. These are supposed to be funny, but I found it to be mildly terrifying in an existential manner: imagine a life where every time you go outside it rains; where every umbrella you'll ever use blows inside-out; where every possibly dangerous machine turns itself on when you're near/inside it; where you can't walk down the street without tripping and falling several times. This isn't humor, it's more like Greek tragedy of a some poor schmuck cursed by the gods. And since it's happening to Lindsay Lohan, I get the creepy feeling that the filmmakers expect us to laugh at her constant suffering just because it's a spoiled rich girl, of COURSE it's funny to see her life become a living hell, randomly, for no particular reason! 
 
Speaking of spoiled, this movie deserves such. Lindsey eventually gets her luck back from the guy, they fall in love, but she selflessly decides to give her luck away because she's grown during her trials and that which doesn't kill her made her stronger and all that other bullshit. Her new boyfriend is a manager for a pop band, and of course they get a great new recording contract and the crowd loves them. (In fact, let's stop and look closer at that band for just a second: they're played by a real-life boy band from England, and they're called McFly. Please believe me when I tell you that the mere thought of an emo band called McFly is funnier than anything else in this movie. Supposedly they really write their own songs and play their own instruments, but since they sound like every other generic boy band on earth, why does it matter? Did one of the filmmakers owe these guys a favor, or did Fox actually think that they'd launch a new singing sensation with these posers?) 
 
In the end, this movie is a filmed commercial prefab plastic corporate venture, designed to do nothing but steal money from teen girls. Fortunately, the public seems to have caught on, and the flick lost money at the box office, and it scored a pathetic 13% at rottentomatoes. Appropriate for a movie where the leading male's "humanizing" quirk is that he has a young daughter from a previous message... or she's adopted... or maybe his much younger sister... by that point I wasn't paying that much attention. She's played by Makenzie Vega, who was unforgettable as the young Nancy who Bruce Willis rescues from a pedophile at the beginning of Sin City. In this movie, which much more screentime and many more lines, she's an excellent example of how it's not the ingredients that count, it's the cook.

 

 

The Marine: 1/10
My main thought during this movie, which repeated itself over and over again: "You've gotta be SHITTING me, Pyle!" I just stared vacantly at the screen in open-mouthed disbelief. They still make movies like this!? I mean, making this fifteen years ago as a direct-to-video cheapie starring Don "The Dragon" Wilson and Billy Drago, sure, I could understand that. But to do it now, as a theatrical major motion picture? What the fuck?! 
 
I don't remember the last time I saw an action movie that was this willfully, cheerfully, blissfully stupid. And I mean STUPID. This is like a Stallone flick without the subtlety. And that's not just one of my snarky lines! I MEAN that! Your average Rambo flick was a thousand times more thoughtful than this one. I mean, this movie was dumber than Forrest Gump after hitting him over the head with a shovel. Dumber than hiring Ann Coulter as a hostage negotiator. Dumber than thinking the GobbledyGooker would actually draw money. DUMB. Want an example? In the very first minute, the movie opens at an Al Quaeda terrorist fort... in Iraq! I mean, Jesus Buttfucking Christ, was NOBODY with a fuckin' brain paying attention? You just change the word "Iraq" to "Afghanistan" and hey presto, there's no longer a glaring continuity error that's guaranteed to draw a cascade of jeers and boos from real marines. Or hell, plan B, change "Al Quaeda" to "terrorist insurgents"! I mean, shit, when you had to combine two completely different facts so precisely to create one blatant fuckup, what the hell was the problem here? 
 
John Cena IS The Marine. Well, not really, in the second scene he gets fired from the corps. For single-handedly rescuing a whole bunch of prisoners. (Yep, the Marines sure love firing people who should get a friggin' congressional medal of honor instead, mm-hmm.) Cena has a problem speaking "serious" dialogue without making us laugh out loud, but otherwise he's just a pretty standard action hero in this. Anyway, his wife (Kelly Carlson, who really looks like a brainless trophy spouse here) gets kidnapped by some jewel thiefs, and hi-ho silver away we go. And then we've got the bad guys, who are the only thing even remotely entertaining about this flick: Robert Patrick always looks like he's smiling at a joke that nobody but him gets, and stuntmant Anthony Ray Parker is not too bad as a paranoid reverse-racist henchman. 
 
But nevermind the acting, cuz this movie can't wait to get to the EXPLOSIONS~! Dozens of the goddamned things. All filmed in reverent slow motion. Every one of them shown several times from multiple camera angles. And yet, even though Cena seems to be at ground zero for every one of them, he hardly even has a smudge on him by the end of the movie. This movie so carelessly violates all laws of physics and logic, repeatedly, that even Schwarzenegger would've taken one look at the script and demanded a complete rewrite. This movie was made by and for people who've never fired a goddamn gun in their lives, and seems almost custom-designed to piss off real Marines with its slavish addiction to mindless mayhem. 
 
In conclusion: it truly depresses me that more people paid to see this movie than See No Evil. That one was just mediocre. This one is truly appalling.
 
 
At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul: 0/10
The "Coffin Joe" series of horror films, all starring and written and directed by Brazilian filmmaker Jose Mojica Marins, are considered to be minor classics in cult horror circles. Watching this one, I have no fucking clue what kind of perverted moron would find this shit to be amusing or possessing any redeeming features whatsoever. It was made on the cheap... REAL cheap, even by 1963's standards, filmed over just two weeks on a microscopic budget. But there were plenty of other movies made all over the world that were just as crude or amateurish; Roger Corman made better movies than this in less than half the time. 
 
I just found the whole thing to be repulsive. Yeah, I know that director Marins wasn't supposed to play "Zao do Caixaeo" aka Coffin Joe, the asshole atheist murderous mortician. I know it was supposed to be some other actor who didn't show up, thus forcing the director to play the part just cuz he didn't have anyone else. But that still doesn't excuse the feeling that infects every frame of this movie: the feeling that Marins really got off on doing all this shit. How about that creepy scene where the giant spider crawls all over that one poor actress's bare skin? I didn't feel bad for the character, I felt bad for the victimized woman playing the part. Or what about the bit where Joe beats the shit out of another woman, at times clearly hitting her with very real non-pulled blows? It felt like the only reason Marins didn't strip her and rape the shit out of her on-screen is because the censors at the time wouldn't allow it. 
 
Aside from all that stuff, the movie is just plain boring and unbelievable. Half of it seems to consist of Joe's constant ranting about how much of an atheist he is and how there is no God, the peasants are superstitious idiots, he laughs at them all, yadda yadda yadda. And can anyone tell me why the hell nobody ever fights back against this prick? He bullies all the townspeople, he murders them in secret but practically brags about it to their faces, and he mutilates at least three guys right out in public for no particular reason. Um, excuse me?! This cocksucker is chopping off people's fingers in the middle of a crowded bar, and you expect me to believe that nobody is just gonna shoot the fucker and get it over with? 
 
Like I said earlier, this repugnant piece of bargain-bin garbage actually has a cult following who really like it. Hell, there's even another sequel coming out NOW! That's right, seventy-year-old Coffin Joe is still around and somehow making money, all on the basis of this inexplicably profitable first film. Just check out the reviews on IMDB, where words like "masterpiece" are actually thrown around. BULLSHIT. This deserves to be Rifftracked and then to have all existing prints burned afterwards.

 

 

Night of the Living Dead (30th Anniversary Edition): 2/10
Wait a minute, hear me out. Have you seen this version? SPECIFICALLY the 30th Anniversary cut? If not, then stay the fuck away from it, because it's a horrid example of graverobbing indeed. The original film is one of my favorite horror flicks, easily Top 5 of all time, but this is just plain necrophilia. 
 
Everyone has seen or at least knows about George Romero's seminal 1968 flick which invented the modern zombie genre and changed horror movies for all time, right? Well, 30 years later, some of the original participants (cowriter John Russo, lead zombie Bill Hinzman, producer Russ Streiner, etc) are apparently needing money and so turned to their one laudable accomplishment in life in order to scam the legions of zombie fans out there. Romero was supposed to be involved, if you can believe the conspirators' commentary, but he definitely had nothing to do with this version. 
 
So, long story short: they pulled a George Lucas and had Greedo shoot first. They shot new footage, including new beginning and ending, and chopped out 15 minutes of original movie in order to make room for the new crap. That would be bad enough in abstract concept, but what makes it even worse is that the new scenes SUCK, just horribly produced on all levels, and stick out like Khali at a midget convention. Pay special attention to the dick playing the priest, if you can stand to, as he somehow manages to be stiff and wooden and yet still chew the scenery at the same time. 
 
Unless you want to listen to the commentary track where the filmmakers blatantly lie about how well the new footage matches the old stuff, even the biggest Deadheads should stay the fuck away from this murdered movie. 
 
 
Battle Royale II: 0/10
Obscene bullshit. I'd heard that the sequel to the great Battle Royale was bad, but JESUS I had no idea. Let me break it down for you: this is the only movie I've ever stopped watching with an hour to go, but still feel completely safe in reviewing and condemning in full. 
 
First of all, it's just a plain bad movie. The brilliant plot of the first film is half ripped off and half shit on in this one, as the government sends a new group of "juvenile delinquints" (who all look WAY older than the believable teenagers of the first film) to kill the survivors of the previous BR, who have now become terrorists. The pacing is bad, the characters are poorly drawn, and then the movie makes its dumbest mistake by killing off almost all of them before we even get halfway through the movie. The storylines are full of massive plot holes and make absolutely no sense, and it's just a jumbled mess overall. 
 
But that's not the worst part, by far. This movie is terrorist propaganda. Seriously. I've seen some leftist flicks in my time, and even enjoyed many of 'em, but this one just flat out states that terrorists are heroes, government is bad, Afghanistan is full of smiling children, and America is a global sociopath who loves killing anything that moves just for the hell of it. Yes, IT REALLY SAYS ALL THAT. What do America and Afghanistan have to do with a movie entirely about Japanese people? Search me, but in this flick the Americans are apparently at fault for the Jap government deciding that it's okay to force children to kill each other. 
 
This movie's first shot is of a pair of fictional Japanese twin skyscrapers getting destroyed by terrorist bombs. Then it goes on to say that the murderers who blew them up are justified and righteous. Don't watch this even just to see how bad it is. It's the worst fucking movie I've seen all year.

 

 

A Midsummer Night's Rave: 1/10
I got this one solely because the title sounded like a fairly intelligent pun. "Rave" is pretty close to "reve", which is French for "dream", and "midsummer night's eve" is a pagan holiday. After watching about sixty seconds of the movie itself, I concluded that the punnery was all just a coincedence. Thank Christ for whatever dumbass stoner who checked out this DVD before me. They must've used the fucking thing as a coaster, because it started skipping into oblivion after just twenty minutes, thus relieving me of the burden of having to watch any more of this shit. 
 
I don't remember the last time I was so annoyed and turned off by a movie right from the very beginning. I could tell that the filmmakers thought it's cute and hip and smart to do stuff like using title cards to introduce us to the names of our heroes. That was interesting fifteen years ago when Clerks did it, and was already tired five years later when I ripped it off in a short film I shot for school. Then it does that frustrating thing where it gives us a teaser about the end, shows some random crap, then a guy shoots somebody, and then POOF "20 hours earlier". 
 
It also stars Andrew Keegan, in his THIRD shitty modern teen flick remake of a Shakespeare play. Why the fuck does this guy keep doing this? Does he really want to typecast himself as someone who repeatedly shits on the grave of the greatest writer in the history of the English language? And finally, this is one of those movies which is directly aimed at drug addicts. If you're not a raver and don't do X, you will probably hate this. And even if you are and you do, you might hate it anyway, because it's condescending as hell. "Hey, we use rollin' terminology, we're hip and relevant!" Godawful drek.
 
 
Romance and Cigarettes: 0/10
Oh dear God in heaven, please lend me the words to describe this, because I'm at a loss. I sat watching this movie with my mouth hanging open, my brow furrowed, as I continually inched closer and closer to the screen; so that I wouldn't miss one second of the amazing precedings, or maybe just to convince myself that it wasn't all a dream. I racked my brain trying to understand why, to come up with a reasonable solution, to attempt to comprehend the alien motivations that must've gone into such a work of art. Finally, with mere minutes left to go, inspiration struck and I realized the truth: 
 
Everyone involved with this movie lost a bet to Satan, and this was their punishment. It's the only possible explanation. 
 
Writer/director John Turturro inflicted such karmic damage on the cinematic world with this terrorist bomb that if the Hindus are right, he's probably coming back as Uwe Boll the 3rd. It's about a bunch of obnoxious people and their shitty lives, and it's a musical. I have no idea what the fuck kind of target Turturro was aiming for, but he not only missed, he somehow simultaneously blew off his nose and his dick with one shot. It took talent to make a movie this bad; it goes beyond mere incompetency, into some kind of madness. An incredible cast of actors signed up to be humiliated in this dreck: James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon, Kate Winslet, Steve Buscemi, Mandy Moore, Mary-Louise Parker, Bobby Cannavale, Aida Turturro, Amy Sedaris, Eddie Izzard, Elaine Stritch, and Christopher Walken. All of them are marched out in front of the firing squad, playing bad parodies of their usual parts, and have their credibility executed right in front of you. I almost want to recommend that people see this movie, just so I'll have witnesses to this jaw-dropping atrocity. But please, no, don't ruin your lives; I may be damned, but there's yet hope for you. 
 
One last appalling bit: go to IMDB and check out this movie's page, specifically the user reviews. Weird how they start off with a few bad ones that bitch about how much the movie sucks... but then after that they're drowned out by a torrent of glowing testimonials about what a great movie this is. I know sometimes moviemakers abuse this site for viral marketing purposes, but come ON. 

 

 

Ultraviolet: 1/10
I usually dispose of crappy movies like this in a couple of short paragraphs, but I'm feeling deconstructive tonight, so let's take a long, leisurely look at this crappy film's many flaws. 
 
-Milla Jovovich sucks. She's the female equivalent of Keanu Reeves. Like Reeves, she barely knows the meaning of the word "acting"; like Reeves, she routinely shows up to sabotage movies that I might've liked if they had a better lead. (Note: Ultraviolet would have zero chance of me liking it even if Nicole Kidman and Kate Winslet took turns playing Jovovich's character, even if they stopped to do a lesbian scene every five minutes.) Yeah, Milla's hot, but the percentage of her movies that turn out to be bad is somewhere in the Pauly Shore range. 
 
-Apparently this is #24601 in the Movies That The Studio Interfered With, Editing Out A Bunch Of Important Stuff Which Made The Movie Worse. On the flipside, can you think of any movie, ever, which was improved by the studio cutting out large chunks? Anyone? Any at all? Bueller? 
 
-Writer/director Kurt Wimmer made this sophmore slumper after his highly touted Equillibrium, a movie which I have not seen but have heard praised mightily. I hope this was just an example of a genuinely talented director Mallratsing out in his second movie. 
 
-IMDB claims the budget was 30M, but it looks cheaper. The CGI effects are REALLY bad, just godawful, we're talking worse than in some student films I've seen, they literally look like they were borrowed from Escape From LA. And the sound design is incompetent too. I was almost happy about the wretched foley work in this movie; the vast majority of Hollywood films have superior sound work which tends to get taken for granted. Here's a great example of what happens when they fuck it up. 
 
-What hath the Wachowskis wrought? Alright, we've got some kind of evil totalitarian empire in the distant future, and it's oppressing the plebes. Here to fight back for all us poor oppressed folk is a superhuman superhero in leather and sunglasses, with the ability to magically kung-fu kill people by the truckload. The Matrix ripoff in this film is so blatant there's even a scene where our hero walks through the front door of the villain's headquarters, has her weapons found by the security scanners, and then cheerfully kills all the guards in her way after cracking a joke. Plus there's also a bit where a helicopter fires a minigun into the side of a building. Come ON, people. (For those keeping score, there's also some pretty blatant Resident Evil, Underworld, and Aeon Flux influence here too.) 
 
-What is the deal with crappy action movies like this always having their evil soldiers' faces being covered by masks? I know, it helps save money on stuntmen when you can use the same dozen guys to play all the few hundred different troops in this movie, but it also adds a disturbing undercurrent about how these guys are just the faceless pawns of The Man, so it's okay to kill them. 
 
-What the fuck is the deal with the parts where the characters randomly drop their guns and start fighting with swords instead? I counted at least three different times that this happened. Did nobody on this movie ever see Raiders of the Lost Ark
 
-I'm so, so terribly tired of seeing sci-fi flicks about totalitarian evil empires. The really lousy ones, like Ultraviolet, never even attempt to explain how society got that way in the first place. (In fact, there's a whole lot of missing backstory: where did Violet get her super ninja skillz, for example?) It's just basically a hamhanded, shallow attempt to say OH NOES BUSH IZ IN UR BRAIN, STEELING UR FREEDUM. There are ways to do this stuff well people, go watch Children of Men a hundred times before you attempt to make another movie. 
 
-The film also vaguely tries to be some kind of parable about the persecution of minorities. Uno problemo: the "persecuted victims" in this film are hyper-violent vampire terrorists who all have a highly contagious, invariably lethal disease. Not exactly Anne Fucking Frank. 
 
-I don't know if the director was too busy lighting the goofy sets to direct his actors, but man all the performers in this movie are terrible. And aside from Jovovich, I've never heard of any of them. None of their names or faces rang any bells. Not a good sign for a $30,000,000 "blockbuster". 
 
-I'm not going to waste your time and mine in detailing all the ways the script sucks. Let's just say the storyline is trite, the dialogue is loathesome, the plot twists are contradictory, and the whole thing makes slightly less coherent sense than I Know What You Did Last Summer
 
So yeah, in conclusion, I didn't like it. 
 
 
Oasis of the Zombies: 2/10
The experience of watching this film is sort of akin to watching a guy walk a tightrope. He's not a terribly good acrobat, but the rope is pretty short and the drop isn't too high, so he gets about a third of the way across just fine. And then he suddenly whips out a .38 and blows his brains out. As all the children in the audience scream, his body falls, crotches itself on the rope, and then spins over and crashes with a sickening thud onto the ground. And then... I can't believe it, he's moving, he's alive! And... he slowly brings the gun up, and eats another bullet. 
 
This is one of the several million European zombie flicks which were churned out after Dawn of the Dead became a huge hit over there, although in tone and production it seems more similar to the Blind Dead type of stuff than anything like the Lucio Fulcis of the world ever produced. So this is one of the Undead Nazi subgenre of zombie films, and it starts out okay, considering that Latin hack Jesus Franco is directing. Oh sure, it's got all the hallmarks of a crappy 70s horror flick what with the laughable dubbing and the shaky handheld camera with an overreliance on the zoom lens. But it actually builds up the tension fairly well; there's an early battle scene which shows that they had a decent budget, and the Saharan locale is a nice change of pace from the urban areas s which host most zombie movies. It's got that grungy 70s realism working for it, where they manage to have a narrative, fictional movie that has the general atmosphere of a snuff film. 
 
And then... the zombies show up, and it's like someone flicked a switch and turned the quality off. Our "Nazis" are very clearly shown to be swarthy Spaniards, complete with goofy long 70s haircuts. The absolutely incompetent zombie makeup is the worst I've ever seen, and I've seen The Incredibly Strange Creatures Which Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies. It looks like the filmmakers just slapped a handfull of dirt on their faces and called it a day. And somehow once they show up, the entire movie around them falls to shit too. The characters suddenly turn into complete idiots, continuity is nonexistant, LOTS of time is killed with people just walking around or starting and/or stopping cars, and the whole mess just plain signs up for the standard Kevorkian benefits package. Worth a look if you treasure watching really, really shitty zombie flicks.

 

 

 

and MORE TO COME...

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I have seen many bad movies, but for some reason I am able to find something redeemable or interesting to not hate them.  Mortal Kombat: Annihilation and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3 are not those kinds of films.  I'm sure there are others just as bad, but I must have blocked them from my mind.

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Jingus: know that you have an ally in your Coffin Joe hate.  I wrote about that same movie on the 3.0 board, and watching Coffin Joe mock the townspeople on a studio stage the size of a half-bathroom makes me mad.  Why didn't anyone just stab the jerk in the throat and call it a day?  I mean, I get that he's supposed to be this version of the Boogie Man and Ol' BM can't really be had, but it makes no sense in this context.  Coffin Joe should have been smoked with his carcass thrown to the dogs.  I didn't understand it.

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The marathon of bad movies... (Howard Finkel voice) MUST CONTINUE!
 
SPOILERED for being way too goddamn long: 
 

Epic Movie: 1/10
This insanely awful "comedy" makes me wonder what the fuck the MPAA was thinking when they let it off with a PG-13. This is such a foul, cynical, dirty-minded little exercise in toilet humor that it just further proves how absolutely useless the ratings board is; if THIS doesn't deserve an R, what the hell does?! 
 
So basically this isn't so much a movie as it is an eighty-minute-long trailer of things which I guess are supposed to be jokes, but Aristotle sure as hell wouldn't recognize them as such. They have no setup, no punchline, no underlying humor; it's basically one long game of "Hey, remember when This happened in That movie?" It doesn't really parody other movies, so much as just repeat them, and then stick a random completely unrelated "twist" on the end. In fact, the movie seems to sometimes even accidentally repeat them; two specific jokes (a snake biting a woman's nipple, Wolverine using his middle claw to flip the bird) really did happen in the original movie, but this piece of shit rehashes those jokes as if they're new originals this time around. 
 
Writer/directors Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer were also responsible for the reprehensible Date Movie and clearly pitched in the least funny parts of the Scary Movie franchise. They're two completely talentless hacks who just watch a bunch of trailers, toss together a script over the weekend which "mocks" them, and then call it a day and cash the check. If I ever met these cocksuckers in person, I'd have to stop and clearly decide whether I wanted to punch them in the mouth or not. The cast doesn't fare any better, either; our young lead principals seem to only exist to make us realize how talented the kids in Scary Movie really were by comparison, especially Jayma Mays doing nothing but a feature-length Anna Faris impression. (And oh yeah, that damn dwarf Tony Cox who's in every one of these things, has anyone ever thought he was funny?) As usual, a handful of older veterans who must've REALLY needed that paycheck signed up to be humiliated: this time around it's Jennifer Coolidge, Crispin Glover, David Carradine, and Fred Willard. When FRED MOTHERFUCKING WILLARD is in your comedy and isn't funny, you suck at life and need to kill yourself. A couple of halfway amusing jokes which I'm almost certain were complete accidents are the only reason this steaming turd gets even one point, because by the third or fourth scene where we're watching peculiar old white people break it down to rap music, it was running in the negative numbers. 
 
Ya know, in retrospect, I think I was unfair to this movie. 
 
I DIDN'T BITCH ABOUT IT ENOUGH. 
 
-This is the sort of movie which is paced so badly that, after assuming that I was about twenty minutes in, I looked at the clock and was shocked and appalled to find out that eight minutes had elapsed. I eventually got to the point where I no longer wondered what would happen next, and instead dreaded whatever the movie would throw at me in a "jesus christ, what else could they possibly fuck up... well, that answers my question" kind of way. 
 
-Carmen Electra actually out-acts her fellow cast members whenever she's onscreen. Seriously. Think about that for a minute. 
 
-Darrell Hammond actually does a pretty good imitation of Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow. Crispin Glover actually does an almost competent imitation of Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka. Too bad the script doesn't give them anything interesting to do. In this movie, Jack's drunk and Willy's a pedophile. That's it. 
 
-Upon my traditional post-movie IMDB visit, I find that Katt Williams is in this movie, as the voice of a talking beaver (no points for guessing its full name is Harry Beaver). Williams can be devastatingly hilarious with the right material. Parts of his stand-up specials almost had me on the floor laughing. This time I didn't even realize that he was doing the voice of one of the main characters. 
 
-Exactly what genre is supposedly being sent up here? This movie seems to think that X-Men, Click, The Chronicles of Narnia and Borat have the same target audiences. 
 
-Where the hell are all the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings jokes which you'd think would be mandatory for a movie like this? Except for one lame Chewbacca stand-in, I didn't spot any at all. 
 
-Is there any moment in the entire movie which points out all its problems better than the Snakes on a Plane sequence? Some generic black dude who is allegedly doing a Sam Jackson impression struts out and screams, "I have had it with these goddamn snakes on this goddamn plane!" Anyone who even saw the trailers for Snakes can tell that ain't the real line. If this movie had been rated R like it damn well should've, they could've at least been accurate, but this film has such a hard-on for conning middle schoolers out of their lunch money that they conciously went with the wrong reference just to be more commercial. Worst of all, after "Samuel L" yells the same line three or four times in a row, someone reasonably asks him why he keeps saying that: "Because the internet bloggers love it!" That line hints towards an entire universe of possible social satire which this movie just drops and completely ignores.
 
 
The Wicker Man (2006): 1/10
Writer/director Neil LaBute fucking hates women. That's the only way to possibly describe this crazy bad movie. He is absolutely terrified of anything with a vagina, and thinks they're all in one big conspiracy to cut his nuts off. How else are we to read this movie, in which every woman is an evil villain and every man is their victim? I'm not exagerrating, and I'm SPOILING the ending right now because it fucking deserves it: at the end of this movie, every single female character in the entire film is revealed to be part of the giant feminazi conspiracy. (In the most banal way possible, when a bunch of masked characters all uncover their faces and we're supposed to go "OMG, it's That Girl!" about a dozen times in a row.) The only reason I'm not giving this ugly pile of misogyny a 0/10 is because at least it has the balls to keep the original 1973 version's ending, even though it still manages to fuck up the little details. 
 
Rampant phobias of vagina dentata aside, this is one astonishingly bad movie. Every single part of the moviemaking process is fumbled, from the awesomely awful dialogue to the inane plot to the hilariously awful costumes to the all-thumbs editing to the teeth-grinding "acting". Nicholas Cage thoroughly embarasses himself in the lead, and truthfully he deserves better. Yes, you read that right, and I'm not a fan of his, but Nicholas Ghost Rider fucking National TreasureS Cage didn't do anything worth being stuck in such a wretched piece of shit as this. And what the fuck is Ellen The Exorcist goddamn Last Picture Show motherfucking Requiem for a Dream Burstyn doing here?! That's god-damned blasphemy, to kidnap such a legendary actress into a movie which takes a gigantic shit all over her entire gender. 
 
I'm trying to think of anything good to say here. I'm failing. It's quite possibly the very worst of all the crappy remakes of 70s horror movies we've been getting recently. This fucking blew. Oh wait, here's one possible positive: you could use this movie as a weapon of theological destruction. If for some reason you know a Wiccan whom you don't like very much and want to piss them off, just show them this movie. Its incredibly wrong-headed and hostile take on their religion will make their head explode.
 
 
Friday the 13th: Part 3-D: 2/10
Lazy, contemptuous, mercenary, purposeless, dumb, gimmicky, sexist, racist, contradictory, and altogether amateurish effort which has absolutely no goal beyond separating crowds of screaming teenagers from their ticket money. Unfortunately, it accomplished that quite well, so they made eight more of these fuckin' things. It doesn't even attempt to do anything different from the previous installments, and just goes merrily about its bloody stupid way, insulting your intelligence the whole time. Instead of giving a full review, I'm just gonna pick out a few things to bitch about: 
 
-This is the film that addressess the eternal question, why does Jason wear the hockey mask? The answer: because this random hockey mask was there, and Jason put it on for no explicable reason, and apparently thought it was so cool that he kept it for the next twenty-five years. 
 
-How's this for some color commentary: for the first time in three movies, we've finally got some non-white characters in an F13 flick, and they're GANG MEMBERS. No, really. Oddly middle-aged looking gang members. And the filmmakers are such squares that they make the black guy into a skinhead biker in a leather jacket, just throwing all the "street thug" stereotypes at the wall at once. Despite all that, said black skinhead is clearly the best actor in the movie, especially with that terrifying smile he gives through the car windshield. 
 
-This time they don't even try to explain why Jason is killing people. He just is. Jason also seems to be moving around pretty good for a guy who got split down the middle with a machete at the end of the previous movie, which was the day before this one in storyline terms. In fact, this film continues F13's fine tradition of having no continuity whatsoever by flatly contradicting the previous film's claim that the entire Crystal Lake vacinity had been abandoned after the events in the first movie. 
 
-Speaking of which, how about that distasteful flashback when the girl recalls being attacked by Jason years prior? Apparently the original script had Mama Voorhees' baby boy raping the shit out of her, but the filmmakers toned that aspect down, just implying it instead of blatantly stating it. The only thing worse than using a gratuitous rape as a plot point in a genre film, is trying to use a gratuitous rape as a plot point in a manner where the audience knows damn well that rapin' took place, although the filmmakers can claim plausible deniability since they never actually showed it. 
 
-Speaking of exploitation, why even bother having gratuitous nudity in a movie like this and then frame it so poorly that half the time you can't see it (the dreaded "Faye Dunaway's nipples are juuust under the bottom of the screen" syndrome), and the rest of it is just filmed in a not-at-all-sexy way? 
 
-They reinstituted some gore this time around compared to the fairly bloodless Part 2, but it all looks awfully phony. 
 
-And oh yeah, THE WHOLE MOVIE IS IN 3-D. This is in that bizarre period when every horror franchise out there was releasing their third sequel in this format; Jaws and Amityville both did the same thing around the same time. There are one or two uses of this gimmick which seem like they might be effective, but most of it is such inane, incredibly lazy shit like someone holding up a stick towards the camera. Oooh, gives me chills. It also has the side effect of 
making about half the shots in the movie waver in and out of focus at random.
 
EDIT: I was in such a hurry to cleanse myself of this piece of crap, I forgot two of the most loathesome parts: 
 
-In another awesomely racist bit, one of our teenagers is supposed to be Hispanic of some sort. During a scene where she goes to a store to buy groceries, she gets up to the counter and the cashier contemptuously tells her "We don't take food stamps", despite there being no food stamps in sight. Then... the girl turns to her companion and asks for money! Somehow this cashier is psychic and knew that this girl was going to be a clumsy stereotype! All this is made even more awful by the fact that the "Hispanic" girl is played by an actor who is 100% white. I don't mean "The Rock doesn't exactly look black" sort of dithering, I mean this is clearly a Caucasian that the filmmakers are strangely trying to pass off as something else. The whole thing could damn near be a Carlos Mencia skit, it's so desperately racist and unfunny. 
 
-The other lead girl who dies is pregnant. This is established early in the movie, and then never referred to again, to the point I actually forgot about it until I was reading a review online which mentioned it. This means that the girl who has sex in the hammock, the girl whose boobs we (attempt to) ogle in the shower, the girl who dies the goriest death in the picture when she's stabbed through the tit from behind, this girl is supposed to be carrying a child the whole time. Talk about fucking tasteless.
 
 
Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning: 2/10
Oh man, where to even START about this one...
 
-There is a part, about halfway through is abysmal excuse for a movie, where I laughed SO hard that I literally hyperventilated. See, this skeezy guy who looks like Super Mario comes to pick up his girlfriend from work. She's a waitress, and is so ridiculously out of his league that it's actually slightly less realistic than the part where "Jason" kills a guy by shoving a road flare in his mouth. While Mario is out in the parking lot snorting coke, the chick goes into the bathroom and randomly flashes her boobs at herself in the mirror while crying out "Show time!". (I know the F13 name requires some nudity which can be described as gratuitous, but come ON). She walks out... and the words "a cat jumps out at her" completely fail to fully illustrate the greatness of what happens. I mean, someone off-screen quite clearly rears back and with a mighty overhand hurls a cat at this chick's head. Complete with a sound effect as if someone had just stepped on it's tail, and the prerequisite loud orchestral sting on the soundtrack. My stomach hurt after I was done cackling. I almost want to recommend this movie, just for people to see that. No, wait, on second thought, it's not worth it, this movie sucks. 
 
-Almost as funny is another bit later on. "Jason" is running around this house, killing people. (We get another random chick getting topless by herself here.) After we see everyone else in the house get killed, this kid who's asleep on the couch wakes up for no reason and goes upstairs. (He's such a Saucy 80's Black Kid that he does everything but demand to know what Willis is talkin' bout.) He opens a bedroom door, and a flash of lightning illuminates a bunch of dead bodies stacked on the bed. (This is the first lightning we've seen in the movie, and the first hint that there's even a drop of rain falling, in the Traditional Friday the 13th Third Act Thunderstorm.) His screams draw in some camp counselor type bitch, who asks what's the matter. (She randomly appears out of nowhere, when she was supposed to be out searching for the others.) She goes into the corpse depository to see what's wrong. (She walks out of our line of sight and into the room to do so.) And then nothing happens. (The setup was practically guaranteeing that she was about to get killed.) They run downstairs, Webster trips on nothing and inexplicably falls down, and then "Jason" busts through the front door and into the house. (It had previously been thoroughly established that he was, indeed, already inside.) Mind-fucking-boggling. 
 
-Not long after that, one of the most painfully groan-inducing moments I've ever seen happens when a girl trips, falls, and is apparently stuck to the ground via powerful electromagnets, because she could clearly get up and run away yet she just chooses to flail around and scream instead. 
 
-It took FOUR people to write this screenplay?! FOUR guys to write lines like "Crap my ass!"? I do believe that it took four writers to insert all the completely random victims in this movie who have nothing to do with the plot, show up out of nowhere, and die five minutes later. 
 
-You might notice I keep typing it "Jason", in quotes. That's because this is the infamous one where Jason Voorhees isn't the killer, it's a copycat pretending to be him. (The fanboys were NOT pleased.) They try to make his identity a mystery, but they fail. They might as well have the dude wearing an "IT'S ME!" t-shirt. He's so, so obviously the killer that you would be excused for thinking that it must be a red herring, because it's too blatant, even the people who made THIS movie couldn't be THAT dumb. No, they were absolutely that dumb. Even though it's a fake Jason, he still miraculously has the real one's freaky retard strength and ability to no-sell getting run over by a bulldozer. And in retrospect, it didn't make any sense that he would want to kill every random person he saw. 
 
-They hired cuter girls this time. The cutest one is the only one whose tits we don't see. Unacceptable. 
 
-They really Scarfaced up the dialogue, didn't they? There's a noticeably raised level of cursing in this one, for whatever reason. I don't see the teens of 1985 going "Hey man, did you hear? They say FUCK like ten times as much in the new Jason movie, and it makes me wanna see it so much more!" Also, more drugs than in previous installments. 
 
-The old "it was only a dream" routine was used at least twice in this film. My count may be low. 
 
-There's a lot of really friggin' weird people in this movie. I mean, we've got the little black kid who likes to play frightening pranks on fragile mental patients, his older brother, Michael Jackson lookalike, and drug-dealing pimp who hits on a plain white girl while his hot black girlfriend is sitting right next to him, the stuttering virgin guy who somehow wasn't Brad Dourif but should've been, the "punk" girl with her kinderwhore makeup and wacky robot dance, Super Perverted Coked-Up Mario, the pretty girl who inexplicably goes out with him, the lamest accidental Hamlet reference of all time with the forensic paramedic's lousy gallows humor, and the lamest comic relief in any movie ever made with Ethel and Junior the lovable terrifying foulmouthed bellowing home-cookin' rednecks. They all make our lead hero Tommy Jarvis seem like a nice well-adjusted fellow, and he's selectively deaf, hallucinates all kind of shit, and is apparently a serial killer. 
 
-Tommy at one point gives someone an F-U through a table. Yes, really. Later on he magically turns into a stunt double with kung-fu grip. Apparently the state mental hospital where he's supposedly spent the past decade must have an excellent martial arts curriculum. 
 
-The acting is so uniformly bad by every single cast member that I must come to the conclusion that it's not the actors' fault. Oh, none of them are the missed Oliviers of history, to be sure. But statistically speaking, they should've at least accidentally cast one actor in the movie who could actually, you know, act. Thus I assume it must be the fault of the dumbass director, who never made anything you've heard of and thankfully never made another movie again after this tragedy. 
 
-It hurts me that this movie somehow ripped off the "get away from her, you BITCH" part from Aliens despite the fact that this movie came out first. 
 
-Movies like these make you really appreciate a good makeup effects technician, like the Tom Savinis of the world. This one clearly had no such person. All of the kills go like this: we see the killer swing the sharp object, and then the camera cuts to a different shot and then we see the wound, after it's already been inflicted. The monkeys-on-typewriters making this flick didn't know how to make an interactive prosthetic and put it on someone's body in order to realistically simulate violence. It's always "swing, edit, body laying there bloody". The very few times they experiment with showing the hit, it's always on a laughably fake limb, head, or torso which is quite clearly not the actual person. There's nothing in this movie on the level of realistic effects like where you actually saw a throat get cut in the first Friday. In fact, there's about half a dozen examples of people being killed offscreen, and someone else finding their body later. 
 
-In fact, check out the only original kill in the movie, the bit with the leather strap around the dude's head. Notice that "Jason" magically tightens it by turning it BOTH ways. 
 
-Continuity errors: how did that body instantly transport itself into the bed in the split-second while the girl was cilmbing up there? How did "Jason" hide inside the punk girl's room when there was absolutely nothing to hide behind? How did he teleport from inside the house to standing by the ambulance? Anyone else notice that the CONVENIENTLY PLACED PIT OF SPIKES wasn't there when they went into the barn? What the hell did "Jason" grab onto when he fell out the window? For that matter, why does this loony bin have a barn full of sharp weapons, exactly matching the barn from Part 3? How come we never heard anything else about the axe murderer from the start of the movie? 
 
-The only clever thing in the entire movie is that in Tommy's hallucinations, real Jason has his traditional mask, but fake "Jason" wears a slightly different one. 
 
-This movie establishes that 1.Tommy Jarvis is a complete nutcase who is institutionalized for life, and 2.Jason was cremated after his death. Please keep than in mind once you get to Part VI.
 
 
Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday: 1/10
Absolutely worthless, loathesome film that keeps all the worst aspects of the F13 series but ditching the stuff that people actually liked. The one point is for the Army trapping and blowing up Jason at the beginning, which was admittedly fucking cool. But that's pretty much it as far as entertainment goes. The movie decides that nobody actually wants to see the dude in a hockey mask, they'd rather see random people get possessed and turned into murderers instead. And it introduces some absolutely batshit insane retconning, shitting on the continuity in a contemptuous manner even by F13 standards. 
 
So apparently Pamela Voorhees was some kind of necromancing voodoo witch, and she called down some demon to resurrect the dead body of her drowned son, which is how Jason became an undead zombie. Uh-huh. The true Jason is represented as some kind of wormy hellspawn, which hops from body to body while searching for a new host: it's ultimately after Jason's SISTER, who of course we'd never heard of. Right. Now some kind of satanic bounty hunter is after Jason with some book-of-the-dead and a magic sword, which is the only way to kill Jason forever. Bullshit. 
 
Even beyond that crap, the movie is just unimaginative and badly made, with about the worst acting, writing and direction possible. Like, that nasty scene in the jailhouse with the fingers breaking: why?! Is that supposed to be funny, or scary, or anything other than sadistic, gratuitous, and gross? Fuck this piece of shit. Easily the very worst movie in the whole series. 
 

 

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning: 2/10
A quote from this movie's target audience: 
 
"OMG, this movie was SO SCARY! Everything was so old and dirty, and there were like no cable or ipods or anything, life sux0red back then! Okay, like, there are these four teenagers, and they're driving through Texas (ewwww, Texas, Bush Sux!) and they run into these creepy rednecks. They're like, cannibals, and they PRAY before they eat people, omg Xians r such hiipocryts! The teenagers are all pretty and wear nice clothes, so their really cool, but the bad guys are all big and fat and old and are soooo ugly, lol. And the movie isn't just scary, it's like so deep too, it's all about Vietnam which was so totally evil and JUST LIKE Iraq now. Rednecks suck, w00t!" 
 
Goddamn, this was one vile piece of shit. It's the origin story for Leatherface and family, and whoa Jesus it's not a good one. (I probably should've realized that as soon as I saw it was directed by Jonathan Liebesman, who also did the shitacular Darkness Falls.) In the 21st century, we're STILL making horror movies about pretty young people going on road trips and being waylaid by ugly locals? Can we not think of another plot? It doesn't help that the specific characters are such a pathetic mismatch: Leatherface and R. Lee Ermey's crazy sherriff are always confident and competent, never showing one ounce of doubt or fear, hardly ever make mistakes, and seem almost invincible. Meanwhile, our screaming random nobody teenagers never do ANYTHING right, actually believe the psycho killers when they say "if you win this contest you can go free", and are fully capable of somehow (in broad daylight, in a bare field) stepping directly on the only spring-loaded beartrap in the whole county. 
 
There's absolutely nothing that's truly frightening in this movie. The ridiculous overabundance of gore is just for gross-out, not for actually inducing fear. It tries to use all the hoary old tricks to shock the audience, from jump-out "gotcha!" scares to scary nursery rhymes to "omg, someone's hiding in the back seat, just when the hero was getting away!" (Exactly how a 7-foot, 400 pound behemoth could "hide" in the back seat of a car remains unexplained.) Even worse is the movie's laughable attempt at having some sort of political meaning. It makes the clumsiest, most transparent swipe at saying "slaughterhouse = Vietnam", and the parallels to Iraq are pretty obvious. The part that made me groan the hardest was when the movie tries to blame the American government for all this shit, what with the slaughterhouse getting closed down and the police office being abandoned and Ermey originally turning cannibal when he served in the Korean war. This film fairly vibrates with the rage of chocolate latte-fueld Hollywood hippies who have never actually been to Texas once in their fucking lives. 
 
EVEN WORSE: this movie is a prequel. Yet in the chronological sequal, the TCM remake, Ermey and Leatherface were alive and well, and free to kill whoever they wanted; also they were still living in the same house. (Which is a giant mansion art-directed within an inch of its life, a far cry from the believeably crappy and creepy house in the original TCM.) Thus, logically, the bad guys can't be killed or even seriously hurt in this movie, and furthermore none of the teenagers could've possibly gotten away, or else they would've alerted the authorities and at least the killers wouldn't still be in the same goddamn house. Conclusion: all the babyfaces get killed by the end of the movie. That's not a SPOILER, it's something I guessed just from watching the fuckin' trailer two years ago. Nothing is more reprehensible than a "thriller" which spoils its own ending just by existing
 
Less than half an hour into the movie, our "heroes" have already been captured by the psycho cannibals. Looking at the clock, I prayed that this didn't mean I was just going to watch these dipshits get tortured for the next hour. Unfortunately, my guess was right. The majority of the movie is nothing but these kids getting tortured, and tortured, AND TORTURED endlessly until their final spectacularly icky "mercy killings". If you like to watch endless scenes of OC-lookin' emo kids (who don't even remotely look like they belong in the 70s) spend the majority of a movie tied down, covered with blood, and screaming their lungs out, then this movie is perfect for you. What the fuck is supposed to be entertaining about this? It's not fun, it's not scary, it's just one long commercial for the makeup effects technicians. (And despite having gallons of loathesome gore, there's nary a tit nor ass to be seen in its natural setting.) 
 
This movie doesn't seem you to want to cheer for either the helpless weakling babyfaces or the ugly fanatical heels, so who the fuck are we supposed to like? Is there anything redeeming here? Well, R. Lee Ermey could be entertaining even in a Uwe Boll film, although his overuse here suggests that he could've been more effective with less screen time. Andrew Bryniarski at least makes a suitably menacing Leatherface, probably the best one since the original Gunnar Hansen. But those are pretty much the only compliments I can come up with. Stay away from this utterly unscary, hideously misguided exercise in torture porn.
 
 
Finding Neverland: 3/10
How the fuck did so many people convince themselves that this cloying pile of mediocrity was a GOOD movie?! 3.5 stars, this must've been when the chemo got to Ebert's brain. 84% on Rottentomatoes, my pasty white ass. This generic, predictable piece of shameless Oscar-bait fucking sucked. Speaking of Oscar: having this cold-bloodedly calculated and manipulative move get nominated for Best Picture is bad enough. But how the FUCKING BLOODY HELL did the inane, absolutely derivative, heard-it-all-a-thousand-times background music which indicated to us exactly how we're supposed to feel in every goddamn scene somehow win Best Original Score? BLOW ME, Academy, you worthless clusterfuck of conformity. 
 
Alright, let's sum things up: it's about a Struggling Artist (who is also a Boyishly Immature Dreamer) can't seem to find that Special Inspiration for his art, which is Promising, But Lacks That Special Something. He happens to discover a Struggling Single Mother and her Adorable Bunch Of Kids, and they Inspire Him To Rediscover His Lost Inner Child and also Compose His Greatest Work Ever. However, it's not all sunshine and roses as Conformist Society Looks Down On The Creative Individual, the Struggling Artist's Thankless Wife just Doesn't Understand Her Husband, and also the aforementioned Strong Single Mother not only has a Hostile Mother-In-Law With A Stick Up Her Ass, but she also just happens to catch one of those Deadly Unnamed Illnesses Where You Cough Sometimes But Have No Other Symptom. 
 
I'm serious about that goddamn consumptive disease that Kate Winslet catches here. We find out she has it in the clumsiest way possible, when she suddenly breaks out into a coughing fit and keels over unconcious. The movie never even bothers with a precise diagnosis, I guess it's tuberculosis, but they never bother to inform us. And except for the occasionaly batch of hacking, Winslet shows NO signs whatsoever of her terminal illness. Shit, even Moulin Rouge had the deceny to have the hot consumptive chick cough up a little blood. This kind of contrived bullshit writing belongs in 18th-century opera, not 21st-century cinema. 
 
Aside from that, Johnny Depp plays his one hundredth Boy Who Never Grew Up character, and he's never done it worse. It never mattered once in this movie that it was Johnny Fucking Depp in this role; he underplays it so solemnly that you could've stuck any of a thousand actors in the same part, and gotten the same result. Winslet is similarly boring as hell, absolutely blank in a role which has no characteristics other than "strong single mother trying to raise her family as best she can in a difficult world". Julie Christie embarasses herself in a shrill performance as Winslet's tightass mother, and Dustin Hoffman seems to be wishing he was in another movie in a sleepwalking role as a theatre producer. 
 
(In fact, the only actor who impressed me in this entire painful experience was one Radha Mitchell. She's given the tricky part of playing Depp's wife, who as written seems to despise her husband and everything he stands for. However, she somehow works around the ham-handed script and manages to inject a feeling of being an actual person, who really does love her husband but just thinks he acts like such a dumbass at times. If, like me, Mitchell's name is only vaguely familiar to you, she played the leading ladies in such random genre stuff as Pitch Black, Silent Hill, Man on Fire, and Phone Booth, and she's an actress to watch out for in the future.) 
 
This movie was so fucking lazy that it even included the creaky old device dramatizing for us all the scenes which happened inside the character's heads. This led to endless shots of Winslet and the kids wandering around in dream worlds, all the while marvelling at it like kids in a commercial who just spotted the Sunny D inside the fridge. I'm sure that showing us the character's imaginations on-screen was real imaginative back when Olivier did it sixty years ago in Henry V, but Jesus it's tired by now. This was like my worst nightmare, all my favorite artists somehow banding together and making something that was just barely more appealing than getting cornholed. I can't begin to fathom why it got such a massive blowjob from critics across the nation. This was poo. 

 

 

Cursed: 2/10
Why did I even bother watching this? It's a remake of the most overrated old horror franchise (The Wolf Man) from the people behind the most overrated modern horror franchise (Scream). I really should've known better. Our director Wes Craven lost all his talent around, oh, 1995, and writer Kevin Williamson has never scripted a good movie in his entire god-damned career. This movie's insanely difficult and chaotic production history certainly didn't help either. 
 
First, let's address the biggest problem: the screenplay, direct from the genius who wrote I Know What You Did Last Summer. Kevin Williamson is the most talentless hack to ever pretend to be a professional screenwriter. He does absolutely nothing different from the other thousand werewolf films in history, blatantly ripping off material from everything from The Wolf Man to American Werewolf In London to a direct steal from a particular episode of Buffy. The characters are paper-thin, the dialogue is loathesome in its self-congratulatory "cleverness", and the plot is predictable beyond description. The script has the kind of half-wit which thinks it's funny to have a scene at a PETA event in a werewolf movie. Depending on how you treated it, that could be hilarious; imagine a monstrous animal devouring an entire roomful of screaming PETA activists. That would be an obvious go-to punchline, but it would work. This movie, however, doesn't have anything actually happen at this party; they think it's funny just to say the word "PETA", with no further joke attached. This is LAZY shit, just awful. And all the usual contrived Williamson teeny horror bullshit is here, from the complete lack of parents, to cell phones which never work right, to the ludicrous red herrings which expect us to believe that someone will instantly turn on their best friends and think they're murderers, to the inevitable scene where the bad guy explains his whole evil scheme, to the really horrible over-the-top sound effects and music which seems to plague all Williamson's movies. And at the ending, the survivors go from being beaten half to death to smiling and laughing with their friends in a span of about fifteen seconds. It even includes the line "We're not so different!" spoken from a villain to a hero. Give me a fucking break. 
 
But anyway, the basic plot, Christina Ricci and Jessie Eisenberg play a couple of siblings who get, guess what, attacked and wounded by a werewolf. Ricci is playing a Standard Horror Heroine with no other definining characteristics, and has never looked less talented. Her brother figures out that they're both Cursed, she doesn't believe him, weird shit happens, yadda yadda yadda. For whatever reason, this is set in Hollywood, and the movie seems to think that just having Scott Baio or Craig Kilborn show up as themselves is hysterical. This movie has some really awful casting, like asking us to buy Portia de Rossi as a real live gypsy fortuneteller in 21st century Los Angeles. We're given C-listers like Shannon Elizabeth and Mya as warm bodies to slaughter, and the only person in the whole cast who makes any sort of impression is the woefully underused Judy Greer, who's snarky and awesome as a gold-digging bitch. 
 
This already had Bad Movie written all over it, but the crazy production problems certainly made it worse. For whatever reason, this movie was delayed, rewritten, reshot, and delayed again in an incredibly chaotic manner. How chaotic? Let's just say that Mandy Moore, Robert Forster, Skeet Ulrich, Illeana Douglas, Corey Feldman, Heather Langenkamp, Scott Foley, and Omar Epps were all in this movie at one point. They're not now. Their characters were either recast or cut completely out of the picture. To even further fuck things up, the movie was drastically edited down, with most of the gore taken out in order to score a wtf PG-13 rating. How or why the studio did this, who knows, they sure as hell didn't save the movie with these changes. Even werewolf master Rick Baker's prosthetics look inconsistent and cheap, with the real practical costumes and makeup not mixing well with some sub-par cgi. 
 
What is it about werewolf flicks which compells every filmmaker to make the exact same movie, over and over again? I'm trying to think of lupine movies which don't follow the standard rigid formula. So far, I've got Teen Wolf and Underworld, neither exactly the high points of the subgenre. Even the better wolfy films like the Ginger Snaps series seem content to keep doing the same shit over and over again. When you compare it to the vast array of different stories and interpretations in, say, zombie movies, it really does stand out. Hero gets attacked, turns into a werewolf, preys on their family and friends, and is then either destroyed or cured with some mystical Macguffin at the end (usually by killing the werewolf who made them). It's the exact same damn thing, every fucking time. What's the problem with showing just a little imagination? The ninety-second fake trailer for Werewolf Women of the SS had more interesting ideas in it than the entire runtime of Cursed.
 
 
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within: 2/10
Um, why the fuck does this movie even have the name "Final Fantasy" on it? The Final Fantasy games take place in a sorta Middle Earth neverland where medieval society exists with a steampunk aftertaste. This film is set, very specifically, on modern day Earth, in the year 2085, in the ruins of New York City. The games are usually about some kind of outsider, destined since birth, taking on an Evil Magical Empire along with a colorful assortment of friends and supporters. The movie is about a bunch of soldiers trying to machine-gun some invisible squid from outer space. There's practically no connection between the source material and this movie at all. What's the point of even calling this "Final Fantasy" when there's nary a chocobo to be found? It's more like Parasite Eve: The Later Years
 
Hell, Aliens seems to be the primary influence here, with plot twists, weapons, vehicles, wardrobe, electronic gadgets, and even background music ripped directly from that movie. Of course, they do manage to retain the very worst aspect of the FF games: the Nu-Age bullshit about lifestreams and Gaia and animistic spirits and a bunch of other nonsense that they should've just been honest about and called The Force. This old Save The Planet stuff is so tired that they even got to mocking it in the games itself (remember the incompetent Avalanche flunkies and wannabes in FFVII?), but the movie makes the mistake of taking it all deadly serious. Our human villains are, of course, some stuck-up military hawks who just want to blow shit up, gain power over the government, and think the scientifist hippies are crazy. Argh, the cliches, they hurts us so much. They never even attempt to specify why the neocons are wrong or why the neopagans are right. 
 
Even aside from that, filmmakers people just don't know what they're doing from a dramatic standpoint. Right at the beginning of the movie, we already get a big action scene with a bunch of faceless, unnamed heroes shooting at a bunch of unexplained, amorphous monsters, while the Suspenseful Background Music saws away. We don't know anything about these people, but the film honestly expects us to care when some monster does something inexplicable but apparently dangerous to some guy we just met a couple minutes ago and has been acting like an asshole the whole time. Epic fail. Oh, and did I mention the alien monsters are invisible? The only way you can see them is in POV shots through the soldiers' goggles, which gets old REAL fast. Even the filmmakers seemed to realize this, as halfway through the movie they invent some bullshit excuse for the monsters to suddenly become visible to the naked eye. Worst of all, towards the end of the movie, they try to ask us to feel SYMPATHY for the beasts. What?! These fuckers have committed mass genocide on the whole human race and murdered billions of us. No, they do not get the benefit of a doubt, you dumb cocksuckers. 
 
About the only positive here is a glorious voice cast: Alec Baldwin, James Woods, Donald Sutherland, Ving Rhames, Steve Buscemi, Jean Simmons, and Keith David. Of course, there's only so much they can do since their characters are stuck firmly in the Uncanny Valley with photorealistic but utterly wooden and unexpressive CGI faces. Oh, did I not mention that this is a computer-animated movie? This is a computer-animated movie. Pixar it ain't. Some of the visuals are pretty, but there nothing here that you can't see in the higher-quality animes out there. This movie would've probably been better if it had just had the same group of actors shot in live action (not good, mind you, but better). 
 
So, we've got a stupid plot in a boring movie made by incompetent people, arbitrarily slapped with the Final Fantasy label in order to steal money away from fanboys all over the globe. This movie goddamn sucked. Motherfuck all this.

 

 

I Know Who Killed Me: 2/10
What. The FUCK. Was that?! 
 
This is the infamous, universally panned bomb that won a record 8 Razzies, more than any other movie in history. Truthfully, was it that bad? Not really. It's certainly not the worst movie of all time; hell, it's not even the worst film I saw from 2007, considering the existence of Epic Movie and Hannibal Rising; and let's not forget that Uwe Boll somehow released several movies last year. So calling I Know Who Killed Me the worst film of 2007 is just plain old bandwagon-jumping hyperbole.
 
Of course, it's still pretty fucking terrible. This movie combines the stupid, the crazy, and the utterly inexplicable into the most perfect What Were They Thinking potpourri. Lindsay Lohan is a stripper (sort of) who never gets naked, and just to let us know She's All Grown Up she says "fuck" a lot. And gets various body parts chopped off. A lot of body parts, actually. I've still refused to see a single Eli Roth movie, but I imagine them being like this: sickeningly graphic and pointlessly cruel. The plot wavers between head-injury retarded and drug-fueled incoherence, yet somehow the secret identity of the villain is still amazingly easy to guess within twenty minutes or so. 
 
Lohan has taken a lot of flack for her performance in this movie, but truthfully the only real mistake she made was simply agreeing to be in it. Nobody, NOBODY could've made this material work. You could've replaced Lohan with Keira Knightly or Ellen Page or Dakota Fanning or Meryl Streep, and it still would've been an incomprehensible mess. The director at least attempts to salvage the awful script with a few pathetically clumsy attempts at style, but stuff like the red/blue color themes are handled so terribly (the red scenes look like they're playing on a Virtua Boy) that it only manages to come off like a David Lynch ripoff and make the movie even more unintentionally hilarious. 
 
This movie doesn't just insult your intelligence, it calls your intelligence's mom a fucking whore. It's so ludicrous that I almost want to recommend people to watch it, just so they can witness a movie which is so insanely bad that it must be seen to be believed. 
 
 
Resident Evil: Extinction: 2/10
Crap. Pure fucking crap. This movie was so lousy that towards the end, I actually starting MST3K-ing it just to amuse myself, because Christ knows the movie itself wasn't entertaining. I mean, for fuck's sake, it was directed by Russell "Hack" Mulcahy and written by Paul W. "Bigger Hack" S. Anderson, and just look at the cast: Milla Jovavich, Ali Larter, Oded Fehr, Linden Ashby, Ashanti, and Mike Epps. If that list doesn't make you recoil in horror, then you've got tougher sensibilities than I. 
 
Every single thing about this movie is bad. Everything. Bad plot, bad dialogue, bad acting, bad photography, bad special effects, bad action scenes, bad ideas all around. Every possibility for something cool seems almost willfully sabotaged or ignored. And every single thing in this movie is directly ripped off from another movie. Everything. The basic plot is Road Warrior meets Land of the Dead, with a little X-Men, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Dawn of the Dead remake thrown in for spice. Milla Jovavich's character Alice is a combination of Jean Grey and Buffy, but first they got her stinking drunk and then repeatedly clubbed her over the head just to make sure that no intelligence survived. 
 
To all you fans of the Resident Evil games: remember that one RE game where the entire world had fallen into zombiegeddon, and a bunch of survivors are living Mad Max-stylez out in the desert? Me neither, since it never fucking happened, but that didn't stop the filmmakers from pulling this lame scenario out of their ass. But the worst part about this movie's blatant contempt for the gaming fandom isn't the stuff they made up, but the laughably pathetic attempts they made at placating the fanboys. That is, there are three characters in this movie who share names and basic appearances with people from the games (Claire, Carlos, and Wesker), but everything else about them has been randomly changed so that name and appearance are the only thing they have in common with the originals. Unless I missed the game where Wesker was the CEO of Umbrella. But even if this was just a standalone movie which wasn't needlessly bastardizing its source material, it still sucked on toast. 
 

 

House of the Dead: 0/10
I'm going to challenge myself here: I'm going to try to write this entire review without any swearing. I will probably fail. I've got a whole lot to say. I am afraid that I will fail to impart just how insanely incompetent this jaw-dropping atrocity is. Those who have not borne witness with their own scarred eyes might not believe the horror which this movie visits upon the mortal coil. 
 
-Uwe Boll really is the modern Ed Wood. I say that in all seriousness, without a trace of irony or exaggeration. He is, by far, the consistently worst big-budget director working today. He has never made a good movie. He has never even made a movie which wasn't shockingly bad. And like Wood, he seems to have absolutely no idea how horrible his product is. Listening to interviews with him, you can tell that he's truly mystified why people around the world spit at the mention of his name. He is absolutely clueless about his complete and utter lack of any and all artistic ability or talent. And yet he really believes that he's making decent genre flicks! Boll is one of those people who makes me hopeful about making films myself, because there's no way on earth I could even accidentally make something as worthless as his film House of the Dead
 
-This movie cuts its own throat right at the beginning, with the awful narration informing us that this one guy is alive, but that these other people are all dead. Wow, the suspense, it is killing me. 
 
-Boll once again takes a big ol' dump over the heads of all the game fans in the world. The House of the Dead games are about some kind of soldiers fighting a variety of demonic creatures, in a gothic European city. The House of the Dead movie is about a bunch of yuppies who go to a rave on a Carribbean island and find themselves in a zombie film. 
 
-But he does try to assuage the fanboys in the most brow-furrowing way possible: he puts footage from the actual video game into the movie itself! Not as in "the camera watches someone playing this video game", I mean like the audience is playing it. He actually flashes full-screen video from the game in random little clips throughout the movie. Absolutely mind-boggling. Too bad Sega got in their product placement via the giant "SEGA" banner in the middle of the rave (corporate sponsored rave, with no drugs, entirely populated by 30somethings, on a deserted island?), so that they couldn't disavow all knowledge of this travesty. 
 
-There sure are a lot of cold-climate evergreen trees here in Vancouver the tropical Carribbean island. 
 
-The characters in this film make the campers from any given Friday the 13th look erudite and likable. I'm not kidding. These are some really bad actors, being shepherded by a really bad director, intoning a really bad script, while playing characters who are so dimwitted and obnoxious that I'm amazed audiences didn't riot in the theaters after ten minutes of this garbage. I was going to go with a "I've seen better acting in my high school plays", but that's so literally true that it's not a fair comparison. Instead, I'll say that I have seen better acting from first-year wrestling rookies who've had less than a dozen matches. All of the main stars in this picture should look back upon their work here with shame. It's no surprise that this is by far the worst movie Jurgen Prochnow has ever been in (and remember that he's been in Dune, Wing Commander, Body of Evidence, and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me), but when I tell you that this movie stains the good reputation of CLINT HOWARD, and I'm NOT JOKING, please reflect and ponder upon that. 
 
-How did all these drunken wannabe-hipster douchebags learn to fight and shoot like they're Jason Bourne, anyway? 
 
-All the production people are seemingly retarded too. The lighting, makeup, costumes, sets, special effects, and editing would all feel cheap even on the SciFi Channel. Even the continuity checker was asleep: grok how Prochnow at one point takes a Colt .45 (which holds 7 bullets) and fires 13 times in a row. There's also at least a couple of times where the actors obviously flubbed their lines, but it was left in the finished movie anyway. 
 
-Boll makes sure to give us ye old gratuitous nudity with at least three topless chicks in the first fifteen minutes. After that, we never see tits again. This is a typical symptom of the very worst in crass exploitation.
 
-This film actually contains the line "It's quiet... too quiet!" 
 
-Until this film taught me, I had no idea that you could cut someone's face off and then wear it as a mask, and it will look so convincing that even the dead guy's best friends will instantly accept that you're really him. 
 
-Why does Boll always have loud, hideous techno music blasting during all of the action scenes? He's done this in every movie of his that I've seen. Often the sound is mixed badly, and the earache-inducing music drowns out any dialogue or sound effects occuring at the same time. Maybe the editors thought the action scenes needed all the help they could get. Lord knows that one big shootout is one of the most astonishingly inept setpieces I've ever seen. 
 
-Speaking of something Boll does in every movie: his shameless sequel-begging endings. Every single time, the movie ends with some sort of "this is only the beginning!" claptrap. The only thing worse than watching these movies is contemplating the possibility of even more of them being made in the future. 
 
-Ya know what? I can't keep my promise. This movie is the worst Boll flick that I've seen, unbelievably terrible, and it offends me that the studios actually released this in theaters and that Boll actually got money to make more movies. So I gotta say it: Fuck Uwe! 
 
 
Bloodrayne 2: Deliverance: 2/10
I'm disappointed. Calling this the best movie Uwe Boll ever made isn't just damning it with the faintest praise. It's a wretchedly bad movie, but never reaches the insane heights of some of his other work. It's just painful SciFi Channel bad instead of Worst Director Ever bad. This time Boll tries his hand at mangling yet another American genre, the Western, and he does about as poorly as you'd expect. Various observations: 
 
-The basic plot: Rayne, a vampire hunter who is a half-vampire herself (arrgh, the cliches, they burns me) chases a vampiric Billy the Kid in the old West. Yes, really. And for some reason Billy the Kid, a man whose real-life American history is thoroughyl documented and commonly known by damn near everyone, here is presented as a centuries-old master bloodsucker who talks with a thick German accent. Epic fail. 
 
-Natassia Malthe plays Rayne, but she does not believably simulate a vampire, or a badass, or a cowgirl, or anything of the sort. She looks and sounds like exactly what she is: a scrawny Norwegian ballerina pretending to be an actress. And where does Rayne find designer mascara and eyeliner on the dusty cowboy trail? In every closeup, she's obviously wearing heavy makeup like she's about to step out on the runway of a Victoria's Secret show. 
 
-You know how Uwe always uses that omnipresent, godawful techno music in all his movies? Thankfully, he somehow manages to refrain from that in his Western here, but he replaces it with terribly generic "western" music which sounds like it should be playing in the background of City Slickers II, not a "serious" action thriller. 
 
-Holy Plagiarism, Batman: a cowardly writer from back East hangs out with the villains in an obsessive quest to get material for his work. He is such a ripoff of the same character from Unforgiven that he even wears the exact same hairstyle, glasses, and hat. 
 
-How many saloons in the Old West had white employees, white customers, and were owned and operated by a black guy? 
 
-Not only does this movie follow the standard Boll formula of having every single woman in the picture look like a Skinemax starlet in her 20s, but every female character wears a cleavage-hoisting corset, even housewives tucking their kids in at night. 
 
-There's actually a character named Irish Mick. No, seriously, he introduces himself that way. 
 
-There's a scene where Rayne gambles against the villains in a poker game. Nobody but James Bond has ever made this work. Poker is essentially a game of chance, but these shitty movies always have our heroes pull four aces out of their ass in such a way that seems to imply that they won because they were Good, not because of luck. I've seen this sort of scene happen time and time again, and it never makes sense. 
 
Truthfully, I didn't even bother finish watching this. There's no hysterically incompetent shit to laugh at, and zero sex and hardly any action to keep your attention in the meantime. It wasn't the "so bad it's awesome" like House of the Dead, it was just boring and lame.

 

 

 

 

And that's all.  

 

 

 

 

...fuck that, it's not NEARLY all.  

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Highlander 2Such an abomination of everything that made the first one great.

 

I don't disagree at all that this is a wretched, wretched movie.  Probably in the bottom 1% of theatrical releases.  I can't argue with anyone who lists this as the worst movie they've ever seen.

 

Having said that, it's really arguable whether or not this is even the worst movie in the franchise.  I'd definitely say the fifth movie, Highlander: The Source was even worse.  Eh, the fourth movie might even have been worse.  Imo, Four is probably better than 2 and 5, but... well, what isn't.  Highlander: the Source is just as badly written, cheaply made, looks terrible, and has no stars (Adrian Paul and a couple holdovers from the tv series are the only "name" actors.  At least 2 had a better cast).  Oh. and The Source is almost as thorough with it's ridiculous retcons of the original premise.

 

I generally don't rent or see too many awful movies in theaters (it helps that I avoid low budget stuff, straight-to-dvd, and horror in general).  I think the worst films I've seen have probably been the SyFy weekend creature features (which I basically channel surf through instead of watching every minute) or MST3K episodes.  Most SyFy flims are at least campy and don't take themselves too seriously.  There's been some dismally cheap ones that are just terrible to sit through.  The first Pumpkinhead sequel SyFy did five or six years ago stands out as being dark (looked like it was shot in a cave), unpleasant, and mostly amateurish.  Sharknado is great art by comparison.

 

Space Mutiny (MST3K) is one of my favorite bad flims.  Incompetent in all areas.  Even the casting is bad.  I've always thought the love interest could plausibly be mistaken for the hero's mother.  She looks a little old to be an ingenue.

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In fairness to everything I listed that isn't FART The Movie... Epic Movie and those parody comedies really do look so bad that I can't even think of watching one, which is the main reason I'll never be able to see "that was the worst I ever saw". I can't think of any motivation to see them beyond "padding my worst films seen" list. Which is a strange thing to do.

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I think Jingus hates himself, you guys.

...yeah, pretty much.  

 

 

The first Pumpkinhead sequel SyFy did five or six years ago stands out as being dark (looked like it was shot in a cave), unpleasant, and mostly amateurish. 

I turned that off the very instant that "Pumpkinhead" first showed up, literally looking like an effect from a Sega CD game.  We're literally talking Night Trap: The Motion Picture here.  

 

 

 

And now:

Never gonna stop me

Never gonna stop

NEVER GONNA STOP MEEEEE

NEVER GONNA STOP! (stop, stop, stop)

 

 

SPOILERED for being stupidly overly verbose:

Battlefield Earth: 1/10
This movie hurt me. It hurt me in my ass. I've of course heard about this legendary bomb for years. I finally watch the damn thing, and it's not even bad in a funny or entertaining way. It's not a Wicker Man that you can snicker at in disbelief. It's more like being forced to watch the world's worst episode of Star Trek, an exercise about as fun as picking fresh scabs off an oozing sore. Instead of even bothering to provide my own review, I'm just gonna skim the net and copy a few quotes that seem funny or insightful enough that I wish I had written them. 
 
Roger Ebert: "Some movies run off the rails. This one is like the train crash in The Fugitive. I watched it in mounting gloom, realizing I was witnessing something historic, a film that for decades to come will be the punch line of jokes about bad movies." 
 
Richard Roeper: "The real danger of Scientology is that John Travolta may someday make another movie based on the writings of L. Ron Hubbard."
 
Jon Stewart: "A cross between Star Wars and the smell of ass."
 
Mr. Cranky: "The only thing I can figure out is that the Church of Scientology decided that they wanted to ensure nobody else joined up. This movie is like watching the Pope accidentally catch on fire while giving Easter Mass. If that's not a time to rethink your spiritual choices, what is?"
 
 
Angel's Dance: 3/10
Sometimes a movie comes along which does ideas I'd come up with myself, but does them even better than I'd imagined: The Matrix, The Descent, Shoot 'Em Up. That's pretty annoying. You know what's even more annoying? When a flatulent flick like Angel's Dance takes and idea I'd had (a hitman has to kill a completely innocent woman as his first target to prove their loyalty, but she proves hard to kill and he falls in love with her) and turns it into shit. In this movie, she basically pulls a "Jennifer Lopez in Enough" and Fights The Power, while in my idea the poor victim had her life destroyed and was mentally traumatized by repeated murder attempts. I like mine better. Oddly enough, I could see Joss Whedon writing either version. 
 
Anyway, this is indeed about a mafia hitman, and it's fucked from the start by our awful protagonist. He's played by Kyle Chandler, who went on to become the main character in Friday Night Lights; good for him. He sure does suck here. The character is already written as an ignorant, ill-tempered, thoroughly stupid rookie; and Chandler makes no attempt whatsoever to rise above the material. This is our hero, a low-level mobster who is a complete asshole and an utter moron. Meanwhile, Sheryl Lee plays (sigh) Angelica Chaste, the neurotic young victim who was randomly picked out of a phone book. It's not like Lee has no history playing either psychos or villains, she was Laura Fucking Palmer for pete's sake. When she's playing the 75% insane young woman in the earlier parts, she's fine; but when she turns into La Femme Nikita later on, whoa jesus I wasn't buying what she was selling. (And she's wearing a HORRIBLE wig which somehow does the unthinkable and makes Lee unattractive.) Meanwhile, the best performance is turned in by James Belushi of all people, who is a sort of Zen master assassin. He stretches the thin character to its fullest, and somehow makes it seem vaguely plausible that someone would take great inspiration from both Nietzsche and Buddha. 
 
The 90s sure offered a cornucopia of crappy movies about hitmen, didn't they? Every motherfucker with a camera wanted to be Quentin Tarantino, and it was all too obvious that these wannabes didn't know jack shit about how the mafia or murders worked in real life. Just off the top of my head, I can think of at least four other movies from that time period where "assassin falls in love with his target" was the main plot. Maybe I set myself up for failure by going straight from a couple episodes of The Sopranos to a direct-to-video indy assassin flick like this. Yet even outside of that 90s trend, this would still be a crappy standalone movie, with dumb plot holes, predictable swerves, and boring action. Even if you like the subject matter, skip this shit. Go watch a forgotten gem like Bulletproof Heart instead.
 
 
Ready To Rumble: 0/10
This is such an astonishingly awful piece of shit that it's hard to believe that even a piece of shit company like WCW circa 1999 would be capable of producing something this bad. I saw this motherfucker in the theaters when it first came out; I was expecting it to be laughably terrible, but even I was surprised by just how hard it sucked. The most terrifying part is something Scott Hudson told me one time: they apparently asked for submissions from the fans for script ideas, and this was allegedly the best one they got. I shudder to think about the toilet scrapings which landed in the Rejected pile. 
 
So the basic plot is about a couple of dorks played by David Arquette and Scott Caan. They're complete dumbasses. They're also diehard WCW fans. But I repeat myself. Anyway, when their hero Jimmy The King (Oliver Platt) is Montreal-ed by the promoter, they decide it's up to them to rescue their idol and help train him to regain his former glory. The basic plot is bad enough, but it's made even wormier by some truly disgraceful dialogue and loathesome "comedy". There are more poop jokes than you can count on your hands. Even if you killed Inigo Montoya's father. The entire film sometimes seems like one long checklist of gags that got cut out of Dumb & Dumber because they was just too lame. The dialogue is the kind of blindly obvious stuff which always chooses the most ugly and inelegant way to say anything, the kind of hackish drivel which makes you long for the subtle witticisms of a Scott Steiner promo. The acting is uniformly horrible too, with it being all too obvious that the entire cast doesn't give a shit about this movie and isn't even trying. It's not like Arquette, Caan, Platt, or Rose McGowan have never been in a bad movie before, but what the fuck were Joe Pantoliano and Martin Landau doing in this? Did they get audited by the IRS that year? As for the basic level of filmmaking competency, let me demonstrate my feelings by saying with complete honesty that, for director Brian Robbins, his later work like Norbit was a step up for him. The production and artistry is such a who-cares slapdash affair that you can always clearly tell whenever Kanyon replaces Platt for a stunt, since they didn't even bother cutting his hair to match the guy he's doubling for. Even if they'd refrained from bodily fluid jokes and had shown the slightest competence in the simple act of shooting and cutting a scene, the movie is essentially a feature-length version of a Tuesday Night Titans skit, complete with wrestlers dressing in their ring gear while walking down the street. 
 
The most personally frustrating part: if I had never been a wrestling fan, I probably would've rated this a little higher. Not much, but it could've gotten away with a 3. But being a fanatic about the squared circle, this contemptuous slap at the business I damn near killed myself for fills me with a sensation of legitimate, personal hatred towards those responsible for making it. This movie just plain hates professional wrestling. It sees all the wrestlers as morons or freaks, and is even worse in its condescending portrayal of wrestling fans as hopeless, deluded, retarded, altogether distasteful examples of the very worst of humanity. While I can certainly attest that is sometimes true, there is not a single person in this film who is presented as an intelligent person or a human being who is any way a positive role model for the audience. 
 
What makes this even worse is that this movie is obviously aimed directly towards wrestling fans, with a few sad little in-jokes and references which only the fanbase would get. The movie never bothers to tell us who Sting or Goldberg are or why they're important, it just expects us to already know. Pantoliano is obviously a stand-in for Eric Bischoff, and Diamond Dallas Page's character is a wrestler named Diamond Dallas Page who is inexplicably pushed to the world championship because of his friendship with the crooked boss... hey, wait a minute. Platt's character of the aging champion has a lot of parallels with various old veterans, with Jake Roberts, Ric Flair, and Jerry Lawler being the most obvious ones. But the movie never even attempts to explain why or how he became such a huge star, since he's a short fat guy, with no apparent charisma or workrate, and has a drinking problem which even the rasslin industry would consider out of control. This, plus dumbfuck errors like claiming that the top guy has been an undefeated champion for years, or even fucking up Michael Buffer's catchphrase which provided the movie's title, show an disgustingly lazy and scornful apathy towards the very demographic which the movie was theoretically aiming for. This movie bombed at the box office, not even making half its money back, and I'm glad for that fact. This kind of bullshit was insulting enough back in the days of Body Slam and No Holds Barred, but for something like this to be released after Beyond the Mat and Mick Foley's first book is inexcusable. 
 
EDIT: one last thing: the big highspot of the climactic match. It involves a wrestler plunging from the very top of the arena, a dangerous drop to the mat below. This movie started filming barely three months after the death of Owen Hart. An absolutely reprehensible Fuck You to anyone who ever cared about wrestling.

 

 

Teeth: 3/10
I don't know exactly how I knew this, but somehow I just knew that a woman didn't make this sausage snatcher. Watching its incredibly puerile and predatory take on teenage sexuality and heavyhanded Freudian symbolism, something about this movie just screams that it was made by a middle-aged man. (And I wasn't surprised to find that it was writer/director Mitchell Lichtenstein's debut feature film, since it has that n00b overconfidence practically coming out of its ass.) It thinks it's being feminist and subversive, but it's really just perpetuating the same old stereotypes we've been stuck with forever. 
 
Teeth is a shallow and mean-spirited horror/"comedy" which plays like a cross between the worst parts of David Cronenberg and John Waters. It's about Dawn, a teenage girl who literally has vagina dentata; a set of sharklike teeth Down There which provide an instant Bobbit for any male who goes trespassing. (And isn't "Dawn" about the third-most pretentious name possible for any female main character, right behind "Eve" and "Angela"?) One of the few good things about the movie is our leading lady, Jess Weixler, who does better work than the smug script deserves in trying to make Dawn seem like a realistic, emotional young woman. However, the actress is literally a decade older than the character she's playing, and it's pretty obvious too. The only other actor worth naming is John Hensley, who does a fine job essaying the part of Dawn's slimeball brother Brad. 
 
In fact, let's look at him for a minute. Brad, apparently a natural born pervert, has harbored incestuous feelings towards Dawn ever since they were little kids. However, the movie completely pusses out on this idea by making Brad her stepbrother instead of her actual blood kin. Furthermore, the movie is so obvious with its foreshadowing, that pretty much the first time you lay eyes on this creep, you know the movie's climax is gonna be him getting his dick bit off. There are tiny little pieces of more subtle stuff scattered around, like how Brad prefers to fuck his women in the ass and doesn't go near their vag (he had a bad experience playing doctor with Dawn when they were young), but that kind of stuff is tossed by the wayside as the movie insists on thundering down its depressingly predictable path. 
 
It doesn't help that this is one of the most startlingly old-fashioned examples of sexism which I've seen in a while. All the women are portrayed as weak-willed innocent victims, and ALL the men are rapists. I'm not kidding. Except for Dawn's father, at least they skipped THAT modern indy movie cliche, every single male character in this movie is a sexual predator who is constantly taking advantage of every pussy in sight. Talk about your straw man arguement; how about a straw cock? When this small town provides an apparently endless stream of perverted violators who just line up to be meaty filling Dawn's crunchy taco, it just made me personally angry at the filmmakers for being so incredibly shallow and uncreative with their storytelling. They even committed the #1 sin of false feminism in cinema, conspicuously showing more male nudity than female. We get our noses rubbed into several severed penises, but we never once get a glimpse of the southern smile which caused it all. That's not empowerment, that's pretentious reverse sexism. 
 
Even aside from that particular moral bankruprcy, the movie just sucks. It plays all the sickeningly graphic chubby-chomping scenes completely for comedy, we're just supposed to laugh at these guys who get permanently maimed in the most horrific way possible. It's as if they're so uncomfortable with their own plot that they didn't want to seriously consider the idea of pricknapping, and just turned it into a joke. The movie's attempt at dark humor and satire is so clumsy and ill-humored; just about every time some dude gets his johnson jerked off, you can bet that shortly thereafter you're going to get an Ironic Song Number with some upbeat old classic pop song from the 50s. "Hey look, we can contrast really sick shit with wholesome family favorites, aren't we so clever!" HAHAHA fuck you that's not funny. Also, why do we need such over-the-top details like Dawn's house being literally right next door to a nuclear power plant, with self-concious shots every five minutes of the cooling towers belching into the sky? Was it Anton Chekhov who said if you introduce an ailing mother with a chronic but vaguely unspecified illness in the first act, you better make it obvious that she'll be dead by the end? And on top of everything else, the movie is incredibly slow, with lots of pointless filler scenes; the goddamn thing is already half over by the time we finally get the first willy whacking. I'm all for a slow build to the disturbing stuff in a horror movie, but there's a difference between establishing tension and wasting time. 
 
Not surprisingly, this movie found some problems getting widely distributed, but it was for all the wrong reasons. Walmart decided that the subject matter was too controversial, and refused to stock it. Somehow I doubt that they had any similar problems selling whatever new movie about some rapist serial killer. Buncha dickless assholes all around.
 
 
Sex and Death 101: 2/10
Monumentally pretentious, infuriatingly smug, disgustingly sexist alleged romantic comedy is one of the more morally appalling movies I've seen in a while. I was not surprised to discover that writer/director Daniel Waters was also the man responsible for the script for Heathers, which although a better movie, also shared a similar condescending and superior tone along with some allegedly dark humor which wasn't remotely funny. (To further illustrate the scenario, he also wrote Hudson Hawk.) I think I can nicely sum up how much this movie sucks by quoting the filmmaker, who said it's "a sex farce for people who have actually had sex" and described his stylistic goal as "Luis Bunuel meets Caddyshack". Oh, and he cast Winona Ryder as a serial killer. Someone please find this wanker and do something appropriately violent so that he'll never be able to make another movie again. 
 
The most frustrating part is that the movie's basic idea, while a bit trite, could've still made a good film. A successful businessman (Simon Baker, a total fucking mannequin here) is about to get married, when he suddenly receives a startling email. It's a completely accurate list of every woman he's ever slept with... and it goes on to predict a lot more in the future, a round total of 101 (argh). The movie further annoyed the shit out of me by actually going out of its way to explain how this could possibly happen, instead of just taking the proud Groundhog Day tradition of "who knows? it's just happening, deal with it". He dismisses it as a prank, until the next name on the list just turns out to be the stripper at his bachelor party, whom he accidentally penetrates. Yes, really. She literally falls onto his dick. That's just one example of a lot of the truly sickening jokes in this movie, but it's not the worst. 
 
I'm gonna go ahead and spoil the worst; at one point Baker is knocked goofy crashing his bike into a schoolbus... which just happens to be transporting a couple dozen sexually frustrated Catholic schoolgirls, all virgins, and they decide to take advantage of the situation and all lose their virginities en masse. I'm not fucking joking, a non-porno movie really seriously did this. It also pleads cowardice about their ages, claiming they're from some kind of junior college and all legal. Worst of all, one of Baker's buddies afterwards asks "...was there a lot of blood?" The other guys boo him, and the general impression is that this guy's an asshole for asking that question. Um, no, fuck you, he's absolutely right. 
 
Oh, remember how I mentioned that Winona Ryder is a serial killer? She's given top billing in the ads, but she's only in about fifteen minutes of the movie. They also chicken out on her character, making her not so much a "serial killer" as a "serial seducer who uses some kind of magic powder to put guys in comas". I think you could actually make a kinda interesting story about a guy who knowingly falls in love with a female murderer, but this movie didn't have the balls for that. Yet inexplicably her character is still called "Death Nell" (ARGH). It also tries to excuse and even applaud her character's actions, by saying she only attacks men who are macho pigs that deserve it. Speaking of macho piggery, allow me to express a little: chalk another movie up on the list of "films where Winona Ryder's character either has sex or gets naked, but her body is carefully covered up the whole time". GET REALLY NAKED ALREADY BEFORE YOU GET TOO OLD. It also keeps Baker and Ryder separate for the whole movie, they only meet right before the end, and the buildup is interminably slow. And WHOA JESUS what a FUCKING AWFUL ending it is, a piece of Reese Witherspoon happy ending bullshit which takes the word "implausible" and rapes it up the ass. 
 
Is there anything good in this movie? Not much. Patton Oswalt has a small role as part of the massive clanking deus ex machina which explains the plot, and he alone manages to sneak in a few laughs. And it might be funny to laugh at the pretentious creepy idiots who I just know are out there who will think this is a smart & funny movie. Well, funny as long as they aren't dating anyone you care about.

 

 

The Punisher (2004): 3/10
Here is a true fact about this movie: I LIKED THE DOLPH LUNDGREN VERSION BETTER. The modern Punisher is a joyless, witless, sluggish, poorly casted, moronically written misfire which fails on almost every level. It changes way too much about the Punisher, keeping little from the original comics and just basically making it up as it goes. This is one of those movies where you check your watch every ten minutes. And why does every fucking comic book movie these days have to be an origin story? What superhero on earth has a simpler backstory than the Punisher? Criminals killed his family; he kills criminals. That's it! We don't need hours of setup to explain how he got that way. 
 
Biggest problem: Thomas Jane sucks. According to IMDB, he's been in a dozen other movies I've seen, and I don't remember him even existing in most of them. In this movie, he's completely inadequate as Frank Castle in just about every way. He's too young, too short, and I never once bought him as anything resembling a Punisher. Jane tries to play him way too much like a normal guy, instead of the remorseless killing machine which Castle is supposed to be. He's a raging alcoholic, he constantly doubts himself, hell he even seems about to commit suicide at one point. In most of the fight scenes, he spends the majority of the time getting his ass kicked and then limps away half-dead afterwards. What?! The Punisher should be casually snapping guys' necks and mowing down entire crowds with an M-60, not almost getting killed by just one or two enemies at a time. He's just not mean enough, and it kills the whole movie. 
 
Of course, even if they'd stuck 1986's Arnold Schwarzenegger in this movie, the rest of it still would've sucked. Our villain is (sigh) John Travolta as a mobster named (sigh) Saint, and he's just hammy enough that he's too silly to be real but too subdued to be funny. And while the rest of the cast contains a lot of people I've really liked at one time or another (Ben Foster, Rebecca Romijn, Laura Harring, Samantha Mathis, Roy Scheider) none of them are doing anything worth seeing here. Writer/director Jonathon Hensleigh has had a career mostly spent making crap, and this might be his stinkiest pile ever. 
 
There are so many problems here I barely know what to mention next. How about the preposterous plot, like that insanely overcomplicated plot to frame some of Travolta's inner circle? Or how Castle hides from his countless mortal enemies by eating in coffee shops, sitting around in parks, and showing up at press conferences? Are we supposed to believe that Travolta would really let Mickey The Snitch work in his house after he got his son killed? And why is the movie so freaking slow? It takes over half an hour to just get to the point where Punisher's family is killed, and the movie is already halfway over before he even slays his first bad guy. Why are there so few action scenes, and why are they all so crummy and boring? Why does the movie play everything so serious for a while, but only start to give us some "humor" after the family is slaughtered? Why do they make such dumbass decisions as changing the comics' ugly girl with crippling loneliness Joan into goddamn Rebecca Romijn? Why... aw, forget it, if I keep going I'll be here all night. This is the kind of movie where you groan "aw shit, what are they gonna fuck up next?" and then Kevin Nash shows up. And when Kevin "Die You Worthless Motherfucker" Nash provides quite possibly the single best scene in the movie, that's a big goddamn problem.
 
 
Naked Weapon: 2/10
Trashy, clumsy, and stupid action flick is just garbage. The premise, though simpleminded, isn't entirely awful: dozens of young girls are kidnapped onto an island and brutally trained to become top-shelf assassins. Unfortunately, the execution is derivative and lame, coming off like a worst-parts combined ripoff of The Professional and Battle Royale. If you are attracted to the idea of seeing a whole bunch of pubescent girls getting murdered, well you still would hate this, because unlike Battle Royale it has no sense of style and the deaths all look phony. That's the first half of the movie, and unfortunately, that's the good half. Eventually one of the girls grows up to be Maggie Q, and she's quickly involved in a lame assassin flick which mindlessly steals entire sequences from other movies (that one waterfront assassination will look REAL familiar to anyone who ever saw The Killer). 
 
This movie has the kind of plot holes that just piss you off. Like, why do none of the lady assassins kill the Madam who has tortured them for years? She's constantly portrayed as a sadistic cunt who shows zero affection or loyalty for her girls, repaying hard work and success with nothing but more brutality; after the final three girls "graduate" from assassin school, their parting gift is getting gang-raped for no apparent reason. So it's really hard to believe that none of the girls ever try to take the Madam out later on when they clearly have an opening to. Even worse, the movie seems to be setting up for a final student vs. teacher climax, but then the Madam utterly vanishes from the film and they literally invent a completely new villain for the last fight. And in the last fight, WTF with the villain picking up a sword and also throwing one to her... and then they suddenly engage in unarmed combat like the swords never existed?! And oh by the way there's a cute young CIA agent hanging around investigating the case. Gee I Wonder If He'll Fall In Love With Maggie Q And Eventually Let Her Go Free. 
 
Especially worth noting is some of the most laughably awful dialogue I've heard in a while. The really weird thing is that the actors seem to actually have been speaking in English on camera, but their lines still sound like bad dubbing. The only worthwhile thing in the movie are a couple of the fight sequences; the director worked as a fight choreographer on everything from Peking Opera Blues to Hero, so he knows how to stage some kicks. Unfortunately, he has no idea how to shoot or edit these scenes, and relies way too much on bullet-time slowmo, bad wire-fu, and really cheap looking CGI. It gets even worse whenever the guns come out, as nobody involved has any idea whatsoever how to stage a shootout. And the best is saved for last: it's simultaneously offensive and hilarious that a movie about hot female assassins called Naked Weapon only features about five seconds of nudity. 

 

 

American Psycho 2: All American Girl: 1/10
I was not a fan of the original American Psycho. In fact, I pretty much hated it. But even I don't think that it deserved to be cursed with such a loathesome "sequel" as this. I mean, for Christ's sake, we've got Mila Kunis as a serial killer (!) and William Shatner as an ex-FBI agent turned legendary professor (!!). You'd at least expect this to be so bad it's good. It's not. It's just unwatchable. 
 
Alright, first of all, this movie seems to despise the first AP more than I did. The very first scene in this film: Patrick Bateman (who is officially a real serial killer and really slaughtered people) (and here is so very much Not played by Christian Bale, they use a laughably obvious Fake Shemp instead) is stabbed to death by a little girl. YES! I'M NOT JOKING! He's murdered by a ten-year-old! And that girl grows up to be Kunis, who is a wee bit unhinged by her unusual childhood. She decides she wants to be an FBI criminal profiler and hunt killers, so she attends a school where Shatner teaches because many of his students end up graduating to Quantico. But college politics and competitive academia rear their ugly heads, and wouldn't you know it, soon Meg Griffin is strangling people and making with the lousy Freddy Kruger puns. You could make a good satire about people literally being willing to kill for good grades, but this sure as HELL ain't it. 
 
You might be saying to yourself, "gee, this sounds like it has nothing at all to do with American Psycho and is just a blantant mercenary cash-grab". If you were saying that, congratulations, you're right. Apparently, Lion's Gate/Trimark owned the sequel rights to AP and decided to cash in. They took a completely unrelated script about a killer coed, did a very quick and very superficial rewrite to tenuously connect it to the first film, and hey presto! Instant sequel. This is the very worst kind of shit which everyone hates Hollywood for, and everyone involved deserves a kick in the ass. 
 
And aside from all THAT it's just a goddamned awful movie. Mila Kunis has absolutely no idea what the hell to do in this part, and oh dear lord does it show. I didn't know that Shatner could stoop to further unplumbed depths and embarass himself even more than he ever has before, but somehow he manages that feat. And the movie surrounding them is even worse; it was shot in literally two and a half weeks on a microscopic budget, and it's not hard to tell. The comedy is not funny, and the horror is some of the more limp and bloodless crap I've seen in a long time; take out the F-bombs, and you'd have zero problems showing this movie on network television. And to top it all off, there's some truly jaw-dropping plot holes which thoroughly wreck the whole storyline on several different occasions. Don't see this movie even if you like shitty movies. Just fucking worthless.
 
 
The Crow: City of Angels: 2/10
You know those movies where there's so many things wrong with them that I have to make a giant list and go over it all one-by-one? This is one of those movies. 
 
-First of all, let's look at director Tim Pope. He's never made a feature film before or since this one. All things considered, we must think of this as a blessing. He made a shitload of music videos back in the day, for the big boys like The Cure, David Bowie and Queen. Maybe this led to TC:CoA being one of those movies which, from start to finish, quite literally is shot and cut to look like one long music video. 
 
-Admittedly, he supposedly wasn't happy with the studio's final cut of the film. Go to IMDB, and they've got a list of things which were edited out of the theatrical version. However, I can't imagine the movie being much better even if all that stuff was put back in. 
 
-And then there's the writer, David S. Goyer. This was... before he got good. Later on he did stuff like Dark City, the Dark Knight trilogy, and the Blade movies. But at the time, his credits were stuff like Kickboxer 2 and Demonic Toys. This movie definitely belongs with those earlier efforts. The dialogue is just awful, REALLY awful. There are plenty of examples, but my favorite is when Sarah blankly mumbles "That's why they call me the Mistress of Pain!" At no point in this movie does anyone ever speak or act like a real human being. And this is one of those pretentious flicks which gives all of its characters portentous nicknames: Judah, Grace, Sybil, Nemo, Kali, Curve, and our main character is called, fuck me, Ashe Corven. Sigh. 
 
-All the actors suck out loud. And the really amazing part is how they all suck in different ways! It's not fair to compare Vincent Perez to Brandon Lee, but his performance here still would've been lame and overacted even if the first movie had never existed. This was also his first English-language film, and oh man does he have a sub-Christopher Lambert mastery of his dialogue. Mia Kirschner appears stoned out of her goddamn mind throughout the entire proceedings; no facial expression, flat monotone, as little movement or effort as humanly possible. As the villain, Richard Brooks appears to be doing a bad Tony Todd impression, and over-enunciating everything like he was in a play instead of a movie. When fucking Iggy Pop of all goddamn people gives arguably the best performance in your movie, and he's playing a manic coked-up freak (yeah, it's a stretch, I know) you've got a serious problem. 
 
-Ashe has a CrowBike. He spends most of his time stylishly riding it off into the fog. 
 
-What is the deal with all the bondage and S&M shit? This is the millionth trashy action flick which uses sexual perversion as a lazy shorthand for true evil. Cause the villains all dress like they work in a brothel or dungeon or both, it lets you know right away that they're Bad People. Hollywood films have long had this kinda conservative trend of having their villains have unusual sexual tastes; how many times have you seen a female villain or henchwoman portrayed in a tight leather outfit as a bisexual nymphomaniac? Although the message is a little muddled, since everyone in this movie wears leather, including the heroes; plus, you get to see the original Yellow Ranger's tits barely being held in place by a corset made of shoelaces. 
 
-We are forced to watch Thomas Jane jerking off in a nudie booth. DO NOT WANT. 
 
-They try to make the villains of this film to be as close as possible to the villains in the first Crow, but it comes off like bad imitation. Ya know how the heel Fox Hound team in Metal Gear Solid 2 kinda felt like an over-the-top parody of the guys from the first game? Same deal here. So once again we've got a crimelord who lives in the top floor of a building, his live in sex slave/psychic seer/whatever, and a quartet of wacky goons who do his bidding. Rip-off city. 
 
-There's a lot of really cheap, really fake special effects work too. We get a nice long look at the crap right up front, with the opening shot of a phony-looking crow flying over a phony-looking model of what is allegedly supposed to be Los Angeles. The fire effects are often particularly bad, like when the crow somehow causes palm trees to spontaneously combust (?!) or when Ashe walks through some flames which couldn't be more obviously not really there. A very special Fuck You to whatever incompetent makeup technician did the REAL shitty fake tattoos in this movie, because there's a bunch of them and they all look like dogturds. 
 
-The cinematography and lighting are also noteworthy for being really hard on the eyes. The color pallette is, shall we say, misjudged. Every scene in the film is tinted either piss yellow, mouthwash green, or dirt brown. It's just fuckin' ugly and hideous to look at. 
 
-There's actually not much action in the movie at all; thank god, cause what it does have is incoherent and poor. I love the villains' tendency to instantly whip out machine guns and start spraying bullets everywhere at the slightest provocation. 
 
-One big difference between this and the first film was that, in the original, they actually made Eric and Shelly feel like part of the community. Ernie Hudson's cop and the younger Sarah knew them, and mourned them; their pictures still hung on the police precinct wall, reminded of an unsolved crime. There's no similar feeling this time around, with Ashe and his kid apparently living all alone in a barren wasteland. 
 
-What the hell was the deal with that Mousetrap bullshit they caught the crow with? They somehow knew that the bird would land on that one spot on the floor and stay there? 
 
-They amped up the Crow's supernatural powers this time around, making him even more godlike, but it felt like cheating. He even has the ability to make the Crow Symbol magically appear out of nowhere. I know the first Crow sure as hell didn't explain exactly what all the rules were, but it felt like it did; this one basically whips out its illogic and waggles it in your face. 
 
-...exploding palm trees?!?
 
-There are, admittedly, a couple of minor positives. This is the only Crow movie which avoided the usual sexist shit of having a guy and his girl both get murdered, but only the guy comes back for revenge. They do flirt with one intriguing subplot (Ashe doesn't want to go back underground after he's done killing) although they never go anywhere with it. The soundtrack is positively kickass. And if nothing else, this increases my respect for one Tori Amos even more; for whatever inexplicable reason, they asked her to play Sarah, and she told 'em to fuck off. Atta girl.

 

 

Blue Smoke: 3/10
What the hell am I doing watching a made-for-tv Lifetime Original Picture? Three words: “starring Alicia Witt”. Fuckin’ redhead being all entrancing and sireny. While Blue Smoke certainly isn’t as aggressively, laughably incompetent as her most recent movie 88 Minutes, it’s plenty bad enough, and more boring too. It’s adopted from a novel by Nora Roberts, whose work I have never read, and if this is any indication of her usual style or quality I won’t bother ever reading it in the future. This is one of those transparent mysteries where half of the movie’s plot twists come from utterly arbitrary swerves which have nothing to do with the underlying motivations of the characters and jerk the audience around, and the other half are so blatantly telegraphed that even the dumbest viewer will solve the enigmas before the heroes do. 
 
Alicia Witt stars as Reena Hale, a newbie detective specializing in arson investigations. Right away, the movie tells us that this will not bear much resemblance to either real cops or firefighters: Reena is put through a ludicrous artificial smokehouse which is filled with insane booby traps which seem designed to seriously kill anyone who tries to go through it. I doubt that real fireman trainees are forced to climb horizontal ladders, with breakaway rungs, over blazing infernos, all alone and cut off from any possible help. Anywho, Reena also has pretty spectacularly bad luck with men, as all her boyfriends seem to coincidentally wind up burning to death at some point or another. The characters in the movie are much slower to catch onto this trend than the audience will be. 
 
Witt does her best in the role, but it’s not good enough. First of all, the part is nearly unplayable, requiring the actress to do one scene all angsty brooding and then the next laughing and carefree. But beyond that, I’m really not sure if Witt realizes what her strengths and weaknesses as a performer are, or has any idea how to best utilize them. In terms of facial expression and body language, she’s great. In comedic scenes or being required to play oddballs, she rules. But make her a Cop On The Edge or something else equally generic and give her the same old dialogue we’ve heard a thousand times, it’s like she freezes up and has no idea how to turn bad writing into tolerable cinema. Most of the rest of the cast isn’t much better; Scott Bakula is bland and miscast as Witt’s partner/mentor, and all the young male characters are interchangeable prettyboys who all look alike. The only bright spot is Talia Shire; I’m not sure what she’s doing in this little clunker, but I was glad to have her as Witt’s cheerful mother. 
 
The movie is one of the more clear examples I’ve seen of stuff which might have worked in a book not working on a screen. When a mystery novel wants to give you a clue, it can bury it between pages and pages of other stuff; a movie is forced to be much more economical with its information, and thus the various plot points tend to stick out too far and whack the viewer over the head to make sure they noticed it. There are also far more characters in the movie than its meager 90-minute running time can support. And there are plenty of moments which might’ve not felt so stupid in print, but watching an asshole FBI agent storm into the room where Witt just found her murdered fiance’s charred body, loudly proclaim that he’s taking over the investigation, and impounding her brand-new wedding ring as evidence, come the fuck on now. Given a few pages of proper buildup, I could see making that work on the page, somehow, in theory. But in a movie scene which only lasts a minute or two, all that stuff just provokes a groan of disbelief. There are fleeting moments here and there which work (Witt’s bemused reaction to a lovestruck guy who’s been searching for her for years, or the surprisingly not-entirely-awful scene where a little boy appears to be trying to rape a little girl) but they sure as hell don’t add up to even half of a satisfying whole. For a movie obsessed with fire and pyromaniacs, it sure as hell seems to know little and say less about its subject. 
 
 
Blood Feast: 1/10
This is the first movie I've seen from infamous schlock director Herschell Gordon Lewis, also of such infamous work as 2000 Maniacs, The Wizard of Gore, and even some of the footage in Monster A-Go-Go. It's known as "the first splatter movie", and I gotta say, for 1963 the quantity of gore onhand here is fairly shocking. The blood isn't quite the right color, but it seems to smear and stain the same way that the real stuff does. And the guts, well, look real. Pretty obviously what HGL did was go down to the local butcher shop and buy a big bucket full of used animal parts. So in terms of sheer shock value based on explicit violence, this movie was unequaled until the Italians caught up with it a decade later. 
 
Problem is, aside from the icky squicky stuff, the movie is entirely a worthless piece of shit. It's so cheaply produced and amateurishly made that you halfway expect there to be a bunch of wisecracking robot silhouettes in the bottom-right corner of your screen. I'm not exagerrating one little bit when I say parts of it approach an Ed Wood level of sheer incompetence. HGL apparently didn't know any real actors, and the folks he found here are all humiliating in their utter lack of any thespian ability whatsoever. Worst of all is the chick playing the leading lady, who literally acts like they just pulled her in off the street. Yeah, I know it was filmed in just nine days on a Blair Witch-sized budget. And so what? I'm supposed to forgive it sucking because it was handicapped? By that logic, I should be able to have a career as a star basketball player, despite being a clumsy fat guy. Don't let anyone ever try to tell you that this laughable failure is supposed to be any kind of cult classic. It's just garbage.

 

 

Death Race: 3/10
Now, admittedly, it coulda been worse I guess. There is one thing in Death Race which continually hypnotized me: machine guns. Lots and lots of machine guns, firing endlessly like they had a secret Infinite Ammo code. I am such a mark for any movie which just gives me an utterly insane amount of automatic weapons fire. Don't know why. Just am. And in the department of "sheer quantity of blanks fired", Death Race can stand tall with the best that John Woo ever shot out. 
 
Unfortunately, aside from that? It sucks. Sucks hard. And it's got SO FUCKING MANY blatant intelligence-insulting plot holes that I feel the need to spell them all out, one by one. Death Race is slightly better than that cinematic level of pond scum whom I usually give the Dissection Of DOOM~! treatment to, but it so cynically assumes that its audience has no brains whatsoever that I just can't help myself. 
 
-Alright, first and foremost: this is a remake of the infamous Roger Corman cult classic Death Race 2000. That was a fucking awesome movie. It was about a dystopic future in which the Death Race was a cross-country Cannonball Run kinda thing, and where running over innocent pedestrians gave you extra points. It was incredibly dark and brilliantly satirical. The new version? Not so much, and totally lacking the balls of the original. This time around it's a Running Man ripoff where a bunch of condemned prisoners are forced to race and kill each other. This movie btw takes place in the year 2012, and seriously expects us to believe that things will get so bad in the next four years that this kind of shit will become legal and accepted. (Damn you, President Palin!) At least The Condemned gave us the explanation that it was taking place in a third-world shithole; this movie really wants us to buy that Death Racing will somehow be approved by Congress. 
 
-This movie commits one of the laziest sins of all: several times, we're shown Instant Replays since this is supposed to be television after all. However, several times we're shown replays from camera angles where there couldn't possibly have been a camera. Remember the impossible magic camera angle at the end of the Rock vs Mankind empty arena match? Same thing here. So fucking stupid. 
 
-Most of the cast don't even seem like they're trying. Jason Statham is less charismatic and less interesting than I've ever seen him, and that includes In the Name of the King. Joan Allen seems to be silently wondering what the hell she's doing here. The next good Tyrese Gibson movie I see will be the first one. Ian McShane is okay, but can't save the movie all by himself. And hey, Robin Shou's still alive? 
 
-Like the original, the remake supplies all the death racer drivers Navigators, hot chicks bussed in from a women's prison. Supposedly they're there for sex appeal, in order to help sell Teh Death Race. However, since there aren't any cameras inside the cars (what, by 2012 they've lost the technology of today's Nascar rallies?) I don't see what the point is of having hot chicks whom the paying audience can't see. Also, the movie utterly forgets about them when it comes time for various cars to blow up. We always see the male driver cringing in terror at their grisly fate, but their female copilot doesn't even get so much as a single reaction shot. 
 
-This movie suggests that one convict was secretly released from prison in order to go on a mission of murder. Really? I have a hard time buying that. And hey, if you were the convict who'd been secretly released, why the fuck would you return to your prison in order to compete in a game which almost certainly would cause your death? 
 
-Tyrese's character is clearly established as being gay. This is subsequently forgotten. They never mention it again. Why even bring it up? And the mean-spirited joke about all his navigators always dying wasn't even close to being funny. 
 
-Joan Allen spends a lot of time looking at stuff. Seriously. At least half her footage in the movie is of her just staring at something off-screen, usually out a window or at a monitor or something like that. 
 
-The Death Race is made up of three (3) separate races. It's clearly established that you only have to win the third and final race; your placement in the other two don't matter, you just gotta survive. Yet, the movie then goes and pretends it never told us that, and acts like winning those other two races is incredibly important. WTF? It literally throws these contradictions at us within the span of about five minutes. 
 
-In the second race, the evil warden releases the Dreadnought, a giant combo ripoff of the semi from The Road Warrior and the Dead Reckoning from Land of the Dead. It proceeds to try and kill every single one of the Death Racers. Um, okay, but why release it in the second race? Even when there are only two racers left, it's still trying to kill them. Wouldn't that completely destroy the plans for the third race? 
 
-This movie apparently has some kind of weird dropped plot point which somehow still made it in. At one point, McShane shows Statham a videotape of the last race. At one crucial moment, he pauses it, points at the screen, and says, "Look there!" We never see what he's pointing at. It's never mentioned again. How the hell did this get past the editing process? 
 
-The whole point of Statham being imprisoned is so that he can be the newest incarnation of Frankenstein, who is essentially the Dread Pirate Roberts of teh death race. But why would the warden specifically seek out a champion racecar driver to play the role of Franky when she doesn't want him to win the race? Furthermore, why does nobody ever notice that Statham vanishes whenever the masked Frankenstein shows up? 
 
-Throughout the movie, the warden is rigging the races against Frankenstein. Subtly at first, but blatantly later on. Wouldn't the paying viewers notice the obvious cheating? Wouldn't they feel ripped off by paying to watch a fixed race? And why does the warden never seem to realize that having Frankenstein die in a fiery crash, which would seem to be the obvious outcome of these shenanigans, would destroy her nefarious plan? 
 
-Over and over again, the prison officials talk about the great "ratings" they're getting because of Ye Deathe Race. They specifically talk about these ratings such as they go up after something cool happens. Except, um, the setup is explained as being a pay-per-view internet streaming video thingy. These two things are highly contradictory. 
 
-Later on in the movie... okay, gotta be careful not to SPOIL anything. Let's just say some events take place where all is not as it seems and there is more than meets the eye. However, much like in The Game, the events involved are far too unpredictable and chaotic to have possibly ever, ever been faked with any chance of safety whatsoever. 
 
-The one chick claims that she will have to be released because "she's already been given her release papers". She says this even while in the very act of committing more felonies, aiding and abetting a goddamn prison break. Fuck you, filmmakers, for expecting me to swallow this. 
 
-How did that bomb get there without escaping detection? How did the person with the trigger know when to push the button? 
 
-LOUD NOISES. I'm so desperately tired of movies which crank the volume so high up. Except for the rare quiet moments, Death Race more or less constantly blasts us with an ear-aching volume of loud crap. The sound effects and background music are turned up so high that it's a miracle we can even hear any of the dialogue, which is comparitively much softer. 
 
-"Written and directed by Paul W.S. Anderson". Need I say more? Sadly, this is not even close to his worst work.
 
 
Death Racers: 2/10
This might be the laziest movie I've ever seen. It's a ripoff of Death Race from a "studio" called Asylum, which specializes in grade-z quicky knockoffs of big Hollywood releases. They're shot on video, on incredibly low budgets, and have names like Alien vs. Hunter and The Transmorphers and Snakes On a Train. The finished product is even worse than you'd imagine. I mean, I pretty much hated Paul Wang-Sucker Anderson's crappy remake Death Race, but even I was surprised to somehow find that this movie was even worse. Imagine shooting up Uwe Boll with sedative, having him direct a Troma movie, and then having some kid who edits his buddies' garage band home videos cut it all together on a home computer. That's pretty much the level of quality here. 
 
Which is a shame, because the plot is such a bizarre idea that I simply had to see this movie. In a nutshell: the Insane Clown Posse are sent on a mission to kill Raven. Just in case that didn't sink in the first time, let me repeat it: the Insane Clown Posse are sent on a mission to kill Raven. Seriously. Come on, any hardcore wrestling mark worth the name should be at least mildly intrigued by that. Raven plays Reaper, a minor variation on his wrestling gimmick, some kind of crazy mastermind dude who is plotting to destroy the world. ICP (and three other much more expendable teams) are sent on a competitive Death Race, with Raven's dismembered corpse as the finish line. There's various colorful thugs and scheming politicians and mad scientists and plastic media people and stuff like that, and the strangest irony here is that this movie is actually a bit more true (or a more faithful theft) from the original Death Race 2000 than the official remake ended up being. 
 
Unfortunately, this movie is such an incompetent affair that even a storyline this fucking insane is not any fun. None of the actors are any good. I mean that even by their own standards; compared to, say, Big Money Hustlas, the Clowns just look sluggish and bored here. Raven tries his best, but he's not used to movie-style acting, and most of his scenes are just sitting around his hideout and yelling at his henchmen anyway. Much of the dialogue is very badly recorded, so between incompetent sound tech and mumbled line readings from the cast it's often hard to hear what the hell they're saying. Apparently they couldn't find many women who were even willing to get naked for a cash-in like this, since there's exactly one pair of bared breasts and they're onscreen for about three seconds. 
 
The low budget also defeats even the simple thriller aspects of the plot; there's not much death racing to be found here, and most of the action are just poorly-choreographed hand to hand fights. In fact, the whole movie is incredibly disjointed and simply reeks of apathy overall. They use a lot of homemade computer editing effects which probably came free with their PC, and it looks desperately cheap and sad. Speaking of PC, there's a shitton of hideously unfunny jokes which are racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and generally in such poor taste that I would hate to meet someone who actually laughed at it. I would comment on the script, except that I think that major chunks of it seemed to be improvised on the spot, in footage which was so awkward that it felt like they never bothered to do more than one take. Lots of padding-out of the run time is done with recycled shots, slow motion, and various other tired tricks to drag this sucker out past ninety minutes. 
 
And I saved the best for last: the movie is so slapdash and carelessly made that some scenes are out of order! Yes, really, clearly, there's one point where two news broadcasts seem to have been inadvertently switched, so that the late-breaking extra in the second one is stuff which has already been talked about in the first one. And the cumulative point totals for the death racers are higher in the first one, too. This was just a depressing waste of time.
 
 
 
Homecoming: 3/10
There have been countless recent movies with strong leftist undertones which I absolutely loved: Wall-E, Land of the Dead, Revenge of the Sith, and the best of them all Children of Men all had varying degrees of staunch anti-conservative beliefs underneath their stories. Well, Homecoming is a movie with heavy liberal overtones, and it does a very poor job indeed at trying to push its message. It's preachy, lazy, and prefers to take the cheapest shots possible at every opportunity rather than actually look at its own content with any real though. And aside from all that, it's just a suck-ass shitty piece of merchandise which isn't entertaining aside from its social commentary. 
 
And oh yeah, it's also an episode of Masters of Horror. Damn, these things just seem to keep getting worse and worse. Which is especially annoying here because this time the director is Joe Dante. Why is Joe Dante so special? I mean, aside from having made Gremlins? Simply put, although he hasn't churned out many horror masterpieces, I think he's the only director I've seen in this series who has never made a movie I didn't like. Even his more questionable stuff like The 'burbs or Small Soldiers has been at least mildly entertaining. So this might be the most bitter disappointment yet, when a guy who formerly had a perfect record has finally turned in his first failure. 
 
Anyway, the story? Try not to groan when I say this. Our setting: Washington DC, shortly before the 2004 elections. The dead begin to rise from the grave, as deceased Iraq War are arising from their coffins and walk again as zombies. You probably haven't heard of any of the actors, and none of them do anything interesting except for Robert Picardo, who manages to wring a lot of fun out of a supporting part as a shady campaign planner. Anyway, as the back of the DVD box has already spoiled, the undead have returned to this world for one reason: to vote against Bush in the election. 
 
What. 
 
In theory, I guess, I suppose you might be able to do something interesting with this idea, but Homecoming sure as hell doesn't, dragging a short-story concept out to an hour's length. It treats the story with all the depth of a Saturday Night Live sketch, with characters dragged directly out of an editorial cartoon. Like, one of the main characters is a bitchy blond neocon pundit, "Jane Cleaver", who just coincedentally happens to share seven out of ten letters in her name with Ann Coulter. For christ's sake, it should not be hard to make me cheer against a villain based on Ann Coulter! I hate that arrogant shrill antagonistic spotlight-loving sociopathic bitch perhaps more than any other talking head on the planet. But this movie does nothing with the idea of Ann Coulter as a fictionalized character. OMG, in the movie she's into bondage and discipline, HAR HAR OH THOU HAST SLAIN THE WYTCH. Hell, just go read World War Z if you desire a character based on her placed into a zombie story; in that one, the author manages in a few scant sentences to make her more interesting than this movie does in its entire running time. Add on the fact that there's practically no violence, gore, tension, or horror of any kind here and a REALLY awful ending which basically takes the finale of Raiders of the Lost Ark and replaces the Nazis with Republicans, and here you have a shallow and worthless complete waste of time.
 
 
The Wizard of Oz (1925): 3/10
What, you never knew there was an early silent version of The Wizard of Oz? Yeah, we all know the story here, right? Dorothy, the Princess of Oz, is kidnapped as a baby from her kingdom by the evil Prime Minister and hidden away on a farm where the workers all have madcap slapstick highjinks, until her eighteenth birthday, at which point she and a bunch of friends all get waylaid by Ozzish highwaymen and then somehow they get to Oz and the friends briefly put on costumes making them a scarecrow, tin man, and lion before promptly taking the costumes off again, and then the wholesome Prince Kynd and Queen Dorothy fall in love while Prime Minister Kruel has some of her friends imprisoned in the dungeon while others inexplicably turn heel and... yeah, so you see why nobody today has ever heard of this movie. Maybe some of the plot points were taken from Frank Baum's other, more obscure Oz books, but this movie bears only the most passing resemblence to the novel of the same title. It also has one of the more blue-balling endings I've seen in a while, where the movie just suddenly cuts off in the middle of the story and arbitrarily ends for no apparent reason. 
 
There's a lot of wasted effort here, in every department. That definitely includes director/star Larry Semon, a poor man's Buster Keaton; he definitely had all the physical ability he needed, but he does a lot of corny overacting and rubber-faced mugging right into the camera lens. The stuntwork and special effects are very elaborate for the time, but they're wasted on mistimed jokes and gags which just plain don't make sense. Way too many "wait a minute, how come...?" moments in this film. The rest of the cast is nothing special, except for a young Oliver Hardy a few years before Stan Laurel got him into all those fine messes; he gets to wear a Tin Man costume for about two minutes, and is otherwise the character of "the fat guy who is evil apparently because he's fat", actually one of two such roles in this picture. 
 
And then there's the "cowardly lion". Oh sweet jesus. This role is played by a black actor. Now, this isn't my first rodeo in terms of watching old movies which have a rather different view on race than ours. But this film is the most ludicrously stereotypical and offensive one I've seen in a long time. This guy, named simply "Snowball", is played in such a cringe-inducing Darkies R Stoopid N Funny kind of manner that it almost has to be seen to be believed. The very first time we meet this guy, in the first shot, he's chowing down on a watermelon. Which he stole. And then conspicuously bugs his eyes out and purses his lips outward to make them look bigger in his terrified reaction shot when the white master discovers him. It's all downhill from there, with jokes about him literally having no brain and being the biggest coward this side of Scooby-Doo and all kinds of horrid stuff. Even the actor's NAME is a shocking slap in the face; the guy's real name was Spencer Bell, but here he's raped with the screen name "G. Howe Black". Seriously. As annoying as the modern political correctness movement has been, I'd much rather put up with it than have an entire race subjected to treatment like this. 
 
 
All the Boys Love Mandy Lane: 2/10
This movie could make you cry, but not in the good way. All the Boys Love Mandy Lane is the most lamebrained horror flick I've seen in a little while, a wretchedly cynical and sadistic exercise in pointless audience manipulation. It's eighty endless minutes of watching a bunch of worthless morons do annoying shit before their disgusting deaths. This is one of those Dead Teenager Movies which is almost entirely constructed from the exhausted old cliches of this genre, except for a really fucking insulting ending which is totally stolen from some more recent horror films. 
 
So there's this chick, Mandy Lane (Amber Heard). All the boys love her, apparently because she's a barbie doll with absolutely no character traits other than being virginal and pure. And she quickly breaks that single bit of personality when she inexplicably agrees to go on a weekend getaway with a bunch of the local degenerates. Why the hell does the local virgin go on vacation with a bunch of drug-addled horndogs? It's never explained. Anyway, yes this is one of Those Teen Slasher Movies where we never see anybody's parents; all these kids seem to be independently wealthy, and they all drive cars and drink liquor and smoke pot and fuck like rabbits and stay out all night without even having to call in with some excuse about why they're not home yet. So anyway, they all drive out to a Standard Slasher Movie Mansion which is out on some ranch in the middle of nowhere. And gee, you think their cell phones might ALL get no reception out there too? And please, anyone, tell me if you're surprised that the men are all quickly killed outta nowhere while the women are all chased around screaming and horribly wounded and take forever to finally bleed out. 
 
When the movie isn't strictly adhering to the formula, it occasionally veers off in some very fucking odd directions which don't improve the general quality of the story. Like, the nudity. For the first half of this film, this appears to be one of those R-rated flicks which teases nudity all damn day, but never delivers. (One of the first scenes takes place in a girls' locker room, where everyone is carefully covered up with towels.) Then out of nowhere one, and just one, of the girls gets topless briefly for no apparent reason. After that, further nakedness is never even teased again. WTF? And what the HELL was going on in that weird scene in the bathroom, where Mandy and the blond bitch had some kind of sapphic tension going on? For a brief moment that scene made me feel like I was watching real people having a real moment, but it's quickly cut short and forgotten about. 
 
If there's a single positive thing about the film, it's that our cast of tweenagers are at least all real actors, and try for a more naturalistic style of performance than you usually see in slasher flicks. Unfortunately, since all their characters ever do is the same old stupid shit we always see, it's all for naught. And that GODDAMN ending! WOW, that was one of the worst fucking endings I've seen in a long time. Firstly, I saw both "twists" coming a mile away. The movie randomly tells us who the killer is about halfway through the movie (without even a single token red herring first), so it was obvious that it still had some kind of "surprise" later on. Secondly, it just made NO fucking sense, they never even attempted to explain what the hell was going on or why the characters were doing what they were doing. This boy typing here would love all those boys who love Mandy Lane to suck his cock and die gagging on his spunk.

 

 

John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars: 3/10
Why? That was my main thought during this film. Why did some relatively talented people bother making this movie? Why did I waste ninety minutes watching it? Ghosts of Mars does absolutely nothing that we haven't already seen a hundred times, and at least sixty-eight of those were done better. I know that John Carpenter was a pretty clear example of the ever-more-plausibe "directors get worse as they age" tendency, only making one theatrical motion picture in the entire past two decades which I liked; In the Mouth of Madness ftw. It's just depressing to think that the same guy who made stuff like The Thing would be reduced to churning out turdburgers like this. 
 
As you may have guessed, this movie takes place on Mars, in the year twenty-one-somethingornother. A group of cops and/or soldiers (they claim to be police, but they look and act like space marines) are sent to retrieve a prisoner from a small colonial town. When they get there, almost everyone in town is dead. Turns out there are Ghosts on Mars which possess people and turn them evil. Well, they call them "ghosts", but it's more like the pheremone wind effect from The Happening. Except it does appear to be alive, sorta... okay, if I discuss all the problems inherent with this plot point, we'll be here all day. Let's just agree that the aliens/monsters/whatever here have a very illogical backstory and a highly contradictory set of rules. So then the movie turns into Night of the Living Dead, or Aliens, or Assault on Precinct 13, or any movie ever about a small band of desperate people fighting off a horde of bestial attackers. 
 
The cast is a very mixed bag. Some of them are clearly just here for the paycheck: Pam Grier, looking at you! Jason Statham hadn't quite perfected his schtick yet, Ice Cube is inconsistent from scene to scene, Joanne Cassidy appears to be drunk, and Clea DuVall has this bewildered expression which just says "No, I have no idea why the hell I'm playing a soldiercop in this movie either". Oddly, the one person who is clearly trying her very best is overall the least talented: Natasha Henstridge, in the lead. Hey kids, remember when she was kind of a movie star? Henstridge seems to just be relieved that she's playing the lead role in a movie which isn't going direct to video, and is really throwing herself into the part with everything she's got. Unfortunately, "everything she's got" is about a 7/10 on the Geena Davis In An Action Flick scale. 
 
John Carpenter was either stoned or asleep in the director's chair, by the look of the results here. There's a lot of bad laughs and unintentional camp, especially with the possessed tribal zombie people (imagine a crappy version of the Reavers from Serenity, or the bad guys from The Road Warrior). The special effects are garbage, with that SciFi Channel look which is more bittersweet amusing than wondrous. There's also a hell of a lot of really bad editing on several levels. In micro, the constant preferance for fades instead of plain cuts is really annoying, and the timing just seems bungled; in macro, the dumbass flashback structure is laughable in its clumsiness and tends to deflate any possible tension. One last bitch: this movie does, as noted, take place on Mars. In theory, this makes it at least partially a science fiction story. So where the fuck are the gadgets?! There is literally not a single piece of technology on display anywhere in this movie which was not already in use by the 1950s. What's the point of setting a film on the Red Planet when you could literally do the exact same story with only the most minor of changes about some cowboys who stumbled into an indian burial ground? 
 
 
The Reader: 3/10
If you were to build a robot with an electric brain and program it to go direct a movie with the specific goal of Oscar nominations, I do think The Reader is the film which would result of such an endeavour. Holocaust! Denied love! Suicide! Foreign accents! Classic literature! Kate Winslet's tits! Ralph Fiennes with a very somber look on his face! Sets and lighting on loan from Masterpiece Theater! Courtroom scenes in which someone says something shocking and all the extras sitting in the back first go "GASP!" and then commence to unintelligeble murmuring, forcing the judge to bang his gavel and demand order! I hope you can already see where this is going. 
 
So anyway, The Reader is about this 15-year-old kid, son of a rich family, in 1958 Germany. (Our older members might recall that, in 1958, there was no one country simply called "Germany". I guess this is a West side story; the movie never bothers to inform us.) He happens to basically trip and fall into a obsessive sexual affair with Kate Winslet, in theory a 35-year-old woman. Now here we stumble onto our first problem: Winslet looks young enough and the kid looks old enough that the visual difference between their ages isn't even half of what they're supposed to be. Even goofier are the later scenes when the kid grows up and is played by Ralph Fiennes, while Winslet's "old age" makeup seems to be entirely restricted to gray hair. It's a bad laugh when she affectionaly calls him "kid" when he's clearly got many long years over her. Anyway, young love affair, summer romance, and for some damn reason she makes him read books to her. And oh yeah it turns out she was a Nazi. 
 
Winslet does her best, but between a wobbly accent and a lot of dumb dialogue, there ain't much she can do here. (And if you've seen that one episode of Extras, you're probably already thinking about it.) I wonder if the filmmakers at some point realized this, since this film contains more footage of Kate naked than almost all of her previous filmography added together. Which is doubly ironic since it never feels sexy, and this is one of those edgy indy artsy fartsy type of movies which will occasionally flash a bit of full-frontal just for the hell of it, but always discretely in the corner of the frame and very briefly so nobody will have to feel upset. And it's also one of those movies which loads up all the nudity in the first hour with zero flesh in the second; kind of like how at the mission, the preachers let the bums eat before they force the sermon on them. The script is just awful, sentimental tawdry crap, with way too much on-the-nose dialogue where characters come right out and articulate their hidden feelings. The direction is so precise and tasteful and elegant and so goddamned noble that I felt like I was suffocating. Can someone throw a shakycam action scene in here to change the pace, please? Why the hell do fucking concentration camps look this clean?

 

 

Baise Moi: 2/10
I doubt anyone would've ever heard of this dreary, amateurish French film if it weren't for its one infamous gimmick: people really fucking on camera. Well, that and a title whose literal translation comes out to either "Rape Me" or "Fuck Me" depending on who you ask. Hell, it's not even the first semi-mainstream French movie to do unsimulated sex, Catherine Breillat had already been there and done that more than once (and if there is ANYTHING about Baise Moi that I liked, it's that we're mercifully spared those constant whiny monologues from Breillat's films about how all males are total worthless bastards). So I'm not even really sure why this one became so infamous, to the point where it even got a very limited theatrical release here in the States. If someone can explain the logic, please do. 
 
The movie is about two French chicks (two porn stars in reality, to do the sex scenes, though as actors they actually don't suck, HAR HAR THAT'S A JOKE SON) who one day just snap and start killing people. They become friends, and bond together as they travel cross-country and kill a bunch more people. Lots of reviews and summaries of Baise Moi go to great pains to mention how the girls seduce men and then murder-them, black widow stylez. This is more indicative of the reviewers than the movie, I think, since the girls only do this a couple of times. No, these psychos are equal-opportunity assassins: men, women, nice people, assholes, cops, random folks standing on the sidewalk; they kill because they have fun doing it. If the film had even attempted to justify their actions or try to exonerate them in any way, it would've been the old 0/10 for this piece of crap; thankfully, while they're portrayed as just a couple of sweet girls whenever they're not killing, the murders themselves are shown as being pretty obviously inexcusable. 
 
The director, Virginie Despentes, adapted her own novel for the screen; she'd never made a movie before or since, and for this we must be grateful. She also had a co-director only known as "Coralie", another porn star, who I guess helped her out with the nasty bits. Baise Moi is shot on video with a nonexistant budget and all the professionalism of an Angry Video Game Nerd skit. The camerawork and editing are laughably bad at times, especially in any of the really phony-looking violent parts. And even at an anorexic 77 minutes the movie drags oh so slowly. 
 
As for the sex, well, I just found myself wondering what the point was. If you're gonna have full-on hardcore fucking, shouldn't there be some kind of larger message you're trying to impart? There didn't seem to be any such thing here. Real dicks in real pussies is a rather powerful stunt for a non-porn film; why not use that for something other than shock value? The shock is there, sure. For the first ten minutes of the movie we're just watching people talk, which makes it all the more disconcerting when suddenly we're slapped with a brutal gang-rape scene in which the copulation is obviously not being faked. Seriously: ten minutes of nothing happening, followed by closeups of an erect penis slamming into a woman's vag while she shrieks in terror and agony. If you're gonna resort to shooting a gun like that, you better be aiming at a pretty fucking important target. Baise Moi just pulls out limply and dribbles its load into thin air.
 
 
Meet the Spartans: 2/10
So some of you may very well be wondering, "Why the fuck did Jingus bother watching something like Meet the Spartans?" Well... sometimes I just like watching a really bad movie. Not when I'm expecting for a good one, or hoping for a good one, or walking in totally unaware of the crap in store. No, that's one of life's biggest disappointments, only finding out after a movie's over that you've totally murdered a couple hours of your life. But when you go in knowing that this movie is absolutely guaranteed to not be any good whatsoever? Sometimes there's just something vaguely comforting about intentionally viewing a product which you're utterly certain is going to be excrement; the sort of thing which can help a fellow feel smarter. ("Yeah, my life sucks and I hate everything, but at least I didn't make Epic Movie.") My inner MSTie must sometimes be fed, and by God, these retarded fucks Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer know how to churn out some real atrocity which assuages that burning hunger. 
 
All the usual Seltzberg hallmarks are in place. The barrage of lame pop culture references that even Seth MacFarlane would consider "going too far". The astonishingly bad dialogue. The unfunny jokes which are told so loudly and stretched out over such a long period of time that they make an Ingmar Bergman film look like fast-paced Airplane! hilarity in comparison. The overbearing cinematography and the atrociously timed editing. The celebrity lookalikes who look nothing like the celebrities in question, forcing the characters in the movie to actually come out and say "Hey, it's Ugly Betty!" because there's absolutely no way we would've known who the fuck it was otherwise. The inevitable scenes of peculiar white people stompin' teh yard to hiphop music. The incredibly nauseating toilet humor, with the first bodily fluids joke literally showing up in the first minute. The Vince Russo-like obsession with making sure that every single minute of the film is loaded up with as much profanity as the PG-13 rating will allow. The endless (AND THE ROCK MEANS END-LESS) nonstop supply of faggot jokes. The cheap knock-off look, which makes you wonder how this movie could've possibly cost $30,000,000 to make. Not-exactly-Oscar-winning actors like Kevin Sorbo looking visibly embarassed in some scenes. That entire feeling that these people had no fucking clue how to make a real movie
 
I used to be angry at those two clownshoes behind these projects, but time has cooled my ire (now I'm just mad at the assholes who actually pay money to watch this shit). Now that I got over the shock of seeing this smegma with their first couple of "films", I've almost gotten to the point where I can enjoy the shittiness in an Uwe Boll or Ed Wood sort of fashion. Contempt breeds familiarity, I suppose. After all, as long as you're not legitimately retarded, watching such a wretched little pile of putrescence like this picture just has to give you a nice warm feeling of moral and intellectual superiority. What's even more surprising is that Meet the Spartans wasn't ENTIRELY humorless; it seems like being forced to parody 300 for most of the movie kind of mashed the script into something vaguely resembling a story, rather like a mangled skull being held in place by a surgical halo. There were even a few parts here and there, I must admit, where I actually might've chuckled. Not loud, but aloud, 
 
Now don't get the idea that I'm actually endorsing this movie, its makers, or anyone who was involved in its production in any capacity. I am not saying that this is a good movie, because oh good lord it is not. Nor am I trying to say that any of you should ever watch it, because oh good lord you should not. If I gave that impression, well, I'm as shitty an impersonator as the talentless nobody they hired to play Leonidas here. (Really, he is a glaring flaw in a movie which is not exactly a tapestry of perfection, and puts Alyson Hannigan's heroic efforts in Date Movie in better perspective.) It's taken me three tries over two days to watch this fucking thing. Considering that the end credits start rolling at the 67-minute point, consider the deepest possible ramifications of that as you meditate upon the meaning of this work of art.

 
 
(pant, pant, pant)
 
Alright, that's enough for tonight.  But I warn you: I've got more.  The exit door is but a doorway, the TV screen is but a window, I'll be back!  
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