Peer Pressure Works!

Originally, I was going to post something about the US election, but, really, nothing has changed. McCain’s still angry, Obama’s still not really saying anything, and both VP choices are still odd. How can you blather on endlessly about change, and then pick a long time insider like Joe Biden as your running mate? And how can you blather on about being a human being with a functioning brain, and then choose a batshit crazy, unbelievably vapid twit as your running mate? Seriously…SARAH PALIN…was the BEST option…you had available?! A woman who believes that she has foreign policy experience because Russia’s next door, and Vladdy Putin has to fly through Alaskan airspace on his way to Washington. A woman who believes that dinosaurs and humans were gallivanting about together on Earth a few thousand years ago. A woman who, upon being elected mayor, promptly asked the town librarian what the best way was to begin a book censorship campaign. A woman who, despite constant coaching from every thinking campaign insider the Republicans can find, still comes off in interviews like a vegetative retard. I actually like John McCain, I’ve respected him for a number of years, but this…there is no word for this, so I’ll have to make one up. Glaggodroski!

Anyway, yeah, that’s pretty much the entire spiel on that topic (there ya go, you now get TWO topics in one post! A bargain!). So, after enjoying some coffee whilst talking with Mr. Harll the other eve, we began reminiscing about bad movies. Not “Wow, this is HILARIOUS” bad movies, but “Wow…I really just want to die” bad movies. And this has inspired me to try and compose a list of the ten worst films I have ever seen.

Now, I’ve seen a LOT of bad movies, so I felt I needed to whittle this down a bit. First off, if I found the movie entertaining, it doesn’t qualify. So, Extreme Ops is out, Battlefield Earth is out, and so on. Second, I have to have watched the ENTIRE awful movie. Therefore, Idle Hands is out (I made it 45 minutes through that turd). They have to be films that I LOATHED. Movies that, when I think back and remember them, hurt. This was a very, very painful list for me to compose…I kept coming up with more and more reprehensible pieces of shit that I had completely forgotten about seeing in the first place…this could have been a Bottom 37 list if I’d really wanted it to be. I found myself actually feeling a tad queasy at various times during the composition of this list. Some of my choices may surprise, some are blatantly horribly obvious. Without further ado…

First off, here are a few that were in consideration for my final list. Depending on my mood that day, these easily could have taken one of the bottom spots…

Batman Forever – Watch Jim Carrey ham it up, then watch Tommy Lee Jones decide that he can out ham Carrey. There aren’t enough heavy stick beatings to give these two the pain they deserve.

Sky Captain & The World of Tomorrow – Watch a bunch of fake people play fake characters on fake sets while a bunch of fake shit happens fakely. Ugh.

Pearl Harbour – First it’s a ridiculous love triangle, which they briefly interrupt for a retarded buddy picture.

Cocktail – Seriously, how did this concept get greenlit?! A movie about a jackass bartender who spends so fucking long flipping bottles and showing off that you MIGHT get your drink in 15 minutes time. All you have to know…he dumps Elizabeth Shue for someone’s grandmother with Dee Snider’s hair!

Mannequin 1 & 2 – The ‘projects’ that brought Kim goddamn Cattrall to us. Everyone associated with them should be burned just for that war crime. I love the fact that that egotistical bitch held up production of the Sex and the City movie until she got a better percentage…pretty big balls, considering that show saved her from being solely remembered for THIS.

Return to Frogtown – The only reason this doesn’t rate for the list is that I’ve purged most of this thing from my memory banks. It isn’t worth putting it back in there.

Independence Day – WOW. WOW. WOW was this a steaming heap. The only saving grace for this movie is the overt racism present in many roles. What is with Will Smith’s ghetto-chattin’ fighter pilot? And, in the winning role, Judd Hirsch as the most cliched over the top Jewish man in the history of cinema.

Bandits - Cate Blanchett plays an unbelievably screechy, annoying harpy. Billy Bob Thornton and Bruce Willis play a couple of ‘wacky’ character stereotypes who decide to compete for the crazy bitch, thus proving they don’t deserve to live. End in a ‘twist’ anyone who is not a mouth breathing retard sees coming from 30005 miles away. (The only reason this didn’t make the list…during the flick, about 2/3 of the way through, Chad, who was sitting next to me, curled in to the fetal position in his theatre seat, said the words “Please kill me.” and actually whimpered).

So, there ya go, there’s your coming attractions…now let’s face this. Be strong, we CAN get through this! By the way, I dare ANYONE to sit down and watch ALL of these damn movies in one weekend and not finish off Sunday night by opening their veins in a bathtub full of hot water.

#10 – 300 – Yes, the ‘legendary’ 300. At first I just didn’t mind this movie, but the more I see it, and the more I think back on it, I hate this piece of fetid shit more. The story of history’s first ever steroid addicts, apparently, as they take on Xerxes, history’s noted piercing addict. Just one single line of subtlety would have been like a soothing salve. Every goddamn line is either shouted or snarled or “Put forth DRAMATICALLY, dammit!”. These people would make a request for someone to pass the peas sound overwrought and dripping with menace.

And the fucking dialogue…RAMBO would wince on having to say some of this foul garbage. “Then we will fight in the shade.” UGH! Someone got PAID to WRITE that. Of course, it fits with that horribly obnoxious filming technique, where every goddamn fight scene goes sloooooooooowFASTsloooooooowFASTFASTsloooooow for a good 5 minutes in a shot. This is not effective, this is not dramatic, this is annoying.

And, my personal favourite part is the end of this movie, where the last surviving member of the 300 Spartans is ‘inspiring’ the Greek army with his speech, where he talks about them “Saving the world from mysticism and tyranny.” Ah yes, the nation that has a king who has to get permission from a group of leprotic old perverts on a mountain and their writhing oracle virgin before he is allowed to take a shit…they’ll save the world from mysticism! And, of course, they’ll save everyone from tyranny whilst taking any boychild who isn’t perfection personified and dashing him on rocks! Yes, perfect! This ridiculous juxtaposition of bullshit really explains unto itself why I despise this fucking film.

#9 – The Messenger – Luc Besson is an arrogant twat. Look at his retarded, insane production design for The Fifth Element! Look at that film! It screams “Hi there, I’m a douchebag and self proclaimed genius!” Then, there’s this…’thing’…

Supposedly it’s the story of Joan of Arc. What it boils down to is watching Mila Jovovich wail her way through 90 minutes of crap. She puts on the most annoying performance I’ve ever witnessed. I’ve seen Rob Schneider make appearances in movies, and had less of a desire to burn him just to hear him scream than the want for Mila to feel nothing but pain that I felt after this. Here’s a typical scene…

Anything happens.

Mila delivers a ‘line’ “WaaaahUUUHHHAAAAAAahhhhhAAAHHUUGHGHGHGHGGG!”

Something else happens.

If France had any balls whatsoever, they would have brought the ol’ guillotine out of storage and hacked Besson’s cranium from his body.

Aside from one 10 minute scene near the end where Dustin Hoffman comes in as…well, maybe he’s God, who the fuck cares, but he’s FUNNY (there’s something startling…Dustin Hoffman…in a movie…where he is not the most annoying thing on screen). She spends the tin minutes doing her usual bug eyed, wailing excuse for a performance, but at least there’s something else to look at. My biggest regret watching this shit was knowing that Mila and Luc were not going to be actually burned at the stake at the wrap party.

#8 – Hellraiser 1-3 – I was SHOCKED to discover recently that there are no less than EIGHT of these goddamn movies currently in existence. EIGHT. I BARELY survived viewing THREE. EIGHT is nothing but a confirmation that Hell is, in fact, real.

This is one of those movie series that creates a set of rules for how things are supposed to work in its’ universe, then completely ignores that and changes EVERYTHING in the next movie, then in the next one, changes SOME of it back, but changes other parts to something entirely new, while the rest is kept as is from #2. Unless the first 3 were written by 65 different people whose randomly typed pages were randomly stapled together by monkeys, and whatever they ended up with was what was shot, there is no explanation for how horribly disjointed these goddamn things are.

Long story short…creatures called Cenobites are supposed to bring man’s pleasures to life. They apparently decide to not do that, but instead tear people apart for shits and giggles. Despite the fact every wackjob in these things seems to have full knowledge of this, people still do their damndest to try and meet this crazy cats, which one does my completing a puzzle box. Call me crazy, but if I have full knowledge that, by solving this puzzle, I will be ravaged and torn asunder for eternity, I’m going to go play some Xbox instead. The leader of the Cenobites is Pinhead, who is rather ineffectual. He’s a guy with pins in his head who can telepathically cause hooked chains to latch flesh. That and the power to wear some 8th grade goth’s ultimate greatcoat are pretty much his powers. His henchmen really never do ANYTHING. In any of the 3 movies I’ve seen, his henchmen basically just stand around and look fucked up…think of them as the Clive Barker version of Grandmaster Flash’s Furious Five.

These abominations also feature some of the all time worst special effects I have ever witnessed. I’ve seen $1000 budget movies with ketchup blood that managed to be more convincing than the inadvertently ridiculous gag reel that pops up in these. ESPECIALLY egregious is the 2nd movie, with computer animation apparently produced on a Vic 20.

I think what completely puts me off these movies is the utter pomposity oozing from every scene. These people think these are SERIOUS films with MEANING, and goddammit, they will not rest until you accept that fact (which a bizarre collection of losers actually does).

#7 – Death Proof – This has a few alternative titles. The half of Grindhouse that DOESN’T feature zombies, or The half of Grindhouse where Tarantino decides to masturbate his enormous fucking ego with endless conversational set pieces that make suicide seem like a solid option.

This might be the most arrogant piece of shit I have ever sat through. Yes, there is a kickass car chase at the end, and that is the sole reason this thing isn’t top 5. Let me set the scene for you…you watch a collection of girls sit around and talk for literally an hour or so of screen time. Their conversations do not advance the plot in any meaningful way…they’re just chattering. Then, they die…and you meet a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT GROUP OF GIRLS and START ALL OVER AGAIN. Yes, that first hour PRODUCED NOTHING. It could have been NONEXISTENT and would have had JUST AS MUCH fucking importance to the movie as THAT did. I think you were SUPPOSED to realize that Kurt Russell’s character is an inhuman monster for just glibly slaughtering them. Frankly, after watching 60 minutes of their gabbing about boys and pointless, banal bullshit, he was my goddamn hero for SHUTTING THEM THE FUCK UP.

Somewhere along the way, Quentin seems to have convinced himself that he’s such a genius that anything he puts on screen will be awesome. If this doesn’t prove him wrong, nothing will. I would actually rather sit through nothing but an hour and a half of closeups on various cases of late stage ass cancer than have to view this neverending spew of pointless drivel again. As for Quentin, somebody hit him with a fucking bat.

#6 – Glitter – Only 2 people are happy about this movie. It made Britney’s film Crossroads look like a dramatic, textured tour de force. It also tends to make one now forget about Sofia Coppola’s approximation of a pile of lumber in her ‘performance’ in Godfather 3 when thinking of worst actresses of all time, because Mariah Carey reaches new depths of awful here.

This was a movie I KNEW was bad, I was just hoping for hilarity. There was no mirth. This movie beat mirth down, then curb stomped it. I don’t even know quite how to describe just how awful Mariah is here. Here ridiculously fake tits are much more realistic than she is as a basic human being. Even Steven Seagal would occasionally frown…I don’t think Mariah Carey’s face twitches one quarter of a micrometre in this entire flick. She’s like some sort of breathing still life.

She has one look on her increasingly simian-looking face this entire movie…a sort of “Woah, those ARE low prices.” appearance, with eyebrows slightly arched, eyes wide open, and mouth slightly agape.

Life’s tough, and she and her roommates are barely scraping by…”Look at those bargains!”

On the rise, has a hit song out, moving in with her DJ boyfriend…”I can’t believe these prices!”

Boyfriend becomes jealous jerk, ‘menacing’ Terrence Howard shoots him, the show must go on…”How can they afford to sell this low?!”

A statue would have performed better. Awful. Awful. Awful.

#5 – The Crow : Salvation – The first Crow was a decent action/revenge picture. The second Crow had Iggy Pop, looking like he’d been dead about 3 years. This was the third one. The original script was done by Rob Zombie, but the studio hated it, and they threw him out and did the whole thing over again. I can’t help but be curious what the Hell he had written, because seeing what they felt was the BETTER option…<shudder>

Basically…corrupt police unit frames kid for his girlfriend’s murder, and he gets the chair. But he’s back! And with the help of GF’s sister (Kirsten Dunst), he not only clears his name, but finds the REAL killer (note to OJ : Apparently, golfing is NOT the best method with which to find a real killer. Who knew, right?).

The real killer…the police chief…who likes to cut people up…for reasons that are never explained…and has a series of wood screws inserted in his arms. There doesn’t appear to be any reason for the screws to be there aside for making him relatively easy to identify. The cop is played by Fred Ward, proving he will do ANYTHING for money…and I don’t imagine this role paid him much. Fuck, he appears willing to ‘act’ for macaroni and cheese at this point.

In the end, the GF’s sister and the guy somehow get the cop in to the room with the electric chair and fry him, with nobody else appearing to ever come by to maybe see what’s going on. Apparently, in this state the chair is located in a shed out in the middle of a farmer’s field, or something. The best part…they never do really find any evidence that would PROVE anything, so approximately one year after the events in the film, you KNOW the Kirsten Dunst character is getting fried for being a cop killer. For being in this, Kirsten HERSELF should have been fried.

Apparently, there is a fourth Crow movie. I just can’t do it.

#4 – House of the Dead – Uwe Boll is Satan. He made a movie featuring ZOMBIE CONQUISTADORS utterly and completely, mind-suckingly boring. This flick should be a cheesetastic good time. It isn’t. I remember watching this with Chad…about a half hour in, there just wasn’t anything funny left to say. It was so bad it has passed the point where a movie can still be mocked. It was like The Grim Reaper himself made the film as a way to drum up more business. It just sort of goes on and on and on. I can’t even think of any interesting way to point out how egregiously horrible it is. The Bubonic Plague sounds like a comic lark next to this.

#3 – I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry – First of all, I want to assure everyone I did not spend a dime on this movie. This was one of the many horrible sights I was subjected to between flights while working at ATS (others that come to mind…the hideous beast known as ‘Elizabeth’, the pool of ‘blue juice’ and human waste that leaked out of the airplane honeywagon when the tank popped in the middle of winter, DVD’s of the ‘comedy’ of Dane Cook). See, people would bring in a movie…then leave it for the night. And, inevitably, it would be played again…and again…and again. Every fucking time you would return to the break room, it would be on, because somebody who’d come in hadn’t seen it yet.

Chuck & Larry played for 3 straight days. And I LITERALLY mean 3 straight days. It did not leave the DVD player. It was played ad nauseam (emphasis on the nauseam) for AN ENTIRE WEEKEND. Not only have I born witness to this thing, I’ve seen it PROBABLY a ‘good’ ten to twelve times.

It’s one of those movies that spends the first 90% of its’ existence making hilarious fun of them queers…then the last 10% of itself chastising you for laughing at all of the jokes it made at the expense of them queers. This movie is proof positive that the only right thing to do for the sake of future generations is to send Jean Claude Van Damme back in time so that he can find the mother of The Farrelly Brothers somewhere during the first trimester and do what SHOULD have been done in the first place in a back alley with a coat hanger. They didn’t write this…they didn’t direct this…but they for damn sure inspired it.

Dan Aykroyd just continues to swirl down the bowl. Kevin James basically does what Kevin James does…stumbles around, does a few really bad pratfalls, and is fat. Adam Sandler makes himself hated worse than Hitler (which, if you think of it, is an impressive feat for a Jewish guy) within ten minutes. The jokes don’t work. The premise doesn’t work. Nothing works.And as if THAT wasn’t bad enough, you will be subjected to a mincing Ving Rhames (WTF is he doing here?!?!). I know it SOUNDS funny…it’s horrifying. It’s like stumbling across a horrible car accident, and then slipping in a big pile of someone’s intestines horrifying. And that is NOTHING when put up against a showering Kevin James (I can’t believe I just assembled that sentence in that way…I have to take a break, because the mere concept of ANYTHING ‘up against’ Kevin James in any capacity is causing the taste of bile to rise up my throat).

#2 – Batman & Robin – Worst…script…ever. Seriously, you forget just what valleys of atrociousness this shitbag sinks to until you sit down to watch it again. The dialogue would have to come up about 17 levels to reach ’stilted and dead’.

George Clooney escapes my wrath, because in every scene, you can see the look on his face, the one saying “Holy shit, how did this happen?” He grins and bears it…maybe it’s his penance for making The Peacemaker? Whatever the reasons, you know he read the script…the ORIGINAL script, the one BEFORE 73.6 different rewrites by 57 different people, 2 of whom weren’t actually BORN yet, and one of whom whose normal day job is coming up for the wacky names for villains in Megaman games.

Chris O’Donnell. Uhhh…do I really have to say anything else?

Alicia Silverstone. Gee, whatever happened to her? Oh…oh that’s RIGHT, she possesses the range of drywall. Chris O’Donnell looks like Daniel Day Lewis when they’re on screen together.

Arnold Schwarzenegger. He watched Batman Forever. He thinks he can be a contender in The Ultimate Ham Batman Villain contest vs. Tommy Lee and Jim. He’s out to win that prize. He’s trying to fucking hard, I keep waiting for his skull to burst forth from the confines of his face. He has an army of iceskating thugs. He sends them to sort of skate around get their asses kicked by Batman and Robin (they have skate blades that pop out of their boots. Really.), and gesticulates a lot. Yeah.

Uma Thurman. She is so over the top whiny and annoying here that you really keep watching just in the hopes that maybe Bane will go in to a Roid Rage and tear her in to tiny chunks. Unfortunately, it never happens.

The Batmobile is dark purple with neon green underlighting. There is a side story about Alfred having some weird disease, and Dr. Freeze having to find ‘a warm spot of tenderness under all that frost’ to help cure him. There is a major story about Robin having to learn to trust. In the end, all the main heroes join together in a ‘family’. The superhero suits have nipples. The dialogue must have been written by a Special Needs class. It tries to have ‘wacky sight gags’ throughout.

Really, Adam West and Burt Ward can look DOWN on this freshly laid dump as something that would have been beneath them.

#1 – The Exorcist 2 : The Heretic – For years, I have said that Batman and Robin is the worst movie I have ever seen. See, I had SEEN Heretic before, but my mind, being a kind sort (well, at least towards me) scrubbed all traces of it from itself. Then I recently saw it again.

Holy. Fucking. Shit. Here’s a tip for Hollywood…if a central theme of your movie is a ‘thought machine’ through which one person can actually SEE another person’s memories, your movie is complete crap.

Regan from the first movie is back, now in what appears to be late adolescence. She now spends much of her time with a psychologist, who decides to use the machine to find out what happened. Also along for the ride is Richard Burton as an ex-student of the old priest from the first movie, who needs to know what happened to his mentor.

Then they bring out the machine. It’s downhill from there, in a car with no brakes, down a mountainside. Somehow, the priest ends up back in Africa where the demonic presence (whose name is apparently Pazuzu…I guess they decided demons have senses of humour) first appeared, infecting the body of a child. The child was never found, yet the father suddenly has a vision of where he is, flies to Africa, climbs down a cliff, and finds him for the tribe. Then, just as suddenly, he’s back. The whole thing is just a contrived reason for him to go to Africa and become ‘infected’ by Pazuzu…even though when we last SAW Pazuzu he was living in the house back in the States. Did he catch a flight home or something? After all, if you remember the first movie, it’s only after the mother hears ’something’ bumping around in the house attic and tells the caretaker to open it up and check it out that Regan is possessed in the first place, leaving one to believe Pazuzu was basically stuck in their attic. He’s less of a monstrous demon and more of an old, senile fucker who kinda remembers who he is. So, he’s not exactly known for his ability to deal with obstacles. Anyway, the boy is now grown up (and played by a slumming James Earl Jones). He is now a healer. Apparently, Pazuzu attacks those who can heal, which makes him more of a dick than a demonic presence. Oh, and when he attacks, apparently a bunch of locusts now appear…you now, just like in the original WHEN THAT NEVER HAPPENED. So, the grown up kid guy now spends his days trying to kill locusts.

The Father returns home, and heads to the house where the original exorcism took place. Regan comes with him. During this period, Burton’s performance consists of staring straight ahead and speaking occasional small snippets in monotone, which is probably a real life coping mechanism he used for dealing with marriage to Elizabeth Taylor.

I never understood what exactly was happening here…is he possessed? Is he driven to defeat the demon? Is he sleepwalking? Did he just get lost on his way to get some ribs? Anyway, they both enter the house. Meanwhile, this other character who was apparently some assistant to Regan’s mom appears, and now she seems to be possessed or something, then there’s a car crash, and she’s burnt alive (it really is this inexplicably confusing. A bunch of stuff just kind of happens for little to no apparent reason).

Meanwhile, Father Lamont is upstairs, where the demon version of Regan has apparently just been chilling out in bed this entire time. Actually, this WOULD explain why the house has never been sold. Anyway, she apparently tries to hit on him and be ’sexy’…watching the chipmunk faced Linda Blair attempt sexy is easily the most horrifying thing seen in this entire picture. Anyway, he appears about to succumb, then rips out her heart.

While all of this is happening, the house has become inundated and surrounded by a massive swarm of locusts which just kind of appeared from over the horizon. It begins to tear the house apart, until Regan starts swinging around this sort of bolo thing in the air, which apparently makes the locusts just fall dead to the ground…or maybe it’s because Lamont ripped out the demon’s heart…or maybe NONE OF THIS MAKES A FUCKING LICK OF SENSE! And then it just sort of ends.

This movie is a muddled disaster. It’s indescribably confusing, it doesn’t work on any level, and it just screams “I SUCK!” from the highest mountain in every scene. It is EASILY the most horrific film I have ever burned in to my retinas.

There, that’s my list. Feel free to offer your own, or just go somewhere and curl up in a ball and hope to die. I choose the latter.