My 25 Least Favorite Movies 1. The
Passion of the Christ Rusty W. Spell’s Commentary 25. Teen Wolf -- This is the one of the first movies I remember thinking was "bad," when I was just getting old enough to have such opinions. For a ten-year-old to have this reaction to a werewolf movie starring his then-favorite actor obviously shows how horrible this movie is. 24. The Newton Boys – This is the movie that caused my re-evaluation of once highly-regarded (and still sometimes highly-regarded) director Richard Linklater. It really does look like a bad high school play. 23. Pocahontas – The Walt Disney studio was already releasing pretty bad animated movies by this point, but this one was overly bad, and dull. All the worst of the recent Disney came out in this movie. There have probably been worse Disney cartoons since this one, but I don’t watch them anymore as a result of it. 22. Austin Powers in Goldmember – The first Austin Powers movie was great. The second was really bad, but at least it tried a little. This one didn’t remember to put in any jokes and retroactively and illogically caused me to not like the first movie that much. 21. Problem Child – I shouldn’t have any worries about this one, since it clearly wasn’t made for me, but it tends to be ever-present, and that kid is just so annoying. This movie represents every movie of this type that has been made. The gold standard for horrible stupid kid movies. 20. Cool World – One of my early disappointment movies. I was all geared up for a "cool" version of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, but all I got was a dorky, faux-dirty, horribly sub-par version of it. This is like when there’s a toy that every kid likes, and then generic companies make horrible knock-offs of it. "Oh, instead of toons, we’ll call ‘em doodles." That kind of thing. 19. The Mask – The first movie I ever remember giving me physical stomach pains. Seriously. If it weren’t for the bliss of Cameron Diaz, I might have died that day. 18. The Dark Wind – This is one of those movies you see on TV because the local network could buy it for cheap and use it to "lure" potential vinyl siding customers to watch the ten-minute-long commercials they show during the movie. At least that was my experience with it. This was supposedly "directed" by documentary genius Errol Morris, but he claims to have barely a memory of shooting the movie at all, which makes me sort of angry at the movie for being a glitch (invisible as it might be) in his movieography. 17. Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over – I don’t know how this qualifies as a movie. Robert Rodriguez took the more or less good Spy Kids movies he’d created and – for a "grand finale" – gave us this horrible version of 3-D (they have good 3-D now, so why did he still use the 1950s red and blue "technology"?) with a "story" concerning little kids jabbing things into the camera and Ricardo Montalbon in a Voltron suit. 16. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Drug trips are never interesting, and Terry Gilliam is old enough to know that. But that didn’t stop him from making one and making me hate him even more in the process. 15. Boxing Helena – This is one of those cases where being a famous person’s kid allows you to bring your personal vision of crap to the public. Jennifer Lynch tried to make an art film and instead just made a fart film. Huh huh huh. I promise the movie is worse than that joke. 14. Legends of the Fall – I suppose this movie stands in for all the crappy epics ever made. This one is also a waste of really good actors. This movie takes a sort of thick, syrupy form and oozes its crap all over you. 13. Twister (1989) – This doesn’t refer to the tornado-chasing movie (which is probably also bad, but I haven’t seen it), but the 1989 Michael Almereyda film based on Mary Robison’s novel, Oh! The entire thing is an experiment in noise and annoyance—the movie equivalent of a three-year-old counting to one million while someone is shooting off firecrackers and scraping a chalkboard. 12. Batman & Robin – There is not one line in the movie that isn’t a bad pun. Not one. Batman himself is all but lost in this movie (and the Batman that George Clooney pulls off is rather dull to begin with—whether that’s his fault or not) to make room for the pun-ishment of the villains, especially Arnold "Catch Phrase" Schwartzenegger. This is an example of how much money it takes to make a true disaster. 11. Masked and Anonymous – Bob Dylan farts around the screen without purpose while really good actors make themselves look really horrible by delivering wretched and offensive lines. Meanwhile, the director has no idea where to put a camera, making the movie not even pretty to look at. The worst of the "muddy" movies for men. 10. Waking Life – Richard Linklater proves that the goodness of Slacker was a fluke as he does the same idea again, this time with animation that is supposedly the movie’s saving grace (but it’s not). Every little "speech" in this movie is as if Linklater said, "Okay, adlib some crap that will make you look smart to assholes." 9. 3000 Miles to Graceland – If you ever need a reason to hate males, just watch this movie. Terribly offensive stuff, so poorly made. But at least Kevin Costner plays a role suitable to a person of his, um, "talents." (See, the joke there is that Costner isn’t talented at all and this movie is junk.) 8. Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas – This movie is horrible for so many reasons. Taking a beloved character, who already had a beloved and perfect cartoon movie, and taking a dump on it is just one of those reasons. The Grinch making jokes about "Jazzercise" is supposed to be funny. This is one of those things that makes you wonder how anyone made it. Take the most repugnant, stupid, insulting, misdirected group of people you can think of and ask them to make a movie, and they will still come up with something better than this. I guess sometimes movies are less than the difference of their parts. 7. Mars Attacks! – Tim Burton, who until this point had made really good movies, decides to parody B movies and ends up making something that wishes it were as smart as a B movie. So insulting on many levels, right down to killing off the better actors in the first half and leaving the bad ones. Maybe that’s the "joke," but it’s not funny. More insulting than anything, of course, is that he’s making fun of Ed Wood, the man he had so carefully and delicately written a love letter to with his previous movie. Tim Burton will continue sinking into his pit with Planet of the Apes and Big Fish. 6. Natural Born Killers – Oliver Stone can make a good movie when he wants to, but this ain’t one of them. Over-directed in the worst sense of the word, this movie is a bloated corpse. 5. eXistenZ – David Cronenberg is a tool. I try to avoid his movies, but I managed to see this one. Apparently biologically organic Gameboys and tired ideas about reality are still interesting to him. 4. House of 1000 Corpses – I really wanted to admire a movie that tried to bring back old-style horror, but Rob Zombie wouldn’t let me. See, there’s a difference between an amateur who is interesting and motivated and has potential, and one (like Zombie) who will always be fourth rate, no matter how hard he tries. 3. Tetsuo: The Iron Man – Like David Cronenberg, Shinya Tsukamoto wants to shock you with the usual post-apocalyptic, cyborgian, sexual deviant, blah blah blah, but just ends up boring you. No lie: this is nothing more than a movie about a guy who jabs things into this body and wraps himself in aluminum foil. 2. Donnie Darko – I probably don’t hate this movie as much as I think I do, but I can’t think of it any more without having an annoyed stab in my gut thanks to the fans of this movie who have proven that they care too much about the wrong things (a dumb movie like this included) by writing me email after email about how I’m just an idiot because I don’t "get it" (they think of this film as a puzzle, you see, as something for smart people to think about and figure out). The truth is, the movie is just a below-average movie that I personally find dull, and I am annoyed by the hipster embrace of it. If it weren’t for the ogling, I wouldn’t care about it any more than I care about Beaches or Look Who’s Talking Now or any other dumb movie. When Richard Kelly grows up and learns to care about things that actually count, he might be a good moviemaker. 1. The Passion of the Christ – I have to admit that this is another movie where the audience’s reaction is more annoying to me than the movie itself—although in this case, the movie itself is a close close second place. So we’ve got a guy, Mel Gibson, who makes some Mad Max movies, some Lethal Weapon movies, who plays a decent Hamlet, and directs a huge obsessive epic called Braveheart… and because of this he’s suddenly the ultimate authority on "how it really was" at Jesus’ death? First of all, no—it wasn’t like that. I was there, okay, and it wasn’t like that. No man could survive that much beating. The Bible itself said he was beat thirty-nine times, not thirty-nine million times. And if you say he could survive that much beating because he was supernatural, then – um – what was the point? What’s the sacrifice of being beaten up if you’re Superman? So the so-called "accuracy" is bogus. The movie is not at all "inspirational." What’s inspiring about seeing a guy, whether the Son of God or not, being slapped around and bloodied for two hours? "So we can see what he went through for us." Okay, well, that seems to be missing the point again, focusing on a few hours of blood and death, when the real point of the story seems to be that he gave up his actual life. And that the life that he did lead was a positive one. It would be like if we only respected Martin Luther King because he was shot, rather than what he did when he was alive. So – religion aside – what’s left of this as an actual movie? Nothing much that I can see. It doesn’t add anything to the Biblical retelling genre, just a bunch of sandals and sand like usual. The story doesn’t mean anything: for all we can really tell, this is a movie about a guy who get a bum rap and is beaten for two hours then hung on a stick. The end. Wow, that was a great story. So, the audience who loves this movie is stupid, the movie is stupid, and Mel Gibson is a complete and total lunatic. In interviews about this movie, his eyeballs look like the tops of Ban roll on deodorant. If I tried hard enough, I could probably find two or three things to enjoy about every other movie up there, but not this one. Congrats, The Passion, you are passionately despised. |
Copyright © 13 Oct
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