This is one of the first filmic disappointments of the '20s (see also X, below). In a dank, unspecified postwar city, a taciturn oddball (Paul Hilton) cares lovelessly and perfunctorily for a toothless little girl (Romane Hemelaers) who's diurnally, orally fitted with icy dentures. Notwithstanding Jonathan Ricquebourg's beautiful photography, coruscating effects, and an uncharacteristically good performance by bovine moron Romola Garai, this dull drama limps flaccidly, unsubstantially to a stupidly violent climax that reflects nothing, except maybe how Lucile Hadzihalilovic -- one of vanishingly few European filmmakers who's actually produced elliptically intelligent movies in recent years -- has been unfortunately influenced by her dopey, overrated husband, Gaspar Noe.
Kubrick, then Spielberg dropped the ball in both conception and execution of this melodramatic science fiction about a robotic child rejected by his parents. Most of the story relies on inexplicably awful, asinine concepts and unconvincing motivations as an excuse for subhuman behavior and unbelievable dialogue like, "I'm sorry I didn't tell you about the world!" Haley Joel Osment is solid in the factitious lead, but spends most of his time whining and pouting. Should extraterrestials recover this movie in the wake of mankind's extinction, they'll probably believe that we deserved it.
Yuppies vacation on a picturesque island, where they're almost effortlessly slain by a horrible creature because they've all the observant and deductive faculties of a mentally retarded toddler. This tedious trash that represents the end of engaging Columbian horror in the early '80s doesn't even try to be fun; most of it just comes off as the post-menopausal fever dream of its butt-ugly protagonist (something called a Sarah Kendall). In their ample spare time, moronic viewers and critics alike have analyzed this movie as though it has any depth for its modest ambiguity. Get a god damned life, you losers, or at least some Gundam models to assemble and paint.
An ugly carny (Richard Lynch) and his demented, witchy girlfriend (Ellen Barber) kidnap her cognate daughter (Danielle Brisebois) from the wealthy couple (Sharon Farrell, Edward Michael Bell) who adopted her. If mom, dad, the lazy, halfwitted detective (Jeff Corey) assigned to her case or the smug, demonstrably worthless parapsychologist (Chitra Neogy) who assists them had their wits about them, they'd rescue her within a week. Instead, their collective density prolongs a bunch of seedy interpersonal conflicts and psychic codswallop, which doesn't actually involve a premonition. This movie's aftertaste resembles that of pork rinds fried in canola oil. Ick!
Plenty of details were revised to satisfy politically correct and logistical imperatives, but Denis Villeneuve's semi-fictionalized reenactment of the misogynist École Polytechnique massacre in late 1989 is admittedly staged, shot, cut, and enacted exceedingly well. It's also bound to its cement block of a script, which nauseates in its conclusive third act when a Strong, Independent Womyn (Karine Vanasse) who survived the massacre and became an aeronautical engineer (and probably built her own space plane and flew right to the moon without the help of stupid boys) declares in a schmalzy, passive-aggressive voice-over how she purposes to ruin her kids' lives by emasculating her son and aggrandizing her daughter with an entitlement complex. If anything, I'm amazed that more budding, feminist careerists haven't been gunned down by insane men who've sat through this claptrap, which is slickly shot but empty, like all of Villeneuve's projects.
If frequency by popular demand was in objective accordance with quality, then the most hilarious and aphrodisiacal sight that any Italian man could behold is that of a nubile young woman running from danger misinterpreted or otherwise into a public locale/celebratory event/room filled with stock weirdos....and -- get this -- she's naked!! Like most other Italian sex comedies, Polanski's stab at the genre isn't funny or sexy, but it's as scrotum-numbingly boring as one could expect. Stupid Sydne Rome encounters eccentrics (Mastroianni, et al.) who are as dull as she is whilst traipsing around a coastal villa. Romek's made worse movies, but they weren't this annoying.
Mrs. Columbo: Word Games (1979)
The much-loathed spinoff got off on a stumbling, probably consequentially broken foot with this tonally erratic, unfunny, vacuous pilot, in which good actors (Robert Culp, Frederic Forrest) seem aimlessly unprepared for the maladroitly interjected cliches that they're tasked to perform. Kate Mulgrew was charming through most of this series, but she's here a pecking termagant. Three different cuts of this exist, the most truncated of which is bafflingly anticlimactic.
Under shopworn circumstances, a stodgy academic (Jeremy Irons) is entranced by the cornball poetry of a posturing doctor (Jack Huston) involved in the resistance against Salazar's dictatorship in the '70s, and travels to Lisbon to meet other, acquaintanced leftist losers who wasted their lives as frivolously as he did. You know the drill: lots of solid actors (Irons, Lena Olin, Martina Gedeck, Bruno Ganz, Christopher Lee, Charlotte Rampling, Tom Courtenay) dissipated on silly roles in a mawkish, hideously photographed sack of Eurotrash through which plenty of cash was likely laundered. Gross.
Turgid, brain-dead hagiography of FIFA strives to ennoble soccer and its grossly corrupt, globally governing body as cultural treasures. Aging, bloated Sam Neill and Tim Roth are loathsomely dull and miscast as two muckety-mucks of kickball's plenary administration. Only a bureaucrat or a moron could enjoy this.
X (2022)
Welcome to softcore porno drama camp, no longer restricted to Cinemax, its rivals, and successors! Ten years ago, he was among the best and most promising genre filmmakers in North America; after years of directing atrociously uninspired and inconsequential televised series, Ti West is now akin to Tarantino: a director and editor possessing a tremendous command of technique that's dissipated on his fatuous, ill-conceived scripts. If his shitty western In a Valley of Violence triggered your horripilation, bundle up if you decide to subject yourself to West's trashy tale of a pornographic producer (Martin Henderson), director (Owen Campbell), his girlfriend and assistant (Jenna Ortega), and their performers (Scott Mescudi, Brittany Snow, Mia Goth) who rent a shack from an elderly couple (Goth, Stephen Ure) in West Texas, where they'll shoot much of a cheesy smut flick before the indignant old farts decide that they're expendable. On one hand, many of West's shots are memorably inspired, and the picture's cut with his idiomatically taut, meticulous care. On the other, it's not scary, it's not funny, his homage to Texas Chainsaw is as trite as ham-fisted, and his dialog is flagrantly, astonishingly bad, almost comparable to Joss Whedon's. A scene in which Snow and Mescudi perform Fleetwood Mac's Landslide before sanctimoniously defending their sleazy libertinism with Goth may be the most nauseatingly Boomerish trash ever penned by a Millennial. Goth's climactic speech and a readily predicted, conclusive "surprise" are almost as mortifying. Not since The End of Violence have I seen something so indulgently egregious by a filmmaker who was once worth watching. I actually recommend this for anyone who wants to see how quickly an artist can degenerate into an awful schlockmeister over the course of a decade -- on an empty stomach, of course.
Transvestic Liev Schreiber, Ukelele-strumming, falsetto Adam Sandler, shrilly pregnant Juliette Lewis, rollerblading Jon Stewart, annoyingly coy, overripe Rita Wilson and lots of other characters who I wish to god were dead and buried harass the spineless Angeleno director (Steve Martin) of a therapeutic hotline during Christmas Eve, 199shit. Of course, the few funny people in this cast (Robert Klein, Garry Shandling) are afforded no comedic moments whatsoever. Nora Ephron's intensely, torturously, almost impossibly unfunny situations rely on her characters' collective mental retardation, suspension of numerous laws of physics, and her audience's willingness to accept anything, no matter how decerebrate and cutesily annoying, as some kind of comedy.
Uninvited (1987)
Never mind Tommy Wiseau or Neil Breen; Greydon Clark is the true successor to Ed Wood: bawdy, clownishly inept, and gleefully dedicated to his craft. On a yacht at sea, George Kennedy, Clu Gulagher, some sleazy financier, two preppies and a couple of bimbos are terrorized by a small, evil cat stalking them inside a larger cat. Of course, this is one of the worst movies that anyone or anything could possibly watch in this solar system, maybe even in this galaxy, because any civilization that's routinely produced movies worse than this (or, for that matter, those defecated from the slimy, vastly gaping cinematic orifices known popularly as Hollywood and Bollywood) was probably annihilated by some benevolent higher intelligence.
Idiotic, aspiring broker (Jeff Branson) joins a firm in NYC comprised of lycanthropes, who he eventually understands and predictably opposes. David DeCoteau can't produce anything funny or scary, but he can aggressively recycle footage every 30 seconds to 10 minutes, and misdirect his actors in inane exchanges. Even porcine joy Eric Roberts couldn't save this shit from itself.
Like every other imbecilic female careerist, Julia Roberts finds herself bored with her pointless occupation and marriage to a typical corporate milksop (Billy Crudup), so she treks to Italy, India, and Indonesia to gorge herself, meditate, patronize exotic locals, ride a few easily impressed men (Javier Bardem, et al.), whine at everybody -- anything but settle down and procreate, of course. Beloved among clubbing, corporate, mundivagant tramps, this third-wave landmark starring feminism's favorite horse-faced leading lady is Elizabeth Gilbert's quasi-fictional expose of what most dumb, talentless women do as an alternative to building and nuturing a family.
Irritating, niminy-piminy, weirdly sexless Irish teens (Cillian Murphy, Elaine Cassidy) mince about, often at the obnoxious expense of others, until they're separated by her consignment to a boarding school; a rescue and murder ensue. Like all pointlessly, unappealingly Irish dogshit (see: 80% of Neil Jordan's filmography), it's to be avoided.
Teenagers derive psychic powers from rocks emitting bad SFX in this early shiteo production by The Asylum, which would be so bad it's great if it weren't frequently so bad that it's dretching. Stale, slightly anachronistic edginess from the mid-'90s is embodied by most of its shallow characters. Of the myriad Craft-alikes, this may be the dumbest.
Never mind its universal, hyperbolic accolades; this movie is horrible. Its plot is porous, characterizations paper-thin, scenarios ridiculous, and anyone with functioning eyes and an IQ above 90 (criteria that exclude Neil Jordan and some of his collaborators) can see at a glance that Jaye Davidson is a man. Irish Republicans kidnap a British soldier (Forest Whitaker, who's never looked or sounded so stupid before or since), who bonds cornily with one of his captors (Stephen Rea) before he escapes in an atrociously directed scene that concludes with him hilariously splattered by one of Her Majesty's ATVs. Rea's wistfully maudlin dissident seeks out his fast friend's effeminate but obviously male boyfriend to court him because although he's straight, he's also obtuse to a degree of clinical idiocy. By his pandering, moronic script and obnoxiously adorable direction, Jordan mostly squanders several good, established players, as well as Davidson, who cannot act in spite of his striking screen presence. This is one of a few pictures that represent the degradation of British and gay cinema alike into degenerate, Americanized, globohomo trash.
Heart of Midnight (1988)
No intelligent, tasteful person on the face of this planet wouldn't be annoyed by Matthew Chapman's screenplay or its realization, for which Jennifer Jason Leigh plays the heritor of her sleazy, late uncle's sex club, which is undergoing renovation into a cheesily themed bar. Never mind his reams of superfluous dialogue that couldn't possibly sound from the mouths of normal people; every aspect of Chapman's plot relies on the impenetrably roundabout incompetence of his witless, superficial characters during a runtime that's temporized by pretenses and scores of needless shots. This is actually worse than his script for Color of Night, which could at least be charitably interpreted as a satire of human behavior. Awful Melanie Mayron's even uglier sister Gale dominates the movie's third act as a semi-masculinized lunatic in a performance that could be the most irritatingly overplayed that I've observed, as though I'm a bystander witnessing a pedophilic gangrape interrupted by an automotive crash involving ten cars and a semi, which is in turn curtailed by an earthquake and contiguous flood, all on the same spot. This movie is that spot, and there's no way to scrub it out.
Utterly toilet-brained fantasy about a computer (wussily voiced by Bud Cort) that ascends to sentience to fall in love, make an ass of itself, and piss me way off. Lenny Von Dohlen and Virginia Madsen are miscast and as wasted as Alex Thomson's beautiful photography on this nonsensical love triangle misplotted by addled idiot Rusty Lemorande. From the century that brought us multiple genocides, Judeo-Christianity, and reggae comes this unwitting condemnation of humanity at its brainless nadir. There is no measure of Boomerism, technological or architectural ignorance, or drugs that can explain or extenuate just how royally god-awful this movie is, or how much excruciation it inflicts on anybody who expects an iota of logic from a picture that isn't Dada. If it were a man, I honestly believe that I could tear this movie limb from limb with my bare hands witout a moment's remorse or hesitation. Nothing else that rolled over like a diseased dog to piss all over itself on my TV or laptop incensed me like this shitwitted dreck. Would that the original reels of this movie were dumped into the Pacific Ocean or launched into the heart of our sun. My hands would reflexively clench at the impulse to murder anybody who told me that he unironically, ironically, or semi-ironically enjoyed this godforsaken shit. If a gormless imbecile later portrayed by another named Vin Diesel inadvertently fumbled something that launched a nuclear strike which redounded to the atomization of civilization, that tragedy might not be more senseless or scathing as this movie. If this picture somehow ceased to exist and its nonexistence officially invalidated its inclusion on this list, I'd be thrilled to omit this entry entirely and reassign the worst credit to Heart of Midnight. Maybe no other motion picture reminds us that wars, disasters, and their hecatombs are occasionally necessary. If hell exists, I can only imagine that every cinema there screens this excrement nonstop.