2008 is over and while there’s been a lot of great stuff worth remembering, there’s also a few things that we’d really like to forget 25 things to be exact. Welcome to the Weekend Warrior’s Terrible 25 list, an annual tradition where we revisit the absolutely worst movies we’ve seen and get them out of our system hopefully once and for all.
A few years ago, we tried to examine what made a bad movie bad in the “pages” of Weekend Warrior, and every single type of bad is present on this list, from misguided premises to bad acting to just all-around incompetent filmmaking with everything in between. No one is safe, not indie filmmakers struggling to make their dream project, not studio-level auteurs trying to do something different, no one. You make a bad movie and we’re forced to sit through it because that’s part of our job, and you make the list.
#25 – Deception (20th Century Fox) – Marcel Langenegger’s long-delayed directorial debut with its ever-changing title starred Ewan McGregor as a guy who got involved with a casual sex ring run by a sleazebag played by Hugh Jackman. It was one of the many Fox movies this year that some critics were surprised that they actually screened it for critics. Surely they must have known this was a dog and were hoping that even bad reviews might help get it some attention, but that was not to be, as it ended up making less than $5 million – clearly not even enough to pay Ewan McGregor to keep it in his pants. (This being an “erotic thriller,” people must have wondered what happened to the missing “Lil’ Ewan.”) It’s easy to believe that the Scottish actor would agree to make a movie this bad to be able to say he had (far-too-short) sex scenes with Maggie Q, Michelle Williams, Natasha Henstridge, Rachael Taylor and even Charlotte Rampling (?!?), but why on earth would any of those mostly talented actresses agree to such humiliation? Clearly, this movie should earn some kind of award for most appropriate title of the year.
Pull Quote: “This boring, obvious and overly stylish cat-and-mouse thriller offers fewer thrills than a Tom and Jerry cartoon.”
#24 – My Blueberry Nights (Sony Classics) – Believe me, I’m probably the most surprised to see one of my favorite filmmakers, Mr. Wong Kar-wai, on this list, being that he has directed some of the most beautiful films of the last decade. Well, this one brought him to America and had him working in English with talents like Natalie Portman, Rachel Weisz, Jude Law and David Strathairn, as well as singer Norah Jones in her screen debut. Something obviously got lost in translation because the story of a waitress traveling across country and meeting all sorts of dysfunctional characters lacked any of the magic of his Chinese films, even as it retained his gorgeous visuals and overuse of slow motion. Here’s hoping he gets back on track with his next movie, but a movie like this is not the way to expand your audience.
Pull Quote: “Shows Wong to be far less adept and successful when working outside his normal element.”
#23 – Mamma Mia! (Universal) – Before you all go, “Well, he must not be an ABBA fan,” I’ll have you know that “ABBA’s Greatest Hits Vol. 1 and 2” were two of the first albums I ever owned and believe me, I was so embarrassed about owning them, that I gave them to a friend once I got into cooler music. Regardless of how you feel about the Swedish pop band’s ridiculously catchy tunes, hearing them being belted out by Meryl Streep, Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgård, and worst of all, Pierce Brosnan, made you never want to EVER hear another ABBA song again as long as you freakin’ lived. Of course, the movie was everywhere, making beaucoup moola worldwide, and there was no getting rid of it, especially as the title song bore a hole in your brain. Months later, I’m still scratching my head what women saw in this–not that I’ve ever claimed to have an understanding of the fairer yet nuttier gender–but they thankfully moved on since the summer to similarly bad flicks like Twilight and Marley & Me, equally big hits.
Pull Quote: “Maybe watching three older women prancing around in tight spandex singing ABBA is someone’s idea of a good time, but I wouldn’t want to be stuck in a room with those people for more than 90 minutes ever again.”
#22 – The Eye (Lionsgate) – The original Pang Brothers horror movie was one of my faves to come out of the wave of Asian horror that Hollywood quickly jumped on to remake, and I had high hopes Lionsgate would do this remake right due to the pedigree of French filmmakers David Moreau and Xavier Palud. That’s what I get for being an optimist. As we saw with the Pang Brothers, foreign filmmaking talent quickly gets squelched when making Hollywood movies, and this was a competent but unimpressive English language debut, a horror movie that wasn’t even remotely scary. Regardless, the most obvious and biggest problem, which always seems to be the case with any movie starring Jessica Alba is that… well, it stars Jessica Alba. Gorgeous woman, very sexy, actually fairly smart and outspoken, but the girl cannot act. (In my review, which you can read above, I compared her acting skills to a janitor’s “skill” at emptying the trash.)
Pull Quote: “This remake of ‘The Eye’ probably could have been a lot worse – Alba could have been given the eyes of Carrot Top for instance.”
#21 – Lake City (Screen Media) – Maybe it was the fact that a couple of guys I really like co-produced the movie and that I always thought the film’s director and “Narnia” producer Perry Moore was a nice enough guy that I never got around to reviewing this, but it was pretty awful. This is the kind of indie drama that we can expect at film festivals every year, though this is more Tribeca Film Festival fare, than Sundance. Oscar winner Sissy Spacek continues her downward spiral, following up her involvement in the cast of Grey Matters (on the 2007 Terrible 25 list), but it was Troy Garrity, son of Jane Fonda, who really stunk this one up playing Spacek’s son, returning home with a kid on the run from mobsters. As much as Garrity tries his best to get by on brooding good looks and a horrible Southern accent that slips in and out as he utters every line through gritted teeth, his performance ruined just about every scene he was in. Throw in very Southern indie drama cliché in the book, seriously… EVERY SINGLE ONE… and it wasn’t hard figuring out where things were going. Ultimately, this was a forgettable addition to the genre and not even worth reviewing.
Pull Quote: Not reviewed.
#20 – The Babysitters (Peace Arch) – Another “what the f*ck were they thinking?” movie, this one about teen girls in a veiled prostitution ring where they have sex with the horny middle-aged men for whom they babysit. The ringleader is a teen girl played by Sam Waterson’s daughter Katherine, whose new business enterprise starts off with one such encounter with John Leguizamo, a middle-aged father who seeks solace in the arms of the teen girl. Not exactly sure whom this movie was intended to appeal to… except possibly middle-aged pedophiles, but being told from the perspective of a teen girl, the movie ended up being far too creepy to be even remotely titillating. Months later, I still can’t believe how repulsive this premise was and why an established actor like Leguizamo would get involved, but then again, he also co-starred in our next selection…
Pull Quote: Not reviewed.
#19 – The Happening (20th Century Fox) – Granted, I was one of the few people who thought Lady in the Water was a step in the right direction for M. Night Shyamalan, a genre movie that was less derivative, but this R-rated apocalyptic thriller really destroyed any good will I had with its concept of people all over the country being driven to kill themselves by some mysterious “event.” The premise was like something Stephen King might have come up with, but Night took a cue from his own Signs by mainly focusing on a small group of people. Unfortunately, those people were played by Mark “I whine when I’m playing angst” Wahlberg and Zooey “I’m much better in indies” Deschanel, and neither of them could make this premise any more believable. Basically, you ended up with a movie focusing on a bunch of people running around in the fields of Pennsylvania scared of the trees… and THE WIND! Oooo… scary! And then the big twist? The whole nightmare “event” of plant pollen forcing humans to kill themselves just ended, just like that, with little explanation except that it was some kind of “warning.” It had to be one of the worst endings to a movie maybe since Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, but by then, you were already annoyed at how you were suckered into thinking it might be good.
Pull Quote: “The results are a complete and utter mess that rarely justifies the ridiculous premise.”
#18 – Hounddog (Empire Film) Deborah Kempmeir’s Southern drama was systematically booed and hissed at when it debuted at Sundance ’07 and my review was none too favorable. Over 18 months later, when it finally was self-released, I was told that the movie had been completely reedited and I should give it another chance. I probably should have learned my lesson many years ago about how very few bad movies rarely get better with repeat viewings. While there’s no question the reedited version toned down some of the more boisterous performances and Kempmeir got rid of the worst scene of David Morse in full retard mode getting into bed with Dakota Fanning after she’d been raped, this will still forever be known as the “Dakota Fanning rape movie,” because it’s the only thing anyone will remember about it. Considering the horrifying depiction of the rape, one would at least expect a more satisfying resolution (like something actually happening to the rapist). Even so, I gotta admit that I still think Kempmeir is extremely brave for getting the movie made and sticking by it (and she actually was one of the better interviews I did this year, too).
Pull Quote: “After the rape scene, it’s pretty much all downhill from there.”
#17 – Harold (City Lights) – Yet another “what the?” movie, this one starring Spencer Breslin (also in The Happening) playing a prematurely bald teen trying to cope with the normal trials of high school… while being prematurely bald! It’s just the most ridiculous addition to the overused high school genre, one relying on the viewer’s ability to believe such a silly premise, though surprisingly, Breslin isn’t bad in the role, playing it like a teenage George Costanza. No, it was the writing and the rest of the cast that ruined this one, including Cuba “I was made for DVD, baby” Gooding Jr. hamming it up as Harold’s best friend, the school janitor, and Nikki Blonsky sh*tting on any good will she got from Hairspray, by basically playing the same character. Not even the likes of Fred Willard, Rachel Dratsch or Chris Parnall could save this one, though the long-absent Ally Sheedy was probably just happy to be working again.
Pull Quote: “This is such a pointless waste of time that you might wonder how this was able to get a theatrical release while so many better movies end up abandoned to DVD.”
#16 – War, Inc. (First Look) – John Cusack starred in and produced this edgy political satire about war profiteering, once again playing a hitman like he did in the cult classic Grosse Pointe Blank. Any attempt at intelligent political thoughts were quickly co-opted by a roster of ridiculous characters, the worst of them being Hilary Duff doing her worst impression of Christina Aguilera as over-sexed foreign pop star “Yonica Babyyeah.” The talents of many better actors were similarly wasted with all of the movie’s silliness, none moreso than Sir Ben Kingsley, doing another bad accent and giving another ridiculous scenery-chewing performance as Cusack’s corrupt CIA ex-boss. It’s a shame because Kingsley almost got through this year on the good will of movies like Elegy and The Wackness, but not quite.
Pull Quote: “There’s a subtle attempt at creating a character arc with depth ala ‘Grosse Pointe Blank,’ but it’s overshadowed by the ridiculous nature of the plotline.”
#15 – Filth and Wisdom (IFC Films) – This is the directorial debut of Madonna… and that’s probably all I need to say for one to understand why it’s on this list. Obviously, the filmmaking talent of Guy Ritchie didn’t rub off on the Material Girl after all those years they were married (and let’s hope to God she doesn’t try her hand at baseball again if the current rumors are true). This is the “Erotica” era Madonna, trying to be daring and shocking with a movie starring Eugene Hütz of the band Gogol Bordello – excellent in Liev Schreiber’s directorial debut Everything is Illuminated, but essentially playing himself, spouting all sorts of nonsense philosophy to his two comely female roommates. It just didn’t work on any level, but at least we were thankful that Madonna didn’t play one of those roles herself. This is the first of three IFC releases on this list, which tells you something about their system at weeding stronger movies like Hunger and Che out from crap like this.
Pull Quote: “A John Waters level of DIY depravity offering lots of filth and very little semblance of wisdom.”
#14 – The Dukes (CAVU Pictures) – While I hate dissing first-time filmmakers who are making their dream projects, there’s very little good to say about character actor Robert Davi’s directorial debut except, “Hey, at least he was able to make a movie, right?” Davi and a bunch of his friends, including Chazz Palminteri and Peter Bogdanovich, got together for this unfunny crime-comedy that seemed to have been scripted on the fly without much thought put into set-up or structure or any of the things that makes for strong filmmaking. It was such a weak effort that relied so heavily on its soundtrack that it made the awful Soul Men, starring Samuel L. Jackson and the late Bernie Mac, seem like a masterpiece by comparison. Like many of the other movies on this list, most of humanity was spared.
Pull Quote: “A vanity project, a budget ‘Ocean’s 11’ for Davi and his pals to sing some doo-wop tunes and ham it up.”
And we go from the lowest budget to possibly the biggest…
#13 – 10,000 BC (Warner Bros.) Roland Emmerich decided to leave New York City alone and go back in time, WAY back in time, for this mix of prehistoric film cliches, including lots of CG mammoths, an amicable sabretooth tiger and deadly creatures that resembled giant turkeys. The fact that the movie was co-written and produced by Emmerich’s composer was somewhat telling as was the fact it starred Steven Strait, who helped make Undiscovered the worst movie of 2005. He wasn’t quite so bad in this one, but it was hard not to laugh at how the movie’s sense of geography and history made little sense as it completely neglected any sort of realism in favor of CG-packed action scenes that ripped off liberally from so many previous movies that one almost needed a scorecard to keep track.
Pull Quote: “The cinematic equivalent of the television series ‘Cavemen’… an atrocious waste of a perfectly good CGI budget.”
#12 – The Doorman (Gigantic Pictures) – This fake New York based documentary from Wayne Price is basically a poor man’s Borat with the unfunny Lucas Akoskin playing one of the most annoying screen characters of the year… well, except one. (See below.) Akoskin plays pretentious and arrogant nightclub doorman Trevor who loses his prestigious job and has to use all of his bullsh*t “skills” to fake his way into another one. Price got a lot of local luminaries from the world of nightclubs and fashion to talk on camera and interact with “Trevor” but the results are mostly dumb and not entertaining. We should hope this movie puts an end to the indie mockumentary genre forever, or at least until Christopher Guest returns.
Pull Quote: “If Lucas Akoskin was even 1/10th as funny as Sacha Baron Cohen, this movie might have worked. Trevor W is a carbon copy of a color Xerox and a poor man’s attempt at getting the same laughs without having nearly the talent or ability to improvise in situations.”
#11 – Never Back Down (Summit Entertainment) – This sports drama could probably be seen as the antithesis of Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler in that it was so incompetently-made, from the derivative script to the weak performances from the likes of Sean Faris as a tough kid with a temper who gets into the world of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) to take on a local bully, played by Cam Gigandet (from Twilight). Somehow, they convinced Oscar-nominee Djimon Hounsou to play Faris’ mentor, and it was pretty clear he was in it for the paycheck, but if you’ve ever seen even a single sports drama, you can pretty much figure out where this is going. Jeff Wadlow did such a bad job with the direction–which I deduced he learned at “MTV Film School”–that it was hard to take it seriously, even as lots of young ‘uns rushed out to see it. Kids.
Pull Quote: “Tries to be ‘The Fist and the Furious’ (but) it’s really just a load of Raging Bullsh*t.”
#10 – Postal (Freestyle Releasing) – What would a “Worst of the year” list be without a movie from the one and only Dr. Uwe Boll? (Seriously, can we convince whatever university gave him that PhD to revoke it already?) Boll has mostly built his reputation giving video games a bad name by turning them into almost unwatchable movies. For this one, he decided to combine a video game adaptation with his own bit of political commentary. He did this by starting the movie off with a recreation of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, so there’s only so far downhill one can go from there. Frankly, I barely remember what the movie is about, but it revolved around Zack Ward being a huge loser whose obese wife is constantly having sex with other men and he joins a cult. The rest of the cast includes the Soup Nazi from “Seinfeld” as Osama bin Laden and a George Bush impersonator, at one point walking hand and hand lovingly. Verne Troyer appeared in the movie as himself, as did Boll and the creator of the “Postal” video game in a bit of reckless self-spoofing, but the worst memory of this movie can only be summed up in four words: “Full Frontal David Foley.” Even the most heinous mass-murdering rapist should never be submitted to that sight. Fortunately, Dr. Boll’s continued offensive contributions to cinema was seen by few and his other movies mainly received DVD-only releases.
Pull Quote: “So unbelievably abysmal that you can’t believe any filmmaker, let alone one as hated as Dr. Boll, would deliberately make light of such subjects in order to shock and offend.”
Speaking of bad video game movies…
#9 – Max Payne (20th Century Fox) AND Punisher: War Zone (Lionsgate) – Cheating here a little bit with a two-fer, mainly because both of these movies might have been better if they took elements from one and blended them with the other, at least that’s what I thought would be the case if the former PG-13 crime-thriller had some more of the R-rated violence of the latter. Granted, the latter took the violence too far, even for a “Punisher” movie. You can find my reviews of both of them by clicking on the links so I won’t get too in-depth on why neither worked, but both were major disappointments compared to the source material and based on the previous work by the filmmakers. The problem is that there was only so much you could take of Ray Stevenson’s ultra-grim Frank Castle and Mark “Him again!” Wahlberg’s similarly grim Max Payne before you start wishing they would aim their gun sights at your head to put you out of your misery. Either way, both were overly-stylish film adaptations from subject matter heavily influenced by cinema that didn’t quite make the translation going back the other way.
Pull Quote(s): “An embarrassment to a genre that’s already delivered some of the worst movies of the last ten years,” and “The Punisher is one Marvel character that probably should stay in the comic books.”
#8 – Zombie Strippers – I love zombies and I love strippers–who doesn’t?–but sadly, that’s not enough to enjoy the likes of (former?) porn star Jenna Jamison shedding her clothes as well as her decaying skin, in this substandard production that would have been fine going straight-to-video before someone decided it would go over better on the big screen. It starts out as a fairly straight-ahead “Dawn of the Dead” rip-off but when it gets to the strip club and the girls there start being killed and coming back turning “zombie strippers” into the next big thing among horny losers… well, let’s just say that if you paid to see this movie you got what you paid for. The presence of Robert “I’ll do anything for a buck until they revive Freddy Krueger” Englund should have been a dead giveaway that this movie could never deliver the socially important message that the title implies.
Pull Quote: “A funny title and easy-to-sell premise is obliterated by the director and cast’s inability to entertain.”
#7 – Everybody Wants to be Italian (Roadside Attractions) – This low-budget indie rom-com tried its best to capitalize on the overwhelming success of My Big Fat Greek Wedding with Jay Jablonski trying to win over a woman he thinks is Italian by pretending he’s Italian himself. While Jablonski and Ceria Vincent made a cute couple, the corny dialogue and hammy acting made the movie nearly unwatchable, as did the racist and sexist cliches which were insulting to anyone who might possibly want to see this. On top of that, the movie was so shabbily made that it’s amazing it got any sort of theatrical release at all.
Pull Quote: “If Italians had their own term for ‘schmaltzy,’ this awful, derivative and painfully cringe-worthy piece of steaming crap would be the most loathsome example of such an adjective.”
#6 – How to Rob a Bank (IFC Films) – An IFC First Take dumper from earlier in the year, just as they were beginning their new business model of picking up bad indie flicks from festivals and “releasing” them into the single theater they own in New York City. This one starred Nick Stahl, the Sundance poster child for bad indie films (like the Charlize Theron-produced Sleepwalking) and Erika Christensen from Traffic, who get trapped in a bank vault during a bank robbery. Now usually, one would think that being trapped in a bank vault with Ms. Christensen couldn’t be a bad thing, but director Andrew Jenkins spent so much time playing around with clever camerawork and plot twists that one quickly gets tired of her loopy character. With his ridiculous characterization of the bad guy, Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale does very little for his chances of getting more acting work either. While Andrew Jenkins shows some promise, this one probably deserved to get dumped without being seen.
Pull Quote: “To say the movie gets better as it goes along would not be saying very much.”
#5 – Blindness (Miramax) – Like Wong Kar-wai, I’m such a huge fan of the director of this movie, Fernando Meirelles, that I’m still shocked at how much I hated this movie. Both City of God and The Constant Gardener were in my Top 10 in the years they were released, and both received high marks, and yet, in adapting José Saramago’s “What if” thriller, Fernando Meirelles had the first epic failure of his career. Maybe it was the fact that the movie disguised itself as a post-apocalyptic thriller ala “28 Days Later” though it was staged more like an acting workshop set in a prison, but between the bad acting and the deliberately blurry camerawork, it was a grueling experience. By the time, the women decided to give their bodies to a group of crazy criminals in exchange for food, this one had hit the point of no return and things didn’t get much better when the group left the prison environment for the outside world. The characters and situations were generally so awful that it made you respect M. Night Shyamalan more for his failure months earlier. Now you might be thinking this movie just needed to be seen in the right environment. Well, I caught it at its Toronto Film Festival premiere, and by an hour into the movie, entire rows of the theater were cleared, and these were of people who actually worked on the movie!
Pull Quote: “A generally repulsive letdown from one of the 21st Century’s greatest filmmakers.”
#4 – Babylon A.D. (20th Century Fox) – Oh, where to even begin with Vin Diesel’s “return” to action and sci-fi? Well, we can start with my “2 out of 10” review at the title link. I remember going into this one with some optimism, being that it was helmed by a fairly well-established filmmaker in Mathieu Kassovitz, who quickly blamed the studio for how badly the movie turned out. Let’s face it. When you start out with a script as bad as this one–based on a book no less–one that liberally steals from past sci-fi and action movies, everything from “Blade Runner” to Diesel’s own “XXX,” it’s hard to take it very seriously. Even talented actresses like Michelle Yeoh and Charlotte Rampling and veterans like Gerard Depardieu and Lambert Wilson were mostly squandered, but the biggest joke was the beautiful but talentless French strumpet named Mélanie Thierry that Diesel was teamed, who spends the entire movie crying out for his character “Toorop” in her bad accent that makes it hard not to laugh. It’s either that or you sit through this with your mouth agape at how this movie could have gotten so far into production without someone saying, “Um, guys? You realize this sucks, right?” Along with Roland Emmerich’s offering, this was easily one of the most laughably bad big budget movies this year, and not even the impressive CG visuals or sets could do much to save it.
Pull Quote: “Like a futuristic remake of ‘XXX’ that no one ever asked for, this atrociously lame and redundant sci-fi flick also holds the honor of being the dullest action movie of the year.”
#3 – Cover – While I’m not the best one to review movies geared towards African-American audiences, I went into this one not knowing what to expect and hoping for something better than what Tyler Perry has delivered. Filmmaker and character actor Bill Duke (whose new movie Not Easily Broken opens next week) seemed to have forgotten how to make movies when he made this one, because it looked like it was made by a rank amateur. It soon became clear that Duke had no idea what movie he was making either, as it started out like a crime-thriller about a woman played by Aunjanue Ellis, accused of murdering her husband, but then it tries to turn into a comedy (in the Tyler Perry vein) before delivering one of the most shocking twists of the year (sorry, M. Night!) as we find out why she murdered her husband. From there, the movie turns into one of the most ridiculous excuses for homophobic rhetoric ever as we see her husband becoming involved with a pop singer named Ryan Chambers, played by a guy named Leon, possibly one of the worst actors to ever get a key role in a film. For the most part, the acting was bad, though Ellis was better than the likes of Vivica A. Fox and Paula Jai Parker. Regardless, I might never know what Duke was thinking when he made this movie or why he thought people might want to see this, but it was also one of the worst examples of false advertising we’ve seen for an independent movie in a long time, as well as a fairly reprehensible sample of why Prop. 8 passed in California this year due to homophobia in the African-American community.
Pull Quote: “Bill Duke sets new standards in filmmaking incompetence. If this isn’t the worst movie of the year, then I feel bad for whomever makes anything worse…”
And yet, there IS worse…
#2 – Mister Lonely (IFC Films) – It’s probably a good thing that I couldn’t find my original review notes for this dog of a movie that almost made it to the bottom of this list. Essentially, it’s a movie revolving around Diego Luna as a Michael Jackson impersonator, and how he becomes a part of a commune for similar celebrity impersonators where he falls in love with Samantha Morton’s Marilyn Monroe impersonator. I can’t remember if it was just that awful premise or the equally terrible semi-improvised acting that made me so resentful of this arthouse flick, but the preposterous subplot with Werner Herzog as a priest in charge of a convent of flying nuns, complete with their skydiving scenes, seemed to have absolutely nothing to do with the main “story.” Who knows what artist and filmmaker Harmony Korine was thinking when he deliberately made a movie that no one but him could possibly want to see, or maybe he wasn’t thinking, because this is a clear case of “art” only being in the eye of the beholder.
Pull Quote: “A painfully excruciating and awful experience that’s bound to make you resentful about the two hours of your life wasted watching such a disastrous and atrocious wankfest.” (OUCH!)
And the absolute worst movie of 2008 is…
The Love Guru!!!!!!! (Paramount) – Put it this way. After sitting through this comedy–and I use that term loosely mind you–I wanted to punch Mike Myers in the face. There’s no nicer way to put it, and being that I would potentially be in fist-throwing range of Myers at interviews the day after seeing it, I thought it best to bow out, worried I wouldn’t be able to control my anger. (My reaction to Blindness was similar.) In the Guru Pitka, Myers has surpassed himself in creating the most obnoxious and annoying character of his entire career, as hard as that may be to believe. His ridiculous, borderline racist character spent an entire movie spouting low-brow bathroom and penis jokes that might have been funny if done in a five-to-ten minute sketch, but a whole movie of it? It was PAINFUL to sit through this, but knowing that it would probably make this list, I stuck it out. To give you a clearer idea of the level of humor and intelligence Myers incorporated into the movie, the story culminates with two elephants having sex in an ice hockey ring. If that wasn’t enough to make you steer clear, Myers surrounded himself with equally ridiculous characters, most notably Justin Timberlake with a terrible French-Canadian accent, playing a one-joke character, and the ubiquitous Verne Troyer, trying to make up for his appearance in Uwe Boll’s Postal. And it’s another movie to feature the delectable but acting-challenged Jessica Alba, who we can only hope will stop making movies in which she wears clothes or speaks after this one. This is the only movie this year to get a 1 out of 10 rating, and it probably didn’t even deserve that. It deserved that the creators of this nonsense get punched in the face, once for every person who was subjected to possibly one of the unfunniest movies of the last ten years.
Pull Quote: “This movie is offensive, revolting and jawdropingly awful from beginning to end, a complete and total piece of Singularly Horrid Infantile Trash (TM).”
That’s it for this year and here’s hoping in 2009, there’ll be less dogs as bad as the ones above or at least that we’re wiser about skipping them.
