Friday, November 26, 2010

Ten Movies I Would Rather Scoop My Eyes Out With A Rusty Spoon Than Watch Again.

This looks like it could do the trick...

I hope my American readers enjoyed their Thanksgiving!  Now let's get back in the swing of things with my own personal Top Ten list of awful movies.  I will, of course, list these in no particular order, as they all deserve the honor of to rotting in the very depths of Hell.  If given a choice between sitting through these and a rusty spoon, I'd go with the spoon.  Oh, and one more thing before I begin.  These are all movies that I have seen.  Yes, there are worse movies out there, but I think I'm pretty good at avoiding most of them.  These ones slipped by... although one of them I knew would be awful.  


1.) Alexander
I had, up until the point of this movie's release, been a huge Alexander the Great fan.  I knew a lot about him for a fourteen year old.  But nothing could have prepared for me for this awe-inspiring suckfest.  At 167 minutes long, Alexander was one of the most boring movies I have ever had the misfortune to see (the director had the audacity to release an uncut version of the movie at 214 minutes; thanks, but I'd rather stick my arm down a garbage disposal).  And the worst part?  I was dumb enough to see it in theaters.  I went with two of my friends, my mother (which made the sex scenes extremely uncomfortable), her then boyfriend, and his eight year old son.  Why an eight year old came with us is beyond me, because this movie was extremely inappropriate for him.    The battles- the highlights of Alexander's military career were too short and too few to make up for the sheer unbelievable amount of dialogue in this movie.  Oh, and by the way, Hollywood, can you give your audience fair warning before you film Colin Farrell's balls and throw them up on a giant screen while he gives it to some Persian chick?  K THNX.

2.) An American Haunting
I have never found a "horror" movie more hilarious than this one right here.  The special effects could have been replicated by a two year old, and the scary parts were predictable enough that I felt like I had already watched it once before.  The acting really stood out here as well- it sucked.  I expect more from Donald Sutherland.  I wish I could remember more of it, but I could barely see or hear it because I was laughing so damn hard.  Seriously, I've felt more scared standing in line at Wendy's.







3.) Children of Men
A friend recommended this one to me not too long ago and said it was one of the best movies he had ever seen.  I believed him, mostly because a lot of people agreed- hell, IMBD gives it an 8.1 out of 10.  I, on the other hand, felt cheated by the ending.  Yes, I get the metaphors and the symbolism- I'm a goddamn English major- but none of it helped enough to save this movie for me.  The acting was decent, the action was okay, and the idea itself is fantastic and yet, for some reason, the end was a deal breaker for me.  And please note, I usually don't mind sad or disappointing endings.  But what the fuck?  It ends with him and the baby on a raft, the mother is dead, and he quickly bleeds out as their goal- a ship- drifts ever closer.  Okay, great.  Does it resolve the movie? No.  "It's supposed to be open ended," you say?  Screw that.  How is this organization supposed to take this one kid and discover why humans have stopped having kids?  And even if they do, so what?  Are they going to whip up a magic potion that will fix our genetics?  Probably not.  Mother Nature is a bitch.  Oh, and I really enjoyed how the human race is dying, and all the British government cares about are illegal immigrants.  That spoke volumes to me about mankind.

4.) The Last Airbender
M. Night Shyamalan tricked me again.  When I first saw the trailer for this movie, I was pretty stoked about it, even if he was attached as the director.  I thought that maybe he'd surprise all of us.  But no, he did exactly what I should have expected him to do: he took the television series (which has both a great concept and a great plot) and raped it in front of the entire world.  Words can not begin to describe how much I loathe this movie.  Allow me to list just a few of the issues:  Paid for 3D when it wasn't in 3D, the worst acting I had ever seen, Shyamalan took an entire season of a show and condensed it into 90 minutes, Shyamalan changed the pronunciation of the character's names (more annoying than you'd think), Shyamalan changed how bending works (think of casting a spell instead of moving with the element), the good action scenes were all shown in trailers, and many of the characters were two dimensional without a name attached to them for about 3/4 of the film.  There's more, trust me, but I have to keep these short.  Just do yourself a favor and skip this movie.  Unless, of course, you want to continue to fund M. Night's spiraling career.  Seriously, everyone that walked out of the theater with me was soooo pissed.  Oh, and when I went to see Scott Pilgrim, there was a trailer for Devil that said, "From the mind of M. Night Shyamalan".  Everyone in the theater subsequently burst out laughing.  Anyway, I think that this picture accurately sums up the similarities and differences between the movie and the show.

5.) Bruno
Luckily, I didn't see this one in theaters.  I was smart enough to wait for it to come out on DVD.  Now, I did enjoy Borat quite a bit.  Would I watch it again?  Eh, give it a few years.  I thought this one would be somewhat similar in it's comedic delivery, and maybe even make some great points about the uselessness of homophobia.  Yeah, no.  I would be lying to you if I said that I made it through this movie.  Roughly twenty minutes in, I popped it out of the DVD player and said, "Done", then went back to watching something much more funny, like people dying.  This movie was about as funny as the recent Gulf Oil Spill.  Unless you want to see some guy's junk swinging at you for a good minute or so (I've been told more), avoid this one.  Unless, of course, you're into that kind of thing.

6.) Semi-Pro
This one hurts because I am a huge Will Ferrel fan.  I don't care if people hated some of his recent stuff, the man is funny, and is a SNL legend.  I could not, however, get behind Semi-Pro.  It had a lot of potential but it seemed too forced, almost as if the whole project was from the beginning.  I laughed a few times, but the movie was just too boring for me to want to sit through again.  If I recall, I stopped watching it about half way through and returned to it many months later.  I owed it to Will.  Now he owes me big time.






7.) Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull
Again, I am a huge fan of original movies, but this newer one made me wish Harrison Ford had died months previous to the film's shoot date.  My issue comes with the plot.  The first three movies were moderately believable at least.  It's almost as if Lucas and Spielburg  went, "Fuck it, we're rich enough to take the hit", and just smeared their shit onto the face of science.  They then proceeded to smear shit onto the face of their audience by casting Shia Labeouf as some tough guy with one of the saddest mustaches I have ever seen.  I'm talking an "I just hit puberty" mustache.  Seriously, guys?  Aliens?  Insects that crave human flesh?  Surviving a nuclear explosion in a fucking refrigerator?  Don't insult my intelligence.  If this movie had been made about the actual Crystal Skulls crafted by the Mayans, and Shia had been replaced with Shortround, this movie would have been tits.  

8.) The Forgotten
This movie was so bad, I don't remember anything about it.  It's all a huge blur to me.  I remember the credits rolling and me saying, "What the fuck just happened?"  Maybe that's the point of the movie- to be forgotten.  Maybe I blacked out.  Or maybe I fell asleep.  Either way, this movie fails at being good.  Don't see it.







9.) American Pie
My issue with American Pie mostly extends to the countless straight to DVD spin offs that the first one spawned.  They aren't funny anymore- they are soft pornography, midget jokes, and toilet humor. Hell, some even recycle jokes from the first one.  In the past eleven years, seven of these movies have been made.  Seven.  That's as bad as Saw, people.  And if I hear the whole "One time, at band camp" line one more time, I'm going to freak out and go on a killing spree.  I get it.  He tried to have sex with a pie.  Wow, that's absolutely hilarious.  If a movie was made every time some guy tried to have sex with something that wasn't a woman, nothing else would ever be released.  We'd have American Cow Heart and Car Battery (yes, that is absolutely true- look it up), American Watermelon, American Couch, etc.  That list could go on and on.  Knock it off, Hollywood.  Oh, and Eugene Levy?  Please, just stop appearing in these movies.  You're hurting yourself.  And that hurts me.  

10.) Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen
While the title does speak for itself, and while I have already mentioned how much I despise this movie in the Michael Bay post, I figured it was so bad that it was worth mentioning twice.  If this list was in order, it would be in first place for the shittiest movie ever made.  Yes, the other nine were bad, but this one takes the cake.  Over the top patriotism, way too many special effects (robots, explosions, etc), racism, toilet humor from robots (the annoying guy humping Megan Fox's leg, for example), failure at geography (Jordan and Egypt are how far apart?), and Shia Labeouf make this the worst movie I have ever seen.  At least until the third one comes out (did someone say Dinobots?....I THINK SO!!!)  Now you might be saying, "But hey! U thought Th Last Airkid wuz bad wasnt it wors than this LOL?"  The Last Airbender was sort of a kids movie, even though I wanted it to be more than that.  Shyamalan could get away with it because kids like pretty much everything.  For people my age and up, yes, it was equivalent to small time genocide, but I'm sure we weren't his target audience.  We were for Transformers 2.  If you think on that for a bit, you'll realize that Michael Bay did his absolute best to ruin something as timeless as Transformers.  The worst part?  He succeeded.  Thanks, prick.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You make a good point about Eugene Levy. I LOVE him but he makes some incredibly poor role choices. I disagree with Children of Men and The Forgotten. Both at least really, really good flicks ... I won't go so far as to argue that they are great, but they are not BAD. -Morgan

Shaun said...

You know, I have to admit, I had a hard time thinking of ten movies that I didn't like because I tend to not see movies I know I won't be interested in. I'll also admit that both The Forgotten and Children of Men probably don't deserve to be on the list, and they'd be the first to get knocked off if I saw other bad movies. I only saw The Forgotten once in theaters, and I may have been too young at the time to really get it. As for Children of Men, I felt that it had the potential to be so much more than it was- like I said, the idea was great. I just felt very... disappointed with it, I suppose.