Hola all. Massawyrm here.

Alrighty. Here we go – one of my favorite columns of the year. The VERY WORST OF…list. I’ve tracked down every terrible movie I somehow missed this year, suffered through them over the weekend and now I feel fully prepared and justified in ripping apart some truly awful films. So for those of you unfamiliar with it, here’s my (brief) yearly preamble. Nothing pisses me off like reading yearly worst of lists. They’re usually a quickly crapped out, tossed off list of the movies that stuck in that particular reviewer’s craw. While they will spend days at a time perfecting the order of their top 10, little thought at all will go into a worst list. And what you get is a smattering of some of the very worst films mixed in with the occasionally mediocre, and sometimes very entertaining but un-critic-ly films that find them self undeservedly compared. Last year, a year which gave us BRATZ, DADDY DAY CARE, EPIC MOVIE and DRAGON WARS, Richard Roeper dared to call out the worst movie of year as HOSTEL 2.

That’s like putting a misbehaving kid in a special ed class and calling him the stupidest creature in the room. It’s one thing to call a film “your most hated” or to refer to it as “the most irresponsible” or “worst personification of what talent can do”. But to compare them to the untalented hacks or uncaring check-takers or meddling studios or overblown egos that churned out these unwatchable misfires? That’s just not fair. SPEED RACER isn’t the worst film of the year. 10,000 BC isn’t the worst film of the year. These are.

10) IN THE NAME OF THE KING: A DUNGEON SIEGE TALE.

Uwe Boll kicks off our list with the incredibly awesome ITNOTKADST (which when abbreviated sounds like something a five year old tries to tell you while dripping blood on the carpet from an open wound.) Now this isn’t awesome because it’s good, it’s awesome because it is bad. But in the best way possible. Normally Uwe makes movies that just plain suck. They’re not only bad – they’re boring. But not this. This movie is howlingly funny. Just try to sit through it without laughing. It’s awful – the rubber masks on the orclike creatures, the terrible combat scenes, the cheesy effects. It feels like the movie they play back to back during a Saturday matinee on television with THE BARBARIANS. If you grew up on 80’s drive-in fantasy films, then you know what this is. And you love it.

Quint’s heterosexual life partner Kraken put this best: “It’s like having your favorite book retold to you by a severely retarded child.” And honestly, I can’t think of describing this any better than that. Get several friends and a case or two of beer and watch Jason Statham, John Rhy-Davies, Leelee Sobieski, Ron Perlman, Matthew Lillard, Ray Liotta, Burt Reynolds and Claire Forlani all slum it like never before. Unspeakably terrific. Undeniably cheestastic.

While one could argue that this might be worse than a few others on the list, it has something the others do not. Humor appeal. It’s so bad it is funny. The others aren’t. Now, onto the pain.

9) THE SPIRIT. Having just reviewed this here less thasn a week ago there is very little to add. It’s terrible, an epic misfire that you cannot fully understand until you’ve seen it. Easily the worst acting out of talented people you’ve seen all year, this film will go down in history as one of the most notable, unwatchable (with the sound on, at least) comic book movies ever made.

8) BABYLON AD (Theatrical cut.) Now, it is very important to note that what I’m writing about here is the theatrical cut of this film, which apparently no longer really exists. The DVD, which is released next week, has a radically altered ending which gives more explanation and removes a nonsensical final action sequence, and altogether plays better than the version I saw on the big screen. But that version existed, I saw it and I paid for the chance to do so.

You can read my full review for this mess here, but the long and the short of it is that this is a classic example of an Interesting but flawed book adapted to the screen by someone with a very specific vision for a studio that simply wants a PG-13 action thriller without all the pretentious bullshit starring an actor who can’t catch a break and just wants to make cool fucking genre movies. It’s a mess. FOX neutered out what was good about the book - the fact that all the action sequences took place in a weird stream of conscious, metaphysical sort of way - and left in all the stupid “putting artificial intelligence in babies” horseshit and expected that in this day and age an audience would buy that a religion could legitimize itself with a simple VIRGIN BIRTH. In the age of science. Yeah. Even the DVD version has its issues. But it’s better than this version. The last act had me howling at moments, then covering my face at the sheer awfulness of others.

7) THE HAPPENING. Ouch. Just ouch. It’s never fun to watch the sheer delightful madness of a deranged man marching into oblivion. But here it is in all its glory. So spectacularly awful that it almost transcends language, this is the single worst big budget, big star, highly anticipated movie of the year. There’s one other big movie on the list, but it didn’t have the hype going into it that this did. The acting – terrible. The plot – terrible. The dialog. TERRIBLE. It’s like he wasn’t even trying. I almost want to believe that M. Night Shyamalan was TRYING to make a bad movie in order to imitate the bad movies of the 50’s he so wanted to evoke. But then he dared to call his film “The best B Movie ever made,” and removed all doubt that the man has lost his fucking mind. Ten years ago he was a complete unknown. Nine years ago he was the hottest writer/director in Hollywood. Today he is a joke.

That’s the business.

6) WITLESS PROTECTION. Here’s a question: what do you get when you cross a Jenny McCarthy direct to video comedy with the annual comedy dungheap that is the Larry the Cable Guy blue collar release for the lowest common denominator? Answer: a cinematic black hole of charisma so dense that not a sliver of entertainment can escape its surface. By this point if I have to explain to you why a Larry the Cable Guy movie vacuums the fleas out of my nuthair, then you are reading the wrong site my friend. Put down the internet, go back into your trailer and please, for the love of God, if you drink around firearms, keep them pointed at all times only at yourself. Preferably somewhere near the temple area. Don’t hurt anyone else.

5) THE HOTTIE AND THE NOTTIE. Quite possibly the single most self serving, self indulgent self involved piece of self promotion I have EVER seen, this film stands testament as to why heiresses should never be given the keys to the movie kingdom. 2008 may have been a shit year for the world, but if there’s one thing I’m proud of, it is that Paris Hilton had something newsworthy happen to her a few weeks ago (her home was broken into) and nobody cared. It didn’t make any of the news sites I read, friends didn’t blog about it. I heard about it as the third story in the 60 second entertainment news section on a radio while Christmas shopping. She’s gone. And this movie was the last holdover of her short-lived career.

Paris plays, I swear on a stack of bibles, “The Hottest Girl in Los Angeles” (end quote) who is pursued by Joel David Moore who has been pining for her since the first grade (you know, when she’s not being pursued by an endless stream of stalkers and onlookers.) Unfortunately for him, she is guarded by ugliest best friend EVER (because of some bizarre movie law of physics that the hotness of one girl is directly proportional to the hideousness of her best friend.) Thus Paris’s alter ego is an undate-able monster that guys won’t even touch when drunk. The film effectively becomes TAMING OF THE SHREW except that Paris is just the McGuffin and Moore falls for the NOTTIE. It’s not just that the film isn’t funny. It’s not just that the film is lame. It’s the endless slow motion shots of Paris walking, jogging and flipping her hair, coupled with the constant adoration of her character topped off with the fact that when Paris is presented as a drunken, flatulent, marriage obsessed whore…she was only kidding and testing Moore to see if he really liked her for “who she is.” Ahem.

Oh, and when he opts for her best friend she smiles, pats him on the back and says “Like I’m going to have trouble getting a date.” Classy. Way to make a movie about yourself.

I won’t miss you.

4) THE LOVE GURU. Wow. Just wow. It’s hard to believe how far Mike Myers has fallen, but I try to describe it here. I laughed twice. Once at the outtake after the film and once unintentionally – when Jessica Alba caps off a series of nigh unwatchable Myers jokes with “You are SO FUNNY.” I about pissed myself at that one. This film may well have been the end of Myers career as a leading comedian. I guess he’ll just have to cry himself to sleep at night on that big pile of SHREK money. On the bright side, few people were really looking forward to this once they saw the trailer.

3) OVER HER DEAD BODY. To this day I believe the makers of this film possess a tape showing Paul Rudd teabagging a small boy in Thailand while he fingerbangs another’s delicate young asshole. There’s no other way to explain what the hell he is doing in this movie. I want to believe a chauffeured car pulled into a lot, Rudd stepped out and said “Where’s Will? Where’s Judd? We’re supposed to be making a movie,” only to then be told the sad, sad truth by a shadowy man seated behind a desk, stroking a cat while tapping a knowing finger atop a digital cassette every time Rudd began to struggle. This movie is entirely unwatchable. Eva Longoria plays the ghost of the bitchiest, most self-obsessed woman who has ever lived who now haunts a fake psychic who is slowly falling in love with Longoria’s ex-fiancé. You with me?

It’s GHOST, if Patrick Swayze were a dick and Oda Mae Brown was making time with Demi Moore. Well, that and it sucked shit through a straw. I have no idea who thought Paul Rudd and Lake Bell would have chemistry together or that Eva Longoria would make a great comic foil. Or that Jason Biggs should be cast in anything. Ever again. But they have a tape. And they made this movie. And it was the very worst thing to play in theaters that wasn’t directed by Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg.

1 & 2) MEET THE SPARTANS/DISASTER MOVIE. Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. Aaron Friedberg and Jason Seltzer. Rosencrantz. Guildenstern. Which one is which? I don’t fucking care. There isn’t an ounce of talent between these two chuckle monkeys nor a single redeeming quality to any of their films. They are cin-imitators. They are not actually filmmakers. They see something in one movie, then imitate it poorly and assume that this very act is funny. Their first crime against humanity this year was MEET THE SPARTANS, a film that not only name checked AICN, but mentioned every film made in the previous year. The biggest problem with that film, which I am more than a little brutal to here, is that the jokes were almost a year old by the time they got around to telling them in the film. In a youtube obsessed/“entertain me in under a minute or I’m clicking to the next video” world we now live in, parody is a daily occurrence. And if you’re going to parody something, it has to be done in an almost timeless manner (like SHAUN OF THE DEAD or HOT FUZZ.)

Knowing that they are not Simon Pegg nor Edgar Wright, these two knuckleheads attempted to be ahead of the curve…by shooting a parody of films they haven’t even seen yet. This way, the jokes not only will be fresh, but lack any real context whatsoever. PERFECT. The result was the aptly named DISASTER MOVIE, which I briefly mentioned here. I keep waffling over which of these is worse than the other. On one hand, SPARTANS caused the most pollution to the collective unconscious and made these guys famous (for being tools.) But at least it parodied scenes from the films it was making fun of rather than just the trailers or characters. DISASTER MOVIE just had Batman show up and Indiana Jones as a black midget (forever proving wrong Quint’s theory of midgets and comedy. Not everything is funnier with a midget.) And not a lick of it made any sense.

Then, after thinking hard about it for a couple of minutes, it dawned on me. Fuck these movies. Fuck these halfwit fucktard wannabes. This was their year. The year they came and went. And BOTH of these movies are the very worst things made this year. I painfully saw both in a theater and long every waking moment that I could take those precious hours back. These aren’t the movies they show on a loop in hell. These are the movies they show on a loop in a private screening room at the very fucking bottom of hell. Hitler is watching these right now and swearing up and down that even HE wouldn’t show these to a Jew. That’s how fucking bad these are.

And that’s that. The very worst things of the year. I hope to god this is the closest any of you have come to any of these and wish you all the best in the coming year. Well most of you.

Until next time friends, smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em.

Massawyrm

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