Okay, I wanted to have this up earlier in the week, but then a plane crashed a couple hundred feet away from where I was working and I had to do the Media Thing of helping to cover it, which oddly enough doesn’t leave much time for mocking dreadful movies. But that’s what the weekend is for! As long as a plane doesn’t actually drop on my house as I'm writing this I should be okay.
So these are my picks for the worst movies of 2008, but with a caveat: no one is paying me to go see movies and review them (yet), I am under no obligation to see any particular movie and won’t part with much cash to see an obvious piece of crap if I can avoid it. So while I’m sure The Love Guru would have made the list had I seen it, I didn’t. Because that movie looks just terrible. So these may not be the definitively worst movies the year had to offer, but they were certainly a waste of my time, and if you’re a Netflixer, then maybe I can keep them from being a waste of yours, too.
10) The Ruins – This one wasn’t offensively bad, it was just bland. The characters were interchangeable, the horror was toothless. There was potential for a pretty good movie here that was mostly squandered with unimaginative direction.
9) 27 Dresses – Again, there was nothing offensive about this movie, but I literally cannot think of one single reason to recommend anyone sitting through it.
8) Sex and the City – I went into more detail about how this film fell flat in my review, but this is definitely one TV series that should have stuck with the high note it ended on instead of dragging its desiccated carcass onto the movie screen.
7) Jumper – Proof that a cool-looking trailer does not always translate into a cool movie. I still don’t understand why they felt the need to use two sets of actors and actresses for the older and younger characters when the age difference was something like five years. Incomprehensible plot, unimpressive action. Cool trailer, though.
6) Vantage Point – This was like eight different movies in one, and none of them any good.
5) Prom Night – No tension, no horror, no reason to waste your time on this remake-in-name-only.
4) Untraceable – Convoluted for the sake of being convoluted and boring as hell.
3) Made of Honor – A romantic comedy that’s neither romantic or comedic. Michelle Monaghan deserves better material than this.
2) The Happening – A couple years ago, I was on a cross-country flight when both my iPod and laptop ran out of juice, so I decided to watch the in-flight movie, The Lady in the Water. It was so terrible that I unplugged my headphones after thirty minutes and spent the rest of the flight staring into space. I thought that would be the worst movie M. Night Shyamalan could ever make. Let the record show that 2008 was the year he proved me wrong on that account.
1) Doomsday – I was nearly apoplectic with rage after sitting through this flaming pile of dross, because there was so much potential here. I love post-apocalyptic movies, I love plague stories, it looked like it would be amazing. And it starts out pretty well, until it suddenly veers off into bizarroland. No plausible explanation is given for why the isolated population of a country nigh overrun by cattle decided to go cannibalistic, or why the other half of the population is Medieval Fun Times With Malcolm McDowell. It was like the filmmakers couldn’t decide what kind of film they wanted to make, so they decided to make them all and, like Vantage Point, made none of them well.
If no movie I see in 2009 is even half as bad as The Happening or Doomsday, then I’ll give this year a solid win over the one that just passed, I swear.
2 comments:
I don't know that any of these were worse than Mama Mia.
See, that's where I'm lucky I don't do this for a living - I didn't have to see that movie, and thus I didn't. (But watch Doomsday and The Happening first, because I can't imagine even Meryl Street singing could be worse than those pieces of crap.)
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