From: keyser72@mac.com Subject: Date: April 21, 2005 3:53:51 PM CDT Hankblog

Sunday, February 20, 2005

Down amongst the dregs

Since I'll be talking about this year's Best Picture noms this week, I figured I would take time out before that with a look at the other end of the spectrum first. Norbizness took a look at IMDB.com's bottom 100 rated movies and offered his own comments on the ones on the list he had seen. Note that because of additional ratings contributed to IMDB since Norbizness' post, my numbers and his won't exactly match up. Of the worst of the worst out there, the ones I've wasted time with include:

#95 Bats - What does it say about a movie that the only thing I remember about the experience prominently is that when the ex and I went and saw it, we referred to it as "Stab" because of the poster's clever trick of inverting the title to mimic bats hanging upside down, and the theater where we saw it doing the same with the letters on the marquee over the auditorium door. Was the most clever thing this movie had going for it.

#94 Superman IV: The Quest for Peace - Utterly disjointed forgettable story, but the movie did provide one good laugh. When I saw it in a theater, it was with my mother and her mom. My grandmother did not speak a word of English, so my mother would tell her what the actors were saying or what was going on quietly during the show. When Nuclear Man (the super villain) made his debut, my grandmother got very agitated before my mother could tell her what was going on. Found out after the fact that my very Catholic grandmother thought Nuclear Man was Satan himself. So apparently, Jor-El doubles as an exorcist ;-).

#82 Jaws 3-D - Worst 3D ever that I've seen. Hard to make a shark swimming toward you scary even if its in 3D.

#72 Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie - A moment of pure shame for me. To my credit, I did not pay to see it as I was working in a theater at the time. I mainly wanted to see what the big deal was, as the show was at its height of popularity when this came out. 95 minutes later, I still don't know, though I remember being cheesily entertained at the time. Now, writing this in reflection, I feel the need for a clensing shower.

#64 Mortal Kombat: Annihilation - I actually found the first Mortal Kombat movie to be entertaining for some strange reason. Low expectations I guess. Which meant that this movie was doomed before it began since the first raised the bar slightly for the second in my mind. When Christopher Lambert won't come back to do your sequel, that tells you how bad a movie you have to be.

#52 Teen Wolf Too and #51 Smokey and the Bandit Part 3 - At least with Smokey I can foist it off on being 11 years old and too stupid to know better. Teen Wolf Too is much more difficult to explain. Was actually on cable while I was laid up sick right after New Year's and I sat and watched about 10 minutes of it. Probably contributed to my being out of the office for a week ill moreso than cedar fever.

#32 Battlefield Earth - Brea and I rented it to see just how awful it was, having only heard the stories and read the reviews. And I thought the Dianetics crew were nutbars before this thing.

#24 Gigli - I watched this last year for the blog when I did a week of bad movies. The fact this thing has not dropped lower in the rankings stuns me. A stink bomb for the ages.

#9 You Got Served (provisional) - The week I was out sick and I saw part of again, I saw this was on Cinemax, and figured I'd tune in for a bit. At the time, this was in the bottom 3 on imdb and I remember my friend Alisa telling me she didn't think it warranted that much derision. She had seen it with her husband and she thought the dancing was neat. I saw the first 10-15 minutes of this thing just to see if she had any standing at all on this one. Alisa, honey, putting the extras of Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo on the leftover set from Bloodsport does not hold an auspicious movie. Unless the dancing at the end provides a cure for cancer, AIDS, and bad breath all in one viewing, it can't be good enough to salvage the 15 minutes I saw.

Add any comments you have on the worst of the worst that you might have witnessed.