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The Shittiest Films Ever Made No. 14: Tribulation If writing about shitty movies occasionally for the last three years has taught me nothing else, it’s taught me that there is no deeper dumpster for cinematic garbage than the Christian film industry. Evangelicals have been producing movies almost as long as they’ve been complaining about how evil they are, but the last twenty years in particular have seen a deluge of fundamentalist flicks flooding the home video market, with a few even breaking through to limited theatrical releases. Why, it’s been positively Noachian! This series has dealt with two evangelical films already — the Casper Van Dien/Michael York epic The Omega Code from TBN Films, and the most didactic time travel movie since Star Trek IV, Rich Christiano’s Time Changer. Now I come to Tribulation, the third in a series of four films centering on the apocalypse produced by the LaLonde brothers at Cloud Ten Pictures. Why Tribulation and not Apocalypse, the first film in the series, or Revelation, the second? Excellent question, I’m glad you asked. I’ll give you three excellent reasons. Gary Busey, Margot Kidder, and Howie Mandel. Oh, and apparently only crazy Busey knew this was an evangelical film before they started filming. ( Read the rest . . . ) | |
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The Shittiest Films Ever MadeNo. 13: Jail BaitOf all the shitty directors of shitty films, Edward D. Wood Jr. is the most beloved by far. The incomprehensible schlock he produced in the 1950s, starting in 1953 with Glen or Glenda and climaxing in 1959 with the release of Plan 9 From Outer Space, virtually defines the genre of so-bad-they’re-good cult classics. But I wonder how many who profess to be fans of Ed Wood have actually sat through one of his films from beginning to end.
Wood made Jail Bait in 1954, after Glen or Glenda and two years before Bride of the Monster. It has no transvestites, no giant octopus, no hubcap flying saucers and no Tor Johnson or Bela Lugosi. It has a few typically Wood-ian eccentricities, but for the most part it’s a flat, brutally boring police procedural. Imagine an overlong episode of the original Dragnet series, produced for no money, featuring a cast of stiffs. By the time it’s over, you’re begging for a Styrofoam tombstone, a limp, tentative striptease — anything.
It’s an Ed Wood movie without any of the stuff that makes us remember Ed Wood movies, which is probably why it’s the least-remembered of all the films he directed. Still, take away the shitty special effects and the goofy attempts at horror and sci-fi, and Plan 9 or Bride of the Monster are no different than this. All of Wood’s movies feature interminable scenes of actors drably reciting awful, repetitive dialogue, and they’re all packed with clumsy moralizing. It’s just that most of those others have enough shots of Tor Johnson getting stuck in doorways or the director prancing around in an angora sweater to make sitting through the dull bits worth it.
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The Shittiest Films Ever Made No. 12: Gothic There’s such a thing as too much style. I know the Baz Luhrmanns and Julie Taymors have their legions of fans, but I’m not one of them. I prefer filmmakers who are able to exercise a little moderation. It’s not that I only enjoy understated character studies or I wish every movie was My Dinner with Andre; I just don’t like being yelled at. Subtlety is so scarce in films like Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge that watching them is like having Baz Luhrmann, that fucking elf, screaming in my face for two hours. Why would I want that experience? Some of my favorite films are dripping with style. You’ll find no bigger fan of Paul Thomas Anderson or Quentin Tarantino than me. Fuck, in Tarantino’s last few films the display of style has been the whole point. The difference between Tarantino, Anderson, Darren Aronofsky, all the other visual virtuosos I respect, and Luhrmann and Taymor is that the former bunch knows when it’s time to turn the volume down. Death Proof is packed with long tracking shots and jump-cuts, its soundtrack is full of the esoteric pop music Tarantino loves, but there are also long stretches of quiet, of conversation, quick little moments that could get by you if you’re not paying attention. Even the audacious action sequences are careful not to get too caught up in their pyrotechnics — compare the car chases in Death Proof or the fight scenes in the two volumes of Kill Bill to the pretentious slow-mo snooze-fests from John Woo and tell me which better serve their stories, and are more fun to watch. Restraint is an alien concept to Luhrmann and Taymor and Woo (“Luhrmann and Taymor and Woo” . . . somebody should write a poem), as it is to Ken Russell, the director of Gothic. Self-indulgence had been the defining characteristic of Russell’s career for decades before he made Gothic in 1986 — in 1975 he directed both the film adaptation of The Who’s rock opera Tommy, and Lisztomania, a musical biography with Roger Daltrey as Franz Liszt, co-starring Ringo Starr as the Pope and Rick Wakeman as Thor. Yep. | |
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The Shittiest Films Ever Made No. 11: The Omega Code In 1999 the Crouch family, the powers-that-be at the Trinity Broadcasting Network, made the momentous (and, for those of us who relish regarding everything evangelical Christians do with ironic condescension, delightful) decision to produce their own films. Christian movies were, regrettably, nothing new. Billy Graham had been producing them for decades — feature-length after-school specials where the moral of the story always wound up being “convert to Christianity immediately.” Lots of other would-be filmmakers had attempted to meet the demand for amateurish and didactic entertainment, among them Peter and Paul Lalonde, and Rich Christiano, whose shitcake Time Changer was the subject of an earlier entry in this series. TBN had long been packing its schedule with this sort of direct-to-video fare. In 1999, sensing an opportunity to dip even deeper into the pockets of their elderly audience, the Crouches — particularly Paul Jr. and Matt, sons of founders Paul and Jan — decided to get into the filmmaking game themselves — and not just to churn out cheapo DVD features, but to make “real” movies, that would be shown to the public projected on movie screens, presumably in movie theaters. They’d tried this already, about ten years before, with a movie called China Cry, about a woman in Maoist China who becomes a Christian after Jesus saves her from a firing squad, or something. It got a theatrical premiere in Hollywood, but then again so did Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo. In ’99, the Crouches were looking to do nothing less than take back the movies . . . for Christ! | |
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The Shittiest Films Ever Made No. 10: The Lost Boys I’d hate for my string of positive reviews of old horror movies in the last few weeks to give the impression I’ve forsaken the shittiest of the shitty. As anyone who’s driven past the marquee of a movie theater in October knows, there’s enough garbage constantly churned out in the vein of would-be scary movies to write about nothing-but from now until they bury me face-down/ass-up. Less numerous but twice as irritating are those horror movies that flat-out suck balls, but manage to become pop culture touchstones anyway. I’m not talking about something awful in an endearing way, like Plan 9 From Outer Space or Faces of Death. I’m talking about a flick that gives you nowhere to hide, that is just dogshit any way you look at it, and has nevertheless acquired a large and devoted following. I might be talking about The Lost Boys. I am, actually. This was one of those films I heard about for years before actually seeing it. My best friend from my early teens through my early twenties fancied himself a horror movie person. He talked a good game — referring to Michael Myers as “the Shape,” and such — but it turned out he didn’t know his ass from an ice cream sundae when it came to movies, and pretty much everything else. The Lost Boys was one of those films he felt I ought to have seen already; when he discovered I hadn’t, he produced his well-worn VHS copy and decided to enlighten me. | |
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The Shittiest Films Ever Made No. 9: No Holds Barred I could write a whole series just on the shitty film career of Hulk Hogan (the only man inducted into both the WWE and Cocksucker Halls of Fame), but everyone has to start somewhere, and for Hogan that was No Holds Barred. Yeah, he made a brief appearance in the first act of Rocky III, but that wasn’t exactly a Hulk Hogan vehicle. The big orange bastard didn’t get his first starring role until No Holds Barred; it’s all Hogan, all the time. When the film was released in 1989, Hogan’s pro wrestling career was more or less at its peak. He had just won his second WWF Championship from “Macho Man” Randy Savage at WrestleMania V, and the wrestling business itself was riding the wave of success that had carried it through the ’80s, still a few years away from the slump that would threaten its existence for much of the next decade. Vince McMahon had been shoving Hulk Hogan down the throats of wrestling fans for nearly six years. The summer of ’89 seemed the perfect time to shove him down the throats of unsuspecting moviegoers, as well. | |
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The Shittiest Films Ever Made No. 8: Star Trek: Nemesis There’s a misconception about the Star Trek films that tells us the odd-numbered ones will be a waste of fucking time and the even-numbered ones will at least be worth the price of a ticket or a rental. The notion falls to shit almost immediately: it holds true for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a portentous piece of nerd-porn that’s 90% slow-tracking beauty shots of the Enterprise; and for the first sequel, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, still the obvious pick for best Star Trek movie; but after that the movies stop cooperating. Star Trek III has gotten a bum rap from Trek fans for years, I think because they were so put-out by the destruction of the Enterprise; it’s actually a pretty good movie, written and acted with wit and skill — not a masterpiece, but definitely superior to the next two episodes in the franchise. Star Trek IV is the most overrated of the series, with its “Greenpeace in Space” premise, and its endless and lame fish-out-of-water jokes as the crew cavorts and capers across 20th century San Francisco. Then there’s the infamous Star Trek V — written by Shatner, directed by Shatner, starring none other than the most obscenely talented polymath in all of Hollywood — nay, the universe — William Shatner. This one gets a bad rap too. Yeah, it’s a shitty movie any way you slice it, but it has its charms. Rarely is the camaraderie among the crew more apparent, and it’s easily the most (unintentionally) hilarious film in the franchise. The odd/even rule works again for the next three, as Star Treks VI, Generations, and First Contact are terrific, god-awful, and outstanding, as predicted. Star Trek: Insurrection then bucks the imaginary trend by being a likable, competently made romp in the same mold as Star Trek III — nothing you’ll remember fondly on your deathbed, but a good (and underrated) piece of work. Finally there’s Star Trek: Nemesis, the tenth and apparently final film of the current franchise, and by far the shittiest. The “odds bad, evens good” principle is, like Nemesis, pretty much useless. | |
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The Shittiest Films Ever Made No. 7: The Neon Bible Sometimes you go in expecting a film to be bad. Sometimes that’s the whole reason you see it in the first place. Lost in Space was like that for me. I knew I was in for an Akiva Goldsman-penned piece of TV-knockoff shit, but I saw it anyway so I could sit there and mock it and feel like a big man. It’s not the ones you expect to suck that get you; it’s the ones that catch you unawares that grind you down and leave you a trembling afterbirth of a human being, glancing at the screen through squinted, tear-soaked eyes, just begging God to end it — the movie, your life, whatever — just to let it be over, please. The Neon Bible is such a film. I followed an interesting thread to see this movie. Ashley bought this album a few weeks ago called The Neon Bible by The Arcade Fire. I wasn’t impressed by what I heard of it, but she liked it enough to find out that there was a novel by the same title written by John Kennedy Toole, the guy who wrote A Confederacy of Dunces and then asphyxiated himself when Simon & Schuster refused to publish it. Ashley got the novel through the library and read it. Later that week I found the film version on DVD at Wonder Book. Ash said the book was good, and the movie starred Denis Leary and Gena Rowlands, so we rented it and, innocent and naïve as lambs, sat down on the couch to give it a look. Sweet merciful fucking God, what a horrible movie. Jesus farting-bleeding-shitting Christ. It doesn’t start out that bad. It’s obviously a low-budget film and you can see where some corners have been cut — sets tend to fade into blackness, making some scenes appear to take place in islands of reality surrounded by infinity, which I kind of liked — but the problem with this movie has nothing to do with how it looks. What really kills The Neon Bible is the fact that the people who made it had no idea what the fuck they were doing. | |
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The Shittiest Films Ever Made No. 6: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington This film is considered a classic. On lists of the greatest American films, it almost invariably finds a spot, often near the top. To pick one list in particular, the American Film Institute ranked Mr. Smith Goes to Washington at #29 on its roll of the 100 greatest American films, ahead of such greatly honored works as The Godfather, Part II (#32), To Kill a Mockingbird (#34), The Third Man (#57), and City Lights (#76). Which forces me to ask — why? Because now that I’ve seen it, I must say, it’s not all that great. It’s not all that good. It is, in fact, inescapably bad. It’s made by competent people, to be sure — director Frank Capra, Jimmy Stewart, Claude Rains — but going in I hardly expected this to be the fruit of their talents. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is awkward, hammy and schmaltzy. And did I mention schmaltzy? Had I not already seen Love Story or Capra’s own It’s a Wonderful Life, I’d call this one the all-time World’s Heavyweight Champeen of Sentimentalism. | |
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After Monday’s syrupy sentiment and yesterday’s goofy non-article, I thought a stiff shot of bile was in order. The Shittiest Films Ever Made No. 5: Time Changer This is a wonderful and Godly Christian film written and directed by the Godly writer-director Rich Christiano, who has also made such impressive films as End of the Harvest and Second Glance, all of which also carry his Biblical message of salvation through Christ. In this film, Time Changer, Rich Christiano has made a truly exhilarating science fiction (“sci-fi”) adventure about time travel and the importance of faith in Jesus! The story begins in 1890 with seminary professor Russell Carlisle (our hero!). He has just written a book, and his fellow professors have a meeting to determine whether or not the university will officially endorse it. The rules say the professors must all vote unanimously in order to endorse the book, but one professor, Norris Anderson, objects because he says Dr. Carlisle’s book recommends teaching the morals of Jesus to unsaved people without sharing the gospel with them. Without Dr. Anderson’s endorsement, the school cannot endorse Carlisle’s book and it will seriously hurt his sales, or something. Anyway, another professor who is on Carlisle’s side says that they can just vote to change the rules so that it doesn’t have to be unanimous anymore, so that’s what Carlisle decides to do. | |
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Most of my film writing the last few months has focused on movies of either the Kick Ass or Mediocre variety, leaving my original series sadly neglected. To that I say, “Fuck!” It is neglected no more. The Shittiest Films club has a brand new member, one long overdue.
The Shittiest Films Ever Made
No. 4: Mallrats Of all the filmmakers favored by guys my age, Kevin Smith by far is the one whose popularity most outstrips his talent. He’s made two excellent films by my reckoning (Chasing Amy and Dogma), two very good ones (Clerks and Clerks II), two that had their moments but were nothing special (Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and Jersey Girl), and one, Mallrats, that is a hideous affront to everything joyful and pure God has created. Its constant torrent of Star Wars, superhero references and sex jokes has won Mallrats a devoted following among Kevin Smith devotees; a following that does not include Kevin Smith, who has publicly apologized for the film and now seems to regard it with a mixture of chagrin and rueful fondness. | |
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Tuesday Darren finally gave me copies of four documentaries produced by members of the 9/11 Truth Movement: Loose Change, In Plane Sight, Dark Secrets: Inside Bohemian Grove, and Beyond Treason. I haven’t had time to watch them all, but last night and this morning I did at long last view Loose Change in its entirety. Having watched it all the way through, a feat beyond even the great Roger Ebert, only one thing remains – to write: The Shittiest Films Ever Made No. 3: Loose Change What I’m trying to do here is review this on its merits as a film. To attempt to refute the claims made by the filmmakers would require more time and space than I’m willing to spend writing about this movie; besides, the “facts” of Loose Change have already been debunked to hell and back by numerous websites, including 9/11Myths and Mark Roberts’s Loose Change Viewers Guide, and a feature published last year in an issue of Popular Mechanics, so there’s not much new I could add. This isn’t about the arguments, the theories, the misdirections, misinterpretations and outright lies in the film – having watched it, I think it’s safe to say that Loose Change is full of shit. But, granting that it’s full of shit, is it a good movie? As Dylan Avery, the film’s director and smarmy narrator would say, “I hope you’re sitting down.” | |
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The Shittiest Films Ever Made No. 2: Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones Goddamn, I love Star Wars. I wasn’t yet born when it opened in 1977, but my mother took her younger brother George with her to see it. When The Empire Strikes Back came out in 1980, I had just been born. By the time Return of the Jedi closed out the trilogy in 1983, I was sleeping in Yoda pajamas. I didn’t actually see any of the movies until I was older, but there’s still no getting around it – I was a Star Wars baby, baby. When I was old enough to watch the movies and understand what was going on (which was around age six or seven – they’re not exactly deep) I found myself really digging them. The more I watched them, and the older I got, the more things I found to appreciate. As a child it was the bickering between the droids, the mishaps that ensued onboard the Millennium Falcon, which never seemed to work, and Chewbacca – what kid didn’t love Chewbacca? Getting older, it was the little things, like Peter Cushing’s magnificent bastard Grand Moff Tarkin tricking Princess Leia into revealing the location of the rebel base and then blowing up her home planet anyway, or how Darth Vader dueled Luke with one hand in The Empire Strikes Back, or Han Solo’s voice when he told Leia, “I know.” Those movies were flights of the imagination, anything seemed possible – but what really appealed to me about the Star Wars films as an adult was the humanity, the sense that these people in this fantastic place doing all these fantastic things, really honestly cared about each other. Crudely written and clumsily acted at times? Hell yes, but it was that sense of wonder and adventure that pulled me along and let me ignore the spots when the dialogue wasn’t so great, or when the story seemed to be circling back on itself (which accounts for most of Return of the Jedi, actually). Fuck the special effects and the aliens and lightsabers – it was the wonder, the adventure, the humanity that really made Star Wars fly. | |
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A momentous day this is, for it marks the start of a recurring feature at this site, wherein I review some of the worst movies ever unleashed on the suffering hordes of mankind. Normally I’ll be reviewing one film per article, but to start things off right, today an entire series of films near and dear to my heart gets a great big bite taken out of its ass. Without further ado . . . The Shittiest Films Ever Made No. 1: The Batman Films
I’m not going to deal with the 1940’s Batman serials in any detail, because they were made in a time when there was no money and no talented people willing to make a film about a comic book character. Objectively, they are pretty terrible, but they entertain in a naively nostalgic kind of way. Plus, the first one, made at the height of World War II, is a bald-faced piece of government propaganda, complete with evil, mascara-wearing Jap villain. Gotta love that. The film spun off from the 1960’s television series will get a pass here, too, because it’s actually pretty funny and I don’t feel it qualifies for a Shittiest Ever list. Instead, I turn my attention to the recent Batman films, those made in 1989 and after. These films were made by a major studio in a time when money was no object and plenty of talented people were available and involved, and they still found plenty of ways to suck beyond all comprehension.
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