As this year’s films make their way to the DVD/Blu-ray market, here are 10 to keep off the home-viewing list.
The greatest sin every bad movie commits is disregarding the better judgment of its audience. The modern masses may be all-too-willing to shell out oodles of dough for mediocrity, even garbage, but that’s no reason not to wag a finger at those who make said garbage, then dare to ask for payment in return, thus continuing the vicious, subpar-cinema cycle.
The worst movies of 2010 ranged from comedies to fantasies to horror films, but all have at least one common denominator: Insulting viewer taste and intelligence for a fee — a fee that, unfortunately, many people gladly paid.
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
To make up for the consequences of the original “Wall Street” (what was meant to be a cautionary tale about the price of greed instead spawned a whole generation of Gordon Gekkos), Oliver Stone delivers a sequel that’s not only drained of venom, but completely devoid of fangs. The result? A treacly, lumbering family flick that’s hideously-designed to boot. Only returning star Michael Douglas is able to bridge the two films’ 23-year gap, picking up where he left off and remaining unruffled by the minefield of missteps surrounding him.
Splice
With its vanguard director (Vincenzo Natali), its gifted leads (Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody), and its slow-boiling first act, “Splice” gallivants about in a guise of sci-fi sophistication. But once the garbage-dump dialogue, self-seriousness and — wait for it — interspecies intercourse take over, it’s clear this is nothing but a cheap bit of tasteless sensationalism. “Splice” isn’t just another tedious creature feature; it’s much, much worse.
Death at a Funeral
An American remake of a 3-year-old British farce that wasn’t even that good to begin with, “Death at a Funeral” joins “Jonah Hex” as one of the year’s most unnecessary movies. Its true crimes, however, are its horde of pancake-flat characters, its rampant homophobia and its utter lack of amusement. Its only stinging irony is its theme of good-versus-bad writing (unless, of course, you count the whole no-pulse thing).
Resident Evil: Afterlife
A waste of everyone’s time (including, especially, its makers’), “Resident Evil: Afterlife” is a prime, egregious example of an inert franchise stubbornly refusing to die (it even has a title that — gulp! — suggests everlasting sequels). You know you’re dealing with dead-tired, uninspired crapola when the film it keeps ripping-off is the original “Matrix,” whose imitations went out of style nearly a decade ago.
Saw 3D
The latest – and, if it keeps its promise, last – chapter of the “Saw” series is a film so shoddy and irrelevant it’s barely worth including on a “Worst of” list. It’s yet one more movie whose “3D” title advertises little more than two hours of free eyewear, and it serves to reinforce the notion that senseless gore and relentless gynecide qualify as worthwhile entertainment. By the end, you feel like your insides have been scraped out with a shovel.
The “Resident Evil” sequels once had hopeful titles like “Apocalypse” and “Extinction.” The new one, shot in punchy 3-D under the misguidance of the original’s helmer, Paul W.S. Anderson, is crushingly called “Afterlife,” confirming this franchise, however inert, is far from extinct, and is adamantly set to remain undead.
It’s always amusing to see how the “Saw” films will attempt to disguise their gruesome “gorno” violence as a perverse form of upright moral justice (“These sinful victims had it coming,” the movies rationalize). The thin mask of principle is as silly as the swirly-cheeked head of the marionette that stands in for the infamous Jigsaw killer.
Not even bad-movie-Band-Aid Drew Barrymore can patch up “Going the Distance,” an infernal rom-com that holds a secure spot on the list of the year’s worst films.
I suppose there are worse things you could do with yourself than sit through a screening of “Grown Ups,” but, then, there also are worse things than being force-fed fistfuls of Ambien and arsenic and having your eyelids peeled back while puppies are slaughtered or being lobotomized in a torture chamber. These are the kind of cruel, unusual and comparable punishments that raced through my mind as I prayed for the end credits of this nightmare of 40-something male infantilism. I swear I saw the wasted minutes burn up as they passed by.
I’ve been saying for years that M. Night Shyamalan, who over the course of a decade went from being the next Hitchcock to a latter-day Ed Wood, should tackle material not born from his own twilight-zone of a mind. I’ve envisioned the gifted, Philly-raised auteur applying his irrefutable stylistic skills to a story uncontaminated by outlandish, swollen-headed, Shyamalanian DNA.
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1. who picks the movies said... on Jan 1, 2011 at 08:54AM
“who ever picks worst movies must not have a sense of humor.Grown ups and Death at a funeral was hysterical.who ever picks them should get a job picking underwear out of people cracks”