The Bad, the Worse, and the Worst

I suppose I was in a vegetative mood, because I spent an inordinate amount of time watching bad movies this past week. Some were chosen for their badness; others just turned out that way.

Road House

Dalton the bouncer
does tai chi without his shirt
and kills half the town.

The level of acting in this movie is just incredibly bad.  I’m not talking about the leads, Patrick Swayze and Ben Gazzara, but the folks who have three or four lines.  A movie like this made today would feature better secondary actors, which leads me to believe that the acting profession has markedly improved in the last twenty years or so.

I was surprised at how violent this film got towards the end.  I guess I shouldn’t have been, but ratings do tend to soften with time (like Midnight Cowboy bearing a ridiculous X rating).

  ShowgirlsDog Chow and Ver-sayce
Cavalcade of T & A
This is not acting.

The lines are ridiculous, the acting is so over-the-top that it would clear Mount Everest.  But one thing you cannot say about this movie — it is never boring, and therefore, I’d highly recommend it.

  MacGruberWhat this film needed:
toothpick, tube sock, bubble gum
and a few more jokes.

There were a few moments where I laughed, but the movie just isn’t funny enough.  The highlight without a doubt is Ryan Phillippe paging through MacGruber’s journal.

  Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen ZhenClick the Fast Forward
when watching this non-action
film in record time.

Jet li’s Fist of Legend is my favorite Chen Zhen story.  I’m a huge Donnie Yen fan — if you haven’t seen Kill Zone or Flash Point, they’re absolute gems.  This one had a few nice action sequences, but the rest of the film is forgettable.

  Batman: Year OneBryan Cranston makes
a gruff Lieutenant Gordon
to a weeny Wayne.

A faithful adaptation of the Frank Miller graphic novel.  It’s a decent film, but the guy who does Batman’s voice is wrongly cast.

  The Wicker Man (2006)Some films are so bad
their ineptitude is good.
I wish this were worse.

The scenes of this movie that are on YouTube, such as Cage beating up Leelee Sobieski in a bear suit, are funny, but the humor unfortunately is derived from their lack of context.  There’s no question the scene is silly, but within the movie, it makes more sense, and therefore, not really funny.

This actually was not a bad movie for the first half of its runtime.  And even the latter half isn’t a total failure — it was more along the lines of being ill conceived.  Let’s just put it this way: it’s no Showgirls.

2 thoughts on “The Bad, the Worse, and the Worst

  1. OMG, The Wicker Man is a (new) bad-movie classic! How dare you impugn it by saying it’s somewhat decent. Any movie that features Nic Cage’s insane line-readings of HOW’D IT GET BURNED?!?! and KILLING ME WON’T BRING BACK YOUR GODDAMN HONEY!!!, not to mention NOT THE BEES!!!! MY EYES MY EYES BLLEERUGUGGHHH!! cannot be anything but awesome. Also, I love how it confirmed Neil LaBute’s suspected misogyny in the most blunt and unsubtle way possible (EVIL WOMEN WILL CUT OFF YOUR BALLS AND MAKE YOU THEIR DRONE!!!!).

    If you need any more bad movies, may I recommend Dreamcatcher? Full of classic lines we still quote to this day (most, unfortunately, I suspect taken directly from the Stephen King novel), and a performance by Damian Lewis that is either genius or the worst acting choice made in the history of ever. Also features Timothy Olyphant looking sleazy.

    • Cage telling Molly Parker to get off her bike (at gunpoint!) was also one of the funnier moments. It is just an inept movie, and I do wonder how it got that way. LaBute is absolutely a misogynist, but I don’t think he’s a dope, and yet he ended up making a very dopey film. Nurse Betty might end up being his best movie.

      For unintentional humor, the first “Saw” is still way up there!

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