Let's just preface this week's post
with a heads up. If you have not already taken in the spectacle that is
Avengers: Infinity War you have roughly 7 days (depending on when you read
this) to do so. There is no way to talk about that movie without any sort of
spoiler, mild or otherwise and it is genuinely a film you need to see without
any idea of how it's going to end. All I'll say for now is that it isn't going
to go how you think it's going to go.
So
for now, in the spirit of Cosmic Balance and a topical segue (it's almost like
I know what I'm doing) we counter last week's joyous celebration of all my
favourite cinema with a rogues gallery of bottom feeding, lowlife, scumbags
that should never have offended my delicate eyeballs. I'm not saying that the
following movies should be struck from history, or that their directors should
be taken into the street, tarred, feathered and then beaten to within an inch
of their lives, but actually for at least one that would have been a good start
and probably saved us a whole bunch of misery. It's interesting that I found it
just as difficult to narrow this list down to ten, particularly considering the
whole original point of this blog was to vent my considerably swollen spleen
and give my friends a choice as to whether or not they hear it. Without further
ado then, I present my ten least favourite movies.
10:
Cabin Fever.
This
the first time I'd heard of Eli Roth, but sadly not the last. His legacy shall
be one of over-hyped and frankly underwhelming horror bollocks that the world
would be better off without. It starts out as a fairly standard cabin in the
woods premise but this time the villain is... a virus? The next hour and a half
showcases Roth's ability to listlessly navigate between gory set pieces with zero
suspense what-so-ever because it's a virus and there literally no way they
aren't all dead by the end. Even the last gasp attempt to shock us (it's in the
city's water supply! Dun dun duuuuun!) is pointless because that just means
everybody's going to be dead too. How he got work after this is testament to
how dismal and dull horror can be, compounded by the fact this got remade a few
years back using exactly the same script. Pointless.
9:
Evil Dead... Remake.
Whilst
the three full stops in the above heading have conjured up more suspense than
Eli Roth has managed in an entire career, they are necessary. I love the Evil
Dead Trilogy and I almost put all three in my top ten. I've spoken to a number
of people about this re-hash and it made the blog a while back, but the more I
think about it the more savage it makes me. The trade-off here was what I like
to term The DC Principle: the apparent and erroneous opinion that modern movies
and particularly remakes, must be darker, grittier and edgier than whatever
came before. Hence, we find ourselves with a film stripped of all the charm and
wit of the original replaced with a teenage junkie and her clueless friends who
end up massacred for your viewing pleasure in as much realism as modern latex
prosthetics can conjure. Except the whole thing is shot so darkly that a great
deal of it is indecipherable. There's an after credits cameo from Bruce
Campbell, but even he can't save this.
8:
(The Brothers) Grimsby.
Comedy,
like so many things is terribly subjective. Grimsby, or The Brothers Grimsby as
it now prefers to be known, is just terrible. Sascha Baron-Cohen is effectively
a giant man child, who genuinely thinks that he's hilarious because he does
gross, crass and boorish things then passes it off as banter. I will admit that
when I was about eight I'd have probably found at least a couple of these
"jokes" funny for about two minutes but I can't really see that
justifying an hour and a half of this crap. People keep paying him to make
movies, and people apparently keep paying to see his movies. I'm not saying
that's indicative of the decline of society but when one of the central
defining qualities of your hero is that he's a horrendous chav it kind of tells
you everything you need to know. I'd have turned this off after about 10
minutes but I wasn't in charge of the remote and didn't want to seem rude.
7:
Batman versus Superman: Dawn of Justice.
This
will always have a special place in my heart as it is, to date, the only movie
with so much wrong with it that it needed two whole blogs to adequately
describe how utterly abysmal it was. When you find yourself checking the time
during a movie, that usually isn't a good sign. When you find yourself
despondent because you think you must be about half way through but you haven't
even got to half an hour yet, that's a sign you should probably just go and do
something else more productive, like see how many Peanut M&Ms you can lodge
under your eyelids before it becomes an A&E job. After Christopher Nolan's
acclaimed Bat-trilogy, Bat-fleck was just a bat-astrophe and the plot was
probably the stupidest, most convoluted and non-sensical horseshit I've seen.
6:
Pearl Harbour.
I
should probably be grateful that I don't really remember much about this turgid
hunk of crap other than for some obscure reason Michael Bay decided that the
devastating sneak attack on the US forces station at the eponymous harbour
wasn't nearly intriguing enough for the cinema-going public so he decided to
have it play second fiddle to some sort of weird love triangle rom-com sub plot
without the comedy. The second closest I've come to walking out of a cinema,
saved only by the fact that Bay does at least do exploding vehicles quite well
and the actual attack wasn't terrible. Just everything else.
5:
Armageddon.
Michael
Bay you sly dog, you got in twice. Some of the worst and most blatantly obvious
foreshadowing in modern cinematic history in the first half of this snoozefest
sets up the most telegraphed and mawkish denouement in modern cinematic
history. Not only is it obvious, but it's nonsensical: why would you put
machine guns on a lunar rover on a mission to destroy an asteroid unless it's
just so the only member of the crew passed psychologically capable of
performing the mission can use them to ruin everything unnecessarily and cause
drama. The only reason I didn't walk out of this is because I was trying to
fight off falling asleep for most of it.
4:
The Blair Witch Project.
The
hype surrounding this movie was unparalleled at the time. I will admit it was a
ground-breaking premise; the found footage approach, the rumours of a realistic
shoot where the actors were just filmed being tormented by the crew and the
cameras just rolled, the viral marketing and rumours that it was all true. Then
you watch it and realise it's about as scary as a National Geographic
documentary on finding Big foot except the expedition members are all
unequivocal idiots who deserve everything they get and worse. Then you find out
that all the viral stuff about them being stuck in the woods is bollocks as
well because they spent the nights in hotels just like a regular movie shoot
and you realise the whole thing was just a student film that got lucky and made
a ton of money. Credit where it's due; they spent sweet FA and brought in
millions but that's because people are gullible idiots not because it was
a great film. I don't think it's a coincidence that none of them have done
anything noteworthy since, and not because they died on set.
3:
Prometheus.
You
probably never realised you needed a prequel to Alien and according to Ridley
Scott's own self-delusion, technically you still haven't. Prometheus is an
alien prequel, but it is also incoherent, rambling crap. This is probably a
side effect of ditching an entire script, nicking some bits out of it, mashing
in bits from other places then getting Damien Lindelof (unofficial the world's
least coherent screen writer) to redo the final act. None of it makes sense,
the characters are all exclusively idiots because if they weren't there would
be no plot and the whole thing makes you wish someone had taken Ridley on one
side and convinced him not to bother.
2:
Million Dollar Baby.
Oh
boy. This is literally the closest I've ever been to walking out on a movie.
This Oscar Winning Best Picture is also the reason why I decry the Oscars as a
completely pointless industry circle jerk where there are no real winners.
Million Dollar Baby opens as a sort of female-driven Rocky style boxing biopic
and about half way through descends into a terminally depressing and thoroughly
dull drama on the morality and ethics of euthanasia. Spoiler alert: Clint
Eastwood snuffs Hilary Swank with a pillow then goes for some food. I just
saved you 2 hours of tedium and you are very welcome.
1
Skyline.
Ladies
and gentlemen, we have a winner. Or loser, depending on how you look at it.
Skyline is awful. Directed by a couple of guys from the FX department behind
The Matrix (who coincidentally also brought you the terrible shitshow that was
Alien vs Predator: Requiem, which almost made it onto this list but I think I
was so traumatised I blocked it from my memory. Also, shot so badly in the dark
that actually I'm not entirely sure 'watched' is an appropriate term), Skyline
does at least look pretty but it's woeful. Nothing really happens, to the point
I'm pretty sure there's a speed-up section of the protagonists doing nothing
for hours on end in an apartment. The most exciting part of this movie is the
credits, and I'm not even being facetious; there's an animated mini feature
going on behind the end crawl which is actually interesting and should have
actually been the focus of the plot in the first place. I don't think it's
coincidence that when they made the sequel, that's exactly what they did.
So
that's that then. Avengers next week, make sure you've seen it. You will not be
disappointed.
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