Tuesday, February 10, 2009

2008 in Review: It Wasn't All Good...

Thanks to HBO's almost non-stop re-airing, I know have seen what must amount to half of Meet the Spartans. Since the movie is seventy-something minutes long, that's a lot of shitty movie. I know I must've seen a healthy chunk of the beginning, swaths of the middle, and more of the ending than I care to admit to.

Listen, I talk some serious shit about bad movies here, but since Meet the Spartans is representative of the kind of "movies" the "shithead twins" make (I won't dignify their names here), I can say with total certainty I'll never watch Disaster Movie, Date Movie, Epic Movie, the rest of Meet the Spartans, or any other turd sandwich they crank out into theatres.

Meet the Spartans is not a movie. A movie has a plot. Even Airplane, which this so badly wants to ape, has a plot. Jesus, Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult has a fucking plot. Meet the Spartans is a collection of bad scenes strung together with even worse narration. I thought reviewers were kidding when they said that these "movies" literally explained a joke, but they weren't.

To give you an example, there's a scene with Carmen Electra where she gets angry or something and is clearly wearing the black Spider-Man suit, right down to the mask and the Spider-Man logo. It's abundantly clear who she is, but some ass-clown still feels the need to say:

"She became angry like Tobey Maguire in Spider-Man 3."

That's EXACTLY what he says. Because the target audience for Meet the Spartans is apparently mentally retarded. Every single reference in this movie is spelled out ad nauseum. They seem to think this is an acceptable substitute for jokes, and the sheer lousiness of this "movie" tends to suck you in. Then you realize what it is you're watching, look away disgustedly, and change the channel.

All of this brings me to the first phase of the long delayed 2008 Year End Recap (in February). We're going to start with

FIVE MOVIES I HOPE TO NEVER SEE AGAIN

Since I covered some of these before, I'm going to be brief. No sense wasting even more of my life on this tripe, but you need fair warning so that the same mistake isn't made in your living room. I saw a LOT of shitty movies last year, but these are the five movies I hope to never suffer through in 2009 and beyond.

1. In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale - The first Uwe Boll film I ever saw will also be the last. Look, I'm a staunch defender of Jason Statham and his terrible taste in roles, but even he couldn't save this stale fart of a Lord of the Rings ripoff. When Burt Reynolds, Ray Liotta, and Matthew Lilliard hamming it up can't salvage this crap, there's no hope for Dr. Boll. Consider yourselves lucky I went a whole year without uttering this film's name.

2. Diary of the Dead - George Romero, what the fuck were you thinking? Look, maybe your social commentary wasn't exactly ("they're us!") subtle in the past, but between the lack of zombies, hamfisted narration, and general unlikability of the cast, Diary of the Dead has nothing going for it. You abandon interesting characters (the Amish man, the guys in the warehouse) to continue following these d-bag film school students, and on top of that you give the worst character in the movie carte blanche to spell out the themes! It's bad enough the reason to "keep filming" is flimsier than Cloverfield's, but do you need to hammer us over the head with this horrible script? Make me a zombie already and get this over with. How the mighty have fallen.

3. The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor - It sucks. Even when the other Mummy movies were retarded, they were entertainingly retarded. This is not, for a lot of reasons. Don't think a football joke involving yeti saves it, either. It doesn't.

4. Righteous Kill - Speaking of how the mighty have fallen. Jesus. When Street Kings is a better movie about crooked cops, you know this has to be bad. And it is. Forget about the gratuitous death of 50 Cent. Don't even bother glancing at the cover. That's how much of a waste Righteous Kill is.

5. Lost Boys 2: The Tribe - Save the worst for last. Hey, this could've theoretically not sucked - pun intended- but the people behind The Tribe tried extra hard to ripoff the story from the first movie and somehow make Corey Feldman look bad in a role that was a no brainer for him. He doesn't have to dress like Edgar Frog for us to remember who he is: we fucking watched The Lost Boys, idiots! That's how we know this sequel is THE SAME MOVIE! The tease at the end, involving Corey Haim promises more mediocrity in Lost Boys 3: Because It's Friday, We Ain't Got No Jobs, and We Ain't Got Shit to Do. Oh boy. Please hold me back.

Everyone do yourselves a favor and avoid these embarassments of cinemas like the plague. Don't let morbid curiousity or fallacious word of mouth trick you into renting them. You're just wasting ten hours of your life (at least).

special (dis)honors also go to: The Ruins, Mother of Tears, National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets, Death at a Funeral, Drillbit Taylor, The Wizard of Gore, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Trapped Ashes, and The X-Files: I Want to Believe, all of which sucked in various ways and are generally not welcome in this apartment again.

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