The Worst:

CATWOMAN (2004)



Attacking Catwoman is almost too easy: it’s such an obvious, defenseless target, what with stinking up the box office like week-old kitty litter, damaging the careers of all responsible and winning Razzies for Worst Picture, Worst Screenplay, Worst Director (for “Pitof,” if that IS your real name) and Worst Actress for Halle Berry (whose Golden Raspberry acceptance speech alone very nearly redeemed both her performance AND her embarrassingly overwrought Oscar speech for Monster’s Ball, including gems like, “First of all, I want to thank Warner Bros. Thank you for putting me in a piece of shit, God-awful movie . . .it was just what my career needed”). But...nope, we’ll never be done kicking Catwoman, for oh, so many reasons. Geeks hated the flick (set in “Lake City” rather than Gotham) for heedlessly violating the sacred mythology of the source material, straight guys hated the way Berry dishonored the legacy of Kitt, Newmar, Meriwether and Pfeiffer by somehow making Catwoman (CATWOMAN!!!!!) distinctly unsexy, fashionistas hated the godawful costume, feminists hated the fact that while male superheroes were out saving the world, Berry’s crusader was investigating a frickin’ cosmetics company and right-thinking people everywhere coughed up hairballs of disgust to discover the whole tacky disaster somehow managed to cost 100 million dollars. But even worse is the nagging sense of how totally awesome a good Catwoman movie might have been...and how we’ll never, ever get to see it now. Thanks a bunch, Pitof.

FROM HELL (2001)



If you think Zack Snyder had a dense, intricate Alan Moore work on his hands when he set about adapting Watchmen, consider what the Hughes Brothers stepped into when they decided to bring Moore’s graphic novel From Hell to the screen. A speculative fiction based on the legend of Jack the Ripper, From Hell is an insanely detailed look at an alternate Victorian England and the massive conspiracy at its heart. It’s endlessly fascinating stuff, and the Hughes Brothers threw away just about all of it in order to make a nonsensical Se7en-style serial killer bloodbath. Johnny Depp is the police investigator, who is given opium-induced psychic powers here that he never possessed in the comics, while that great British actress Heather Graham plays the cockney prostitute he romances. The entire plot has been re-jiggered into a lame whodunit, thus jettisoning almost every unique aspect of Moore’s take on the Ripper story. It’s not shocking that such minutiae as the extensive tour of London’s Masonic architecture wouldn't make it to the screen, but keeping the Ripper's identity a secret throughout the movie only robs the story of its most interesting character. Worst of all, Hughes and Hughes don’t even bother trying to recreate the look of the comic – the whole sooty, early-Industrial vibe. From Hell looks like it was shot on the set of a Batman movie, which is probably what the brothers would have rather been doing in the first place.

BATMAN AND ROBIN (1997)



After the departure of Tim Burton and Michael Keaton, Warner Bros. put the Batman franchise in the unsteady, garish hands of director Joel Schumacher, who told everyone within earshot that he wanted to return to the "campy" tone of the old Adam West series, as if daring everyone in earshot to scream at him, "What're ya, high!?" Schumacher's first Batman movie, Batman Forever, which featured Tommy Lee Jones giving a performance that would have embarrassed Rip Taylor and Chris O'Donnell capering in his underoos and declaiming, "Holy twisted metal, Batman!", was one of the worst big-budget horrors ever, and damned if the old boy didn't manage to top it in his follow-up. Pre-release word on the movie was terrible, but Schumacher stubbornly continued to talk it up until his megaton bomb hit theater screens, inducing pain and suffering in all who had eyes that see. Schumacher reacted defensively at first -- "I had no idea that putting nipples on the Batsuit and Robin suit were [sic] going to spark international headlines," he pouted, in stubborn denial of the likelihood that people were trying to be nice and the nipples were the least objectionable thing about his movie. By then it was clear that, in the summer comic-book movie sweepstakes, the Caped Crusader had gotten his nuts crushed by Men in Black, a movie based on a comic little read by people outside the artist's and writer's immediate families.

DAREDEVIL (2003)



With X-Men and Spider-Man having solidified its status as king of the superhero-film hill, Marvel must have thought itself invincible, because only hubris could possibly explain the comic giant’s decision to okay Mark Steven Johnson’s take on Daredevil, the blind lawyer who combats crime at night. From the cheesy tone, to Johnson’s habit of turning his camera on extreme angles, to the miscasting of Ben Affleck, to the soft-core love scene featuring Daredevil and Jennifer Garner’s sexy assassin Elektra, Daredevil is a fiasco through and through, turning its hero into a second-rate Batman whose every extraordinary leap, jump and twirl is the byproduct of lame CGI. Johnson shoots every action sequence with maximum spasticity, setting his fights in rain and strobe lights and editing them to ribbons. Stuck headlining this misbegotten adaptation, Affleck vainly attempts to act tortured by flashing a variety of grimaces, all while an overacting Colin Farrell attempts to devour any scenery in sight as the hysterically corny villain Bullseye.

THE SPIRIT (2008)



With The Dark Knight proving in 2008 that it was possible to make a truly great superhero movie, it was actually kind of a relief to have Frank Miller remind us that same year that it was still possibly to make a truly rank one. Miller himself is one of the greatest comic artists and writers the industry has ever seen; though his work has been spotty in recent years, in the 1980s, he put out a fistful of some of the greatest superhero stories in the history of the medium. As a director, though, he’s a hell of a banjo player. Utilizing the same tricks he relied on in Sin City, but with a notably weaker cast and a downright rotten script, he took the Spirit – a venerable crimefighting character created by the beloved Will Eisner – and stuck him in a movie that would have to be twice as good as it is to be an embarrassment. Sidled with an incoherent screenplay, a tone-deaf sense of mood and pacing, a lot of wasted femmes fatale, and Samuel Jackson in one of the most deranged (and not in a good way) villain roles in recent memory, The Spirit would have been a disaster regardless, but the final nail in the coffin was the casting of charisma-free nobody Gabriel Macht in the lead role. Macht brought a Twinkie-heavy sense of anti-gravity to the Spirit the likes of which we haven’t seen since a young fellow named Klinton Spilsbury donned the mask of the Lone Ranger in his first, and last, motion picture role. Miller’s lucky he built up so much credibility in his comics career, because movies as crappy as The Spirit have ruined lesser men.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four, Five & Six

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent, Nick Schager, Leonard Pierce