Under normal circumstances, with Mother’s Day just around the corner, I’d probably be introducing a list of the Top Ten Best and Worst Movie Mothers of all time (hello, Stella Dallas, Edna Turnblad, Mrs. Robinson, Mrs. Bates and, uh, Mothra)!
But, sadly, these are not normal circumstances, and as your doomed pals here at the Screengrab kick off the first of our Final Four Lists of All Time, we figured we’d better get down to brass tacks with some big-time definitive statements.
And so, this week, we’ve all joined our esteemed colleague Scott Von Doviak down in the deepest depths of the cinematic junk heap to compile our own list of Cinematic Unwatchables. And judging from our picks, it seems Tolstoy was correct when he said, “Happy audiences are all alike; every miserable audience is miserable in its own way.”
In other words, our picks were all over the map, but thanks to the cutting edge calculating powers of the state-of-the-art Screengrabulator 5000, we hereby present our ultimate, irrefutable list of THE TOP TEN WORST MOVIES EVER MADE!!!!!!
10. BREAKING THE WAVES (1996)
I don't know if Lars Von Trier thinks there's something "real" buried in the contrivances and gimmicks and grabs to the crotch that he calls movies, and I don't want to know. I do know that they can do real damage when he persuades talented people who are susceptible to really bad ideas to take part in them. Unlike the auteur, his leading lady, Emily Watson, has since done enough good work to redeem herself for whatever the hell it is she thinks she was doing in this, but at the time, her performance seemed to call less for an award than an intervention, if not an exorcism. (PN)
9. THEY’RE JUST MY FRIENDS (2006)
Bad movies come in all shapes and sizes, but few approach the sheer, wholesale incompetence and awfulness of They’re Just My Friends, an autobiographical indie co-written by and starring World Super Cruiserweight boxing champ “Punchin’” Pat Nwamu that, in terms of aesthetics, narrative, and performance, redefines the very notion of a cinematic failure. It’s a master class in how not to make a movie, made all the more distasteful by the fact that, after two excruciating hours, it abruptly, randomly ends with a cliffhanger that portends a sequel. (NS)
8. WIRED (1989)
John Belushi was a funny, talented guy and a lot of people loved him and enjoyed his work, but Bob Woodward mostly accentuated the negative as he chronicled every drug the late comedian ever ingested in his 1984 exposé Wired, prompting Belushi’s brother Jim to call the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist a cocksucker a few years later in the SNL oral history Live From New York, adding that “Woodward did a really nice job of making John look like a Bluto junkie. I don’t think Woodward’s capable of understanding what love is, or compassion, or relationships,” while Dan Ackroyd noted that Woodward “painted a portrait of John that was really inaccurate.” So I can only imagine what they must have thought of Larry Peerce’s godawful adaptation of Woodward’s book, which begins with Michael Chiklis (whose career somehow survived one of the most catastrophic debuts of all time) emerging from a body bag as Belushi, post-overdose...a concept so jaw-droppingly tasteless it belongs in the Cinema Wing of the Bad Idea Hall of Fame on a shelf with The Day The Clown Cried. And then, remarkably, the maudlin, humorless fiasco gets even worse, as Chicklis’ Belushi revisits scenes from his life, like a faux-SNL skit even more endlessly, painfully unfunny than anything Charles Rocket ever cooked up, and a Second City improv class weirdly depicted as some harrowing cross between primal scream therapy and a Khmer Rouge boot camp. Like HBO’s weirdly overpraised 2004 hack job The Life and Times of Peter Sellers, Wired seems to actively despise its own main character...but not nearly as much as I fucking despise Wired. (AO)
7. FIELD OF DREAMS (1989)
The stench of aging-Boomer anxiety rises thickly from this gross hunk of whimsy. Why did national menace Kevin Costner fall out with his dad? For all Field of Dreams tells you, dad might have been a war criminal and a serial killer and a fan of Black Oak Arkansas, but of course the movie doesn't want to get into any specifics that might interfere with the effectiveness of its guilt trip warning that you must mind your elders so they'll always be there to play catch with you. (Of course, Costner, like a lot of people in the audience, just happens to start regretting how he treated his daddy once he's become a daddy himself. This is self-critical regret as a form of narcissism.) The smarmy smugness taints all that it touches: baseball, Burt Lancaster, James Earl Jones. Check out the scene where Shoeless Joe Jackson (a miscast Ray Liotta) drops Ty Cobb's name just so he can have a laugh about how much he hates the Georgia Peach for a taste of how Costner became, for a while, the movie's poster boy for politically correct claptrap. (PN)
6. CANNONBALL RUN II (1984)
I hate to even mention this one so soon after the death of Dom DeLuise, but not even Captain Chaos could salvage a fiasco of such awe-inspiring ineptitude. The first Cannonball Run was no award-winner either – even longtime Burt Reynolds pal Johnny Carson described it as “an industrial-strength laxative” – but it doesn’t come close to the pure, unadulterated shamelessness of the sequel. Once again featuring enough Burt buddies, big name cameos and Grade Z celebrities to sink The Love Boat, Cannonball Run II takes the coast-to-coast genre into daring new territory by eliminating the race altogether. A few seconds worth of squiggly Ralph Bakshi animation stands in for the actual racing, leaving plenty of time for Jamie Farr to mug in a burnoose, Shirley Maclaine to frolic around in a nun’s habit, and Frank Sinatra to phone in a sleepy cameo, looking like he couldn’t be bothered to cross the street to appear in the same frame as Reynolds and the gang. Who could blame him? (SVD)
Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine & Ten
Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Nick Schager, Scott Von Doviak