Worst Films
The Garbage Pail Kids Movie
It doesn’t really feel right to write about this film. I’ve been struggling to come up with a way to encapsulate this film in one sentence, and the best I can come up with is this: when the world finally ends, The Garbage Pail Kids Movie will at least make our horrific fate seem deserved. That humanity managed to put out such an abomination as this movie warrants nothing less than our total extinction.
Released in 1987 (and oh God, you can tell), The Garbage Pail Kids Movie was an attempt to capitalise on the relative success of the Garbage Pail Kids trading card series, in turn a crude and crass parody of the decidedly cuter Cabbage Patch Dolls. It may be the worst adaptation ever imagined by anyone, ever. Aside from the countless faults this film throws in your face (and I’ll get to them), its chief problem is how unnerving they look. Rather than rely on animation or animatronics, they instead relied on – wait for it – dwarves in suits. I wish I was kidding. They got a bunch of dwarves, made them wear huge, leering, completely static heads, and figured that would work. They produced the stuff of nightmares. I’m scared to sleep, now, and I’m 20 years old. Think about what this did to kids.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg – everything about this film ranges from bad to the filmic equivalent of a man in a bare room screaming in anguish until the end of time. First up, it’s dark. One of the Kids sports a flick knife, and the other one suffers from incontinence (I say suffers; he’s proud of it). The protagonist gets the shit beaten out of him more than once, and there’s a particularly harrowing scene where his attackers leave him to drown in raw sewage. No-one in the film acts, apart from Anthony Newley as Captain Manzini, who I’d call a saving grace but doesn’t come even close.
The film has two plots. One involves Dodger, the protagonist (an awful Marty McFly, right down to the haircut), trying to win the affections of Tangerine (a girl), by forcing the aforementioned Kids to design clothes for her fashion collection. Tangerine is the girlfriend of Juice, a total misogynist dickhead who makes Dodger’s pitiful attempts that much harder. If the film was just this, I think I could deal with it. It’d be really boring, but I wouldn’t have nightmares.
The other plot involves the abduction of the Kids by Juice’s gang and their confinement to the State Home for the Ugly, a holding facility where ugly people are locked up by the government before execution. This is something that, yes, is generally acknowledged as a Bad Thing, but it isn’t treated with quite the horror it deserves, considering we’re talking about death row for unattractive children. I should add – this movie was marketed to kids. It’s intended for people about eight years younger than me.
That it’s a film for kids is worrying. There are a few scenes of horrific violence, a sequence where the Kids get ridiculously drunk, and the most sexualised portrayal of a child I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen Lolita). I’m all for tough love when it comes to kids – the adaptations of Roald Dahl’s work, Tim Burton’s abomination excluded, did this incredibly well – but this is just disturbing. Poorly executed and awfully acted too, of course, but above all – just wrong.
Gigli
Take Goodfellas, add The Big Lebowski, throw in Rain Man, ladle on a generous helping of Chasing Amy and top it off with a steaming pile of bullshit and you’ve got Gigli, the 2003 film that aimed to capitalise on the burgeoning romance between Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez and instead left critics everywhere slack-jawed in disbelief.
Each of these sources warrants a decent explanation, and I figured a decent way to treat this film would be to examine each one in turn and see how Gigli completely gets it wrong. Because this most definitely is plagiarism. If you’ve seen any of the films above, you’ll know that they have something distinctive about them. Gigli tries to take the most distinctive elements of each one, and ends up with a mish-mash of disparate influences that combine to produce one colossal catastrophe of a motion picture.
First, then, Goodfellas, because it’s arguably the smallest influence. The original followed the life of one upstart as he rose through the ranks, only for people in his mob organisation to lose control, prompting a series of murders with our protagonist next on the list – so he escapes into the witness protection programme, and is never heard of again. This is part of the plot of Gigli – perhaps most concrete is Al Pacino’s scenery-chewing gangster (yes, you read that right: Al Pacino. This film pulled some pretty big stars) who shoots a man in cold blood, only to chuckle about it as he sits next to the man’s corpse while repeating “I just don’t give a shit.” Arguably, the mob-related stuff is the most engaging part of this film, which isn’t saying much.
Next, The Big Lebowski. The 1998 masterpiece featured a plot element where a toe turned up in the hands of the titular character, only for it to be a case of mistaken identity and for the toe to belong to a complete misnomer. This happens here, except it’s a thumb belonging to a corpse (which Affleck inexplicably saws off with a plastic knife). There is no way that this isn’t directly lifted from the original. Except it’s played as a slapstick sequence. Because of course it is.
Rain Man is next up in order of impact: accompanying Ben Affleck the greasy-haired slickster and Jennifer Lopez the featureless lesbian is Justin Bartha as a Baywatch-obsessed, rap-spouting mentally ill person who Ben Affleck (I think) develops a sort-of brotherly relationship with over the course of the film. Bartha is no Dustin Hoffman, though – he’s just bad. Having said that, he went on to star in The Hangover, so clearly he’s got something. But in this film, he veers between being awkwardly annoying to a shining example of how low Hollywood screenwriters will go to get a cheap laugh.
And finally, there’s Chasing Amy, a film that stars a lesbian who sort-of falls in love with Ben Affleck (yes, the same one), has a few disturbances, and then breaks it all off in one of the most underrated but brilliantly cathartic film sequences in the last 20 years. Gigli desperately tries to replicate this, casting Jennifer Lopez in the lesbian role, and putting a twist on things by making them all live Happily Ever After. Chasing Amy was also a foul-mouthed comedy, which managed to be hilarious in almost every scene (even the sad ones); this tries to be a foul-mouthed comedy, and fails miserably. There are some classic lines in this film, if by “classic” you mean terrible: an example emblematic of the whole film occurs when Affleck smashes a kid’s computer, only to remark “hey, nice computer. How about suck my dick dot com?” Or when he calls Lopez a “dykosaurus”. Or when Lopez is being all sensual and then says “the mouth is the twin sister of the vagina”, shattering the moment for everyone at home but drawing Affleck’s swinging dick of a character even further in. In the immortal words of Tim Minchin, “since they said that, I can’t look my great-aunt in the eye.” And since seeing this film, I’ll never listen to another Jennifer Lopez song ever again. Not that I was a fan before.
The Room
To make up for neglecting this blog, it’s probably about time that we looked at what many critics and normal people alike consider to be The Worst Film Ever Made. It’s a film with its own mythology, a massive fanbase and is popular to the point where its director, Tommy Wiseau, has made his living since the film’s release by touring the USA, doing extensive and often bizarre Q&A sessions to sold-out audiences around the country. I’m talking about the 2003 masterpiece of cult cinema, The Room.
The first thing that strikes you after this film is the notion that the creators must have put a lot of effort into getting everything just wrong – the set-pieces, the cinematography, the actors; everything about this film screams awful. Looking back at the previous films treated in this blog, each one has its own redeemable characteristic. With Battlefield Earth, it was the stunning CGI; Pluto Nash, the accidental B-movie sensibilities; Paris Hilton’s Whore-A-Thon, pretty people. The Room has none of these.
It’s hard to put into a genre, but at best we could call it a melodrama. It focuses on the life of a character called Johnny (Wiseau), who gets caught up in a love triangle with his fiancée, Lisa (or, as Johnny calls her in every other scene, his “future wife”, played by Juliette Danielle) and his best friend Mark (played by Greg Sestero). There are also a few subplots which are introduced and forgotten almost instantly, like the drug addiction of Johnny’s sort-of-surrogate-son Denny (Phillip Haldiman), and throwaway lines like “I got the test results back: I definitely have breast cancer.” The film ends with Johnny learning about Lisa’s affair, destroying his apartment in potentially the Best Worst Scene Ever Filmed, and shooting himself in the head.
In case you think that a plot like that could be done right (and if you do, you presumably have an overwhelming faith in stylistic conventions to save a film), nothing helps it. The biggest compliment probably goes to the cinematography, in that it doesn’t pull any bizarre angles and tries its hardest to integrate the repeated stock visuals into the overall scene structure. On the other hand, there’s an excruciating scene where we’re treated with the sight of Johnny’s horrifyingly muscular (and presumably steroid-enhanced) buttocks clenching as he has sex with Lisa (it’s worth noting that Juliette Danielle was 19 when The Room was filmed; if he isn’t lying about his age, he was 33 at the time) – a scene that is later repeated, gratuitously, shot for shot with hardly any variation. So there are problems there too.
There are some killer lines that make this film what it is: besides the aforementioned habit of referring to Lisa as his “future wife” whenever she’s brought up, he also reinforces the fact that Mark is “my best friend” around 30 times over the course of the film, and the infamous line “YOU’RE TEARING ME APART, LISA!” is so well-known by now that it has its own dubstep remix. There’s an exchange in a diner between Johnny and Mark, focusing initially on Johnny’s reluctance to talk because of supposed confidentiality; when he tries to dissipate this talk by saying “No, I can’t. Anyway, how is your sex life?” the mind boggles.
Integral to understanding The Room is to look at Wiseau both as an actor and director (though primarily as an actor, and if the latest reports are anything to go by, he didn’t exactly direct it). It’s harsh to say so, but the initial thing to point out is that he just looks weird – from the (hopefully) drug-enhanced muscles, to the straggly black hair, to a face that looks like it could only come out of years of heroin abuse, he’s the man who stands out in a cast of otherwise fairly normal-looking people. Then there’s his voice – he claims that he’s just “an American”, but he has an accent that’s impossible to pin down – there’s a hint of Eastern European, but you can’t really get much more specific than that. Having accepted this, it almost makes sense that Johnny is the only character that’s remotely believable; with the other actors, every line seems forced, just because it’s so syntactically strange.
There’s no way to comfortably summarise all of the mythology surrounding The Room in one short article, so I’ll end it here. But this might be the first film treated in this blog so far that can provoke nothing but delight at how fantastically terrible it is. Watch it, and you’ll see why it has so many fans. Chances are, you’ll join them.
The Hottie and the Nottie
I’m not a violent person. The closest I’ve ever come to being in a fight was when someone punched me in the face at the age of 15, leading me to break down in tears and do absolutely nothing to defend myself. I’m not even confrontational – I might spout a ton of vitriol in this column, but face to face I’m more likely to cower in fear. I say this because despite all this, I’ve always harboured a desire to punch Paris Hilton in her stupid face. And after seeing this film, I want to nuke the entire state of California. (Note: I won’t, because that would be bad, but I want to – part of me wants to, if only to serve the comic narrative of how much I actively dislike this film.)
A brief summary to the billions of lucky people who haven’t seen this film: The Hottie and the Nottie stars the aforementioned heiress as Cristabel Abbott, a supposedly attractive girl and object of the desires of Nate Cooper (played heroically by Joel David Moore, turning a total bastard into a vaguely annoying screen presence). But wait! There’s more! Apparently, because it’s how women work, right, Cristabel “I’m A Whore” Abbott has an ugly friend called June Phigg (get it? It’s like “pig”! Oh, HA, HA, HA), and she’s made some sort of chastity vow that can only be broken when June gets laid. Because that happens too.
Before focusing on all the minor atrocities in this film, here’s the central problem: it has a really ugly message, namely that you have to be stunningly attractive if you want anyone to love you. This is obvious from the first ten minutes – as the sort of beast that doesn’t technically exist in the real world, June is quite clearly a beautiful woman (Christine Lakin, doing her best with a crap script) under a few layers of stage makeup.
As time goes by (prepare yourself for this), June has plastic surgery and her teeth re-done, along with a ton of other beautifying treatments which manage somehow to raise two contradictory questions. First: why hasn’t the character already done this in a context other than furthering this dismal narrative? And second, what sort of awful people openly and obviously shrivel up their faces in disgust when they see someone ugly? Is this the society we live in – where anyone less than the apparent ideal of a braindead heiress most famous for doing porn has to be shunned and spat on? Actually, that’s probably about right. We’re doomed as a species.
Things from here are fairly formulaic – a braindead hunk to match Hilton’s braindead whore shows up, there’s some interpersonal tension, and eventually Nate lives happily ever after with the newly-beautified June, a woman who 80 minutes ago was making him retch.
In the periphery are an assortment of pathetic characters – a midget mime artist (who Nate punches in the face – yay, abuse!), a retarded albino stalker (yay… stereotypes?), and Nate’s best friend, Arno, a sort-of easy-to-despise version of Seth Rogen. The script is completely unfunny (though with occasional gems: “only a true romantic would keep their elementary school photo… that, or a paedophile”), the plot’s sloppy, and we’re treated with endless montages that scream “HEY! ISN’T PARIS HILTON SEXY! BUT, LIKE, IN A LEGITIMATE WAY, RATHER THAN THAT FREAKISH NIGHT-VISION BLOWJOB WAY? YEAH?” Seriously – there’s a scene where Hilton strips down to a bikini, and the camera spends about three straight minutes roving around her body, before finally resting on her stupid face.
There are some films that are so bad that they become brilliant, and depressingly, I think this might be one of them. The making of an awful cult film is a series of moments that leave you open-mouthed, going “wait – did that just happen? Did a sane human being think that would work? Did they not get the memo saying that whoopee cushions stopped being funny five minutes after they were first produced? Can it be possible that a sex tape featuring the same lead has more of a plot than this?” This is a film that begs those questions, and a ton more. Watch it drunk, you might even enjoy it.
The Adventures of Pluto Nash
Generally considered to be one of the worst box office flops of all time – it grossed around $7 million on a $100 million budget – The Adventures of Pluto Nash is an oddity, cursed by a series of poor performances, a plot that consistently fails to engage, and visuals that range from awful to overblown. That said, it’s still worth seeing, because it stands out in the sci-fi genre. If The Fifth Element had a stupid cousin that no-one in the family liked to talk about, then this would be it.
The film’s biggest mistake is casting Eddie Murphy in the title role. Don’t get me wrong: Murphy’s perfectly suited to some roles (with the usual rule being the sillier the better) but he’s not meant to play the straight man – something he tries to take on here, bless him, but fails miserably. Rosario Dawson, brilliant in Clerks 2 and perfectly adequate in recent release Unstoppable, is reduced to a simpering moron, and Randy Quaid’s robot bodyguard… after seeing this film, it’s understandable that he thinks there’s an assassination plot against him. He’s horrifying.
This film suffers from the same contradiction that tends to befall a lot of science fiction films – epic ambition, but narrow vision. It clumsily addresses a ton of subjects, but the only thing done with any competency is the principal storyline, which is fairly straightforward (if sprawling). But then again, perhaps the outside nods are meant as in-jokes rather than commentary, in which case… it sort of works.
Here’s the problem: The Adventures of Pluto Nash isn’t necessarily an awful film. It doesn’t really deserve to be treated here, but considering that it received a host of negative reviews upon its release, it has to. But it’s genuinely funny at points (though, in fairness, pathetically unfunny at others), has a fair few peripheral characters who are genuinely compelling – veterans Peter Boyle and John Cleese stand out in particular – and while some of the effects might be low-key, at least they’re consistent. And there are parts that are stellar – the sets are stunning, and there’s convincing use of CGI for panoramic shots. In effect, it’s a pretty good B-movie.
Having said this, it did have a budget of $100 million, and was agonisingly deliberated over for nearly 20 years prior to production (the script first surfaced in the 1980s). And there are parts… most readers of this will understand what I mean when I say “Y2K hangover”. There were a slew of sci-fi films, and elements of pop culture (particularly music videos), which definitely belong to the pre-2000 period, because they imagine a gritty yet lurid cyberpunk future where everyone dances like robots and everyone has their personalities turned up to 11.
Sometimes, this was done to great effect – in fact, despite it being set on Earth, Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days seemed like the closest parallel to this film after The Fifth Element – but more often than not, it’s something we can look back on with wide-eyed confusion. And this is where The Adventures of Pluto Nash belongs – sure, it’s a rollicking fun adventure, but at the same time it clearly takes itself a little too seriously. And some of the sequences – like a hover-campervan being driven across the moon to “Moon Beach” from (get this) “Little America” – are just absurd. They’re too distracting to be able to focus on the story.
Having said this, it’s easy to see why this is consistently ranked as one of the most entertaining films to have a hellish time in the box office and amongst the critics – it’s no lost gem, but in all its lurid, ridiculous, nostalgic mess, it’s a genuinely engaging film. Watch it with a healthy dose of scepticism, and you might even enjoy it.
Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000
Battlefield Earth was the sort of film that needed to grossly exceed expectations if it was ever going to do well. An adaptation of L. Ron Hubbard’s book of the same name, critics were already suspicious that it was just going to be a Scientology propaganda machine. In retrospect, it looks like they were being a bit too hopeful.
A quick plot summary: the film takes place a thousand years down the line (indeed: the full title is Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000), where an alien race called the Psychlos have taken over earth and are mining it for profit, while mankind is on the brink of extinction – a fact that the intertitles remind us of twice in the first five minutes. During the course of the film, our human heroes are trapped, used for manual labour by the Psychlos, and eventually mount a resistance and destroy not only the Psychlo colony but their entire home world, thus making the entire moral point of the film completely murky by having its heroes commit genocide (oh, and the complete obliteration of a planet – we’ll come to that in a second).
The one merit of this film, and it’s one that a lot of people picked up on, is that the visual effects are stunning. Ignore how they’re filmed, and they’re fantastic; the CGI spaceships that dominate the bleak skyline, the elaborate sets, and the sweeping shots of the “dome” where the Psychlos live are all brilliant, if totally unoriginal – as it happens, it just looks like they’ve imagined the world of Blade Runner a few hundred years later, where the buildings are derelict and the only lighting available is unnecessarily harsh.
The good stuff stops there. The obvious thing to pick up on is the atrocious acting from everyone involved: John Travolta’s scenery-chewing freak of an alien overlord/Head of Security stands out the most, with brilliant lines like the drunken “while you were still learning to SPELL YOUR NAME, I was learning to conquer galaxies!” and “If man-animal likes his rat uncooked, that makes our job all the more easier!” You wonder what he thought he was achieving by half-screaming every single line; his role transcends villainy and ends up just being mental.
Not that he’s the only one: pretty much every character in this atrocious mess is horrifyingly insane, whether it’s the good or bad: Forest Whitaker looks stoned for the entirety of the film, the hero (played by Barry Pepper, in a way that raises the instruction to “look as desperately emotional and on the edge as possible in every single scene, especially the tender emotional ones” to new and undiscovered heights) and the supporting cast are either pathetically insignificant or one-dimensional and nuts.
Another quick note on the cast – it’s almost universally male. There’s a female love interest on the good guy’s side, but she gets around six lines and her only function is to be rescued by the hero; on the aliens’ side, John Travolta’s wife gets a cameo as a slutty alien with a huge tongue (I’m not kidding), but beyond that women are grossly underrepresented. This’d be fine if it was making a point, but it’s not: Whitaker’s character even goes to the lengths of saying “I’m gonna fire all my wives, and buy new ones”, and it’s clear that we’re supposed to find it funny in a sort of hurr-durr, Jeremy Clarkson way; it just comes across as grotesque.
Throw in the fact that it hilariously takes place for the most part in Denver (no, seriously – a big centrepiece is in the ruins of Denver Library), that you know the ending after three minutes, that the best visual elements borrow heavily from Blade Runner and Logan’s Run, that it’s grossly violent but contains no blood whatsoever, that every single shot is filmed from a ridiculous angle, and that there are huge plot holes – nerdy, but would universe-conquering aliens really attribute Euclidean geometry to Euclid? – that the aliens just look like really ugly humans, that the authority is referred to as the “Home Office” (as a politics nut, the line “the Home Office does not make any mistakes” had me chuckling), and that despite it being completely insane it’s the least compelling film you’ll ever watch, and this all makes Battlefield Earth the sort of film that not only deserves to be scorned; it’s not even worth elevating to the level of “cult classic”. That’s the saddest part of this film; despite everything, it just feels like a waste of time.
That said, Travolta does shoot the leg off a cow. That part was fun.
Mac and Me
The first subject of this column is Mac and Me. It’s the most unsubtle piece of capitalist – specifically, American – propaganda you’ll ever see. It shamelessly plagiarises its concept from another family film of the period. Despite this, in its own little way, it’s brilliant. Ready?
Remember the 2006 James Bond film Casino Royale? Remember how every single gadget in that film was manufactured by Sony? That it was a little curious that both the goodies and the baddies were using Sony VAIO laptops? That Bond couldn’t afford a smartphone, and was instead using a crap Sony Ericsson mobile? Really? You didn’t?
OK, run with this anyway.
The fairly straightforward (and correct) explanation for this was that Casino Royale‘s reboot of the Bond franchise was co-sponsored by Columbia Pictures, itself owned by Sony. It all goes back to who’s producing the financing, and whether they’ve got outside interests or not. When it’s something that’s incidental to the plot anyway – as gadgets always have been in Bond – then it’s fine. It works. This is an important lesson that Mac and Me completely ignores.
Example: one of the centrepieces of the film takes place at a McDonalds franchise, where everyone breaks into an impromptu dance battle. There are a series of shots where the only point is to linger on a bag of Skittles. The only attractive character in the film works for the aforementioned fast food franchise. And get this – Coca-Cola is so brilliant in this film that it actually restores the aliens’ lives.
By that, I mean that at one of the most emotional (I use that word loosely) points of the film, where the kids in the lead parts, accompanied by MAC – an acronym that apparently stands for “Mysterious Alien Creature” but is clearly just another nod to, well, you know – discover the emaciated and spent bodies of MAC’s parents in a mine, they feed them Coke and they come back to life.
Seen as a horror film with anti-consumerist overtones, Mac and Me is actually brilliant. It has all the right elements – aliens that walk like zombies and look like sex dolls designed by William S. Burroughs, a precocious little creature (if you haven’t been following this, it’s the titular “MAC” of the film) that almost definitely kills a man in the opening twelve minutes, the destruction of a shopping mall filled with god knows how many people, effectively killing them all along with the lead character, and a revival process (because in this world, Coke as the elixir of life hasn’t yet extended to humans) that looks a lot like a Scientology “touch assist”.
You can take this further, too. In the end sequence, where the aliens are – of course – naturalised as American citizens, the man presiding over the ceremony asks them to agree, as all would-be citizens of the US have to, to perform military service for the government if requested, and to renounce the citizenship of their home planet. They’re dressed in the uniform of the Perfect American Family, and drive a pink Cadillac off into the sunset. It’s possibly the most horrifying sci-fi image you’ll ever see.
But Mac and Me isn’t a horror film. It’s essentially a really bad version of E.T., down to the point where it was released at the same time, and features a bewildered alien who makes friends with a kid, is hunted by the US government, and eventually gets to return to his home planet (no, wait: gets naturalised as a US CITIZEN, but let’s ignore that part). In short, it’s supposed to be a family comedy. But it’s terrifying at best, and simply boring at worst.
The acting is wooden (apart from the kid’s mother, who actually appears to be having a nervous breakdown, but that might have just been coincidental), and there are some scenes that are just harrowing. The very opening scene, set in a research facility, is just terrifying. It feels like the bit in Independence Day where the alien regains consciousness in Area 51. Except scarier.
I’m not saying that Mac and Me created a new generation of rednecks, conspiracy theorists and public officials, but – no, wait, that’s exactly what I’m saying. This is a film that should never have been made, if only for the safety of the public. It’s a film that’s best summed up by the end of the cast list in the end credits: “and RONALD MCDONALD as Himself”. This is a world where Ronald McDonald is real, the sheer stupidity of aliens could actually kill you, and cameras are always lingering on the products you buy. A nightmarish vision of the future?