Call it masochism, call it sick pleasure, call it a case of good ol’ Stockholm Syndrome, but I have an almost perverse fascination with terrible movies. Let others have their cinematic sirloin; for me, there’s nothing more oddly alluring than the prospect of cold, messy movie meatloaf — which is why I signed on to this particularly masochistic “experiment” in the first place.
That’s right: after four months embedded deep within the smaller theatres in Edmonton’s many multiplexes, scoffing until my throat was red and my eyes had permanently rolled back in my head, I’ve come up with a shortlist of the summer’s most awful films. It wasn’t easy, and there were plenty of casualties along the way — fair-weather friends who waded into battle with me only to stand up and say, “This sucks,” before walking out. But I alone soldiered on, just so that I could now deliver, for your sadistic enjoyment, a user’s guide to The Worst Films of the Summer.
Worst Career Move For A Walking Sculpture: Made of Honor
Hoping to break out of his hardscrabble existence as the perpetual second banana to People’s Sexiest Men Alive, Patrick Dempsey was looking for a role that could earn him true big-screen leading-man status. And better way to show female fans he can headline a rom-com than to play a lecherous, womanizing cretin?
McDreamy, who seems here to be posing more than acting, doesn’t exactly exemplify the “knight in shining armour” ideal in Made of Honor, and it isn’t clear if the producers were in on the irony of the title. His character is a repugnant, ladykilling douchebag who shuffles through women like a blackjack dealer. Regardless, the film plays out like a laundry list of shopworn romantic writing staples.
What’s that, you say? The only woman Dempsey’s truly loved — played by the ever-talented Michelle Monaghan — is engaged to another man? Better put them together in an awkward dinner situation ripe with laboured physical comedy. While romantic comedies really aren’t my bag, it was amusing to watch Dempsey grin dumbly through the entire endeavour. The movie’s critical drubbing probably won’t hamper him if he wants to pursue his natural calling as a professional face model, but it suggests the former star of Can’t Buy Me Love has a long way to go before he’s Humphrey Bogart.
Worst Use of Science to Unfunkify Marky Mark: The Happening
By the time you realize that an explanation of the scientific method is the least hamhanded bit of dialogue you’ve heard in more than an hour, it’s too late to run: you’re stuck watching an M. Night Shyamalan film.
“Identify the variables... design an experiment... careful observation and measurements... interpret the experimental data,” drones Mark Wahlberg, practically crying out to his Funky Bunch for help. Even throwing in a little “You’re a star, you’re a star” wouldn’t have hurt. Then again, if Shyamalan were Paul Thomas Anderson, The Happening would probably be a stirring indictment of greed and power in the canola industry instead of this botanical disaster.
Wahlberg stars as a cardigan-sporting, go-getting Philadelphia science teacher who’s too square to be hip. But after New Yorkers start killing themselves for no apparent reason (could it be the plants?), Wahlberg and estranged girlfriend Zooey Deschanel, Hollywood’s most adorable deer in the headlights, make for the countryside, where they meet two botanists who suggest strongly that plants may be behind the suicide epidemic. By the time Wahlberg whips out his huge scientific method and starts talking to plastic trees, you may begin to suspect plants have something to do with everything.
In a movie as lacking in subtlety as The Happening, you half-expect Shyamalan will make his customary cameo appearance as a man wearing a sandwich board reading “It’s the fucking plants, don’t you get it! The twist is that there is no twist! Ain’t I a stinker?”
Slightly less self-satisfied than Lady in the Water but more enjoyably campy, The Happening reaches a pinnacle of laughable dialogue when a kooky hermit callously derides Wahlberg for “eyein’ her lemon drink.” If Shyamalan truly had a sixth sense, he’d hire a screenwriter, stat.
Most Insulting Film to Hindus and Non-Hindus Alike: The Love Guru
As some anonymous genius once said, “Silence is the best answer to the stupid.” By that measure, Rajan Zed, president of the Universal Society of Hinduism, thinks The Love Guru is on par with Dostoyevsky. After the film unceremoniously tanked — a rare victory for fans of both comedy and good taste — the only one still railing against the movie was Zed, oblivious to the fact that he was now the sole source of publicity for Mike Myers’ bargain-bin-ready schlock.
With jokes running the gamut from preverbal to the preliterate, Myers takes lowest-common-denominator comedy into a brave new world where elephants fornicate and pies in the face are replaced by urine-soaked mops. With the insufferable Guru Pitka, Myers actually creates a character more aggravating than his take on The Cat in the Hat. There’s one good joke in here: the Leafs win the Stanley Cup. Otherwise, Myers’ idea of humour is to hurl Verne (“Mini-Me”) Troyer across an ice surface. Myers’ abuse of Troyer, who is incredibly talented at being short, escalates with each subsequent film. If I were Troyer, I’d be terrified; Myers is probably writing a knee-slapping scene at this very moment in which Troyer is forced to have sex with a goat.
Most Unnecessary Summer Sequel: The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
Over 3,000 days ago, greedy studio executives set out on an expedition to extract as many gold doubloons from the pockets of naïve filmgoers as possible. That film, 1999’s The Mummy, took action entertainment to new heights of shrug-eliciting “meh”-ness. But little did they know that excavating the tomb of Boris Karloff’s timeless classic would unleash a creature of unspeakable mediocrity, who would bring the 10 plagues of action clichés onto the unsuspecting populace. The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor is only the third of such plagues and from the looks of things, 10 may be a conservative estimate.
In a summer relatively bereft of perfunctory, cash-grab sequels, Dragon Emperor courageously stepped in to finish the job that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull only began, returning to answer all the unasked questions left hanging from The Mummy Returns. Brendan Fraser, Hollywood’s most realistic CGI creation, returns to the franchise, with Maria Bello, who clearly failed Cockney Enunciation 101, replacing Rachel Weisz. With Fraser’s swinger son (who looks only five years younger than Fraser does) in tow, they’re off to battle Jet Li, whose kicking and punching are assuredly not martial arts, since Li declared his cinematic martial arts career finished only several martial arts films ago.
The Mummy series is a textbook example of the dangers of giving audiences exactly what they want: predictable family-friendly action sequences loosely strung together, with the excitement coming from their overwhelming ridiculousness (which is still admittedly fun). With an ending that practically screams, “By golly, you’re gonna love you some Mummy 4, ain’t ya!”, this dumb creature will likely stumble once again through the cinemas within the next year or two. May God have mercy on us all.
The Absolute Worst Movie of the Summer: Meet Dave
A complex, brooding action thriller, Meet Dave examines the roles of heroes in our society and how they can be misunderstood by the public. In a behind-the-camera turn worthy of Christopher Nolan, director Brian Robbins (of Norbit and The Shaggy Dog fame) brilliantly conveys the inner moral turmoil all of Eddie Murphy’s characters struggle with. Dave is the psychopathic force of destruction and anarchy in the world, kicking cats, screaming at passersby, and ferociously mugging for the camera. The Captain, meanwhile, is a tormented source of good attempting to maintain justice and order in the system, even if it means he is sometimes seen as the villain.
Okay, okay, all Dark Knight comparisons aside, I chose Meet Dave as the worst film of the summer as it was the only one that I actually felt humiliated to sit through. It almost feels like a Vietnam flashback; I occasionally still wake at night in a cold sweat, screaming, remembering how I had to remain absolutely still as bombs went off in front of me, unable to risk standing up and escaping for fear of revealing my face to the people surrounding me. All five of us at that 3:30 Friday afternoon screening remember what it was like to cringe through Meet Dave, heads hanging in embarrassment, forced to watch as an Eddie Murphy-shaped spaceship sprayed us with comedic Agent Orange, defoliating our sense of humour and probably giving us cancer too.
The only silver lining to this cloud of shame is that Meet Dave tanked badly, hopefully signaling to Murphy that it’s tougher to hide your smug detachment from your audience when you’re not wearing a latex fat suit.
