Let’s face it. You love bad movies, we love bad movies. That’s why we’re
called Rotten Tomatoes and it’s why a movie needs a 60% Tomatometer to be
considered Fresh — we want to see films sweat to be considered good. Now
nothing cleanses the palette like a bad movie. They encourage us to actively
appreciate our favorites even more while (hopefully) giving us a good laugh. You
already read our Golden Tomatoes article,
now continue for the 10 worst movies of each year of Rotten Tomatoes’ existence
(which are sorted using the same weighted scores that we use on our big features
lists).
Black comedies are hard to pull off consistently (even the American masters,
the Coen Brothers, succeed only slightly more than half the time), and one set
during high school runs the risk of being zero interest to critics, who have
long since conquered high school, college, and probably a few midlife crises.
But Jawbreaker, detailing a beautiful girl clique’s attempt to cover up a
murder, tries its hardest to make it work. And by making it work, we mean
shamelessly stealing from Heathers, Clueless, and John Waters while failing to
establish a consistent tone. “Not quite a satire, not quite an homage,” writes
Liam Lacey of the Globe and Mail, “Jawbreaker falls into a third category:
audaciously unoriginal.”
People think Cuba Gooding Jr’s post-Oscar career was a crash and burn when it
was actually more like greasy fiery wreckage slowly descending on America. He
was memorable in his first movie after Jerry Maguire (As Good as it Gets, a
pretty good flick itself!), What Dreams May Come was an ambitious epic that,
through no fault of his own, backfired, and the potboiler Instinct could’ve
been an intense thriller in different filmmaking hands. But the moment we all
knew something was amiss at Camp Cuba? Chill Factor, a pale imitation of Wages
of Fear and Speed that lacks the suspense of the former and the actorly
chemistry that characterized the latter (though considering Gooding’s co-star
is Skeet Ulrich, that’s probably a good thing). Jonathan Rosenbaum brings the
vitriol: “This action-adventure movie shows the usual contempt for life,
humanity, art, the audience, intelligence, characterization, and plot.”
Co-producer and star John Travolta kick-started 2000 with was supposed to be
the start of an new sci-fi franchise, an epic to (subtly) spread the name of Battlefield Earth author L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology. But
instead, what Travolta gave us was the first truly awful movie of the new
millennium, a one-dimensional, grimy-looking movie filled with drab colors and
way too many dreadlocks. In space, no one can hear you scream, but here on
Earth, we can definitely hear Boxoffice Magazine’s Wade Major: “Utterly inane
and innocuous in the most harmless, uninteresting way — the fruit of an
overrated star’s overblown ego, recklessly indulged by studio excess.”
On one of his comedy albums, Andy Dick — no stranger to critical poundings
himself — rhymed “Chris Kattan” with “horse-faced troll of a man.” None of the
critics who sat through 2001’s Kattan-led Corky Romano stooped quite
that low in their reviews of the year’s most rotten movie, but they weren’t
exactly kind to the alleged mob comedy, either: Emily Blunt urged readers not
to see it “if you respect anyone in the cast or comedy in general,” while
Stephen Himes of Film Snobs was beautifully succinct, summing up Corky
as “very, very bad.” You can’t keep a good man down, though; in recent years,
Kattan has starred in such notable productions as a deleted scene in Superbad
and the upcoming CBS series Gameshow in My Head.
Take the number 100, remove the 1 from the front, and what do you have? A pair
of zeros, that’s what — which can either refer to this movie’s supremely
dreadful Tomatometer rating, or the two stars themselves. Okay, so that’s
probably a little harsh, considering that Antonio Banderas and Lucy Liu have
entertained us in other films — but on the other hand, even in the context of
take-the-money-and-run paycheck roles, Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever makes Reindeer
Games look like Casablanca. The plot is undeserving of analysis, or
even a summary; the most fitting epitaph for this, the worst-reviewed movie in
our site’s history, might come courtesy of Film Quips’ John R. McEwen, who
asked: “Antonio Banderas, Lucy Liu, have you no pride? Have you no standards?
Have you no shame? Don’t you pay attention to what’s written on the papers
you’re signing?”
You try to look all cool and stuff now, America, but we were there at the turn
of the century, and we remember — you were all gaga over Bennifer. 2003’s Gigli
was supposed to be the cinematic culmination of the nation’s paparazzi-fueled
love affair with Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, but a funny thing happened on
the way to the box office: we got tired of them. Oh, and also, Gigli
stunk. And actually, critics didn’t find that last part so funny — Empire’s
Simon Braund, for instance, referred to it as “torture,” saying it was
“impossible to imagine how it could have been worse,” and the Guardian’s Peter
Bradshaw deemed it “awe-inspiringly, world-historically awful.”
Sure, it’s an accomplishment (if not necessarily an honor) to be called the
worst-reviewed movie of your respective release year. And nearly all the
movies on this list are at least celebrated and for their sheer badness,
passed around amongst hip moviegoers for ironic viewing accompanied with shot
glasses. 2004’s worst movie, Twisted, runs the gamut of reasons why critics
hate a bad thriller: the “screenplay is a compendium of by-the-book clichés,”
the “direction leaves the material stranded in a limbo between po-faced and
trashy,” and the main actor’s (in this case, Ashley Judd) “approximation of
drunkenness is worrying to behold,” writes Time Out. But here’s the (har har)
twist: not only is Twisted the worst-reviewed of its year, it harbors the
extra-dubious distinction of having been completely forgotten. Seriously, have
you thought about Twisted since the Friday it opened and you decided to avoid
it at all costs?
Uwe Boll. Christian Slater. Tara Reid. Meet the Holy Trinity of the Moldy
Tomatoes, gang! Even by game-to-film standards, 2005’s Alone in the Dark
is shockingly bad — something that even the most ardent fans of the popular
game must have known as soon as they saw the talent assembled behind the
scenes. Would you believe it took three people to write this screenplay,
loaded with corn-scented dialogue like “fear is what protects you from the
things you don’t believe in”? The critics who watched it all unfold onscreen
were just as dumbfounded; Rue Morgue Magazine’s Jovanka Vuckovic, for
instance, called it “overblown, amateurish gibberish.”
If it had been made 15 years earlier, it probably would have been one of
the biggest hits of the year, no matter how bad the reviews were. But there
weren’t many people looking for a sequel to Basic Instinct in 2006, and
most of Basic Instinct 2‘s potential audience was scared away by
negative reviews from critics like the Austin Chronicle’s Marc Savlov, who
dismissed it as “garish” and “deliciously awful,” or Reel.com’s Brie Beazley,
who boiled all 117 minutes down to six words: “Everything about this movie is
bad.”
It had Diane Keaton in winsome neurotic matron mode, and the trailer featured
a shot of adorable Mandy Moore in her skivvies — Because I Said So
should have been a nice, winter-sized hit for the rom-com crowd when it was
released in February of 2007. Such a shame, then, that the script was stuffed
with clichés, and Keaton’s character consisted of little more than reheated,
watered-down bits of the roles she’d played in recent films such as Something’s
Gotta Give. As Sean Means of the Salt Lake Tribune noted, Because I
Said So “could have been retooled as a horror thriller,” and “that version
probably would have been funnier, too.”
Since you’ve made it to the end, you have indeed proven your worth as a true
acolyte of crap cinema. For further research, check out our Worst of the
Worst feature, where we’ve compiled the 50 worst-reviewed movies on Rotten
Tomatoes.
