One of the staples of a good summer, along with beach trips, ice cream trucks and hot pants, is terrible movies. There’s no better way to spend a blazing July afternoon than by plopping down in your local air-conditioned AMC and annoying the people around you with snarky comments about Keanu Reeves’ less-than-stellar acting abilities.
Blockbuster season, of course, is prime time for the kind of vacuous, explosion-filled hits we all love to hate and hate to love. Last summer delivered groan-worthy gems like “Rush Hour 3,” “License to Wed” and “Evan Almighty,” while 2006 will live in infamy for “Lady in the Water,” “The Da Vinci Code” and the incomparable “Snakes on a Plane.”
This season was no different, serving up its fair share of corny, disappointing and just plain ol’ bad movies. And so, in honor of the summer’s end (and the beginning of the snark-fest that will inevitably become a large part of your college experience), we have compiled a short list of the best worst movies of the summer. Enjoy. (Warning: contains spoilers and graphic depictions of awful movies.)
“The X-Files: I Want to Believe”
Nerds everywhere have waited a solid 10 years for this follow-up to the first X-Files movie, which featured everything we’ve come to love and expect from the series: aliens, conspiracies, the Cigarette Smoking Man and enough sexual tension to blow up a building (which also, incidentally, happens in the first movie). It was somewhat dismaying, then, to find Mulder and Scully transformed into a squabbling couple, and our trusty ET’s morphed into a backwoods serial killer. To be fair, Chris Carter did have the decency to go whole-hog with his villain, a gay Russian veterinarian who hacks up young women and uses their body parts to sustain his husband’s severed head in a lab.
Sounds good on paper, right? But in the end, neither weirdly misplaced social commentary (what was up with that this summer?), nor Billy Connolly as a child-molesting priest, nor Xzibit playing an FBI agent could keep this movie from being its own insistently, irrepressibly dull self. Lucky for the X-Files franchise, there will always be a contingent of diehard fans (read: fat bearded guys with ponytails) who get all hot and bothered by Gillian Anderson wearing a surgical mask.
Pluses: Scully’s still hot; Mulder has a beard.
Minuses: No aliens.
“The Happening”
As a Philadelphian, I had high hopes for the follow-up to M. Night Shyamalan’s inexcusable 2006 effort, “Lady in the Water.” After all, what could be better than watching Marky Mark and indie it-girl Zooey Deschanel battle an invisible apocalyptic force that makes people shoot themselves in the face? As it turns out, a lot of things, not the least of which is watching “The Sixth Sense” over and over, pretending that it’s the only film Shyamalan ever made.
Reel highlights include Deschanel looking surprised and Wahlberg flaring his nostrils, repeating in an ominous tone, “There’s something… happening.” (As any Film Studies professor worth his salt will tell you, it’s always a good sign when movies compulsively repeat their own title.) This is not to say Shyamlan shouldn’t be commended for dedicating his latest film to the global warming cause… but we should’ve known it was a bad sign when IMDB’s pre-release synopsis merely read: “Duh, it’s the plants!”
Pluses: Environmental message; people killing themselves gruesomely.
Minuses: Bad guy is a bunch of trees.
“The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor”
Let’s be honest, nobody really expected this to be a good movie. I, for one, was never able to picture Brendan Fraser as anything other than George of the Jungle, so trying to imagine him as the hero of an adventure movie never really did it for me. Even less plausible is Fraser as the semi-retired elder statesman of, um, mummy-fighting, with a petulant adolescent son ready to take on the reins.
Like any good bad blockbuster, however, “The Mummy” has all the nominal ingredients of a sweet action movie (ancient curses, shape-shifting, karate, hot chicks), thrown together in a haphazard plot and stirred up with big-budget effects. This, sadly, meant that the martial stylings of Jet Li were largely masked by computer effects; it also meant, however, that we were treated to a three-headed dragon, an army of undead soldiers and, bizarrely, an abominable snowman.
Pluses: You could probably do an elaborate analysis of this film relating to the ways in which China’s changing status on the world stage has impacted pop culture in the West. Also: Karate, dragons, yetis.
Minuses: Already so bad that it sucks all the fun out of mockery.
“The Wackness”
For those of you who haven’t seen it, “The Wackness” is actually a pretty decent movie, featuring fine acting and a decent script. Ben Kingsley and Josh Peck team up for a bizarre buddy flick/coming-of-age story about a teenage drug dealer who befriends his shrink after trading therapy for weed. Hilarity, hi-jinks and heartbreak ensue.
Even better, it takes place in 1994, making it the first real sign that we may finally be ready to ditch the ’80s in favor of a new, more relevant nostalgia for the ’90s. Despite these virtues, “The Wackness” earns its place in the pantheon of the summer’s best-worst through an unswerving dedication to the ridiculous.
Three primary infractions include a hackneyed storyline, a silly title yanked right from a character’s mouth (“I see the dopeness in everything, and you just see the wackness!”) and an ultimate tailspin into full-on melodrama. Although it starts out promisingly enough, the movie soon devolves into broken marriages, ripped-out hearts and suicide attempts a la Virginia Woolf. On the plus side, we get to see Oscar-winner Ben Kingsley donning ridiculous hair and an even more ridiculous Brooklyn accent, which he only manages to maintain for about a third of the movie. There are also some pretty shameless “Full House” moments that clash disturbingly with a raw make-out scene between Sir Kingsley and Mary-Kate Olsen.
Pluses: Horrifyingly inappropriate make-out scene; sweet hip-hop soundtrack.
Minuses: We’ll never look at Ben Kingsley the same way again.
“The Love Guru”
Mike Meyers is a love guru who tries to help a hockey player win his wife back from a rival athlete (played by Justin Timberlake) so his team can break its losing streak. And yes, it’s exactly what you think.
Pluses: Jessica Alba, Justin Timberlake, and Mike Meyers with a killer handlebar mustache.
Minuses: The rest of it.
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