Number 46: Surf School (2006)
Yeah, brah. It’s teen surf comedy, brah.
How could you not like that, brah?
Well, if you have half a brain actually.
I’m sure surfing is great fun and all but it doesn’t make for the best movies.
Couple it with sub-American Pie ‘humour’
and you get a real shit pile on your hands.
I don’t know why, but every time I watch
a new film I always think ‘Well, it has to be better than the last.’ Which is
idiotic, since I’m going down the list from 100. I’ve already seen the best
IMDB’s Bottom 100 has to offer but somehow I live in hope that I’ll find some
hidden gem, really undeserving of its placing. Surf School is not that gem.
I’ve already alluded to American Pie, so now let’s tackle that
head on. American Pie was a decent
enough teen comedy released in 1999. The problem is that it was a massive
success. There were teen comedies before that of course but they weren’t quite
as explicit as American Pie. In
Hollywood, if something works once they’ll try and make it work a hundred times
over. So films like Road Trip, Van Wilder
and American Pie’s own sequels
all came out in quick succession. There was an idea for a while American Pie could become the new National Lampoon, a whole glut of films
only loosely related to each other. That experiment died quickly but Surf School was the latest in that line
but probably missed the boat by a couple years.
So you get the usual horny teen jokes
throughout. Sisqo is probably the biggest name involved in this but I’m pretty
sure that’s just to make one joke. They’re on a beach looking at a woman in a
bikini and he says ‘I could make a song about that thong.’ Ooh the irony (and
pain) of it.
So story, Jordan moves to California in
his senior high school year but finds himself pushed to the social fringes with
the goth girl, the nerd, the horny punk kid and there’s no good way to put
this, the black guy. I’m sure that’s not the intention but that is the only
thing that marks Sisqo’s character out from the popular crew.
The bullies are surfing champions and
are competing in a competition in Costa Rica. Jordan and his gang of misfits
decide they are going to compete as well, despite the fact none of them have
ever surfed before.
They fly out to Costa Rica where they
stay in a hostel run by a hippy couple keen to espouse their hippy wisdom to
their young minds. And we get, goddammit, more singing. I’m sensing that’s turning
into a thing with these films. Bad movies have bad songs.
It turns out Goth girl is a good singer.
Not as good as the film characters make out but decent enough. She goes on an
arc where we find out her black hair is actually just a wig for her blonde hair
and she is at heart a Valley girl. Superficiality wins again.
Jordan and his gang meet a guy called
Rip, a former surfing champion now alcoholic, who is going to teach them to
surf. It turns out he’s actually a good teacher and they are quite good at
surfing. And that’s a problem. It is all too easy for them. Surfing from what I
gather is not an easy thing to do and they all pick it up really quickly. Just
going to Costa Rica was way too easy, no one had to worry about how they were
going to pay for it or if they were going to be given permission. There’s no
real hardship to make their eventual triumph mean something.
The competition comes, they struggle at
the start but come back, blah, blah, blah. You already know they’re going to
win, its typical Disney stuff in a non-Disney movie.
Predictable story, puerile jokes. Just
like an American Pie spin-off movie.
Brah.
Number 45: Danes Without a Clue (1997)
Forget about those clueless Danes, let me tell you about
what I’ve had to go through here.
I wanted to find the 100 bottom films but it can’t be done.
I have spent days searching for this and I just can’t find it anywhere. I’ve
found a couple clips but nothing substantial. I searched under both its English
and original Danish titles with no luck.
I thought I could
maybe import a DVD copy of it but no luck there either. So, I’ve come up with a
solution: a substitution.
I first started this list on 31st August 2015 and
that is the list I work from. But the IMDB Bottom 100 exists in a state of flux,
with new entries coming in all the time so I’ll take a film from there that
wasn’t on my original list and swap it with Danes
Without a Clue. A compromise maybe but I will still have seen 100 of the
worst films.
You got lucky this time, Denmark but I don’t want to see you
around here again.
So, without further ado…
Number 45: Troll 2 (1990)
As a delightful treat, Troll
2 has made its return into the IMDB Bottom 100. Currently number 93 on the
list, this is too good an opportunity to pass up.
A long time holder of the uncoveted number one spot, Troll 2 has quite the cult following. It
is the subject of its own documentary, Best
Worst Movie. It has an awful director, terrible actors, a horrible script
and a ridiculous story. It’s as if someone was playing The Producers in real life.
To start with what’s wrong here you only need look at the
title: Troll 2. There are no trolls
in this movie, this is actually about goblins. Goblins disguised as people, as
is well established in goblin folklore.
Story is about a family who go to take a vacation in a town
called Nilbog (its Goblin spelt backwards, you see? Isn’t that clever? Well, it’s
the cleverest thing you’ll see here). The goblins are turning people into vegetables
and eating them. Again, as is well established in goblin folklore. Just like
Tolkien used to write.
But this isn’t about the ‘story’. Because you’ll be spending
most of the time trying to decide just who the worst actor in this is.
The kid, Joshua, is bad but child actors are pretty terrible
in general. The mum doesn’t have much going for her. The Dad is pretty bad but
does at least have some memorable moments (‘you don’t piss on hospitality’).
For a while I was convinced it was the teenage daughter, Molly. But there was a
clear winner, it couldn’t not be this guy:
There are some hilariously bad moments amongst the just
generally bad acting on display. Moments such as:
- - The above scene where people are turned to
vegetables and eaten
- - A man being dragged across the floor in a
flowerpot
- - A guy being drowned in popcorn
- - The family holding a séance and then having it
dawn on them that none of them know how to hold a séance.
There are too many things to list here but I fully recommend
you watch this. It is the perfect example of a ‘so-bad-its-good’ movie. You’ll
laugh so hard until you realise it’s not a comedy.
George Hardy, who plays Michael, the father in the family,
has said that when they were making this the actors would often talk to each
other about how strange the script seemed to them but they trusted the director
who told them it would all make sense. Their trust was clearly misplaced.
I wasn’t supposed to be watching this but thank you Denmark.
I can guarantee that whatever your film was about, it wouldn’t have been as
much fun as this was.
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