IMDB Bottom 100: No.s 90 & 89 - Santa Claus & Theodore Rex

Number 90: Santa Claus (1959)

Ah Santa, we’ve all heard about him? Travelling the world in one night on his sleigh with his flying reindeer, delivering gifts to all the good boys and girls. The time he fought the Devil. A classic Christmas story.

This Christmas tale comes to us from Mexico. It starts with Santa and his elves, with ‘elves’ being a euphemism for ‘child labour’. They are taken from all over the world and we are treated to a variety of folk songs and nursery rhymes to represent all the nations. The USA being particularly amusing as they appear to forget the words to ‘Mary had a Little Lamb’.

They get their revenge on Santa by tricking him into releasing the devil Pitch and…oh, my God he’s attacking with interpretive dance. The swine!

Pitch’s plan is to make children do bad things, such as stealing. Santa can do nothing as he cannot leave Lapland until Christmas Eve. All he can do is watch from his castle with a multitude of machines he can use to spy on the world’s children, even into their dreams. Santa is a good guy isn’t he? It’s hard to tell with all his creepy machines and menacing laugh.

He’s very vain too, Jolly Saint Nick really loses it when one child describes him as ‘old’.

We meet characters from around Santa’s castle, including Merlin, who give him the abilities to sneak around unseen and a key that unlocks any door. He goes through a fitness regime so he can get down all the chimneys. He claims to know ‘every child on earth’ and has a powder he can use to make them sleep. Again, he is the good guy isn’t he?

They obviously couldn’t afford real reindeer, so there are weird looking toy ones instead. And there’s only four of them, sorry Rudolph you didn’t make the cut.

The devil Pitch tries to stop Santa into going into a house by moving a chimney’s entrance out of position, showing a complete lack of understanding of how chimney’s work. No problem though, Santa’s got his magic key remember? Pitch tries various other schemes but Santa always gives him his comeuppance. One plan involves getting three ‘bad’ children to kidnap Santa, fundamentally flawed from the start. These children are all on the ‘naughty’ list, so Santa wouldn’t stop for them and he doesn’t.

There are attempts made to show the differences of celebrating Christmas between the rich and the poor but ultimately it’s about the values of being good, not just at Christmas but all the year through.

As a child I may have enjoyed it but as a more cynical adult, it’s all just a bit silly.

Number 89: Theodore Rex (1995)

If you must watch a Whoopi Goldberg movie, watch The Colour Purple. Because if you do you might forget just how far Goldberg fell afterwards.

The mid 90’s were a particular low point for Goldberg with one mediocre comedy after another, Theodore Rex being the absolute bottom of the pit.

This is a world where anthropomorphised dinosaurs live and work alongside humans. They had been genetically engineered several years previously for…reasons. The first scene of the titular character puts me in mind of Howard the Duck. Hmm, not a good start.

Goldberg, as detective Katie Coltrane, is teamed up with Theodore Rex to work on a ‘dinocide’ case. As you might expect, Coltrane is not thrilled about being teamed up with a dinosaur. Not too surprisingly, dinosaurs are not regarded as equals in this world. Speciesism is alive and well in this universe.

So anyway, the engineer created the dinosaurs decides he’s bored of Earth, wants to start over so builds his own version of Noah’s Ark and plans to bring on a new Ice Age. It’s good to have a dream.

After lots of unfunny jokes, Rex melts Coltrane’s cynical heart and they start getting along. All your standard clichés are here: incompetent henchman, the badass sexy henchwoman, a ball-breaking police captain and an insane master villain. With added dinosaur.

It’s worth noting this came out two years after Jurassic Park, so the producers were eager to capitalise on the world’s interest in dinosaurs. But once the novelty of seeing the dinosaurs living with humans wears off, you are left with another poor kids movie that were so frequent in the 90’s.

There is a nice message in the two leads of overcoming prejudices and learning we can all get along despite our differences but that’s not enough to save the movie. I would rather watch The Super Mario Brothers Movie than this and that tells you all you need to know.

Just one more film Whoopi Goldberg would rather forget.

IMDB Bottom 100: No's 92 & 91 - Deportees 2 and Battlefield Earth

Number 92: Deportees (Ekhrajhia) 2 (2009)

When I started this venture to watch all of the IMDB Bottom 100, I knew there would be some challenges. I figured some of them would be obscure and hard to find.

I hadn’t guessed one of the films would be Iranian. And I’d have to watch in Urdu. With no subtitles. I don’t speak Urdu. But I’m going to do this properly, so I watched it all and pieced together what I could.

So here we go, my first taste of Iranian cinema…

From what I can make out, the film follows a group of Iranian soldiers in the Iran-Iraq war through. There is a good way of telling the Iraqi’s and Iranians apart. The Iranians have beards, the Iraqi’s can only grow puny moustaches. They get captured and put in a prison with Iraqi’s creating tensions. There is a sub-plot where a plane is hi-jacked by a lone terrorist with a gun and brought to Iraq where they are paraded in front of the media. From there they are taken to the same prison the captured soldiers are in and the Iraqi prisoners start to play what one youtube search later, I now know to be the Iran national anthem. This is much to the chagrin of who I am saying is supposed to be Saddam Hussein in attendance. The film ends, Iran is great.

The characters don’t fit with the stereotypical view of Iran. They dance, they drink, some of them smoke and one of them appears to be constantly hitting on a flight attendant. One of the prisoners is a Godfather type figure, supplying all the other inmates with cigarettes and seems to have a friendly relationship with the guards.

Not an easy one to review given I couldn’t understand a word of it and could only base this on what I could see on screen. It’s a testament to the medium I could decipher as much as I could. I didn’t hate it as a movie but there is a pro-Iran vibe that sticks in the throat a little.

Number 91: Battlefield Earth (2000)

After that last film, John Travolta’s stupid alien face is a welcome relief. It might be just as incomprehensible but at least it’s in English!

I don’t even need to go trawling through dodgy websites to find it as (to my shame) I already own it.

So, Battlefield Earth, well it’s even worse than I remembered. By the year 3000, Earth has been taken over by a race of aliens known as Psychlo’s who are mining the planet of all its resources. Humans have devolved to caveman levels and are used as slave labour.

John Travolta’s character, Terl is a particularly ambitious Psychlo stuck on Earth thanks to a dalliance with a senior senator’s daughter. He becomes interested in one ‘man-animal’ in particular, Johnnie, who appears smarter than all the other humans. Terl takes him on as his own pet project teaching him to read, how to speak Psychlo and how to mine for gold. Why he does this isn’t clear. A hobby?

After reading the Declaration of Independence (what else?), Johnnie comes up with an insane plan to free the humans that involves blowing up the massive dome the Psychlo’s have to live under, blowing up their home world with a nuclear bomb and harrier jets.

The planes are a particular source of mirth for film fans. Suppose for a moment you did find a 1000 year old plane, that still worked and the fuel inside it could still burn. Now, I am no expert in aviation but to be able to fly a plane, and to fly it well, takes months, even years, of training. This movie would have you believe all you need is one hour in a simulator.

Bear this in mind as well, in one scene Terl tells Johnnie that the Psychlos first defeated the humans in just 9 minutes. So highly trained pilots were wiped out almost instantly but amateurs on their first time out are able to defeat the alien invaders with relative ease.

Stars Forrest Whittaker and John Travolta have both apologised for this movie. Barry Pepper (Johnnie) won a Razzie award for Worst Supporting Actor.

It’s a particularly big deal for Travolta as he was a producer and fan of the book on which it’s based. The more you look at his CV, the more you realise Pulp Fiction was one shining beacon lost inside a sea of mediocrity.

Battlefield Earth is stupid and nonsensical but what else can you expect from a movie based on a book by founder of Scientology, L Ron Hubbard?

(these are from the list of IMDB bottom 100 as it was on 31^st August 2015)

IMDB Bottom 100: No.s 94 & 93 - Simon Sez & Laserblast

Number 94: Simon Sez (1999)

For some reason in the 1990’s, Hollywood producers got in their heads that basketball players would make good movie stars. Because the ability to hit a slam dunk is obviously transferrable to acting.

Michael Jordan had a go. Shaquille O’Neal went into movies, video games and rap. He sucked at all three.

The star of Simon Sez is Dennis Rodman, the original bad boy of the NBA. Rodman has a distinctive look with his bleached hair and multiple piercings, he regularly courted controversy throughout his NBA career. He carried on much the same after retirement becoming good friends with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

Rodman won a Razzie Award for his role in the lead role of Simon Sez but to be fair to ‘The Worm’, he’s not the worst thing in the film. Don't get me wrong, he is bad but at least he has some charisma about him. More offensive is Dane Cook as his goofy sidekick, Nick. Dane Cook isn’t a much known figure outside the US and for that we should all be grateful (unless you live in the US in which case, you have our sympathies). He just gurns his way through every scene to the point Rodman’s appearance actually becomes a blessed relief.

Simon Sez is a spiritual successor to 1997 movie Double Team, in which Rodman also starred with Jean Claude Van Damme.  Unfortunately, the Van Daminator is nowhere to be found here…wait, did I just write that?

Rodman plays Interpol agent Simon who has to foil a suitably over the top terrorist’s plot to blow up the world’s monuments with a kidnapped girl sub-plot. Simon is ‘assisted’ by CIA Agent Nick, the Cyber-Monks (two tech guys who dress up as Monks and like to dance) and his ex-girlfriend, Dancer (look out for an epilepsy inducing sex-scene).

So, the terrorists take over the world…of course they don’t, the good guys kill the terrorists, save the world and our hero gets the girl.

There are some good action scenes and well done fight choreography but you to have to put up with the ‘comic relief’ to get to it. Don’t expect too much out of it and Simon Sez is not too bad.

Number 93: Laserblast (1976)

As far as titles go, Laserblast is pretty spot on. There’s a laser and it blasts. You can’t really argue with that.

To sum up, an alien lands on earth pursued by another group of aliens but they leave one of their weapons behind . A teenage boy finds the laser gun but it doesn’t work. Then he finds it power source, so now he can blow stuff up and take revenge on everyone who ever done him wrong. The more he uses the gun however, the more it begins to mutate his body and he becomes more indiscriminate with his killing, until the aliens return to reclaim their property.

That all looks fairly interesting but truthfully, Laserblast is a fairly unremarkable film with not much really going for it. There is a small role for Roddy McDowall and the aliens look interesting, a sort of cross between our traditional idea of aliens and a dinosaur.

The early to mid-70’s were not a great time for Sci-Fi with not many major productions coming through and Planet of the Apes franchise getting worse with each sequel. Luckily, by the time of this films release, Star Wars was just one year away.

(these are from the list of IMDB bottom 100 as it was on 31^st August 2015)

IMDB Bottom 100: No.s 98 & 97 - Demon Island & Tees Maar Khan

The next two films in the worst of the worst list

Number 98: Demon Island (2002)

The best way to sum up Demon Island would be Nightmare on Elm Street meets Predator. Seriously, the monster in this film uses heat vision and then steals their souls.

So, the film begins with a drawn out explanation of how a demon was trapped inside a clay piñata hundreds of years ago (it’s not specific about the time) in an unknown Central American country.  So obviously, a group of American teenagers come along and set it free.

Chief among our teens are Nicholas Brendon (better remembered as Xander in long running tv series Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and Jaime Pressley (who was excellent as Joy in My Name is Earl).  Along with a group of other rather forgettable teens, they arrive on island as some sort of College fraternity break to play a game that involves them collecting lots of underwear scattered across the island. Yes, really.

They all get paired up with Xander and Joy being forced together, which neither is happy about as they recently broke up but that doesn’t really play much of a role in the rest of the film. Two of the kids find the piñata, they break it open and the demon escapes.

From there on, it’s like every slasher film you ever saw as all the kids get picked off one by one. Xander and Joy survive to the end (along with a tour guide who disappeared from movie for about 40 minutes), they kill the monster, escape the island and there’s a shot to establish a possible sequel.

I don’t know if Demon Island’s really that bad, just generic.

Number 97: Khan the Con (2010)

This is an interesting one as Khan the Con (or Tees Maar Khan) takes us into the world of Bollywood.

This is not a genre I am overly familiar with, I have seen a few Bollywood films but am by no means an expert. I am going to focus on the film elements rather than the songs because it’s not a style of music I listen to and in all honesty, I probably could not tell you a good Bollywood song from a bad one.

However, even with my limited knowledge of Indian cinema I know the likes of Akshay Kumar and Katrina Kaif are fairly big name stars in Bollywood, so that’s got to be a good sign going in, right? Well, given that all the reviews from people who are more acquainted with this style are saying that the great songs can’t cover for how bad this film is, possibly not.

Well, it’s certainly as bright and colourful as you’d expect from a Bollywood movie.

The story revolves around Akshay Kumar as the titular Tees Maar Khan, an internationally renowned criminal, who is planning a great train robbery. His plan involves duping a village into commiting the robbery for him by pretending to be a Hollywood director shooting a movie. That’s not a typo by the way, I did mean Hollywood as Khan pretends to be M Night Shyamalan (or M Day Ramalan as he calls himself in this film).

Predictably, he grows a heart and can’t let the villagers take the blame for his crimes. He escapes prison, beats the bad guys and we have our happy ending (which is appropriately enough, the title of the last song in the film).

There are a few too many characters, the three stooges in Tees Maar Khan’s gang start to grate pretty quickly and Katrina Kaif’s character Anya doesn’t add anything to the movie. The film drags on a bit too long and would have benefitted from being cut down to 80-90 minutes but from my experience Bollywood doesn’t believe in shorter movies.

But in fairness, Akshay Kumar is charming in the title role and he has the charisma to carry the rest of the movie.

Overall, it wasn’t too bad so is maybe a little unlucky to be in the bottom 100 of all time.

IMDB Bottom 100: Numbers 100&99 - Breaking Wind and Underground Comedy

I like watching bad movies. I do like watching good movies too but there is a charm to watching bad movies too. And these are the worst, or at least they are according to the users of www.IMDB.com.

These are the official 100 bottom movies of all time (http://www.imdb.com/chart/bottom?ref_=chttp_ql4). And I have resolved to watch them all.

A list of this kind obviously is always subject to change but this is the list as it was on 31^st August 2015 when I first decided to embark on this endeavour.

Number 100: Breaking Wind: Part 1 (2012)

Number 100 on the list is ‘Breaking Wind: Part 1’, which as you might expect is a parody of the Twilight movies. So it’s a terrible comedy based on a terrible film and book franchise. Remember what I said about bad movies having a charm to them? That doesn’t apply to comedies, they’re always just bad.

There’s not a lot new that can be said about Twilight that hasn’t already been said: the nonsensical story, the bland characters and the fact Bella is a terrible role model for young girls. So what great comedic insights does Breaking Wind have for us? Well, three minutes in and we’ve already had a fart joke and a joke about adult incontinence. That’s the level we’re dealing with here.

As you may have guessed from the title, there are a lot of fart jokes. And I mean a lot. If they aren’t actually farting they are talking about it. Given the right context and set-up a fart can be as funny as anything else but farts for the sake of it is not.

Bella and Edward are just as dull as their Twilight counterparts, so at least they got that right. Jacob is fat and eats all the time. However, he is always talking about his abs and ‘six-pack’. This might actually be the only good idea in the film that Jacob’s delusion about his body is an allegory for his delusion he could actually end up with Bella. But I suspect the director (Craig Moss, who is also the writer) just thought it would be funny to make him fat.

Danny Trejo (of Machete fame) turns up to prove he will do anything for a pay cheque as the head of the werewolves telling a nonsense story about the birth of their race that references Transformers, The Smurfs and just about every other 80’s cartoon series they could cram in. Then there’s a bit about the tribe being wiped out by four Johnny Depp characters (Edward Scissorhands, Willy Wonka, the Mad Hatter and, of course, Captain Jack Sparrow. I didn’t get it). And then Danny Trejo farts. Obviously.

The story is the standard Twilight, new group of vampires moves into area, they want to kill Bella for…reasons, blah,blah, blah. But that’s all just a distraction from the director’s perfect vision of non-stop farting. I hate that I’ve had to mention farts so many times but Breaking Wind just gives you no choice.

The last bit of the film is real life footage of Twilight fans (who I have now learned are called ‘Twi-hards’) reacting to footage of a Twilight film trailer (doesn’t say which one). One girl in particular, who says she saw a Twilight film (again, doesn’t say which one) 5 times in the same day, gets a good kicking.

After the credits have ended there is an extra-scene that is actually a call-back to the start of the movie. A man lying on all fours in the rain, screaming ‘I’m sorry!’

Too little, too late.

Number 99 - The Underground Comedy Movie (1999)

On to the 99^th worst film of all time is The Underground Comedy Movie. This was a hard movie to track down and in the end I had to watch in Italian with English subtitles. But it was absolutely not worth the effort.

What you have here is a collection of not very funny short films. Bat-man (he uses a baseball bat), Dickman (a superman parody about a guy with a penis for a head, guess how he attacks his enemies) and an almost certainly racist Asian sex instruction video.

Some notable cameos though such as from Michael Clarke Duncan, who plays a gay virgin saving himself ‘for the right guy’ but being hit on by the same man in a series of skits that repeat throughout the movie and has no real pay-off. Michael Clarke Duncan was a fine actor (though probably limited in his roles by his size) but for every Green Mile there was a Daredevil, Scorpion King and a, well, Underground Comedy Movie to go with it.

Slash from Guns ‘n’ Roses turns up in one skit, not looking like he has any idea what’s going on. I don’t think he was acting.

The start of the film has a definition of ‘satire’ but what exactly is being satirised isn’t quite clear. At the end a message comes up on screen saying, ‘To all the self-righteous, prima-donna, cock-sucking hypocrites: You are our inspiration.’ This is a cynical attempt by the director Vince Offer, to deflect any criticism. If you don’t like the film because it’s an unfunny piece of crap, it’s not their fault,iIt’s you who has the problem.

The main problem the film has is that it’s just flat out boring, the biggest crime for a comedy movie. Breaking Wind was bad but at least it didn’t drag out it’s scenes. Every scene UCM just goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on. You are probably thinking I should have stopped that at least four ‘and on’s’ ago. Well, that’s what watching The Underground Comedy Movie is like.

Two down, 98 to go.