A-List: Great Bad Movies
By Josh Spiegel
May 13, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com

I'd say yes, Mr. Willis, but you're like 80.
Most bad movies aren’t worth watching more than once. The movie’s bad; why would you want to relive the experience? Sometimes, however, a movie comes out and is so uniquely, singularly terrible that you don’t just want to watch it again, but you need to watch it again, with a lot of your friends, and probably a healthy dose of booze. It was with this in mind, and a certain movie on this list that involves Julianne Moore and nefarious aliens (is there another kind?), that I embarked on a bad movie marathon a few months ago, and discovered the first movie on this week’s A-List. But more about that movie in a minute. This week’s A-List, indeed, is about great bad movies. There aren’t many of them, because it’s so hard to quantify what makes a bad movie more than just bad. Sometimes, it’s an issue of performance; sometimes, it’s an issue of direction; sometimes, it’s the script.

Each of the five movies on this week’s list all encapsulate some or all elements of a great bad movie. These are movies that you’ll laugh at more than an honest-to-goodness comedy. One thing that makes a great bad movie so great is that the people behind it will usually never own up to it being terrible. They may agree with your assessment, but they’re smart enough to never acknowledge the film’s lack of quality, and with good reason; movies that set out to be cheesy may be so, but they’re not memorable. One of the films on this week’s list breaks this rule, but if you’ve seen it, you’ll know why I had to include it. Some movies are too good—or bad—to pass up. These movies aren’t brilliant, but they’re worth your time if you’re in the right mood. Let’s get to the list.

Sweet November

It’s only been a couple of months since my life changed, readers. Why did my life change? Because I finally saw Sweet November, the 2001 remake of the 1968 film of the same name. This movie isn’t as well-loved in the bad movie community, but I would like to spearhead a campaign to get this movie shown as frequently as a certain other film on this list. The plot is simple: Keanu Reeves plays Nelson, a workaholic adman who foregoes a relationship with Lauren Graham for his work. However, he gets fired from his job after a disastrous day and a run-in with a flighty yet independent spirit named Sara (Charlize Theron). Sara convinces Nelson to live with her for one month, so she can change his ways and make him a better person. Do you think they might fall in love? Is the Pope Catholic?

So what makes this movie so bad? What if I told you that there is a lengthy sequence wherein Nelson and Sara watch a little boy work a remote-control tugboat in a race by a pier? What if I told you that Jason Isaacs and Michael Rosenbaum (a.k.a. Lucius Malfoy and Lex Luthor) play a gay couple who live underneath Sara’s apartment? What if I told you that Nelson’s catastrophic pitch involves a hot dog being used in very sexual ways? I could go on. This movie is so sentimental, so saccharine, so cloying, and so damn silly (did I mention that a climactic scene involves Nelson climbing up Sara’s apartment building with a dishwasher?) that I couldn’t help but laugh. What makes this movie so damn terrible is that the movie genuinely wants to be good, and fails so spectacularly. If you want a good laugh, watch it.

The Forgotten

For some movies, it takes a few minutes for you to realize how bad they are. For some, it could take an entire movie. For The Forgotten, the crucial scene comes about 80 minutes into the movie, when Julianne Moore, playing a distraught and potentially insane woman looking for a son that no one else thinks exists, is confronted by a cop, played by Alfre Woodard. Woodard is searching for Moore, and has finally come around on the idea that Moore may be right about the existence of her son. She’s reaching out to the fragile, broken woman, explaining that she finally believes. All is well, until an invisible force literally sucks Woodard into the sky, never to be seen again. Now, if that sight doesn’t get your attention, what will? Though I won’t go too much further into the plot’s particulars (yes, aliens are involved, because why not?), The Forgotten is ridiculously overbaked.

What’s worse, this movie has a pretty good cast; at the very least, the cast’s not as bad as the story is, but they don’t elevate it out of the dumpster. Alongside Moore and Woodard are Dominic West (playing a variation of Jimmy McNulty from The Wire), Anthony Edwards, Gary Sinise, and Linus Roache. Not the best cast, but there aren’t any clunkers here. So what went wrong? The story is too sincere, and the script is too lazy; Woodard’s not the only one who gets sucked into the sky (and again, I’m not using that as a metaphor of some kind; people get sucked into the sky in this movie), and each time, it happens as a machination of the plot. The final explanation just makes no sense. Why not, next time around, make a movie about a woman who thinks she’s sane, while everyone else thinks she’s insane….and the woman’s wrong? It’d be depressing, but it’d be realistic, and Moore would be up to the challenge of bringing such a character to the screen. Until then, check out this piece of crap for a laugh.

The Room

Being fair, The Room stands out on the list for a few reasons. The first is that it features no famous actors, and wasn’t distributed by a big (or little, for that matter) studio. The second is that, no matter what its writer/producer/director/star says, the movie is not meant to be a comedy. It’s meant to be serious. The other four movies on this list also say the same, but even after being embraced as bad movies, none of those films’ directors have changed their tune, saying that the stories were meant to be terrible. No, the man behind The Room, Tommy Wiseau, would like you to believe that his film, about a man who’s spurned by his fiancée and his best friend, is a winking nod at…something, though I’m not sure what. What makes The Room so iconic in its badness isn’t the story; it’s everything else.

The performances, from Wiseau’s as Johnny to every other amateur in the cast, are awful. The dialogue is pretty crappy, or it’s being delivered poorly by the strangely accented Wiseau (“You are TEARING me apart, Lisa!”). The set, mostly revolving around Johnny’s apartment, is boring. The sex scenes, of which there are four, are set to the same ridiculous R&B song, and feature two spectacularly unattractive people (yes, I realize that’s shallow, but since these scenes make up a good 10 minutes of the film, it’d help if they looked all right with no clothes on). The supporting characters vanish and reappear randomly, and have subplots that are never followed up; the famous one is where the fiancee’s mother says, in a cheerful tone, “I got the results back, and I definitely have breast cancer”, with no further discussion. You’ve heard of The Room. Now, go experience it.

Perfect Stranger

Perfect Stranger may not seem like the perfect bad movie to wallow in, but do not be fooled by this seemingly simple film. Starring Halle Berry, Bruce Willis, and Giovanni Ribisi, Perfect Stranger is all about an investigative reporter going undercover to nab a seemingly evil executive who may have had a hand in her best friend’s death. Not so crazy yet, right? Frankly, for the majority of this poorly received film from director James Foley, it’s all just bad. It’s not funny bad, it’s just bad, with the exception of Ribisi, whose performance as Berry’s techie buddy is obviously so campy and over-the-top that he didn’t care about anything except his paycheck. And then comes the ending, where…well, I’ll end this paragraph with a big old spoiler alert, to warn those interested few of you away. You’re warned!

It turns out that Berry constructed the entire plot to get back at her friend, who’d seen Berry’s father get killed years ago by Berry’s mother. The entire movie is a labyrinthine, overly convoluted plot from Berry to clear her family’s good name from….nothing (since the murder of the father happened decades ago, and no one was investigating it; oh, did I not mention that the climax of the film is the first time we hear of this?). She pins things on Willis and Ribisi, but what about that neighbor across the street who apparently saw the entire thing….And on and on it goes. Perfect Stranger is one of the silliest, most overwrought thrillers of recent memory, and it’s obvious that Berry and Ribisi are either having too much fun to take it seriously, or they don’t realize how awful they are. Willis…well, he’s in it for the paycheck. You should check it out for the laughs.

The Happening

If you’ve been to the movies in the past few weeks, you’ve likely seen ads for one of the big summer movies, The Last Airbender, based on a popular animated series from Nickelodeon. The film, as is mentioned many times in the trailer, is written, produced, and directed by M. Night Shyamalan. A decade ago, that name would guarantee plenty of audience members; now, I wonder if Paramount is just tempting fate. Shyamalan is the same man who was behind Lady in the Water, The Village, and the final choice for this list: The Happening. This is a movie with an interesting concept (what would happen if people just started killing themselves for no apparent reason?), but has terrible execution. What’s more, the lead of the film is Mark Wahlberg, and his earnest, quizzical nature works well in some movies. This is not one of them, especially when he’s meant to be the voice of reason, but is too busy running away from the wind.

Yes, the wind is what’s behind all the death in this movie, but what makes the movie so flat, so dumb, and so unintentionally funny is the trademark of most of Shymalan’s films: dead seriousness. There’s a point where you have to deflate any situation with humor, tense or otherwise. Sometimes, the movie needs a Han Solo, someone to poke fun at what’s going on. M. Night Shyamalan doesn’t do that here or in any of his films. There is, granted, one improvement on this truly hilarious bad movie, but it’s a small pittance: Shyamalan doesn’t appear onscreen. He’s not the best actor, but in Lady in the Water, he plays a character whose writing is so important, that it will save the world. Sound familiar? Shyamalan’s last three films are all terrible, but with Wahlberg at the helm, there’s something charmingly giddy to enjoy in this piece of trash.