Reviewing the IMDb Bottom 10 - Part 1
A trip through some of the lowest-rated films of all time.
I have a strange fascination with bad movies. Some may consider it masochism, but it has become one of my passions. I could spend a whole article trying to rationalize this phenomenon, or I can just quickly segue into what this obsession has led me to.
I've decided to sit down and watch the Bottom 10 lowest-rated films on the Internet Movie Database and relay my personal opinions to you, my dear reader. I'll try to keep each of these reviews short, as I'm going to cram three of them in one article. Besides, I don't have that much to say on each film. I just want to give each of these films a fair shake, and see if they live up to their reputations.
I think it's important for cinephiles to seek out some of the worst that cinema has to offer. Once you know what rock bottom looks like, you may not be so hard on other films. Sure, Expend4bles might be pretty bad, but is it Epic Movie bad? It sure puts things into perspective, don't it?
Keep in mind that these aren't the films with the lowest scores on IMDb, rather the films with the lowest average ratings relative to the amount of ratings they've received on the site. Think of these not as the ten worst films, but perhaps the ten most hated films by the general moviegoing public.
One last thing to address is the film that currently holds the #10 spot on IMDb’s bottom list, an Indian action film starring Salman Khan called Radhe. The film currently has a 1.9/10 on IMDb, with over 179,000 ratings. I’ve decided not to count that film because it is only two years old, so I believe it is too soon consider it a mainstay of the Bottom 10. Give it another year, and the film may fall down a few places.
This has happened with a number of films in the past, where they have shot up to the top of IMDb's bottom list shortly after their release (i.e. the German comedy Kartoffelsalat from 2015), and fast forward years later, and they're not even on the list anymore.
Instead, I will consider the current #11 film on the list as the true #10. It's a much older film, even older than I, so I feel it has earned its spot at the top of the list. And boy, it's a doozy…
Battlefield Earth (2000)
The world lost a megalomaniac when L. Ron Hubbard passed away in 1986, and he left behind a lot of deluded followers in his wake. He is survived by his Church of Scientology, whose many devotees in Hollywood and across the world have helped keep his dark legacy alive in some form or another, even after numerous scandals.
One of the church's highest-profile members was John Travolta, who spent years trying to get an adaptation of Hubbard's 1982 novel Battlefield Earth to the big screen. It finally came to fruition in the year 2000, and (likely for the good of humanity) it flopped hard. The public had soundly rejected the church's $44 million gateway drug.
I’m already not that into sci-fi/fantasy epics with lots of worldbuilding, and this one is particularly interminable. There isn’t much time for characters to be fleshed out. Scenes just happen, one after the other. It feels rushed, as if it was cut down from over three hours.
The villains are known as the Psychlos, an alien race which has enslaved humanity. Think Planet of the Apes but way dumber. Travolta plays the main Psychlo in the film named Terl, and he decides the best way to make our human protagonist his good little slave is to not just teach him their language, but endow him with all the knowledge he can use to fight back. The Psychlos are supposed to be so advanced, but we see one of their dumb ass pilots manage to crash his ship into an old tower. By the way, the story is set in the year 3000, and all of the infrastructure from the year 2000 has survived the ages, somehow. You could spend hours picking apart all the plotholes, as many people already have.
Despite all the ridiculous things that happen in the film (i.e. primitive cave-people learning how to fly fighter jets after a couple of hours in a flight simulator), it's not fun to sit through. It's badly edited, it's scripted and performed like community theater, and almost the whole thing is shot with Dutch angles. Seriously, they thought it was a good idea to keep the camera tilted the whole time. There's even a couple of moments where it sounded like the music score got cut off by the next scene, like in a Turkish mockbuster.
Epic Movie (2007)
The screenwriting duo of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer got their start writing for the great Leslie Nielsen in his 1996 spoof Spy Hard, directed by Jason's father Rick Friedberg. In the 2000s, Friedberg & Seltzer would embark on a reign of terror co-writing several spoof films, including the successful Scary Movie franchise. This success would lead them into directing their own line of spoof films, many of them with Movie in the title.
It was with this line of films that the duo would cement their legacies as peddlers of low-effort comedy for the lowest common denominator. They learned quickly that they could cram a bunch of well-known IPs into their film, and their marketing, and cheat copyright law by calling it a parody.
You would think that a film called Epic Movie would maybe be spoofing films like Ben-Hur, Lawrence of Arabia, or Gone with the Wind, but that's expecting too much from these two. By Epic Movie, they meant Blockbuster, and specifically blockbusters made in the last two years, like Pirates of the Caribbean, Harry Potter, Chronicles of Narnia, Da Vinci Code, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, so on and so forth. When I got near the end of the film, it dawned on me that they never even brought up Lord of the Rings, in this supposedly Epic Movie! I guess they considered that old news at that point. "That's so 2003!"
The film has one M.O., and that’s referencing whatever is in the zeitgeist in the hopes that the adolescent audience will be amused for 70 minutes. If that doesn’t work, then get a bunch of attractive women to show as much skin as is allowed in a PG-13, and throw some janky rap music on top of it. The bare-bones plot could have been told in about 20 minutes, but they just keep stopping to reference MTV shows like Cribs and Punk’D.
I suppose it was sweet for all these actors to get paid God knows how many thousands of dollars for essentially playing dress-up and live-action role-playing for a few days. Actually, I just laid out the definition of acting right there. Sounds about right. It may have been fun for them, but it ain't fun for us to watch.
If there's one thing I smiled at, it was when Fred Willard had a fight scene with an Asian body double. The most amount of pleasure I got out of this was watching that stunt guy do his thing.
Son Of The Mask (2005)
I haven't had the desire to revisit The Mask in many years. It's not that I think it's a bad film, I've just never been too crazy over it. It's rather ironic, since I'm working on a project devoted to the films of 1994.
Honestly, I think I’ve seen the sequel more times than the first. It used to play on Cartoon Network when I was a kid, and I would watch it a few times. I loved Tim Burton flicks and other weird, wacky stuff at that age, and Son of the Mask, more so than the first, seemed to tap into that manic, twisted humor.
Watching it now, yes, it is pretty bad. It's got flat characters, ugly CGI, and the best actor in the film is the baby. However, this is not even close to one of the worst films ever made. It has a few too many virtues to rank it alongside Epic Movie.
Speaking of which, this is the second film on the list to feature Kal Penn. I bet he was very happy with his agent. In this film, he sounds like he was dubbed over by someone who was putting on more of an Indian accent. It’s weird. I doubt that was his actual voice, but then again, I haven’t watched a lot of Kal Penn. My main frame of reference is that goddamned Epic Movie.
It might have the best cinematography of all the films on this Bottom 10. Granted, that’s not saying much, but I can appreciate a little of the visual flair. There was at least a little more creativity poured into this production than a lot of others. There’s even some neat practical setpieces, such as a line of dancing cars, or a piano being yanked up a flight of stairs. It’s just difficult to appreciate these things when they’re overshadowed by the frenetic editing and the freakish CGI baby.
The film was shot in 2003, but wasn’t released until 2005. Those two years make a big difference, as this film feels much closer to a 1990s style of filmmaking. Maybe it wouldn’t have gotten so much flak if it had been released a little earlier. I don’t know, I think this film might work for children. I liked it when I was a kid, but then again, I was a weird kid. Definitely a bad film, but not as bad as it’s been made out to be.
