Another year gone but bad movies carry on. My brain pounds and my teeth grind as I have to remind myself of the down-spots of the last twelve months, movies that left me with empty pockets, cold feelings and a looooong drive home. So let's get this over with:


#1 GIGLI
A movie so bad that it went down in flames before the first weekend was over. Gigli is a vanity project loaded with termites. It features media sweethearts Ben Affleck and J. Lo in performances that would gag a houseplant. Too much? You obviously haven't seen the movie.

Ben sports an Italian-American stereotype so offensive that Mario would have been offended. He stars as Larry Gigli, a mob hitman who is assigned to kidnap a mentally retarded brother of a California district attorney and hang on to him for the boss. Ricki, an assassin, is sent to oversee Gigli's job and make sure he doesn't screw it up. Too late!

The ads featured B and J making googly eyes at one another but left out the mob angle and the fact that Jen plays a lesbian! That more or less clamps the lid on any romantic chemistry the two
might have had until the movie gets down to it’s underlying message: mental retardation can be curedwith prolonged exposure to “Baywatch” and lesbianism can be cured by finding the right guy. Ben? What exactly have you learned from Project Greenlight?


#2 Bad Boys II
What is this? 80s nostalgia?

Bad Boys II was the sequel no one asked for, a mean-spirited cop buddy movie featuring Martin Lawrence (once again proving his limited appeal) and Will Smith who after Wild Wild West and Men in Black II seems determined to destroy his own box office clout.

See if this sounds familiar: Miami detectives head up a task force trying to head off drugs headed into the country from Cuba. They are led to the kingpin but have problems getting to him because he has powerful connections. So a gun battle insues and the cops go against the orders of their superiors and determine to take the crook down no matter what.

Now would you believe me if I told you that this worn-out genre piece goes on for Two and a Half Hours!? Michael Bay directs the movie with the flair of a tuneless marching band, the movie is a depressing opera of exploding cars, gun fights, beheadings, chases and, yes, stuff that gets blow'd up real good.



#3 Dreamcatcher
Have you ever heard the term "When monkeys fly outta my butt"? Well here's a movie that rests on that very idea. Well, not exactly a monkey but a creature made up of scales and teeth that literally makes it's appearence from the business end of one's intestinal tract.

Believe it or not, the movie sinks long before we get to that little nugget of joy. Dreamcatcher is Hacknyed Stephen King Adaptation #312, a dismal horror story about four friends who meet as children and are given special powers, then meet years later only to meet up with a crazy old coot and the aforementioned colon creeper. Easily dismissed though it may seem, one is baffled by the talent involved:
The cast includes Morgan Freeman, Jason Lee and Tom Sizemore and the director was Lawrence Kasden who helmed this godawful mess at the same time he was attacking Martin Scorsese for his great Gangs of New York! Lawrence, remind me again where that creature emerged from.


#4 Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd
Did I mention that Bad Boys II was a sequel no one asked for? Well, fans of the Jim Carrey/Jeff Daniels hit may have been clammering for a sequel to Dumb and Dumber but in there defense I have to say they deserved better.

Unable to wrench Carrey and Daniels from better gigs, the studio cast unknowns Derek Richardson and Eric Christian Olsen in the lead roles and altered their faces on every ad sheet so audiences wouldn't know that they were getting an unreasonable facsimile.

They realized they had been duped the first weekend and promptly informed their friends to stay away - and boy did they ever, to the tune of just 5 million dollars.


#5 Boat Trip

Anyone up for an anti-gay comedy with more stereotypes than a music store?

No? Well apparently no one else was either. Cuba Gooding Jr. continues to drown his post-Oscar career playing a hetro homophobic horndog who drags buddy Horatio Sans onto a cruise ship only to realize that a spiteful travel agent has booked them on an all-gay cruise.

Among the offenses are gay-bashing jokes, lisping, swishing charactatures and one babe on board so Cuba can develop a romance. At it's best it has an attactive cast, at it's worst Sans comes out of the closet when he finds some Poker Buddies. UG! I need a dramamine.


#6 Gods and Monsters
Never has one movie been so nostalic about the saddest chapter in American history. Never has one movie presented The Civil War with such a white-washed treatment. If we educate ourselves on this movie then we learn that the South fought for it's land, the North for it's profits, the battles were utterly bloodless and freeing the slaves was just a happy bonus.
If you don't live and breath The Civil War day in and day out and spend your weekends reenacting the battles with your buddies over beer then you might have trouble sitting through four hours of this rather cleansed recreation of the war between the states.
On top of that, the movie loads itself down with speech after speech after speech in which every character is racing to be the first to get into Bartlet's Quotes.
Added to that the movie's four hour running time makes you feel as if you are living the war in real time.


#7 Good Boy
Bad Movie!
Dogs, we learn, are really aliens from outer space who came to earth billions of years ago to take over but instead ended up liking their lives of endengered servatude to man. Meanwhile a kid named Ozzie has just adopted a dog named Hubble, whom he learns can actually speak. Together they must stop dogs from outer space from taking over the earth.
I'm still stuck on the information that dogs came to earth and actually chose a life of being popped with a newspaper and having their noses rubbed in their own mess. After this movie, that's how I felt.


#8 The Core
To some, bad timing may have sunk The Core as it was released the same week at the shuttle disaster - YEEKS!. But truthfully the movie would have sunk anyway. This hacknyed disaster movie features bad science, stock characters, a rare element that can save mankind and of course a kid who holds the key.

The idea: For reasons unknown, the earth's core has stopped spinning which has caused the planet's electromagnetic field to rapidly deteriorate. Instantly, life around the globe begins to change.

In Boston, 32 people with pacemakers suddenly drop dead.
In San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge collapses.

In London's Trafalgar Square, a flock of pigeons loses it's ability to navigate and flies into car windows. In Rome, as thousands of tourists watch helplessly, an electrical superstorm reduces the ancient Roman Colosseum to pebbles.

To get things spinning again the government and military officials get geophysicist Dr. Josh Keyes and a team of the world's most gifted scientists to travel into the earth's core in a subterranean craft piloted by "terranauts" Major Rebecca "Beek" Childs and Commander Robert Iverson. Their mission: Detonate a nuclear device that will reactivate the core and save the world from sure destruction.
Got all that? Well trust me, I've explained it better than the movie did.



#9 From Justin to Kelly
When reality TV hits the multiplex we get the ultimate nightmare: two perfectly good movie screens being stained by The Real Cancun and From Justin to Kelly. Both are exercises in slack-jawed idiocy but the latter gets my vote because it was created in six weeks to cash on the success of American Idol.

Justin Gaurini and Kelly Clarkson giggle and make googly eyes at one another while on spring break and are briefly interrupted by dance number (of COVER songs, nothing original) put on by the usual human traffic jam from MTV's Spring Break.
And if you need proof that Western Civilization is NOT about to collapse, the movie was pulled from theaters after four days. *sigh of relief*


#10 The Lizzie McGuire Movie
I may get shot for this, but if you knew what I went thorough while sitting through this bag of Pixie Stix, you'd understand. Prying Lizzie McGuire from the small screen to the big screen may have seemed as inevitable as the tides but I honestly didn't think that it was possible to make a movie that was dumber than the TV show.
In the flick, Lizzie has just graduated from Junior High School and goes off on a field trip to Rome (*ahem* Vancouver) and falls for the dreamy Paolo who has David Cassidy's hair, Donny Osmond's smile and Gilbert Gottfried's irritation level.
I already know that I am not the prime target for this movie. I've seen
one episode of "The Lizzie McGuire Show" but I still wanted to view the movie from an outsider's point of view. What I found was an experience so sugary sweet that it helps me understand why theater floors are sticky.