*These films are in no particular order.
Not Cool (2014)
Some college
students come home for Thanksgiving and we see a pair of relationships develop
and diminish. A movie made by YouTube vlogger Shane Dawson, Not Cool is loud, edgy, and offensive,
and it tries so hard to be. The film is an assault on the senses, as any
potential comedic moment is immediately escalated to its most extreme
possibility: a character making a crack about switching lives with a homeless
man is immediately responded with a plain-faced statement that the homeless man
eats his own faeces. A girl excited to see her boyfriend takes literal seconds
to turn in to an awkward glory hole blowjob scene with lots of yelling and
crying. It’s a constant bombardment of shock humour that ends up working
against itself and numbing you to anything the film tries to do. To make the
viewing that much worse, the film tries to have it both ways by including poor
attempts at melodramatic relationship drama, that may have been a comedic
attempt, but fails like everything else in the movie to evoke anything other
than sheer disgust. The film’s only redeeming factor is Cherami Leigh as one of
the main characters, whose calibre of acting is noticeably better than everyone
else in the movie, and makes the scenes she is included in almost bearable.
Jason is
resurrected for the fourth time to lumber around a boat for an hour before
stopping off in Manhattan for a few minutes, killing a dozen or so teenagers
along the way. All of the Friday the 13th
moves are varying levels of bad, but Jason
Takes Manhattan is by far and away without a shadow of a doubt the worst of
the bunch. Every single scene comes across as lazily forced through, no actor
emotes, no plot thread is given meaning, and no attempt is made to contribute
to the series’ weird and inconsistent lore or its horror icon Jason. It’s just
awful exploitation without even the decency to be creative like the previous
two in the series or the two that follow. I will, however, say one thing in its
favour: Axing someone with a guitar is a clever flourish that redeems the movie
for a solid ten seconds.
Fred: The Movie (2010)
The original
YouTuber movie, Fred is a feature
length story about an internet caricature, so it’s essentially a poorly-written
joke for children stretched out over about eighty minutes. It isn’t outright
offensive like Not Cool, but it’s
incessantly annoying, goes nowhere, and even doubles back on the one character
arc it actually set up. The plot is just mentally disturbed Fred going on a
journey to the home of the girl he obsesses over. It’s played like a comedy,
but the root of the story sounds like some paranoid thriller along the lines of
When a Stranger Calls. There’s
nothing to this movie and nothing likable here, save for the concept of John
Cena as Fred’s imagined father, who comes along to offer life lessons and
perform wrestling moves.
The Emoji Movie (2017)
It’s not
just that this is a cynical, soul-sucking advertisement masquerading as a
movie, it’s also that it isn’t even trying to be better than that. The movies
that The Emoji Movie blatantly rips
off, such as The LEGO Movie and Wreck-It Ralph get away with being
blatant advertisements because they also have the decency to layer a well-made
movie on top of it; the movies are good in spite of the built-in and hackneyed
nostalgia-driven product placement, not because of it. The Emoji Movie has a mostly meaningless and otherwise tonally and
thematically inconsistent script, lazy if pretty animation, and a cast that
seems to want people to forget that they are talented. I felt physically ill by
the end of my experience with the film, a trip on nobody’s nostalgia that uses
references several years out of date and without any heart or soul to it that
suggests the people making it at all cared about what they were inflicting upon
the world.
Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever (2002)
There are
thankfully precious few action films as bad as Ballistic: Eck vs Sever. The movie has a super spy Ecks out of the
job after the death of his wife go after another super spy Sever when he finds
out that his wife is actually alive and in danger from Sever. It also turns out
that Ecks’ best friend is the man who faked Eck’s wife’s death and at the same
time faked Eck’s death so that he could be with Eck’s wife, and it is revealed
that she was pregnant at the time of their dual fake deaths and has been
raising Eck’s son in secret, and that Eck’s best friend has injected the kid
with nano-machines will stop his heart. Sever’s involved because she kidnapped
Eck’s son and is trying to reveal the evil truth about Eck’s best friend. It’s
an incredibly convoluted plot that feels like the action movie equivalent of a
bad soap opera, with everyone and their mother faking their deaths and lying to
each other. It’s made that much worse by some of the worst editing I have seen
in a film all year, as the film doubles back on several pieces of the film, revealing
Eck’s wife to be alive by stating a different woman’s name, then having Ecks
later be surprised by the alias of his wife, revealing and re-revealing the
unnecessary twists in the story, and cutting between scenes in some of the most
jarring ways that it all adds up to a hilariously awful experience played to a
soundtrack of grunge and Matrix-style
synth.
Tooken (2015)
A friend
jokingly lent me a copy of this, undoubtedly in the hopes that it would one day
ruin my evening. One night, I guess my curiosity and self-hatred got the better
of me. Admittedly, I laughed a total of three times, which is more than I can
say for some of the other ‘comedies’ on this list, but it’s otherwise an
aggressively unfunny attempt to spoof the Taken
series that goes nowhere and tries so hard to be funny that it never stops to
see that it was never funny in the first place.
The Amazing Bulk (2012)
This is an actual scene from the movie. Enough
said.
Baby Geniuses (1999)
A movie
about babies that is often completely inappropriate for babies. I wish I could
say the plot is in the title, but there are so many additional unnecessary plot
details that just leave you questioning your very existence as you watch the
film: babies are supposedly geniuses until the age of two, and this genius is
exploited by an evil corporation to sell baby toys, while a pair of twin
super-powered geniuses get swapped and lead to a revolution of babies against
the corporation. I wish it were some obnoxiously self-aware comedy, but Baby Geniuses is horrible from beginning
to end; tone deaf comedy that combines a myriad of poorly executed poop and pee
jokes with far too many jokes about babies imitating adults. On top of a lot of
bad ideas that should have never made it past the writing stage, it’s all
executed with the most awful of effects to makes the babies look as if they are
talking.
Smosh: The Movie (2015)
I don’t know
how I did it, but this year I somehow managed to watch three movies based on
YouTube sensations. This movie isn’t as outright offensively unfunny as Not Cool, but it doesn’t have John Cena
physically abusing the ire-worthy main character. It’s also incredibly niche;
rather than edgy or scream-y humour, Smosh:
The Movie tries to get laughs by utilising other YouTubers for an easy reference
in weird and strangely specific ways. The people from Smosh try to get a video
removed from the internet by going in to the internet, encounter a bunch of
YouTube names and somehow also change time when they change the video, rather
than removing it. It’s so bizarre and nonsensical that I almost recommend this
one for the spectacle of weirdness that it is, but I found only one joke funny
in the entire film, and it was literally the last joke.
The Garbage Pail Kids Movie (1987)
I almost
forgot about this movie, and really wish I had. This is an attempt to create a
movie franchise out of a card series that was originally a gross parody of the
Cabbage Patch Kids cards. It’s also a gumbo of random gross-out and feel-good
ideas that don’t mix in any way, with an 80s aesthetic so exaggerated Kung Fury is making fun of it. The film
is in the same category as Baby Geniuses,
where the concept of the movie seems designed for kids but there’s a hefty
amount of mature humour that clashes with the childish stylings. This is
worsened by what is easily one of the shallowest attempts to moralise at the
end of a film to give it some sort of lesson.
Honourable Mentions
Vampires Suck (2010)
Collateral Beauty (2016)
Published December 30th, 2017
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