06/06: Movies That Cause Physical Discomfort But You Should Watch Anyway
Everyone knows that Patrick Swayze's epic magnum opus, Roadhouse (an everyman named Dalton's struggle to bring order to the Double Deuce--a chaotic bar where anything goes--and eventually the whole town), and to a lesser degree, Swayze's team-up with Keanu Reeves, the tour-de-force Point Break (a rookie FBI agent paired with Gary Busy on the hero's journey, determined to take down a group of surfing bank-robbers [as well as the Red Hot Chili Peppers]), are probably the greatest bad movies of all time. They transcend their shittiness and become almost biblical explorations on what it means to truly be a man in modern American society. But there are worse movies out there, ones that don't feature Swayze, Keanu, or even Jeff Goldblum, who wasn't in either of those. There are movies that suck so bad they're not even fun to make snotty little comments with your dipshit friends as you watch. There are movies available to the general public that can hurt you. These are just a few. Rent at your own risk, hot shot.
Gigli Obviously, this was rented as a humorous experiment, just to see what all the fuss was about. For a little while, you're like, "Oh, it's bad, but not as extreme as its reputation," but then out of nowhere, Affleck does this weird Corey Haim half-smile, and it begins to plummet. That smile caused one of the three people I was in the room with to get up and leave, and I don't think they even had anything else to do. There is an incomprehensibly bad speech I can't find words to describe, but Jennifer Lopez delivers a treatise--while doing yoga--on the power of her "pussy" (her word, not mine), and it literally leaves Affleck in tears, because he thought it was so beautiful (the speech, not her twat). I failed to find the screenplay online or that particular scene on youtube to post, so I assume there's a covert ops team out there deleting any record of it to protect the public.
Coyote Ugly This served as an endurance test for me; it asks you how tough you really are, and you must respond by staying with it until the credits roll. A small-town girl wants to move to the big city to make it as a... songwriter. She doesn't want to be a singer, she just wants to write songs for LeAnn Rimes. Her dad is John Goodman and he doesn't want her to follow her dream because her mom died. Then she works at a real rowdy, sexy bar where everyone present says "Hell no, H20!" in unison if you order water, which is supposed to be funny. She stops a riot by singing along with "One Way or Another" by Blondie on top of the bar. The song she writes for a shot at the big time is called "Can't Fight the Moonlight." Then she fucks a dude. When I saw this, I felt like Alex during the reprogramming scenes in "A Clockwork Orange". It tortured me emotionally, physically, and by the end, my spirit was as broken as the condom I fucked your mom with last night.
Waitress Keri Russel from "Felicity" is a small-town waitress who works at a "pie diner," which apparently exist. She is something of a savant and has a reputation for coming up with innovative and tasty new pies every single day. The movie uses her voice-over narration with overhead shots of hands rapidly adding ingredients to different pies depending on what she's talking about. That's right--a thematic motif of dessert metaphors. Here are some symbolic menu options if you don't believe me:
I Hate My Husband Pie: "You take bittersweet chocolate and don't sweeten it. You make it into a pudding and drown it in caramel."
I Can't Have No Affair Because It's Wrong And I Don't Want Earl To Kill Me Pie: "Vanilla custard with banana. Hold the banana."
Pregnant Miserable Self-Pitying Loser Pie: "Lumpy oatmeal with fruitcake mashed in. Flambé of course."
Over the Top Sylvester Stallone stars as Lincoln Hawk, a big-rig truck driver training for the arm-wrestling world championships, whose life is suddenly turned upside-down when he's given custody of his 12-year-old son, who he hasn't seen in years. Straight-laced serious Michael has recently graduated military school and thinks his father is just an uncultured buffoon, and resents him for leaving his mother, who is now on her deathbed. This odd couple takes to the open road, which Hawk hopes will be a bonding experience, but it's rockier than Hawk was hoping for, especially when the boy's angry, conniving grandfather underhandedly schemes to get custody for himself. Hawk teaches Michael that "life meets no one halfway," but if they try, maybe a father and son can. Also, Stallone turns his baseball cap around before he arm-wrestles anyone to let them know it's fucking game on. Just as powerful as Roadhouse and Point Break, but missing an important ingredient called Swayze. If you love movies featuring oily biceps and mullets, maybe you should go over the top.
Silent Hill Watching this in an empty theater with Shawn Bruiser, I forced myself to fall asleep about halfway through (this is a defense mechanism I use a lot during bad movies that I've paid to see), and when I groggily came to 45 minutes later, I looked over and Shawn was passed out too. I woke him up so he could see a guy with a pyramid for a head running around on some steps doing nothing. This was after the lead actress had walked around for the whole movie, meeting up with some ghost-nurses that stood around doing neck exercises and some smoldering children who also performed acts of little or no consequence. Some time into the film's 4th hour, they tried to deliver some back story about some evil woman maybe who burned the town down, or had an evil child who she hung or not, I have trouble piecing it together because there were no pieces and I was drifting in and out of the sweet escape of slumber. Then I went on imdb.com and saw the message boards were full of people who thought it was the best horror movie of all time and how a lot of viewers didn't "get" that it "wasn't supposed to make sense." Everyone on Earth is an asshole.
Duets I watched the first ten minutes of this, and from what I could gather, Huey Lewis is a karaoke shark--as in he hustles people at karaoke. Let me explain this further. He goes to a bar, makes fun of the whole idea of karaoke to someone who's really into it and thinks they're a good singer, who would obviously bet Huey couldn't perform karaoke well and challenge him to a sing-off. Then Huey belts out a shitty Joe Cocker song, wows the crowd, wins the bet, and takes a hot karaoke groupie home to fuck with his dick. That was the opening scene. Thank God I changed the channel before they introduce his daughter, played by Gwyneth Paltrow. The sights and sounds of these two singing a duet are easily enough to make one want to go outside.
I Know Who Killed Me First of all, Lindsay Lohan, if you're playing a stripper, you have to strip. Let me ruin the ending for you--Lindsay's hand magically falls off or something and she thinks she's someone else and then it turns out she has a secret twin who's being tortured somewhere and every time she's wounded, a sympathetic injury appears on Lindsay. The killer is her dad! Or her twin's adoptive father. And then there's a spooky shot of an owl I think they just took from a Twin Peaks website or something. Barf.
Dan in Real Life Single-father-of-three-daughters Steve Carrel steals his brother (Dane Cook)'s, girlfriend while they're on a family vacation at a lake house. As if that's not a bad enough plot, what really annoyed me is that for the entire movie, the whole family is constantly involved in these well-organized, wholesome group activities no real family would do, including--but not limited to--the following: a boys vs. girls team crossword puzzle race, early morning outdoor group calisthenics, a talent show where Steve and Dane sing some Pete Townshend song no one's ever heard of, two-hand touch football, and the worst is for every meal the mom and dad cook a massive amount of food, like stacks of pancakes or sandwiches, in assembly line for all twenty family members. It just pissed me off. Fuck you.
Mindhunters Most of these other movies will hurt you to watch, but this is "so bad it's good" without poisoning your soul. It brings together the Dream Team cast of Christian Slater, Val Kilmer, and LL Cool J, you should watch it on that basis alone. A group of FBI serial killer profiler students go to a remote island for a training exercise, but it turns out that one of them is actually a murderer who uses really creative ways to dispatch with his quarry, with traps slightly less complicated than Saw or Final Destination. Actually, this isn't bad at all, I think I'm gonna go rent it right now.
Gigli Obviously, this was rented as a humorous experiment, just to see what all the fuss was about. For a little while, you're like, "Oh, it's bad, but not as extreme as its reputation," but then out of nowhere, Affleck does this weird Corey Haim half-smile, and it begins to plummet. That smile caused one of the three people I was in the room with to get up and leave, and I don't think they even had anything else to do. There is an incomprehensibly bad speech I can't find words to describe, but Jennifer Lopez delivers a treatise--while doing yoga--on the power of her "pussy" (her word, not mine), and it literally leaves Affleck in tears, because he thought it was so beautiful (the speech, not her twat). I failed to find the screenplay online or that particular scene on youtube to post, so I assume there's a covert ops team out there deleting any record of it to protect the public.
Coyote Ugly This served as an endurance test for me; it asks you how tough you really are, and you must respond by staying with it until the credits roll. A small-town girl wants to move to the big city to make it as a... songwriter. She doesn't want to be a singer, she just wants to write songs for LeAnn Rimes. Her dad is John Goodman and he doesn't want her to follow her dream because her mom died. Then she works at a real rowdy, sexy bar where everyone present says "Hell no, H20!" in unison if you order water, which is supposed to be funny. She stops a riot by singing along with "One Way or Another" by Blondie on top of the bar. The song she writes for a shot at the big time is called "Can't Fight the Moonlight." Then she fucks a dude. When I saw this, I felt like Alex during the reprogramming scenes in "A Clockwork Orange". It tortured me emotionally, physically, and by the end, my spirit was as broken as the condom I fucked your mom with last night.
Waitress Keri Russel from "Felicity" is a small-town waitress who works at a "pie diner," which apparently exist. She is something of a savant and has a reputation for coming up with innovative and tasty new pies every single day. The movie uses her voice-over narration with overhead shots of hands rapidly adding ingredients to different pies depending on what she's talking about. That's right--a thematic motif of dessert metaphors. Here are some symbolic menu options if you don't believe me:
I Hate My Husband Pie: "You take bittersweet chocolate and don't sweeten it. You make it into a pudding and drown it in caramel."
I Can't Have No Affair Because It's Wrong And I Don't Want Earl To Kill Me Pie: "Vanilla custard with banana. Hold the banana."
Pregnant Miserable Self-Pitying Loser Pie: "Lumpy oatmeal with fruitcake mashed in. Flambé of course."
Over the Top Sylvester Stallone stars as Lincoln Hawk, a big-rig truck driver training for the arm-wrestling world championships, whose life is suddenly turned upside-down when he's given custody of his 12-year-old son, who he hasn't seen in years. Straight-laced serious Michael has recently graduated military school and thinks his father is just an uncultured buffoon, and resents him for leaving his mother, who is now on her deathbed. This odd couple takes to the open road, which Hawk hopes will be a bonding experience, but it's rockier than Hawk was hoping for, especially when the boy's angry, conniving grandfather underhandedly schemes to get custody for himself. Hawk teaches Michael that "life meets no one halfway," but if they try, maybe a father and son can. Also, Stallone turns his baseball cap around before he arm-wrestles anyone to let them know it's fucking game on. Just as powerful as Roadhouse and Point Break, but missing an important ingredient called Swayze. If you love movies featuring oily biceps and mullets, maybe you should go over the top.
Silent Hill Watching this in an empty theater with Shawn Bruiser, I forced myself to fall asleep about halfway through (this is a defense mechanism I use a lot during bad movies that I've paid to see), and when I groggily came to 45 minutes later, I looked over and Shawn was passed out too. I woke him up so he could see a guy with a pyramid for a head running around on some steps doing nothing. This was after the lead actress had walked around for the whole movie, meeting up with some ghost-nurses that stood around doing neck exercises and some smoldering children who also performed acts of little or no consequence. Some time into the film's 4th hour, they tried to deliver some back story about some evil woman maybe who burned the town down, or had an evil child who she hung or not, I have trouble piecing it together because there were no pieces and I was drifting in and out of the sweet escape of slumber. Then I went on imdb.com and saw the message boards were full of people who thought it was the best horror movie of all time and how a lot of viewers didn't "get" that it "wasn't supposed to make sense." Everyone on Earth is an asshole.
Duets I watched the first ten minutes of this, and from what I could gather, Huey Lewis is a karaoke shark--as in he hustles people at karaoke. Let me explain this further. He goes to a bar, makes fun of the whole idea of karaoke to someone who's really into it and thinks they're a good singer, who would obviously bet Huey couldn't perform karaoke well and challenge him to a sing-off. Then Huey belts out a shitty Joe Cocker song, wows the crowd, wins the bet, and takes a hot karaoke groupie home to fuck with his dick. That was the opening scene. Thank God I changed the channel before they introduce his daughter, played by Gwyneth Paltrow. The sights and sounds of these two singing a duet are easily enough to make one want to go outside.
I Know Who Killed Me First of all, Lindsay Lohan, if you're playing a stripper, you have to strip. Let me ruin the ending for you--Lindsay's hand magically falls off or something and she thinks she's someone else and then it turns out she has a secret twin who's being tortured somewhere and every time she's wounded, a sympathetic injury appears on Lindsay. The killer is her dad! Or her twin's adoptive father. And then there's a spooky shot of an owl I think they just took from a Twin Peaks website or something. Barf.
Dan in Real Life Single-father-of-three-daughters Steve Carrel steals his brother (Dane Cook)'s, girlfriend while they're on a family vacation at a lake house. As if that's not a bad enough plot, what really annoyed me is that for the entire movie, the whole family is constantly involved in these well-organized, wholesome group activities no real family would do, including--but not limited to--the following: a boys vs. girls team crossword puzzle race, early morning outdoor group calisthenics, a talent show where Steve and Dane sing some Pete Townshend song no one's ever heard of, two-hand touch football, and the worst is for every meal the mom and dad cook a massive amount of food, like stacks of pancakes or sandwiches, in assembly line for all twenty family members. It just pissed me off. Fuck you.
Mindhunters Most of these other movies will hurt you to watch, but this is "so bad it's good" without poisoning your soul. It brings together the Dream Team cast of Christian Slater, Val Kilmer, and LL Cool J, you should watch it on that basis alone. A group of FBI serial killer profiler students go to a remote island for a training exercise, but it turns out that one of them is actually a murderer who uses really creative ways to dispatch with his quarry, with traps slightly less complicated than Saw or Final Destination. Actually, this isn't bad at all, I think I'm gonna go rent it right now.