When I wrote up my post on The Worst Movies of 2014 last week, I neglected to include a personal ranking in there. I saw a good number of bad movies in 2014, but for me, nothing stood out quite like “Winter’s Tale.” I mean, it got me to do a write-up on a current movie, which isn’t something I make a habit of.
This week, the We Hate Movies podcast put out an episode on “Winter’s Tale” as part of their Worst of 2014 retrospective, and it reminded me of just how much baffling, nonsensical fun it was to watch that movie. The WHM gang didn’t recommend the film, which is a point where I am definitely going to disagree with them. If you watch any bad movies from 2014, “Winter’s Tale” should be one you check out. If you need any more selling on it, check out the “How Did This Get Made?” and “Cinema Snob Midnight Screening” episodes on the movie, and look at how much fun they all have with this incomprehensible mess.
“Winter’s Tale” wasn’t the worst film of 2014 by any kind of honest metric, but it was almost certainly the strangest Hollywood film product to come out of the year. Personally, I think it was the best good-bad movie to come out of the year, because the entertainment value to the film is off the charts if you go into it knowing what to expect. And what you should expect, to be specific, is a magical flying horses, bad Irish accents, and some of the most nonsensical dialogue-babble you will ever hear. More people really need to see this movie.
Better late to the party than not showing up, right? Well, here I am: a week into January, and just now doing the “Worst of 2014” post.
Many of you have probably seen the highly publicized listing of Rifftrax’s “Worst Movies of 2014” list, as voted on in a public poll. For those that haven’t, here it is:
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Transformers: Age of Extinction
Dumb and Dumber To
A Million Ways too Die in the West
Left Behind
The Amazing Spider Man 2
Ouija
Sex Tape
Noah
300: Rise of an Empire
Interesting. I certainly have some quarrels with it, but such is the nature of democracy. Let’s compare that with a handful of other “Worst of 2014” lists, shall we?
Here is one pulled together by the good folks at the Stinker Madness Podcast, in no particular order:
Needless to say, it was quite a divisive year for bad movies. None of the lists agreed on a number one, and different films show up in each of them. Notably absent from all of them is the Bollywood movie “Gunday,” that sparked so much controversy on IMDb and other social media sites, instantly tanking to the bottom of the IMDb Bottom 100. Also, the much-maligned “Saving Christmas” is oddly underrepresented, barely cracking the AV Club list, and not making the other lists at all. Even the latest “Transformers” movie, which topped one list and was runner up in another, totally missed the AV Club list of 20. The Rifftrax number 1, “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” missed the AV Club and Rolling Stone lists. “Left Behind” consistently showed up in three of the lists, but missed the Rolling Stone ranking altogether. In another shock, “God’s Not Dead” only appears at #10 on the Rolling Stone list, and nowhere else.
I can’t express how astoundingly bizarre this is. I expected to see a significant difference between the Rifftrax list and the others, because Rifftrax was democratically run and open to the public, whereas the others were selected by critics. But the critics didn’t see any kind of agreement between them! We’re not even talking about minor gripes with the ordering: they are selecting entirely different movies!
Holy shit. Not only is there another different #1 worst movie (one that appeared on no other list, I might add), but 5 of 10 movies on the TIME list did not appear on any other list. You have to be kidding me.
That is the first repeat top selection so far! However, there are also 4/10 that haven’t appeared on any of the other lists, so we aren’t making much progress there.
So, I’m going to try to come up with an aggregated “Worst Movies of 2014” out of these lists. First off, any film that only appears on one list is disqualified. That leaves me with the following 15 movies to rank:
A Million Ways to Die in the West
The Nut Job
Winter’s Tale
Left Behind
Sex Tape
Sin City: A Dame to Kill For
Transcendence
Amazing Spider Man 2
3 Days To Kill
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turles
Transformers: Age of Extinction
Noah
Godzilla
Men, Women & Children
The Legend of Hercules
Now, I’m going to come up with a formula to decide the ranking. I’m thinking I am going to add together the Rotten Tomatoes review aggregate score, the Rotten Tomatoes audience score, and the IMDb score times 10 (it is on a 10 point scale normally, so this makes it out of 100). For each movie, that will give me X/300, and I will rank them from lowest to highest. Lets see what that looks like…
The Legend of Hercules (79/300)
Left Behind (86/300)
Sex Tape (103/300)
The Nut Job (113/300)
Winter’s Tale (119/300)
Transcendence (120/300)
Transformers: Age of Extinction (130/300)
3 Days To Kill (135/300)
*TIE* Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (136/300)
*TIE* A Million Ways To Die In The West (136/300)
Men, Women & Children (147/300)
Sin City: A Dame To Kill For (158/300)
Noah (181/300)
Amazing Spider Man 2 (189/300)
Godzilla (207/300)
Well, isn’t that interesting? Another new number 1 in “The Legend of Hercules,” but I am more interested in the higher numbers on this list. Those of you who are math-inclined may have noticed that the lower entries on here don’t have horrible scores: “Godzilla” has a 69%, which is damn near a “C”, and a passing grade however you cut it. “Amazing Spider Man 2” has a 63%, which isn’t good, but is certainly nowhere near the bottom for the whole year. For comparison, this scale gives “Saving Christmas” a 46/300, or a 15.3%, which is well lower than anything else on the list.
I think the conclusion here is that 2014 is a year that we are all going to have to “agree to disagree” when it comes to movies. I’m personally very interested to see how this shakes out on the other end of the spectrum: a lot of people are expecting an equally competitive field in the “Best of 2014” category, which is going to be quite a firefight once awards season rolls around.
Welcome back to the (Plot)opsy Podcast! Today’s episode is a bit of an oddball, in that I’m going to be covering a play instead of a movie. Well, sort of. The play doesn’t actually exist, but a movie about it does. Also, there’s a play adaptation of the movie about the play that doesn’t exist, and a further movie adaptation of that play. Sound confusing? You have Mel Brooks to thank for “Springtime for Hitler,” the fictitious Broadway smash at the center of the acclaimed film-turned play-turned film again, “The Producers.”
Recently, I caught a fantastic American Masters documentary about the legendary Mel Brooks. The movie chronicles his entire impressive and lengthy show-business career, and offers a lot of the behind-the-scenes insights that I always enjoy learning about. This, of course, sent me through a re-watch of some of Mel’s film highlights, including his Hitchcock-inspired “High Anxiety” and the beautifully executed “Young Frankenstein,” just to name a couple.
While I love a lot of the Mel Brooks movies, I don’t think any of his later films quite match up in quality to his 1967 Academy Award winning debut, “The Producers” (and its subsequent musical adaptation). Given my fondness for the aesthetics of the awful, I’m admittedly a bit biased here: the plot of “The Producers” is about creating the worst play of all time, so of course that is up my alley. Coming from a place of affection for “The Producers” and Mel Brooks, I want to analyze the baffling success of the film’s fictitious Broadway blitzkrieg: “Springtime for Hitler.” Hang with me here, this could be interesting.
Believe it or not, I think there is very good reason as to why “Springtime for Hitler” is successful within the world of “The Producers.” In the Broadway adaptation, Bloom and Bialystock share a musical number called “Where Did We Go Right?”. I think that I can adequately explain exactly what went “right” about “Springtime for Hitler.” Here’s a look at some of the lyrics to get us started:
We searched Broadway on and off
For singers with a cough
We had tryouts and auditions by the score
And to trip the light fantastic
We picked dancers who were spastic
If anyone jetted, we jetted them out the door
They shouted hooray for that sausage on display
Where did we go right?
Our leading man was so gay he nearly flew away
Where did we go right?
A show so easy to despise
Now it’s up for the Pulitzer prize
Oh, where, oh, where, tell us
Where did we go right?
In “The Producers,” the lead characters are attempting to craft a genuinely bad play, which should be a fairly simple task in theory. So, the question is: how did Bialystock and Bloom stumble into the elusive realm of the “good-bad” aesthetic? First off, it helps to understand the accepted contributing factors to “good-bad” status.
It has been alleged that one cannot intentionally create a “good-bad” feature, because one of the most widely accepted requirements for the pseudo-genre is a healthy degree of earnestness. Basically, in order for a movie or play to be “good-bad,” it needs to have honest and genuine effort thrown into it by at least a healthy number of the cast and crew. Thus, trying to intentionally capture the “good-bad” aesthetic is impossible (or is it?).
I believe that “The Producers” actually stumbled across a fascinating way to intentionally create a good-bad work, even though that isn’t what Bialystock and Bloom set out to do in the movie. As mentioned previously, earnestness is absolutely key to the good-bad aesthetic. In most cases, an attempt to create something awful will lose that all-important creative honesty. However, the plot of “The Producers” skirts around this roadblock: the only two characters who are in on the plan are the eponymous producers, who are not part of the hands-on creative team. Their influence on the play is limited to the assembling of the pieces: they are shown selecting the director, the script, and the cast, for instance. That means that the creative team of “Springtime for Hitler” is unaware of the dishonest motivations of the production, and are therefore earnest in their efforts with the play.
While earnestness is a major key in creating a good-bad feature, there is more to the success of “Springtime for Hitler” than that alone. After all, earnestness is essentially atmospheric, and doesn’t guarantee entertainment value. For that all important entertainment value, most good-bad movies rely on the actors. Sometimes this is achieved by over-the-top performances (like Nicolas Cage’s in “Vampire’s Kiss” and “The Wicker Man”), other times it may come from astounding underacting (as is found in “Birdemic”). Or, best of all, the acting can provide a peculiar mix of the two, as was the case in “The Room,” which features a cavalcade of simultaneously emotional, intense, and completely vapid performances.
The cast of “Springtime for Hitler” is one of the few things that significantly varies between the initial film version of “The Producers” and the later musical adaptation. They both function more or less the same way and lead to the same ultimate result, but the differences are worth pointing out.
In the initial film version, Hitler is played in “Springtime for Hitler” by a hippie named Lorenzo St. Dubois (LSD). He apparently performs while drugged out of his mind, and improvises most of his dialogue (to the intense disdain of the play’s author, Franz Liebkin). However, his performance is what turns the audience around: before he takes the stage, the audience has already started parading out of the theater in disgust. Once he gets going, however, his baffling exploits quickly win over the crowd. Adding a cherry on top of the performance are the antics of the infuriated Franz Liebkind, who takes to the stage in a fit of rage while clad in his German army helmet. The audience mistakes this for part of the surreal act, responding with immense applause.
LSD as Hitler in the original film version of “The Producers”
In the musical adaptation and subsequent film, the character of LSD is cut from the story. Instead, the writer of the play (Franz Liebkind) is initially cast as Hitler, but is injured before opening night. The director, Roger De Bris, takes over the role or the great dictator for the show. The play goes much the same way as in the initial movie, with the audience storming out just before Hitler takes the stage. Instead of drugged improvisation, De Bris wins the audience over with flamboyant innuendo and comedic song and dance (“Heil Myself”). I personally think that the De Bris Hitler version works better for the film by eliminating an unnecessary and light character, but the LSD version is certainly more surreal. In either case, the curious and hilarious performances of the leads wind up providing the entertainment value behind “Springtime for Hitler”, and save the play from the dull fate that it seemed all but doomed to. They make the final difference between bad-bad and good-bad for “Springtime for Hitler”.
The last and perhaps most important factor in the success of “Springtime for Hitler” as a fictional good-bad smash is entirely the fault (or credit) of Bialystock and Bloom: the assembly of the “Springtime for Hitler” creative team.
In general, all of the decisions that the producers made in the creation of the “Springtime for Hitler” team were big, obnoxious, and loud: they couldn’t settle a bad, boring script; it had to be the worst, most offensive script. They wouldn’t take a mediocre director, they wanted the absolute worst. Their Hitler had to be the most atrocious Hitler since the actual Hitler. Arguably, if they had settled in any one of those categories, the flop may very well have been assured. What led the producers to going so over the top with their assembly, though? Why go for all of the biggest personalities and extreme outliers? The obvious answer is that they wanted a guarantee of failure, but I think it goes a little deeper than just that.
At the beginning of the story, it is made clear that Bialystock had been producing flops for years, with Broadway success just a fading memory from his distant past. When Bloom reveals the theoretics of the flop scam that ultimately drives the film, there is a perceptible change in the character of Max Bialystock. His desire for failure brings back the drive and ambition that he had clearly been missing, and was almost surely what made him successful in the first place. This is particularly driven home in the musical adaptation’s number “The King of Broadway”, which paints a clearer picture of the pro-Bloom, downtrodden Bialystock.
In essence, Bloom’s scam reawakens Bialystock’s motivations, and he is once again driven and capable of assembling a team. While he tries to build something to fall apart, I think he underestimates himself: despite his many flops, he lacks the innate ability to create failure, which is something he wrongfully believes to be the case. His failures, as much as the audience sees of them, come from a place of apathy. The mere fact that he is expending energy and displaying passion for “Springtime for Hitler” is the kind of intangible that can positively effect a production. Just looking at the way he desperately courts and pleads with Roger De Bris and Franz Liebkind is intriguing when viewed from this perspective. They don’t know why, but they know that something about “Springtime for Hitler” has Bialystock exited to produce again. Remember: no one other than the producers know about the scam until after opening night. For all they know, this script has genuinely reignited Max Bialystock.
“Springtime For Hitler,” a play created to fail, is ultimately a success within the story of “The Producers” for the same reasons that we have cult classic good-bad movies in the real world. The play is made in absolute earnest by an outlandish, eccentric, and boisterous cast and crew, led a highly eclectic lead with a peculiar charisma that is capable of captivating audiences. Despite it all being assembled by crooked producers with impure motivations for failure, “Springtime For Hitler” was unintentionally crafted with an ideal, elusive formula for a good-bad smash, along the same lines as beloved films like “Troll 2” and “Birdemic.”
Well, here it is: an entirely subjective, rough ordering of the IMDb Bottom 100 movies I watched over the course of 2014. If you want to read some thoughts on why there are 104 of them, how they were selected, etc., check out my previous IMDb Bottom 100: COMPLETE post.
I tried to rank these by giving consideration to production values, earnestness, dialogue, acting, plot coherence, off-screen calamity, entertainment value, technical prowess, and sensory/general offensiveness. It wasn’t easy to do, and I tinkered with it constantly while writing it up: there are just too many factors and subjective aesthetic aspects for this sort of ranking to be broken down into a science. In any case: here they are, in a rough order from best to worst:
Happy New Year! Be sure to check back in 2015 for more Misan[trope]y movie reviews and (Plot)opsy Podcasts. Thanks to all of you readers and listeners for making 2014 the best year yet here at Misan[trope]y Movie Blog!
It has been many months, but I can confidently say that I successfully watched over 100 movies from the IMDb Bottom 100 ranking in 2014. That was my goal at the beginning of the year, and here we have it! In no particular order, here are links to my reviews of 104 IMDb Bottom 100 movies.
Let me explain why there are 104 movies, and what those asterisks mean. As it turns out, watching all of the IMDb Bottom 100 is more complicated than you might think for a number of reasons.
Thanks to the international representation that has grown on the list in the past couple of years, there are a fair number of films in the ranking that did not get a Region 1 release: this means that no only was there no official distribution in the US, but there are also no official English subtitles or dubs. For some of these films, like “Daniel der Zauberer” and “Turks in Space”, they have enough of a following that fans have created subtitles so that English audiences can watch them. More often than not, however, these international entries in the IMDb Bottom 100 are just not available in any form to an English-speaking audience. Movies like “A Fox’s Tale” and “Danes Without a Clue”, for instance, just do not exist in an English-friendly form, and aren’t popular enough to have fans distributing them online and creating subtitles for them.
“Danes Without A Clue” never made it to Region 1 distribution
In addition to foreign films that lack English language versions, a number of other movies in the IMDb Bottom 100 simply don’t have any distribution, and similarly lack the popularity for there to be online copies of them available. IMDb Bottom 100 movies like “The Tony Blair Witch Project”, “Anus Magillicutty”, and “Ghosts Can’t Do It” all fall into this category: the first two are just low-budget projects that didn’t get spread around, whereas “Ghosts Can’t Do It” is simply out of print and only available (scarcely) on VHS.
In an attempt to make up for these unattainable members of the ranking, I went back through some archived versions of the IMDb Bottom 100. Because the list is democratic and constantly accepting new votes, movies regularly fall out and break into the ranking, meaning that a snapshot of the IMDb Bottom 100 from 2004 looks very different from the one that exists today. All of the movies in the above list marked with an asterisk were pulled from these archived lists to make up for the missing movies that I couldn’t get copies of.
“Highlander II” was one of these Alum features I covered
So, how did I wind up with 104 movies covered? As I mentioned, the IMDb Bottom 100 is consistently shuffling in new movies as votes come in and movies reach the qualification quota of 1500 votes for the list. As was the case with “ROTOR” and “Saving Christmas”, I chose to cover new movies as they popped into the Bottom 100 over the course of 2014. Between covering movies from the IMDb Bottom 100 archive and new members of the ranking from 2014, I managed to tip over 100 movies covered in total. In fact, there are even more IMDb Bottom 100 movies that I could still cover (and in all likelihood I will at some point).
For now, I am going to put the IMDb Bottom 100 on the back-burner: I managed to watch and review over 100 of them in 2014, and I am interested in taking on some new bad movie challenges in 2015. That said, I am planning on doing my own ranking of those 104 movies in the near future, and writing a more in depth retrospective on the challenge after I’ve had some time to mull it over.
As for now, I wish you all a Happy New Year, and look forward to having you back in 2015!
“Blubberella” is yet another entry in the IMDb Bottom 100 brought to us by the much-maligned director Uwe Boll, who was also behind IMDB Bottom 100 flicks “Alone in the Dark” and “House of the Dead”. His immense unpopularity as an individual (among critics and audiences alike) is almost as notable as his his astoundingly awful filmography at this point, something that has certainly had an effect on the public perception of his works. Given that the IMDb Bottom 100 is in many ways based on popularity and public opinion, it is no surprise to see Uwe Boll pop up numerous times in the ranking.
Uwe Boll is literally Hitler
However, “Blubberella” sets itself apart from the typical Uwe Boll fare: not only is it a comedy (not Boll’s strength), but it is also a parody movie. If there is anything that the IMDb Bottom 100 can tell you at first glance, it is that parody movies can go wrong very easily, and Uwe Boll certainly isn’t Mel Brooks when it comes to the craft of cinematic comedy.
Adding to the bizarreness, “Blubberella” is a parody of a Uwe Boll flick that was being filmed simultaneously (“BloodRayne 3”), so it isn’t even aping a movie that the audience would identify with. According to some behind the scenes footage, this was a decision made first and foremost to save money: Boll’s logic was that it would cost the same to make two movies at the same time with the same sets, cast, and crew. In theory, if both movies did well, the profits would be exponentially better. This is an old principal that dates back to the classic Roger Corman B-movies, but those films were usually unrelated apart from the cast and setting: they weren’t designed to be symbiotic.
Personally, I feel that Uwe Boll’s already unpopular personality combined with this economic motivation for the making of the film would have led to a negative perception of “Blubberella” regardless of whether it was any good or not. Unsurprisingly, though, it is absolutely awful. Not only is it the worst Uwe Boll movie in the IMDb Bottom 100, but I personally think it is the worst parody movie as well. That put it is some truly elite company.
The humor in “Blubberella” is not just crass and lazy (just as with the other parody movies in the IMDb Bottom 100, it relies heavily on stereotypes), but it also comes off as generally cruel and bitter. I think just about every joke in the movie punches down, which is generally a poor practice and sets a thoroughly uncomfortable tone to the movie. By the end of the movie, it is pretty clear that Uwe Boll not only isn’t funny, but that he has a lot of personal ire for women, homosexuals, and fat people (not to mention pretty much everyone else). He comes off as even more of an asshole than everyone already believed he was.
Another huge issue with the humor in “Blubberella” comes from the fact that the movie is effectively unscripted: Uwe Boll left an excessive amount of the dialogue up to the actors to improvise (the two lead actors apparently did enough of this to justify co-writing credits on the film). Shows like “Curb Your Enthusiasm” can pull off this style of improvised scripting because of the comedic talents of the players, but it definitely requires a lot of skill from everyone involved for the technique to work. If you haven’t seen poorly done improv before, I assure you that it is some of the most uncomfortable, miserable comedy you will ever come across. In the case of “Blubberella”, the actors just aren’t up to the improv weight that is thrown on them by Boll. In the behind the scenes interviews, it seems like the actors are appreciative of the freedom that they were granted with this style, but I highly suspect that Boll made the decision to go with improv dialogue because he didn’t want to waste the time writing a fleshed out script (time is money, after all). In any case, it doesn’t work, and the end result is poorly paced and painfully unfunny.
A titanic comedy duo, in the sense that all of the humor sinks into the icy depths of misery
As far as the cast goes, the only real bright spot is beloved oddball character actor Clint Howard, and even he doesn’t perform up to his usual par. Worst among the cast list by a mile, however, is Uwe Boll himself, who portrays Adolph Hitler. To put it lightly, his acting is atrocious.
Clint Howard playing a Nazi Doctor
There is nothing to recommend about “Blubberella”: it is a creature spawned from hate-based humor and cheap economic logic. The pacing and comedic timing throughout the film is just awful, and there aren’t any redeeming performances or aspects that can justify sitting through the flick. Worse yet, you can tell how rushed the production was, and it is evident that there was no effort put forth to make this movie. Unless you are planning to watch all of Uwe Boll’s movies for the challenge of it, I would definitely avoid “Blubberella”.
1965’s “Monster A Go Go” is an astoundingly bad film, enough so to be a true separation from the rest of the IMDb Bottom 100. The movie is a patchwork built primarily from parts of an unfinished product (that was poor in its own right), and then supplemented with original footage filmed years after the fact to complete the movie. This has been done with a number of other B-pictures (“They Saved Hitler’s Brain” comes to mind), but “Monster A Go Go” is the most distractingly awful example of this that I have come across.
The props are pretty awful as well. But then again, so is everything else in “Monster A Go Go”
Apparently “Monster A Go Go” was only cobbled together to fill out the second half of a bill for a double feature. With that in mind, a lot of the flaws in the movie make more sense: the sound issues, continuity errors, inexplicable sets, and abrupt editing are all explained by the simple fact that there was only a minimum amount of effort put into creating the film. The fact that “Monster A Go Go” was also a cheap attempt to salvage an abandoned film certainly contributes to almost all of the most glaring problems in the movie, such as the replaced actors and seemingly unrelated asides throughout the film. The disjointed product of all of these problems is a film so unfocused and bizarre that it is nearly unwatchable and incomprehensible.
You have to love the laundry room science lab set
As with many of the other IMDb Bottom 100 entries, “Monster A Go Go” owes much of its reputation to the show Mystery Science Theater 3000. However, none of the other movies in the list have the honor of being considered by the MST3k crew as being the worst movie ever to have been featured on the show*. Considering the sort of movies that made their way onto the MST3k screen, that is really saying something. That said, they certainly do their best to make the movie worth the watch, and the episode highlights are worth checking out:
Personally, I am conflicted about Monster A Go Go. It is undoubtedly a spectacle of how to do everything wrong in making a movie. From an academic perspective, that makes the movie kind of fascinating. On the other hand, it lacks much of the entertainment value that people expect from “good-bad” movies. The MST3k riff is fun and makes the most of the overall rather dull movie, but it is still a tough film to sit through if you are expecting to have a good time. Some of the lighting goofs, silly sets, and the hilariously awful ending get genuine laughs, but they are very few and far between. Unless you want to watch a bad movie for the sake of seeing a movie gone terribly wrong, “Monster A Go Go” is skippable. It certainly isn’t the ideal flick to watch with a group of people to have a good time.
Surprisingly, “Monster A Go Go” is pretty low in the IMDb Bottom 100 (it has been sitting in the 80s). Without a doubt, this is one of the most objectively worst films I have seen while going through the list, standing out with movies like “The Starfighters” and “The Maize”. Given the influence of MST3k fans on the IMDb Bottom 100, I don’t expect it to fall out of the ranking anytime soon, but it is quite surprising to see it so low. I am somewhat curious if there is an odd subset of people over-ranking this movie intentionally, because I have a hard time believing that any significant number of people would rate this movie with more than one star in earnest. In any case, it is sitting where it is for some reason hidden within the will of the masses.
Today on the (Plot)opsy Podcast, I am spotlighting a particularly infamous IMDb Bottom 100 film as part of the 15 Days of Bad Christmas Movies: a 1959 Mexican production called “Santa Claus.” Despite the simple title, this is one of the strangest Christmas movies out there: the plot involves Satan, Merlin, some of the creepiest surveillance devices in cinema history, robotic reindeer, and Santa’s captive child workforce who are housed indefinitely in his space castle. I recommend seeking it out.
An assortment of Santa’s humanoid listening devicesSanta with his mechanical toy reindeerThe demon Pitch attempting to tempt LupitaSanta Claus with PitchLupita with giant, horrific, dancing dollsPromotion for the December 2014 Rifftrax Live event featuring “Santa Claus”
Be sure to visit my cohorts in the “15 Days of Bad Christmas Movies”:
This may seem to be an obvious caveat for a post covering a movie on the IMDb Bottom 100, but I feel like it still bears stating: “Anne B Real” is not a good movie. However, in my opinion, it is also not an excessively bad one.
When I initially heard the synopsis of “Anne B Real”, I expected that the film would be blatantly offensive, and generally atrocious. Here is the sort version currently on IMDb:
ANNE B. REAL is the coming of age story of a young female rapper, who finds her inspiration by reading the Diary of Anne Frank.
From reading that alone, it certainly seems like there are a lot of ways for the story to go very wrong. As it turns out, “Anne B Real” is basically just a low budget passion project about growing up in the face of adverse circumstance, and is a story that focuses on a young girl slowly gaining self-confidence in her abilities. Again, this isn’t a good movie: it is the sort of thing that wouldn’t make the cut at your average film festival I feel. Mercifully, Anne Frank doesn’t serve as an ethereal rap coach or anything like that, which was what I was expecting. The downside of this, however, is that the movie is really boring.
There isn’t a whole lot to say about the movie: every aspect of it is just a little below par. The writing, the acting, the directing: nothing is offensively bad, but none of it is particularly good. This actually brings up a very interesting question: how did “Anne B Real” wind up in the IMDb Bottom 100? How did this little passion project art film draw so much ire and garner so much attention as to break into the ranking in the first place? Honestly, I have absolutely no idea. The movie is very forgettable and boring, but it is nothing like the rest of the films in the IMDb Bottom 100.
This is the only actor I recognized, and I only know him as “that one guy from Dexter”
The only other movie where I had this feeling after watching it was “Crossover”, which I covered way back when I first started with the list. That movie is similarly low-budget and amateurish, but not at all painful to sit through if you ask me. Honestly, I’m inclined to say it is better than “Anne B Real”, if only for Wayne Brady’s role in the movie as a skeevy sports agent.
There is a pretty notable similarity between “Crossover” and “Anne B Real”, and as much as I hope it isn’t why these films are so lowly ranked, it may very well be the case: both films have almost entirely black casts. One of the downsides of a no-holds-barred democratic ranking system like the IMDb Bottom 100 is that it will inevitably reflect biases among the users. I’m not saying that IMDb is like Stormfront or anything, but I am curious if there are some latent tendencies in the IMDb userbase to be unfairly harsh on films like “Crossover” and “Anne B Real”. They are both bad movies, but they are also ranked much lower and judged much more harshly than I think they should. These aren’t Ed Wood level movies by a long shot.
In any case, there aren’t any compelling reasons to recommend “Anne B Real”. The movie is pretty dull, and there isn’t much in the way of entertainment value to be had. The story isn’t all that bad, but it just feels sloppily executed and poorly paced. It is squarely on the wrong side of mediocre when it comes to bad movie enjoyment, but I would rather sit through this countless times than take on another Ulli Lommel movie.
There are plenty of things to complain about with “In The Mix”. It is definitely not a flawless movie (it isn’t even a good movie), but it was damn near refreshing compared to most of the things I have had to watch in the IMDb Bottom 100 as of late.
Most of the complaints I have seen about “In The Mix” are completely valid. More than anything else, I have seen a lot of criticism of the stereotype-laden script, which also spends an inordinate amount of time worshiping the lead character played by Usher. The way women treat Usher in the film is far beyond unrealistic, to be sure, and the constant reliance on Italian and African-American stereotypes is both lazy on the part of the writers and tiring to sit through. Even more baffling is the fact that Usher has no loss of mobility after being shot in the shoulder at the beginning of the movie, and is allowed to act as a bodyguard while recovering from a serious injury. However, I’m going to focus on some positives with this review. Because, shockingly, I found a lot of things positive worth noting in this train-wreck of a movie, particularly in comparison to other IMDb Bottom 100 flicks.
“Look, it is just a gunshot wound. I can still be an effective bodyguard for your daughter”
First off, “In The Mix” bears a significant similarity to a handful of IMDb Bottom 100 members, primarily in that it is structured around and starring a non-actor celebrity. But, in comparison to those (“Daniel der Zauberer”, “From Justin to Kelly”, “Popstar”), “In The Mix” pulls this off pretty well. The problems with “In The Mix” are almost entirely compartmentalized to the writing, which is shocking for being a movie centered around a non-actor. Usher, despite what I expected, was pretty serviceable in this movie. Compared to Justin Guarini or Aaron Carter, he’s Orson Welles.
Well, he’s at least Robert Costanzo. Maybe not Orson.
More importantly, Usher seems to actually have chemistry with his co-lead Emmanuelle Chriqui, and both of them seem to be enjoying themselves. I think the greatest weakness of any of these celebrity vehicle movies is a lack of connection between the actors, which can make a huge difference in how watchable and believable the movie is on the whole. Usher manages to pull this off, and despite the poor quality of the movie overall, deserves credit for that.
I’ve noticed that a lot of folks direct their ire about this movie towards Usher, but not typically because of his performance. More often than not, I’ve seen complaints that he didn’t take responsibility as one of the film’s Executive Producers to ensure the ultimate quality of the project. I have a bit of a problem with this complaint. First off, the director is the one responsible for the project as a whole. When it comes down to it, the role of Executive Producer is left intentionally vague: it can mean a lot of different things on different productions. As I understand it, Usher was given that credit primarily due to his vested interest in the product as its public face. Just because he holds an Exec. Producer title doesn’t mean he is responsible for the quality of the film: producers are far more likely to be responsible for the fundraising and the marketing of the flick than anything else. Also, Usher isn’t an experienced movie maker, so how exactly would he have spotted a problem during development if he didn’t know what to look for? It may not have been wise to give him a producer nod, but even that falls back to being the director’s fault. From what I can tell, at worse Usher was complicit in the failure of the movie. At best, he did his damnedest to make it better, and failed to single handedly save the movie.
The accessory cast of “In The Mix” is, appropriately, a mixed bag. The poor dialogue and writing in general anchor the whole product down, but a few folks still deliver half decent performances. It is always nice to see a bunch of character actors like Robert Costanzo and Chazz Palminteri doing their mobster thing, but the grating comic relief performance by Kevin Hart leaves a whole lot to be desired (like, for instance, the sweet embrace of death).
“In The Mix” is a film teetering on falling out of the IMDb Bottom 100, and for good reason. It is a movie that is just “good” enough to not be entertainingly bad, which puts it unfortunately into the range of forgettable mediocrity. There isn’t anything outlandishly bad enough about it for me to recommend watching through the whole thing, but it serves as an interesting side-by-side comparison with the other celebrity-driven IMDb Bottom 100 features I mentioned here.
Reviews/Trivia of B-Movies, Bad Movies, and Cult Movies.
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