The Worst Movies Of 2005: A Wretch-rospective

Editor's Note: When it came time to assign the year-end "Worst Of" list, Cinematical writers Erik Davis and Robert Newton both jumped at the chance. Rather than put them in the steel cage and let them fight to the death (something which parent company AOL frowns upon), we are letting them tag-team with this "Wurst Movies Of 2005" feature:

Erik Davis: I'm probably not going to be very popular for this choice (especially among Scientologists), but I have to start off with…

10. War of the Worlds – Okay, so Tom Cruise didn’t defeat the Aliens by giving them a computer virus (with a Macintosh) à la Independence Day, but that still doesn’t excuse this film from sucking up the hype and spewing it all over our faces as we left the theater.

Robert Newton: I'm a big sci-fi fan, and am always pained to see a fetid floater like Snore Of The Worlds or Aeon Flux or The Island, but for me, the most leaden of all genre turds was…

 

9. A Sound Of Thunder - Warner Brothers had this diseased turkey about time-traveling dinosaur hunters on ice for two years, and it came out freezer-burned beyond all recognition. Poor Ray Bradbury, watching yet another one of his works done injustice on the screen.

Erik Davis: And speaking of injustice…

8. Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo – Why anyone would pay to watch Rob Schneider do anything on-screen (other than commit seppuku) is beyond me. This movie was pointless, vile and criminally unfunny. Add it to the "Sequels We Never Asked For" list. [See also: Son Of The Mask, or better yet...don't.]

Robert Newton: Nice segue, by the way. Son Of The Mask was one of those movies that was top-loaded into the early part of the year when moviegoers are so wiped by the holidays that they'll go see anything. They are usually more forgiving, but there was no forgiving January's…

7. White Noise - Taking cues from Poltergeist, The Sixth Sense and The Ring -- without managing to take any of these films' appeal -- was this militantly uninteresting supernatural thriller. The movie starred the apparently desperate Michael Keaton as a grieving widower who becomes a sort of secretary for the dead after getting hip to something called EVP -- Electronic Voice Phenomenon -- with which the deceased can communicate with the living. He sleepwalked through this atrociously edited, straight-faced craptacular, looking as confused as we did and without the benefit of being able to sit anonymously in the dark. You might expect this kind of lazy presentation of so-called fact from a caller on crackpot shepherd Art Bell's radio show, but from a movie that is supposed to entertain over all else, it is a simmering crock.

Erik Davis: Simmering crock - nice image. Which brings me to…

6. The Dukes Of Hazzard – If there is one thing 2005 will be remembered by, it will be the way in which Hollywood decided to blatantly resurrect as many old television shows as it could, only to watch each one of them bomb at the box office. They should’ve just removed the entire cast save Jessica Simpson and re-titled this one, “Hot Piece of Ass.” [See also: The Honeymooners, Bewitched]

Robert Newton: Watching The Honeymooners made me secretly wish that the kid at the concession stand didn't wash his hands before handling my nachos, because at least if I'm sick in the bathroom from food poisoning, I'd have an excuse for not watching the movie through to the end. No such luck with this one, or glorious enematainments like…

5. Saw II - Man, I took a beating over this one from readers, mostly by ones who hadn't seen the movie yet. However, I stand by my opinion of this sadistic, überhip mess. There is a great bit in the otherwise forgettable 1990 comedy Crazy People in which an insane man, tapped by institutionalized ad exec Dudley Moore, writes a tag line for an upcoming horror movie called The Freak: "This movie won't just scare you, it will fuck you up for life." Secretly, that is the standard that most fans of horror, however casual, have when they buy a ticket to Hollywood's latest attempt. Scare me, don't insult me. [Check out the recent episode "Cigarette Burns" from Showtime's new series Masters Of Horror for some further rumination on this kind of thing.]

Erik Davis: I was insulted a lot this year, like when I saw…

4. The Pacifier – Don’t you love it when some big action star decides to drop the machine gun and pick up a baby bottle? If there’s one thing Vin Diesel -- who was out-acted by a crotch-pecking duck named Gary -- taught us in 2005, it was that any actor who takes on the role of XXX will most likely wind up acting alongside a group of rotten kids in the near future. [See also: neutered and formerly badass rapper Ice Cube in the relentlessly stupid Are We There Yet?]

Robert Newton: Something that I've noticed about the movies on this list so far is that none of them were made with very much imagination at all, so why should this one be any different?

3. The Fog - It wasn't that great of a John Carpenter film in the first place, but this decerebrated remake managed, on every level, to stink, stank, stunk. I didn't even feel that it warranted a proper review, so in the spirit of its unoriginality and laziness, I nicked quotes from reviews of other bad movies.

Erik Davis: And where would a list of bad movies be without the prerequisite "High Tech Superplane Becomes Self-Aware And Turns Evil" movie:

2. Stealth – I know I wasn’t the only one wondering which 2005 Oscar winner would follow up their once-in-a-lifetime role by performing in one of the worst films in recent memory. Jamie Foxx must have had a bit of Ray Charles left in him after reading the script for Stealth, seeing as one would have to literally be blind in order to think this albatross could fly. Oh no, the villain is played by an out-of-control plane! Help! The terror is overtaking me!

Robert Newton: Which brings us to the top…rather, the bottom of our list. May I?

Erik Davis: Go right ahead. I don't disagree with you.

Robert Newton: Worse than Doom or The Man or Undiscovered or In The Mix or The Perfect Man or Mr. and Mrs. Smith or The Lords Of Dogtown or Boogeyman or Hide And Seek or House Of Wax…

1. Alone In The Dark - How about making a movie based on a video game that does not involve monsters, hideous zombies or Amazon chicks with big guns? Why not a biopic of Alexey Pajitnov, the creator of Tetris? Or a movie version of David Sheff's book, Game Over: How Nintendo Zapped an American Industry, Captured Your Dollars and Enslaved Your Children? Give us something to ponder, other than, "What the hell is this brain-dead crap?" From Uwe Boll, the German glauco-visionary who brought us the grotty 2003 byte, House Of The Dead, comes this equally as all-around inept dark fantasy, also an adaptation of a video game. It is about a paranormal black ops program that threatens to infest the world with thorny, bloodthirsty, terribly cheap-looking CGI mastiffs from another dimension called "xenos". The fear we should feel here is replaced with abject pity for the likes of Christian Slater, Tara Reid and Stephen Dorff for being involved in what should have been a quiet, direct-to-video shuffle. Luckily, the tax loophole that Boll exploited to produce these shite epics has been closed, though he has a whopping six game-based movies in queue, including January's BloodRayne. Ed Wood, you have been unseated as the Worst Filmmaker Of All Time.