Peter Fraser picks his ten worst
Dear Close-Up Film,
Fresh out of a glorious screening of The Red Shoes I was bundled into a car and I awoke in this hellish cell with nothing but a projector and a screen to keep me company. There was a key lying near the door. As I scrambled to reach it I pulled the chain wrapped around my leg and the key shot away, leaving me to bake in the stifling heat and ponder the poor review that I’d given the film Saw. ‘What manner of punishment is awaiting me from some sick and twisted serial killer?’ I quavered to myself in the darkness. ‘Still’ I reflected with an expansive gesture towards the screen, ‘at least I have the movies!’ Then I spied the DVD cases lying in the insect-infested muck that caked the stone floor. ‘Dear God, no…and look, they’re open!’ I glanced fearfully at the projector. ‘This is perverted beyond words…is someone actually trying to prevent me from submitting my top ten worst movies to Close-Up Film by screening them to me in one sitting, perhaps, heaven forbid, on a loop?’ Reader, at that point I began to lose it.
I’ve been here a few days now. I’ve worked out the running times of my top ten worst films and multiplied them by the number of screenings I’ve endured so far. It comes to at least nine insufferable days. I think I’m going out of my mind. I tried to close my eyes but a cacophonous voice told me that if I did, I’d get the Clockwork Orange treatment. I don’t know what’s coming but viddy well my brothers. On the tenth day I may have my final screenings and I don’t know what will happen afterwards. So here is my top 10 worst saved for posterity through Close-Up Film. I shall scrawl my list on the walls with the lipstick in my pocket and when that runs out I’ll use my blood…I have my suspicions about who my persecutor could be…one of ten suspects…was that an English inflection in the booming voice from the loudspeaker…?
[Here is Peter’s article as it was bravely scrawled on the walls of the crime scene – Ed.]
My worst nightmare would be to be locked in a room with the ten films I’m about to talk about on a constant loop. I can’t think of anything more dreadful. ‘All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ While I don’t think it is necessarily true that all happy families or good films resemble each other, I do think that the rule ‘if it’s not broke, then don’t fix it’ applies. There seems to be less reason to examine what makes a film so distinctively good than to examine why a bad film might be so extremely bad. It’s akin to slowing down on the motorway to examine a car crash.
Is it because we want to help, or is it because as movie enthusiasts an utter disaster panders to our most naked voyeuristic impulses? Do we want our pound of flesh? You might say that it’s also a survival instinct, to identify and isolate memes (the cultural equivalent of genes) that threaten to generate a regressive lineage and revert us to Neanderthal cinephiles grunting in the dark, dancing around the flickering light of the cine-projector like fire. With so many bad films - the number ceaselessly increasing everyday - there must be personal reasons to dredge just ten from the morass and, of course, there is.
The common thread is disappointment. I expect Halloween 4 to be bad so if I happen to catch it at the pictures or chow-down on the sofa one night and flick to channel five, I pretty much know what I’m getting. It may be utter shit but it has no pretensions to be anything else. Likewise there are films that I think are massively overrated, or with whose politics I disagree, or which belong to a genre I dislike, that remain interesting and provocative, and competent within the normal bounds. In other words personal prejudice has a limited role here. I’m a reasonable man. The films below are simply objectively bad.
Nonetheless disappointment is the key. Why these bad films rather than others? I didn’t see many of the British gangster films of recent years because I knew they would be skull-numbingly awful. No, the films I remember as being particularly bad are those from which I expected, or even simply hoped, for more. The films that robbed me of my innocence, then robbed me of my naivety and finally threatened to rob me of my idealism and turn me against cinema for good. Hence you’ll notice that they’re the kind of films I would have seen at the local multiplex growing up and if I still enthuse about cinema then it is wholly in spite of the likes of these. There are bad films made in good faith, perhaps Plan 9 from Outer Space (which I haven’t seen), and then bad films made in bad faith, which are worse because they are so insidious
These films fall into different categories of bad film. Connoisseurs of cinematic calamity, if such a hideous breed exists, have your spiral-bounds ready and if I err may I be consigned to a personal screening hell.
In no particular order:
A. I. Artificial Intelligence – Stephen Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick: the dream team. Give me a break. We’re used to variable output from Spielberg, but to sully the pristine oeuvre of Kubrick with a film notionally pitched - and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry - as a tribute was just unforgivable. What we wanted was the heart of ET unified with the head of 2001. What we got was the heart of 2001 combined with the head of ET and more false endings than I can remember in any other film, all of them rubbish.
Batman & Robin – Joel Schumacher. Joel ‘Sleeping with the Enemy’ Schumacher. Joel, you’ve been responsible for a few too many bad films and to be honest even your good films haven’t been all that, but you really excelled yourself this time with unmitigated codswallop, like licking candy floss made from wire wool.I was young. I was stupid. I thought that the director who had taken the awe surrounding near-death experiences and turned that mystery into Flatliners could still make a good Batman film…
That he could still make a good film per se! Joel, I won’t make that mistake again.
[The article cuts out here]
Joel, is that you…behind the projector?
[Resumes]
An American Werewolf in Paris – I’m breaking into a sweat. I can feel my skin tingling and my eyes bulging, the taste of blood in my mouth. Am I turning into a werewolf? No, I’m just quite rightly reacting in revulsion to this travesty of American Werewolf in London. Were I transforming into a werewolf then I would want it to be something more convincingly feral than the laughable CGI on display here. Bring back animatronics. The first was so sublime; does the sequel have to be so ridiculous?
…as for the exquisite Julie Delpy. Don’t get me started. I just hope it was a good payday, that’s all.
Stealing Beauty – The very worst of arthouse from Bernardo Bertolucci who more than many of his peers has skirted the vat labelled dross and more than occasionally fallen in. The Conformist is a mostly great film, Last Tango in Paris is undeniably a great film but for all the wrong reasons and perhaps despite Bertolucci. Stealing Beauty is a reprehensible film, an old man’s film, and it shows what happens when romanticism heads straight through sentimentality to become maudlin kitsch. Jeremy Irons doesn’t help.
The Constant Gardener – Ok ok, admittedly this is here mainly for polemical reasons and perhaps it’s a debatable inclusion. After all surely there have been worse films? Yes, no doubt and I’m sure that The Constant Gardener was made in good faith, but really. Its argument against the pharmaceutical giants gets lost in a trite conspiracy thriller, full of needlessly alienating ‘style’ from new kid on the block Meirelles and unoriginal performances from Fiennes and Weisz. This in a film that apes the neocolonial mentality by objectifying and stereotyping Africans and presuming that only the Europeans can save Africa. Take a look at the ending again and tell me, is this film depicting an African tragedy or a European one?
Magnolia – While we’re at it, here’s another film that may not deserve to be in the ten worst but nonetheless demands sober appraisal to counter the hyperbole bestowed upon it. Greatly Robert Altman’s inferior, PT Anderson gives us a film in which the characters are neurotic ciphers whose problems are reduced to the worst that therapy-culture can offer. The entire cast skates on thin ice until the ice cracks and they find themselves in a melodramatic swamp of tears. It’s the audience, and its inner child, who drown.
Alien Resurrection – Never has the phrase ‘a sequel too far’ been more appropriate. The fact that it paved the way for Alien vs. Predator might make it worse but at least that film didn’t take itself too seriously. The worst thing about this film is that it wasted an interesting conceit. If Ripley really is half-Alien then think of all the things that she might be capable of! Sleepwalking top of the list, if this film is anything to go by.
The Matrix Revolutions – I think this is probably the worst film I’ve ever seen.
The Phantom Menace – It only gets worse in the light of the subsequent two films. Liam Neeson, Hollywood’s ‘sage for hire’ is just a black hole and the future Darth Vader turns out to be one of the most annoying child actors of all time. Look, I wasn’t religious about the original trilogy or anything but it’s coming to something when the prequels are so much worse than the least of the ideas that we conjured up in our school sixth form. Indeed the very worst thing about this dramatic debacle is that Lucas knew what he was doing. First to spawn blockbuster tie-ins we might have known that he’d take them to their tawdry apogee. As for Ewan MacGregor, I guess six years in front of blue screen is punishment enough.
The Phantom of the Paradise – The tenth film has a special place because it’s made by a gifted director who perhaps has made more ‘bad’ films than ‘good.’ In what sense then can he be called ‘gifted’? Well his films aren’t bad in the conventional sense. Among the films on my list, we’ve had films that are bad because they’re pretentious, films that are bad because sentimental, films that are bad partly because they’re sequels, films that are bad just because they’re plain bad. But Brian De Palma has talent and his films work very efficiently. They’re coiled like medieval torture instruments, beautiful in the cruelty of their formal austerity. Yet De Palma has undeniably bad taste if his films are anything to go by and if his films are anything to go by, then he doesn’t care. This is, in a sense, commendable and certainly alternative. Everyone has differing tastes after all. But Brian’s tastes are really verging on beyond the pale and The Phantom of the Paradise, his virtuoso explosion of kitsch, is just a step too far for me. I imagine that if you watch this film on acid, you’ll never come back. It’s unique, certainly, but not in a good way.
…Nevertheless as an auteur statement by the director who takes us beyond Hitchcock into the darkest undercurrents of our cinephilia, this film is the only one worthy of honourable discharge from the list.
[The article ends here but Peter’s ordeal continued. Those fond of Peter, or squeamish, may prefer to look away]
No, it’s not Joel. Brian, is that your shadow at the projector? Oh no Brian, I don’t dare think what tortures you might conjure…no, no, it’s not Brian De Palma, no, that English accent, the plummy vowels of the born bon viveur…
It’s Michael Winner! With his entire filmography! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!
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