'08 on Film? Please Pass The Duds
25 Stinkers Shared One Good Thing: End Credits

By Michael O'Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 31, 2008

I love my job.

The worst movie I saw this year, in my capacity as film critic? "Punisher: War Zone."

Here's a film that inspired a critic from USA Today to ask, "Why punish us?" A film that features, in the title role of the comic-book vigilante, Ray Stevenson -- I had the same reaction: who? -- who jams a pencil up his nose to reset some broken cartilage. It's accompanied by a wet, gristly sound effect that suggests someone deboning a chicken.

And yet I say: Thank God.

Apparently I dodged a bullet here. "Punisher: War Zone" isn't even one of the 25 worst movies of 2008.

We asked our friends at RottenTomatoes.com to send us a rundown of the 25 most egregious duds of the past 12 months, based on the Web site's highly sophisticated "Tomatometer" ranking system. Here's how it works:

Any movie that received at least 30 reviews from a list of approved critics was eligible. Reviews come, for the most part, from such major media outlets as The Post, along with some online film sites. Each review is assigned a numerical grade, based on the critic's rating (or, if no rating is given, on an assessment by Rotten Tomato's genius editors). Those grades are then averaged into an aggregate score, from 0 to 100, just like in elementary school. In the case of a tie, the movie with the most reviews was considered worse.

This year's Hall of Shame includes "Made of Honor" (score: 11), "College Road Trip" (12) and "Superhero Movie!" (15), a parody of "Spider-Man" and its ilk whose bravely optimistic exclamation point was, apparently, not enough. By way of comparison, "Man on Wire," a documentary about tightrope walker Philippe Petit, got a 100. The animated charmer "WALL E," about a lovable robot, got a 96.

So. The best -- that is, least awful -- thing on the Rotten Tomatoes list of 25 bombs? M. Night Shyamalan's "The Happening." That apocalyptic horror film gets a Tomatometer grade of 19 out of 100. As a comparison, "Punisher: War Zone" earned a whopping 22.

Other films that beat out "Punisher" in the race to the bottom include "In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale." The cumbersomely titled, two-hour-plus epic by Uwe Boll is, like most of the notorious German director's work, based on a popular series of video games. Boll has been widely described as the worst filmmaker in the world. Web sites such as UweBollIsAntichrist.com are dedicated to trashing him.

Here's the Onion AV Club take on him: "Boll has been compared to Ed Wood," wrote the humor newspaper, citing the legendary, and now perversely beloved, maker of such cinematic bombs as "Plan 9 From Outer Space." "But there's nothing personal about [Boll's] ineptitude; he's just a deal-maker completing a transaction."

Then how on Earth did the masterpiece of such a soulless hack earn a whole 4 points, placing it, at No. 5 on our list, just above -- or is that just below? -- "Meet the Spartans"? That flatulent, scattershot parody of such epics as "300" fared only half as well, with a Tomatometer score of 2.

Well, somebody, somewhere kind of, sort of, halfway liked Boll's movie. "I wouldn't change a thing," raved the Combustible Celluloid Web site. "It's been a while since I've seen Hollywood filmmaking this unsafe and unhinged." (For the record, Boll almost achieved the distinction of having two titles on the list in one year. But we had to cross off his political satire "Postal" because it never opened here.)

Everyone, it seems, has an opinion. And these days, it's all too easy to share it, especially if you've got access to a computer and a lot of free time.

Which is why it's all the more important to pause at this time of year, a time when the elite movie world seems to fall into lockstep, with best-of lists featuring such names as "Frost/Nixon," "Wendy and Lucy" and a handful of others.

Let us consider, then, "The Hottie & the Nottie."

There's a lesson to be learned from that misogynistic Paris Hilton vehicle (No. 7 on our stinker hit parade, with a score of 5), which Richard Roeper, in a fit of adverbial excess, called "excruciatingly, painfully, horribly, terribly awful" and the Chicago Tribune "a pea-brained vanity production." (I'm not sure if that last line refers to the movie or its star. Perhaps both.)

That lesson is: Making fun of bad movies is easy. Making good ones is hard.

Nobody sets out to make a lousy movie. Among the more high-profile titles on a list that includes such flashes in the pan as "Prom Night" and "Shutter" (a horror twofer tied for No. 8) is "The Love Guru."

The stakes could not have been higher for that summer comedy, produced and co-written by its star, Mike Myers, about a long-haired prophet of self-help named Pitka. To restore his street cred, onetime comic genius Myers, who hadn't appeared in a live-action film since 2003's disastrous "The Cat in the Hat," needed to make us laugh again, and badly.

Unfortunately, that seems to be exactly what he did.

"If you're in the mood for a delightful tweak of today's self-actualizing New Age gurus," wrote Entertainment Weekly, of what Rotten Tomatoes calls the 19th-worst film of the year, "look elsewhere. If, on the other hand, you want to see gags about boogers, elephant poop, and mano-a-mano duels with mops drenched in urine, then this is for you."

Ouch.

It certainly isn't the only example of how the mighty have fallen.

Al Pacino, in the thriller "88 Minutes," was described in this paper as "over-mannered and near-histrionic." Another critic compared the acclaimed actor's performance to a "festival of hair." According to the New York Post, the only suspense in the film -- about a forensic psychologist with less than an hour and a half to solve his own impending murder -- came from audiences wondering "until the very last minute whether this is the worst Al Pacino movie ever made."

Oh, I don't know about that. Does anyone other than me remember a little something called "Simone," a 2002 satire about a creatively blocked filmmaker so desperate that he creates a digital actress, who then becomes more famous than he?

I must admit that the presence on the list of one title in particular gave me a bit more schadenfreude than most. Who wouldn't have expected better of Ben Stein -- a guy who's known for being both smart ("Win Ben Stein's Money") and funny ("Ferris Bueller's Day Off") -- than the way he comes off, as narrator, in "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed"? Here's what the Globe and Mail had to say about Stein's attack on a scientific orthodoxy that allows no room for consideration of the so-called intelligent design theory of creation. The film, which garnered a Tomatometer score of 10, is "an appallingly unscrupulous example of hack propaganda and it sucketh mightily. What's more, I didn't laugh once."

Not once? At Ben Stein? Something is seriously wrong.

Not quite as wrong, however, as "Fool's Gold," a nautical romantic comedy starring bickering ex-spouses Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson that the Philadelphia Inquirer dismissed as a "soggy mess." While it, too, earned a score of 10, its multiplex-ready marquee names gave "Fool's Gold" a slight edge over "Expelled," which was less widely reviewed.

But now, for the news you've all been waiting for.

The worst movie of the 2008 is -- drum roll, please -- "One Missed Call." Tomatometer score: 0.

That's right, zero, zippo, zilch.

How is that possible? And what do you mean you never heard of it? Surely someone out there liked this remake of a Japanese horror film, starring Shannyn Sossamon and (be still my heart) Edward Burns, about people who get creepy messages on their cellphones from their future doomed selves.

But maybe not. Among the film's kinder notices was the review by WaffleMovies.com, which called it a "turkey of a bomb of a debacle." The only thing missing, WaffleMovies said, was . . . Lindsay Lohan.