Hollywood's Total Stinkers: Our Critics Pick the Worst Flicks By Stephen Hunter Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, February 3, 2000

The talents of Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman couldn't help the "The Avengers." (Warner Bros.)

Obviously, we sold ours long ago to get these fabulous jobs.

So let us just say: These are times that try movie critics' butts.

It's hard to sit still through so much swill. The American movie industry seems to have bottomed out. Our bottoms have certainly bottomed out. Nothing decent has arrived in weeks. Two Fridays ago: zip. One Friday ago: nada. Tomorrow: "Scream 3." The vocabulary of contempt is severely taxed; how many times can you find a synonym for "stinks"? Not even the old thesaurus can help much; it merely offers "stench," "reek" and "smell."

All of which brings up the larger subject of awfulness. An editor asked recently whether "Isn't She Great," one of last week's sorry specimens, was the worst movie I'd ever seen. The answer was: Not even close. It wasn't even the worst movie of the week! It wasn't even the worst movie that director had done! (The guilty, guilty, guilty party was Andrew Bergman, who did "Striptease.") As bad as it is, "Isn't She Great" is only modestly bad.

It's not brazen in its awfulness. It lacks arrogance, self-delusion, grand scale and that hype-inflated sense of being inescapable. It's not incoherent at the plot level. It's not misconceived in ways that seem so painfully obvious after the fact. It's also not morally reprehensible, squalid, inordinately tasteless (except for some of Nathan Lane's sport coats), aggressive or filled with more than the usual number of lies. It represents that dreary middling awfulness of schmaltz, conversations with God (who listens and answers with bestsellers), torpor, a wavering tone and sentimentalization. It's not nearly as bad as any of the novels its subject, Jacqueline Susann, wrote. It's the banality of the awful, a minor species.

Now we may be getting somewhere with "Eye of the Beholder." There's nothing routine or immodest about that movie's soul-deep badness. You can tell that its director, Stephan Elliott, thinks he's making a great movie. He thinks every frame is a work of art and he was put here to show John Ford and Orson Welles where they went wrong, so it has the wondrous virtue of the insufferability of youth (in stills, he looks about 14). The movie is an incandescent fever dream of hyperfervid awfulness, wasteful of the talent it contains (Ashley Judd and Ewan McGregor), incoherent, garish in its sexuality and violence. Its warrior pride in its own grotesqueness is truly impressive, in a rotten kind of way. But still . . . it's better-than-average awfulness, a little more irritating, but somehow so portentous that it's meaningless.

So let's look for real awfulness in the movies. Let's look for the White Whale of awfulness; we'll be mad Ahabs, cruising the celluloid seas with a harpoon of sarcasm for the biggest, baddest, fattest, most bloated blob of putrescence we can find. We'll stab, stab, stab till the broad daylight. We'll attack like there's no tomorrow (but there is a tomorrow: "Scream 3" AIIIIIEEEEEEE!!!!).

And we'll play fair, too. No obscure mondo trashos like the Mexican-American horror film from 1952, "Mesa of Lost Women," also called "Lost Women of Zarpa," and starring, I kid you not, Jackie Coogan. No midget westerns like "The Terror of Tiny Town." No Victor Mature. Nothing merely shockingly gory, like the oozy scum from the "Friday the 13th" mutants. No Ed Wood stuff, with pie-plate saucers and a dying Dracula bumping into the plywood sets. No smug revisionism, like "Stagecoach," because it stands for the evil white man's violent hegemony over the noble purity of the Native American.

No, it must be from mainstream cinema, and let's restrict it to the modern era, say, the last two decades. Let's also, just to make it interesting, add the following purely arbitrary difficulty: It cannot have been directed by Kevin Costner. More: It has to have been released by a major. It must lie, cheat and steal, corrupt the young, inflame the elderly, insult the intelligent, deaden the masses and be in color. Someone has to have invested millions in it, and supported it aggressively in the theaters with an ad campaign that got more and more grotesque as its ignominy wore on.

It can't have taste or poetry or a single redeeming moment. It has to shriek brazenly from the pretentious part of the brain, and it must exhibit the sociopathic virtues of high self-esteem, lack of interest in others and an incapacity to face its own responsibilities. It would help, too, if somewhere some claque of desperately-seeking-a-life losers believed in it passionately.

So here are the usual suspects from the Post movie critics.

Three Colossal Wastes of Talent, Money and Material

My choices for the three worst movies of the past 20 years, in descending order of awfulness:

The Avengers (1998). Here is a movie in which, grandly and triumphantly, nothing works. Nothing. The plot bites. The actors (Ralph Fiennes, Uma Thurman and Sean Connery) seem to be in three different films. The screenplay seems devised upon the model of a paper-stone-scissors game in which each new development cancels the developments before it. It trashes the memory of an energetic television past in the legendary '60s in which Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg's Steed and Peel had acquired the giganticism of deities. It cost a fortune. It lost a fortune. It disgraced everybody affiliated with it. It made the regal, lionesque Connery look stupid. It made Uma Thurman look asexual. It made Ralph Fiennes look so twerpy he should pronounce his name "Rayfe."

The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990). This movie begins with conceptual idiocy. Brian De Palma, a liberal, is signed to direct a novel by Tom Wolfe, a conservative. His first task, of course, is to "fix" it. And, of course, the more he fixes it, the broker it gets. The result sucks the bracing vitality from Wolfe's autopsy of '80s greed, lost American vitality, surrender to the banal, the coarse, the craven and the grotesque. The novel's social tapestry, its exactness of observation, its swiftness of passage, its curiosity about how things work – in short, its truth – become lost forever.

Showgirls (1995). This Joe Eszterhas-Paul Verhoeven collaboration in and of itself ruined an entire year of moviegoing. The worst part of it was that it showed so much promise up front. Verhoeven was a certified bad-boy genius, with such twisted hits as "RoboCop" and "Total Recall," which showed him to be one of those remarkable creatures of the demimonde turned on by both sex and violence. I like that in a man. Eszterhas, on the other hand, was a super-successful screenwriter ("Jagged Edge," "Music Box," "Sliver"), except that nobody noticed that all the movies had the same plot. He, too, liked 'em mean and dirty and had even collaborated with Verhoeven on the sado-macho Sharon Stone star vehicle "Basic Instinct," a super hit. So: Turn these guys loose on Vegas and those leggy, gorgeous creatures who so fascinate those of us in the audience who will never get close to one. Tell it like it is, all the squalor and glamour, all the backstage bitching and fretting, all the sweat and work. Sounds good, no?

But "Showgirls" is as sexy as dishwashing. The star, Elizabeth Berkley, can't act. It has no tone, save a leer. At the end, it turns into a karate movie. It was ugly as sin but nowhere near as much fun.

Kyle MacLachlan is so fine as the oily, slimy casino entertainment director that he almost completely destroyed his career. Eszterhas did destroy his career, and then he had a pitiful try at "revenge" by writing and co-directing an anti-Hollywood movie billed as an "Alan Smithee Film," and it, too, was truly awful.

And Verhoeven? He got another multimillion-buck project just a few years ago: the Nazis vs. Space Bug movie "Starship Troopers."

As for De Palma? He's had several films since then and in fact is on the schedule for this year in "Mission to Mars." That just goes to show that in Hollywood, no bad deed goes unrewarded.

– Stephen Hunter, Washington Post Staff Writer

Double & Nothing: The All-Sly Sampler

With the exception of "Rocky," "First Blood" and "Copland," Sylvester Stallone's entire body of work is a veritable flock of turkeys. He has done more for poultry than Frank Perdue. Considering that it takes only half a brain to watch one Stallone movie, it took six of them to make my list of the three worst films of the last 20 years:

Rhinestone (1984). In this comic gobbler co-written by the star, Stallone hoped to remake his image from himbo to sensitive romantic lead, but he ended up trading the family jewels for a paste imitation. It's about a would-be country singer under the tutelage of Dolly Parton. Sure the plot's lame and the co-star is improbable and the pacing is pooped, but on top of all that: Stallone sings.

Tango & Cash (1989). In this ludicrously homoerotic prison thriller, Stallone and Kurt Russell could be mistaken for two bowling pins in love. Two cops are wrongfully imprisoned. Shower scenes ensue. They say they want to escape, but at times one wonders. And that's the good news; it's also brutal, nasty and trite.

Oscar (1991). Stallone demonstrates the comic timing of Pope John Paul II in this John Landis-directed comedy about a gangster's son, who promises his dying father (Kirk Douglas) that he will go straight. Sly was not born to play filial farceur. This movie works like an anesthetic – doctors should show it to people before surgery.

Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot (1992). Test your tolerance for dysfunctional family high jinks and adorable little old ladies in this onerous romp about a henpecked cop (Stallone) and his meddling mother (Estelle Getty). This movie is sappier than a maple forest, and to date, few people have been able to sit through more than 15 minutes of its torture.

Judge Dredd (1995). Stallone, at his most egotistical, is Dredd, a one-man justice system empowered to arrest, try and execute criminals on the spot in this tired, needlessly gory futuristic thriller. Framed and imprisoned – does this sound familiar? – Dredd sets out to clear his name with the help of wacky sidekick, Rob Schneider. Sly prances and poses and tries vainly to show that he doesn't take himself so seriously, a la Arnold Schwarzenegger, but let's face it, he's just a lump.

An Alan Smithee Film – Burn Hollywood Burn (1998). For masochists only, this excruciating industry spoof with Whoopi Goldberg, Jackie Chan and Stallone became a real Alan Smithee film when the disgruntled director, Arthur Hiller, employed the pseudonym used by mortified directors who don't want their names used in the credits.

– Rita Kempley, Washington Post Staff Writer

Howe: The Mighty Have Fallen

Before my mind completely goes and you find me pacing wildly inside a padded room, babbling incoherent curses about Garry Marshall, Joe Eszterhas, Renny Harlin, Nora Ephron and other dreadful filmmakers, let me try to isolate the worst three movies of the past 20 years.

It would be less daunting to come up with the best movie of all time (That's easy: "Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery"). But the worst? Nearly impossible. The key word is "flops," great big, screaming plunges from the towering cliffs of arrogance, egotism and delusion:

Mighty Aphrodite (1995). Of all the loathsome things Mia Farrow has accused Woody Allen of doing, nothing compares to the artistic crimes and misdemeanors he commits in this comedy. He's Lenny, a sportswriter who becomes obsessed with finding the birth mother of his newly adopted son. The mother happens to be a leggy, buxom hooker called Linda (Mira Sorvino). The movie is cover for Allen's three-part agenda:

* He portrays himself as the best adoptive father in Manhattan.

* He enjoys another romance with a younger woman, despite having the sexual appeal of a shelled turtle.

* He gets to use all the off-color jokes about oral sex and pornography he can dredge from that dank soul. He festoons Linda's apartment with more phalluses than a cave full of stalagmites. And you ain't seen nuttin' till you've seen Allen's ancient, Brooklyn-accented Greek Chorus trying to comment humorously on the action.

Havana (1990). Director Sydney Pollack never met anything he couldn't turn into an oversize production. But in this stupendously awful "Casablanca" rip-off, set in Cuba's capital before La Revolucion, the characters are so one-dimensional, it's amazing there aren't on-screen technicians to help move them around. Robert Redford is particularly wooden as a professional poker player who loves to gamble while film extras dressed as Batista goons fight revolutionaries in the soundstage background. We are also to believe that slinky Lena Olin would leave her husband for Redford, an aging crustacean himself, who spouts lines like "I feel more honest playing cards than trying to make believe these mountains are mine." Rick? Something tells me this is the start of something awful.

The Story of Us (1999). It wasn't enough to make "When Harry Met Sally . . ." – director Rob Reiner had to make When Bruce Met Michelle. You know the movie's over, right at the beginning, when Willis and Pfeiffer take turns staring into the lens and talking to us about their failing 15-year marriage. Imagine two overpaid deer in the headlights, trying to be funny. We're left to cringe with embarrassment at the performers' weak attempts to be amusing, as if a dinner guest has started a long-winded joke that we know can only end badly.

– Desson Howe, Washington Post Staff Writer