The Ten Worst of
the Year 2001
Written by: Brian
Orndorf
1) NOT ANOTHER TEEN MOVIE (Sony)
I received the most hate mail of my term as a critic for this film.
Readers derided my original review as too passionate, too personal to take seriously. I
can’t help it. When cinema get this bad, I lose my mind. Why this junk gets a wide
release, when better satire like "Wet Hot American Summer" barely makes it into
theaters is beyond me. Vile, worthless cinema, created by fools and executed by amateurs,
"Teen Movie" just doesn’t have the sense to know what to do with itself.
Thankfully, this inexpensive film was somewhat lost amidst the holiday blockbusters. Yet,
with video and cable on the horizon, this film will haunt my very existence for years to
come.
2) 3000 MILES TO GRACELAND (Warner Brothers)
"Scraping the very bottom of the creative barrel, "3000
Miles To Graceland" is - to put it candidly - the worst American motion picture to
come along in the last decade. A trashy, faux-stylish actioner with a lump of coal in
it’s heart and a peanut for a brain, "Graceland" just isn’t worth the
attempt. It’s a disgusting buffet of egotistical actors, a director without any trace
of capability, and a script that would’ve been considered dated back in 1990."
3) BRIDE OF THE WIND (Paramount Classics)
In hindsight, it seems kind of funny, as "Bride" asks the
audience to sit and watch a film about Alma Mahler, a mediocre composer, promiscuous lover
and anti-Semite. I wasn’t the only one who found it hard to hold interest in this
biography. Though carefully mounted, this soap-opera-with-poison-inside really had some
nerve to ask people to sympathize with such a loathsome person.
4) TOMCATS (Sony)
This wretched comedy makes it hard to be a man in America. Hateful
to women, to thinking people and to testicles (don’t ask) everywhere, it’s only
a matter of time before "Tomcats" becomes the hastily deleted credit from
everybody’s filmography. I learned later that the film was written by a former porn
screenwriter. Even with that established, there is still just no excuse for how appalling
this "comedy" really is.
5) AMERICAN OUTLAWS (Warner Brothers)
"These types of "rock and roll" westerns annoy me to
no end simply because all this time, money, and effort went into bastardizing what I
consider to be a very valuable genre. Director Les Mayfield really has no respect for the
intricacies of the genre, instead focusing in on just the clichés: the whorehouses, the
bank shoot-outs, the dead mother, the faithful Native American sidekick (Good. Lord.), the
noble outlaw, and the evil lawmen. He is wasting people’s time with this nonsense.
I’m not looking for another brooding, dark oater with Clint Eastwood. Even a comedy
would’ve been just fine. But Mayfield instead creates a film of zero pleasures. He
misses the greatest opportunity to resuscitate the dead western genre, and instead seals
up the crypt for another decade."
6) THE MUSKETEER (Universal)
"It’s really bad enough to make yet another film from
Alexandre Dumas’s classic novel "The Three Musketeers." It’s even
worse to veer wildly from the source material, losing the story of the Musketeers, and
feature choreography from the "legendary" (aren’t they all recently?) fight
master Xiong Xin Xin. The easy logic would be to just stand back and wonder why. Why
bastardize a classic so much when very little effort in translating the book could’ve
produced an entertaining film? But that kind of thinking will drive you insane."
7) HEAD OVER HEELS (Universal)
"In 1997, director Mark Waters set forth into the cinematic
world the sensible and quirky "The House Of Yes". Now in 2001, Waters has the
star of his new film sitting on the toilet while four models stand behind a shower curtain
making "PU" faces. Hitting rock bottom, Waters’s "Head Over
Heels" is the kind of picture that can stop a filmmaking career. It’s recklessly
awful and shamefully complacent. What happened to the texture that Waters brought to his
earlier work? I don’t know. Obviously trying for that Staff Of Ra-sized discovery of
the perfect blend of homespun wackiness and painfully labored Hollywood romance,
"Head Over Heels" finds itself veering wildly into bodily fluid humor and
truckloads of visual innuendoes that test the film’s rickety PG-13 rating."
"To be nice, I'll just say that Waters should go back
to his indie roots and stay there. In all honesty, "Head Over Heels" is
instantly forgettable, however for 80 long minutes in a theater "Heels" sure
doesn’t feel like it’s ever going to end."
8) THE FORSAKEN (Screen Gems)
A vampire flick without any bite. This laughably poor attempt at
gothic mood doesn’t help its case any by hiring a group of WB actors to spit out the
lines. The murky "Forsaken" is nothing more than the luckiest B-movie to
actually see movie screens in some time. Don’t waste your time.
9) BEHIND ENEMY LINES (20th Century Fox)
"Though not based on fact, "Behind Enemy Lines" has
moments of reality interspersed throughout. I’m convinced Moore was looking for a
little credibility with this debut, but the episodes that could possibly be construed as
"real life" battle moments are quickly pissed away by his need to use heaps and
heaps of special effects to sell this lukewarm tale of survival. It’s like a Gap
commercial gone to war. Honestly, how seriously can you take a film that has the
celebrated comic actor Owen Wilson sliding across the mud or ice with guns blazing in
super-slo-mo? Or the liberal use of "bullet-time" that Moore implements to sell
the explosions? It came to a point in the film where, if Wilson was to bend back,
Neo-style, to dodge bullets (or tanks, or missiles, or everything else he isn’t
magically hurt by), I wouldn’t have flinched. Moore has shaped the film as if I
should have a Playstation 2 controller in my hand. He is making a video game, not a film.
And why he would want to abuse cinema like this really disturbs me."
10) SOUL SURVIVORS (Artisan)
Held from release for a year or so, then cut from an R rating to a
milder, ambiguous PG-13, is it really any wonder that this horror/thriller doesn’t
work at all? Talented actors like Luke Wilson, Casey Affleck, Angela Featherstone and
Eliza Dushku get lost in the constant studio rethinking that unravels what might have been
a nice little chiller for the summer. Anyone who harbors the thought that wonderboy Wes
Bentley ("American Beauty") has acting talent should take a look at this film.
Ouch! Actually, that might be the only point of interest left in this mess of a picture.
Just missed the cut : SUMMER CATCH, GEORGE WASHINGTON, BABY BOY,
CHOPPER, THE MUMMY RETURNS, FROM HELL, THE
ONE, JOE SOMEBODY, BUBBLE BOY, AMERICA'S
SWEETHEARTS, EXIT WOUNDS, TIME AND TIDE, MONKEY BONE, HOW HIGH, VALENTINE |
