Wolf.
Wolf (1994) 
USA
125 painful minutes
Director: Mike Nichols
Writer: Jim Harrison
Wesley Strick
If you happen to be in the mood for a film whose budget can only be described as totally welfare, look no further. Wolf is it. I’m unsure exactly why director Mike Nichols chose to spend money on welfare looking animatronic wolves, for example, when real wolves would have sufficed. It wasn’t as though the wolves were required to perform overtly complicated manoeuvers like driving sports cars or jumping through flaming hoops. No. I think the most complex thing that I saw any of these shitty animatronic wolves do was raise their heads and look at the camera.
It doesn’t matter though. It’s not like real wolves would have made the difference between this film eating a colossal wolf dick (which it did) and being lauded by critics everywhere as an astounding achievement in filmmaking (which it wasn’t). Wolf had more problems than an unemployed, alcoholic single mother, namely that it was a two hour long, storyless exercise in fucking terribleness.
According to the trivia section on Wolf’s IMDB page, Jack Nicholson tried for 12 years to get this project off the ground. He should have quit after about six minutes. What exactly it was that made Jacky boy think that anyone would ever enjoy a film about a cuckold douche splash, who pokes a wolf with a stick until it bites him, and who subsequently turns into a werewolf that is more Robin Williams than evil nocturnal beast of the witching hour, is totally and completely beyond me.
It’s also completely beyond me as to why this movie had to have anything at all to do with the publishing company that Jack Nicholson’s character worked at. Did we really need to see him repeatedly show up for work even after he’d been fired? What the fuck was he doing there? He didn’t even have a job and no one seemed to care. They let him keep his office and everything.
Oh man…
It’s going to take me a while to recover from this one.
Nights in Rodanthe.
Nights in Rodanthe (2008) 
USA
97mins
Director: George C. Wolfe
Writer: Nicholas Sparks (novel)
Ann Peacock
John Romano
Why not? Why not give the last two posts of the month to Diane Lane? She deserves them.
Oh, Nights in Rodanthe. Such an elegant title isn’t it? Once again I was forced to watch this on a flight on a shitty airline that still hasn’t caught on to the idea of having TV screens installed in the backs of every seat so that you can choose which films you watch as you fly. (Incidentally, that airline was Lufthansa and I truly don’t recommend it.) No, they do it the old fashioned way where they show you one film every six fucking hours, on a faded and blurry screen that you can barely see at the fucking front of the plane. And what better film to drop on a flight full of bored, entertainment deprived travellers than fucking Nights in Rodanthe? Awesome.
In this smoldering heap, Diane Lane surprised everyone by playing – you guessed it – a divorcee. Richard Gere is in this fucker too and he plays a doctor who is tormented by the death of a patient. They both end up meeting up at a sea front getaway. Gere plays hard to get, but it isn’t long before they both get liquored up and Lane’s got her Kung-Fu grip going all over Gere’s sausage. Then they struggle with their relationship for reasons that don’t matter and which do nothing more than extend the running time of the film. There are also some wild horses that are supposed to run across the beach from time to time. I didn’t care about these horses when Diane Lane’s character tells Richard Gere’s character about them at the beginning of the film, and I especially didn’t care about them when they actually materialize at the end of the film.
Come to think of it, I didn’t care about anything in this film. It’s also pretty fucking depressing to consider that if my flight would have plunged into the Atlantic Ocean whilst I was watching this, it would have been the last film that I’d ever seen. Now that’s a truly horrible thought.
I think I just ruined my day.
Under the Tuscan Sun.
Under the Tuscan Sun (2003) 
USA/Italy
113mins
Director: Audrey Wells
Writer: Frances Mayes (book)
Audrey Wells (screen story and screenplay)
This movie would have been great if they could have gotten rid of the director, the cast, the screenwriter and pretty much everyone except the DP. This is because the locations were the only thing that kept me interested in this thing past the 15 minute mark. I would gladly have taken 113 minutes of silent footage of Southern Italy over 113 minutes of what I got, which was Diane Lane wandering around Italy, sad, then happy, then sad, then happy again.
The truth is, I don’t even know where to begin with this. Through a series of incidents that I more or less glazed over in which Diane Lane’s character finds out that her husband is banging some hot young college slut, Diane Lane’s character is then faced with a life of poverty, which involves having to sell her house to her cheating husband or else she’ll have to pay alimony. Why does she have to pay and give up her house if it was her husband who was the one that was cheating, you ask? No idea.
Did I say that she faced a life of poverty? Well yeah, technically it is a life of poverty. That is, if you define poverty as the ability to purchase, remodel and live in a three-hundred year old Italian villa without ever having to work again.
But hey, details, schmetails. The rest of the film plays out like one big Massengill commercial set in Italy, complete with Diane Lane being showered in rose petals (in slow motion), snuggling in bed with a dark and handsome Italian and drinking wine amongst the flowers.
There are flaccid attempts at injecting metaphors and references to Italian film that would be completely lost on the middle American neglected housewife set whom this film is targeted at.
There is also Sandra Oh, playing a pregnant lesbian who travels to Italy in order to have her baby there. The baby is born and who fucking cares. This film has all the twists and turns, ups and downs and surprises of making a sandwich. Not a lunch sandwich either – a drunken, home from the bar at 5am sandwich where you pile whatever is at hand on and soak it all down with bar-b-que sauce and mayonnaise.
You Don’t Mess With the Zohan.
No He Won't. He'll Just Blow.
You Don’t Mess With the Zohan (2008)
USA
113mins
Director: Dennis Dugan
Writer: Adam Sandler
Robert Smigel
Judd Apatow
Someone really does need to mess with the Zohan. Someone needs to fuck his shit up good. Maybe that way Zohan will learn that you don’t mess with the Audience. I’m not kidding when I say that this film didn’t make me laugh once. Not once. No smile, no giggle. Nothing. If this is the best that Adam Sandler can do, he might as well pack it all in. Just quit making movies because he obviously lacks the ability to get anything remotely resembling humor across to his audiences.
The worst part about all this is that I’ve never disliked Adam Sandler. I used to think that he was funny. I liked Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore. Hell, I even laughed a couple of times at Mr. Deeds. But this? The problem with Adam Sandler’s brand of humor is that it wallows in a type of immaturity that is only slightly over the heads of children. This causes problems because kids don’t get the jokes and adults do get the jokes but don’t think they’re funny. That’s because the jokes aren’t even close to being funny.
And did this bowel movement really need to be almost TWO FUCKING HOURS LONG? Come on! If you’re going to make a shitty movie (and the people behind this know that it’s a shitty movie, they just do), then at least make it short.
This film did really well at the US/Canadian box office if memory serves me correctly. Thankfully for Adam Sandler. Still, just because something makes a lot of money most certainly does not mean that it’s good. Prostitutes for example, make a lot of money. Does that mean that they’re the best lays around?
Oh well.
Friday the 13th.
Friday the 13th (2009)
USA
97mins/106mins (extended cut)
Director: Marcus Nispel
Writer: Damian Shannon
Mark Swift
Mark Wheaton
The worst thing about remakes is that they’re remakes. The second worst thing about remakes is that 99.9% of the time they are worse than the original.
I don’t know why I watched this and most people probably think it’s a little obvious of me to put Friday the 13th on here and then whine about how much it sucks. Of course it sucks, you’re thinking, it’s Friday the fucking 13th. And you’re right, it is obvious.
The thing is, this didn’t have to suck. It’s really not that hard to make a horror film like this. I’m serious. I could write a better horror script than this with my eyes closed. I know that this is targeted at a teen demographic and sorry to say this if there are any teens reading this, but fuck you. You’re the reason studios make shit like this. Happy?
It was however, hard to watch this film without laughing. My personal favorite part was when this guy goes to take a piss and then stumbles upon this crop of weed that him and his friend planted. He’s pumping Sister Christian on his iPod and then Jason kills him. Who the fuck listens to Night Ranger in 2009? On an iPod no less. The use of Sister Christian in a film was only acceptable once, and that was in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights. It fucking owned this scene. (2 minute mark.)
I’m also still not sure why the pussy whose family owned the cabin at Crystal Lake owned a cabin there. Who builds a cabin at a place known to have been the site of a serial killer’s rampage? I mean, you’re just asking for trouble.
Ping Pong.
ピンポン (2002)
(Ping Pong)
Japan
114mins
Director: Sori Fumihiko
Writer: Matsumoto Taiyo (manga)
Kudo Kankuro
Somewhere around the halfway mark of this cure for insomnia, while watching a fury infused school boy snap his ping pong paddle around repeatedly as sweat lashed from his brow, I really wanted to be able to just put my arm around this guy and be like “Man, it’s just ping-pong. You need to chill. It’s just ping-pong.” But I couldn’t do that and so I had to sit and watch like, five different characters play ping-pong and pretend that they were really tough about it too.
This film could have very easily called it quits at the 50 minute mark and I wouldn’t have resorted to any name calling. It did not however, decide to quit at the 50 minute mark. Instead it continued to drag on, fueled by nothing remotely compelling, beating the proverbial “dead horse” into a satiny, grey dust.
I think that a great deal of the film’s problems would have been fixed had there been a narrative and a main character. Instead of that, there were lots of great shots of guys playing ping pong, and then fighting about it and then acting cool about how awesome it was to be a ping pong player. And maybe it is awesome to be a ping pong player, but this film just made it all look really fucking boring.
Paris When it Sizzles.
Paris When it Sizzles (1964)
Psst! I'll tell you a secret: this film sucks.
USA
110mins
Director: Richard Quine
Writer: Julien Duvivier (story “La fête à Henriette”)
Henri Jeanson (story “La fête à Henriette”)
George Axelrod (screenplay)
This is just fucking depressing. The worst film that Audrey Hepburn ever starred in. I don’t exactly know what the director, producer, writer, were going for with this. I think they were trying to be both funny and fun, but they just ended up being cocks for wasting Audrey Hepburn and William Holden’s time in this.
The story revolves around a struggling screenwriter holed up in Paris who orders a personal assistant, who turns out to be Audrey Hepburn. It sounds like it could be potentially interesting. But it isn’t. Imagine listening to the shittiest hack writer from the 60’s pitching you his worst ideas for a script. Then imagine watching each of those ideas in ten minute vignettes, for 11o minutes. Sound like fun?
Of fucking course it doesn’t.
The Happening.
The Happening (2008)
This movie sucks so hard, it's actually warped the poster image.
USA/India
91mins
Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Writer: M. Night Shyamalan
This is the first and last M. Night Shittyman film that I am ever going to review. I’m not kidding, the way this guy is going, if videotapes of the birth of Christ somehow surfaced and it turned out that M. Night Shyamalan had inexplicably gone back in time, shot and directed it and then returned to present time with the tapes, I would still be skeptical of actually paying money to see it. Seriously, I would probably have to ask people who’d already seen the footage if it was any better than M. Night’s other stuff. And most likely it wouldn’t be.
But back to The Happening. This movie is about the earth being mad at the people and blowing winds on everyone, which then makes everyone kill themselves and each other. There is no explanation for why this wind exists or what exactly it is. Details, schmetails. This is M. Night Shyamalan, fool. He doesn’t have time for petty shit like logical explanations of the storyline. Fuck that. This is the guy that made one movie that people talked about fucking ten years ago or whatever and as a result audiences are forever expected to go easy on him for consistently baking us shit cakes.
Not only that, but Mark Wahlberg is about as convincing as a school teacher in this as Burt Reynolds would have been as Lawrence of Arabia. A note to Mark Wahlberg: just because you’re saying things that are supposed to sound smart doesn’t mean that you have to say them as though you’re explaining dinosaurs to a three-year-old.
The Happening is worth watching only if you don’t have any other choice and your eyes have actually been removed from their sockets so that you can only really judge things by their sounds. Otherwise don’t bother.
300.
300 (2006)
300 Sausage Jockies
USA
117mins
Director: Zack Snyder
Writer: Zack Snyder
Kurt Johnstad
Michael Gordon
Frank Miller (graphic novel)
Lynn Varley (graphic novel)
If you like watching half naked, greasy and dirty CGI buffed men fighting each other with long spears and swords while grunting and letting out orgasmic cries of triumph, then this film is probably right up your alley. I personally don’t have any problem with watching a movie about 300 gay men fighting, but this was fucking boring.
I guess the most surprising thing about all this was imagining a past where all the men were gay. I knew that the ancient Greeks and Romans liked to “experiment” sexually and what have you, but I didn’t know that they actually had entire armies of gay men who would go out and fight other giant armies of gay men. There were even gay monsters in the 300 universe. I think this film was actually attacked for its historical inaccuracies because obviously there were no such thing as gay monsters way back when.
The truth is, I don’t remember much else about this film other than the fighting, which doesn’t make a film good. I’ve heard that the sequel will feature some sort of mission to save a sacred, old, rusty trombone or something. I’m not too sure though, that might just be a rumor.
Alles is liefde.
Alles is liefde (2007)
Netherlands 110mins
Director: Joram Lürsen
Writer: Kim van Kooten
This film managed to stun me not once, but twice. It’s true. First it stunned me that after what felt like hours of watching this mess, I discovered that it was actually only 110 minutes long. This movie fucking crawls. The second time that this film stunned me was after I discovered that… this film – this miserable asslick of a film, is according to the fine chaps and lovely madam’s over at ye old Wikipedia:
…the most visited Dutch romantic comedy film ever, and is in the top 20 of most visited Dutch films of all times.
And that is just really sad news. I don’t even think that I can sum up the strength to try and explain what is going on in this movie. Basically if you have seen Richard Curtis’ Love Actually and wanted to see what a shittier version of it would look like, then you’ve found your film in this one. There’s a man who pretends to be Santa Claus and a prince who just wants to love a girl that works in the jewelry section of a department store. You know, compelling stuff. There’s also a gay couple who are planning on getting married. There’s like, thirty characters in this film and why the fuck do I need to try and keep track of your thirty shitty characters? Write three fucking excellent characters and you have me. There are no excellent characters in this. Watching this was a terrible experience. I can’t believe that Dutch people lined up for this shit.
I'll Tell You What Sucks. 