The Cinematic Hall of Shame

Written as a dumbed-down Rambo rip off, Deadly Prey is comical when it should be serious and painfully awkward when it is aiming for levity or connecting to our emotional side. When the protagonist's wife is brutally executed I chuckled. It fails consistently at everything it attempts even having its actors fall down convincingly. Though, it might be somewhat entertaining as throwaway schlock if it weren't so redundant and flat. The film consists mostly of increasingly emotionally-detached, blood-curdling violence and jogging, intermittently broken up with bad acting. If there was a message it is: violence is morally wrong, and violence can solve everything.

As an extra-depressing factoid, one of the 'stars' of the film was one of the founding members of The Actor's Studio, and had second-billing beneath the likes of Brando, Gable, Cagney, and Beery. You heard me.

A major pillar of the film's thesis is debunked in three minutes using Google image search. In its own way an instructive example of the manipulative power of hearsay. In its defense, it had the good grace to vanish into thin air unlike the Loose Change franchise.

Cannon Films (aka Golan-Globus) found their niche in the Eighties financing washed-up directors (Frankenheimer and Cassavetes), ambitious wannabe power-players (Luciano Pavarotti and Norman Mailer), and low-budget action vehicles for D-listers (Van Damme, Chuck Norris, etc,). Jean-Luc Godard represented the prestige-project wing of the corporate strategy. Needless to say there is a reason you've never heard of this film outside of an aside in a New Yorker article, and Cannon itself is no more.

Somebody felt the need to make a dumber, more pretentious (yes, that is a T.S. Eliot allusion, though I think they obliviously ripped it off from Apocalypse Now), cheaper version of a film originally based on a defunct line of kid's toys, with a plot element ripped off from Demolition Man. It sums up 'The Asylum' company that its business model banks on a segment of the population being too careless or impaired to realize they had just obtained the wrong movie on eBay or in the Wal-Mart bargain bin or off NetFlix, etc. The Razzie Awards presumably failing to honor this nauseatingly inane thing (to call it a movie seems distasteful) either because it was too obscure, direct-to-video, or not worthy of the free advertisement. But we all know this was likely the true 'least respectable film of the year.'

If you can make it through a half-hour of the 'film's' acting, CGI, and dialogue you are a better man than me, or insane.

Cult movies often garner critical curiosity and even genuine affection from film fans decades after their release, but no one is fondly gathering in cinemas or viewing parties in their living rooms to see this Z-level clot of celluloid pus.

1987 was not a good vintage for movies it seems. Leonard Part Six, the pun -- based on the gimmick that parts 1 - 5 were classified or something -- revealing a convoluted plot and inexplicable rationale for existence, is also the closest this piece of crap comes to humor. In between his t.v. gig and hawking New Coke, Ford, Kodak film, and Jello pudding pops, Bill Cosby unfortunately found time to write, star in, and produce motion pictures. Cosby graciously recognized his own blunder and warned people to avoid this debacle, which sort of makes him the lone hero in this perverse tale. This is the epitome of what happens when a star has too much hubris, too much clout and creative control, and no one brave enough to call his bluff. And you thought Jerry Lewis was a terrible auteur.

A grisly warning that making movies actually requires talent. It's easy to watch a Michael Bay movie and think anyone can do it, but some things are better left to professionals.

Possibly the stupidest film ever made. Words fail to express the idiocy of a Terminator/ Jurassic Park/ The Thing mash-up starring a second-rate Van Damme lookalike and featuring a born-again subplot and streetwise whore-turned-nun. The Brother from Another Planet with a Swiss martial artist and the special effects of One Million Years B.C. What could go wrong?

If you were perplexed who Vanilla Ice was designed to be marketed toward, you'll be equally baffled trying to figure toward what audience this movie is supposed to appeal. Surely this could only have been green-lit out of financial interests. I prefer to think of this as a future anthropological study-piece or novelty in some cultural studies class not unlike the Fiji-mermaid or some piece of dung of a long extinct sub-species experts study under a microscope. This is what happens when uncreative minds with dollar signs in their eyes unite and jerk each other off. So bad you can't even really laugh at it.

The absence of more Seltzer-Friedberg films upon this list is based on the fact I refuse to see one of their abominations ever again. Sold as a spoof or satire of pop culture, I'm not sure the writer-directors would even know what the word 'satire' means if you asked them.