Someone recently approached me and inquired about how it must be a kick for me to belittle inferior films. Tell me, what's so amusing about folks spending their hard-earned money to see film flops that have no business being on the screen in the first place? Granted not everything can be flawless and substantial but conjuring up cinematic crap just for the sake of it is indeed inexcusable. As I offer yet another annual listing of what I considered a flooding of floundering films, let's just hope that in the upcoming moviemaking seasons ahead that the filmmakers can keep down this celluloid dreck to a minimun. Let's relive the monotony, shall we folks?
Frank's top ten worst films of 1999 were (in alphabetical order):
1. BABY GENIUSES: For those of you who appreciated the lovely achievements of comedic bliss with the cutesy antics of babies and their talking ways in the LOOK WHO'S TALKING films, then I'm sure you will welcome with open arms the display of kiddie comedy in BABY GENIUSES. This film has all the cleverness of a dusty pacifier and the appealing wit of a soiled leaking diaper. But don't blame the clueless kids that parade around in this woefully dimwitted toddler's tale. Instead, blame the middle-aged big babies who brought this tacky film to our attention. Child-rearing chowderheads Kathleen Turner and Christopher Lloyd are thrown into an excruciating premise playing an evil-minded couple who are child-rearing experts. The movie fails at every attempt in trying to satirize the notion that babies may inherently be smarter than their adult counterparts. BABY GENIUSES desperately tries to cling to its spoof-like aspirations but the filmmakers forgot to draw an even line where both children and adults can relate to the hoax. When all is said and done, the movie is indeed child abuse...in a moronic, monotonous-sort-of-way. Gives a whole new meaning to "pamper-ed" stars. Save yourself the hardship of enduring this juvenile junk. If anyone needs a spanking on the rear end, it's the filmmakers behind this underdeveloped stupidity. Imagine these poor tots forced to partake in this preschool pabulum-producing picture!
2. CHILL FACTOR: Another listless, loud, raucous, repetitive generic action buddy-buddy picture that pops all over the place more times than a bunch of balloons in a needle factory! Exceedingly classless and hopelessly unoriginal, CHILL FACTOR--just like the other countless redundant duo daredevil flicks before it--has really nothing to offer anyone. Unless, of course, the design of the film is simply meant to attract the male moviegoing audience by supplying them with empty-headed explosions and slick, dumb dialogue. Oscar-winning actor Cuba Gooding, Jr. and Skeetch Ulrich are bickering boneheads trying to escort a volatile load of chemical weapons in an ice cream truck while traveling through the treacherous Montana mountains. Gooding Jr. plays the bugged-eyed, exasperated black partner who overreacts to Ulrich's flippant, don't-give-damn, James Dean-like white partner. Certainly a poor knock off at mixing the tension pressure cooker of SPEED with the off-kilter comraderie of the LETHAL WEAPON series. The catch in this overwrought plot is that the chemical weapons could blow to smithereens if the temperatures exceed 50 degrees. Believe me, it's not so much the chemical weapons that could use an exaggerated blast as can this futile, fleeting flick. CHILL FACTOR will leave audiences frozen with indifference although it will take Neanderthal Nation less time to thaw out.
3. DETROIT ROCK CITY: So you say you're a faithful follower of the rebellious makeup-wearing demons of heavy metal rock known as the group Kiss? Well rock on if you will dude but let's see if your devotion to Kiss is still in tact when puckering up to a frantic, uninvolving seventies nonsensical nostalgic dud like DETROIT ROCK CITY. This misplaced movie tells the tale of dedicated Kiss fanatics--in this case four teenage burnout buddies led by Hawk (Edward Furlong)--who are fortunate enough to obtain Kiss cocert tickets only to end up losing them while roaming around in Detroit. And so this premise results in a relentlessly long exercise of a movie that has nothing really to say about the real effect that a group like Kiss has on its hardcore fans. Director Adam Rifkin pounds the pavement but just seems to string along painful moments masquerading as a complete movie without once thinking of a valid way to fulfill our expectations for the film's payoff. And when the payoff known as the Kiss concert finally arrives, you never do appreciate the ultimate experience because the group doesn't register with the lackluster theatrics it lamely offers. All in all, DETROIT ROCK CITY is as long and hideous as bandmember Gene Simmons' blood-coated tongue. If the film was looking to promote Kiss, then why do it with the dispassionate divulgence of a decrepit '70s-oriented teen romp? Because this is such a downbeat disappointment, there's just no use blowing a "Kiss" at DETROIT ROCK CITY.
4. FORCES OF NATURE: Whether it's fashionable to parlay a '90s substandard screwball romantic comedy into something more playful and fulfilling than what it really is remains to be seen. But to conjure up a contemporary and complacent clunker like FORCES OF NATURE and ask us to believe in its contrivance based on the superior films it's trying to emmulate is too much to ask, folks! Director Bronwen Hughes has a major task ahead of him. Here, he caters to a weary and meandering script that is an anemic conglomeration of previously successful screwball comedies. Ben Affleck plays Ben, a handsome and humble soul whose focus of the moment is getting from New York to Savannah in time for his wedding. He meets up with Sandra Bullock's free-wheeling, romantic rascal named Sarah, a pretty frolicking female spirit who does what she pleases and pleases what she does. Basically, Ben plays the bewildered hunky straight arrow to Sarah's unabashed curved bow. All the thrown-in scenes are terribly manufactured ploys to breathe life into a reaching script that offers prankish platitudes without serving up anything distinctively strident in its wry sexual wit. FORCES OF NATURE provides its own weathered-down mediocrity.
5. INSTINCT: You would think that director Jon Turtletaub ("Phenomenon") and his collaboration with Academy Award winning actors Anthony Hopkins and Cuba Gooding, Jr. would produce a refreshing, original psychological thriller that adds a measure of sophisticated tension with raw vitality. Unfortunately, INSTINCT doesn't have that kind of drive. Instead, this film opts to knit together an arbitrary string of familiar movies from yesteryear (Hopkins' own "Silence of The Lambs", "Gorillas In The Mist", "Shawshank Redemption", "One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest") rather than concentrate its efforts on providing a distinctive identity of its own. As a result, INSTINCT comes off as a haphazard, forced, futile pseudo-suspense piece that doesn't have the confidence or capability of being its own captivating showcase. Hopkins plays Powell, an anthropology professor sent to Rwanda to observe the country's gorillas only to end up being one of them by sharing the beasts' animalistic behavior. Enter a young hotshot psychiatrist (Gooding, Jr.) who tries desperately to penetrate the unstable mind of Powell and you have a derivative, manipulative film that meanders heavily in the all-too-familiar arena of the ridiculousness. My immediate INSTINCT was to dismiss the entire movie!
6. LOVE STINKS: Yeah, love stinks sometimes but so does this misguided movie which stunk all the time in its painful 95 minute entirety. Jeff Franklin (creator of the long-runnng ABC-TV kiddie sitcom "Full House") comes up with this droll, unimaginative and uneven romantic comedy that lingers on like a slow death. LOVE STINKS, quite frankly, is a mysogynistic marital mishap-of-a-movie. The set up involves Seth (French Stewart from TV's alien comedy "3rd Rock From The Sun")as a situation comedy writer whose constant bickering with his over-eager girlfriend Chelsea (Bridgette Wilson) launches what is supposed to be the comical conflict that gives the flagrant film its stinging edge. Sadly, there is nothing remotely hysterical or gently touching about the asinine antics in LOVE STINKS. Franklin feels there's a need to be caustic in this callous comedy but the tone of this simple and sassy movie feels staid at times. The exhausting moments are nerve-racking. Indeed LOVE STINKS and remember, I didn't provide the truthful title for this lame offering--the filmmakers did. Talk about truth in advertising!
7. THE OUT-OF-TOWNERS: An unnecessary and truly stale remake of the Neil Simon 1970 comedy that originally starred Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis. We have an Ohio couple (Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn) who seem to encounter one disaster after another in the big city. The comedy, at least according to the premise of this kinetic and klutzy flick, stems from the fact that Martin gets to do his over-exasperating shtick as he faces one crisis after another while taking on the frantic fury of the city. The problem with this version of THE-OUT-OF-TOWNERS is that finding the funny frustrations of city life and all its hustling happenings seems like such a tired cliche'. And to top it off, the familiar Steve Martin put-upon act manifests itself to the point of transparent silliness. This senseless remake doesn't know when to be subtle or forceful in its comedic timing. THE OUT-OF-TOWNERS will settle down with a renewed slaphappy life on the video shelves where it can make itself useful by gathering dust.
8. TEACHING MRS. TINGLE: Writer and teen guru Kevin Williamson gets his opportunity to direct the wicked and overwrought TEACHING MRS. TINGLE, a snide and sneering high school comedy satire that has all the subtlety of serving cyanide in the school's cafeteria. Williamson, best known for his contributions in movies like the SCREAM series and television's DAWSON's CREEK, conjures up a labored, uncharacteristically droll and mean-spirited farce that relentlessly goes across boundaries like an out-of-control vehicle. The great and gifted actress Helen Mirren is misused and totally wasted as the iron-fisted and aloof teacher Mrs. Tingle, a stiff upper-lipped repressed maiden who resents her students with a passion (gee, an emotionally -drained educator who tires of her pupils...go figure). If anything, this film is just a tawdry excuse for delivering commotion as a smoke screen for ushering out yet another dark teen-driven quickie that placates the appetite of young, misadventurous moviegoers. Stark and needlessly overbearing, there's a bad lesson that's being taught in TEACHING MRS. TINGLE. The lesson being the sensationalistic and sadistic sensibilities of a clumsy, over-compensating satire that deserves to choke on its own devilishly movie-made noose. Just like Dawson, Williamson's feisty and foolish frolicking is up a creek without a creative paddle.
9. WILD, WILD WEST: Barry Sonnenfeld's big screen remake of the WILD, WILD WEST is indeed nothing short of a woeful, woeful waste. Sonnenfeld reteams with his MEN IN BLACK star Will Smith to serve up a restive, posturing, uneven and totally spiritless flick that has Smith strutting around in the Old West while taking on 21st century-oriented gadgets with the assistance of computerized special effects. WILD, WILD WEST, based on the campy inspiration from the 1965-70 CBS-TV western series of the same name, simply seems to engage itself in the flattery of its own nuanced nonsense. This, of course, makes the film feel richly contrived and desperate. In short, WILD, WILD WEST is nothing but an excuse to capitalize on the dependable summer box office clout of studmuffin Will Smith. Smith and co-star Kevin Kline (who stars as sidekick Artemus Gordon, master of disguises and gadgetry) have the natural on screen chemistry likened to that of a peanut butter and gravy sandwich. This underdeveloped WILD, WILD WEST is mild, mild at best. Gee, how the WEST was wane!
10. WING COMMANDER: Simply a thinly-veiled, vapid, velocity-driven, semi-transparent space spectacle. WING COMMANDER is actually the big screen version of a top notch computer game by the same name. So the question remains: why must this space-age farce come off as a numbing, unengaging, banally boisterous, techno-tedious pile of intergalactic idiocy? Well, it did have that notion of capitalizing on the upcoming Star Wars: Episode I--The Phantom Menace craze. But then again when one paints a street lamp, it doesn't necessarily make them Picasso, now does it? Freddie Prinze Jr. and Matthew Lillard (both from "She's All That") are space combat pilots out to challenge the sordid existence of enemy solidiers by participating in a full-fledge galaxy war. Director Chris Roberts, like so many sci-fi movie filmmakers, flexes his special effects muscles which may be the one superficial motivator that this film can call its saving grace. And despite being a recycled hybrid from previous hits such as Top Gun, Star Wars, Star Trek, and Alien just to name a few, WING COMMANDER still comes off as a generic joke. The badboy daredevil antics of its two show-offy stars Prinze Jr. and Lillard, the ineffective jauntiness of the insipid dialogue, and the audacity to serve itself as the appetizer to THE PHANTOM MENACE's main course meal all becomes too much for the system to take. WING COMMANDER has all the natural vitality and brightness of Lillard's character's florescent follicles that are featured in this hyperactive space yarn.
Now to recap and list Frank's worst films of 1999:
1.) Baby Geniuses
2.) Chill Factor
3.) Detroit Rock City
4.) Forces of Nature
5.) Instinct
6.) Love Stinks
7.) The Out-of-Towners
8.) Teaching Mrs. Tingle
9.) Wild, Wild West
10.) Wing Commander