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Reviews
Mixed Nuts (1994)
Miserable
This is possibly Steve Martin's worst film. From the bad dye job (WHY?) to the bad acting to the bad writing to the poor direction to the crappy sets to the cheap costumes to the unfunny gags to the unsuccessful attempts at physical comedy to the sheer waste of great talent to the incredible, unbelievable, mind-blowing amount of sheer BOREDOM contained within, Mixed Nuts has it all. The jokes fall flat, the music is embarrassing and cartoonish, the characters are uninteresting...ugh, I'm bored even writing this review.
I am stunned by how bad this was. It's nearly impossible to believe that the brains behind When Harry Met Sally directed this total failure of a movie. That was 90 minutes I will never get back.
Four Christmases (2008)
Mean-spirited and offensive
Brad and Kate, an urbanite unmarried couple with no plans to tie the knot or ever have children, are forced to visit their respective families after bad weather grounds planes and keeps them from going on their yearly tropical Christmas vacation together. And so we the audience are treated to nonstop cruelty, violence, profanity, and humorless mockery of the Christmas tradition for the rest of the film.
When Brad and Kate aren't being attacked, vomited on, and belittled, they're bickering about their increasingly deteriorating relationship, which is maybe not as solid as they thought. There is some funny dialogue, and the fish-out-of-water classism is amusing at times. But a few witticisms once in a while can't make up for the rest.
Four Christmases had potential; as a concept, it makes sense. Nearly everyone can relate to dysfunctional family comedies, and with four families in the mix this movie could have been hilarious. Instead, it's relentlessly cruel. If the script had been tempered with any kind of warmth, love, or holiday spirit, perhaps it would have been a Christmas classic. Unfortunately, the writers saw fit only to mock Christmas and Christians both under the pretenses of making a Christmas movie.
That the filmmakers loathe Christmas and everything it stands for is evident in every scene. That they expect their Christian, or Christmas-celebrating audiences to laugh along with their pathological hatred of the holiday and its higher meaning is absurd. The cast is indisputably talented but their skills are wasted on this charmless, unfunny bore. What a shame.
Hang 'Em High (1968)
A little dull, a lot disappointing
Hang 'Em High: what a great premise for a movie! It's 1889 in the Indian Territory. An ex- lawman is wrongly lynched by a group of strangers for cattle rustling and murder. He survives the hanging and takes up his badge once more to get his revenge. In the meantime he encounters a bloodthirsty judge who sees it as his duty to bring law and order to a lawless territory by way of the rope, and a beautiful, mysterious woman seeking vengeance of her own.
Unfortunately, the film falls short. The pacing is tortuously slow in all the wrong places, none of the shootouts are impressive or exciting, and there's not a single character worth caring about. What should have been a legendary classic was instead a two-hour bore. Even the love story between Rachel and Cooper is tepid at best.
It should go without saying that Cooper gets his revenge, but the final scenes are completely anticlimactic and unsatisfying. His confrontation with the three surviving men who tried unsuccessfully to kill him not once, but twice, is a cakewalk and very short. There is no suspense and no real drama aside from a baffling conversation with one of his foes, whom he saves from suicide and then forgives for reasons that are never made clear.
Hang 'Em High should have been great. It's certainly better than a typical spaghetti Western, but overall this is a dully plodding film that never really pulls us in. If you're a die-hard Clint Eastwood fan or a Westerns aficionado, it's worth seeing once. Otherwise, you're better off with any of the dozens of superior films in the genre.
Smother (2008)
Essentially unwatchable
Watching Smother was perhaps the longest not-quite-90-minutes of my life. There wasn't a laugh to be had; in fact, I don't remember ever cracking a smile. Diane Keaton was horridly unfunny as a middle-aged chain-smoking dog hoarder, the textbook overbearing mother character, a relentlessly irritating woman who clearly suffers from some kind of personality disorder. She is manipulative, conniving, melodramatic, childish, narcissistic, and worst of all, boring.
I suppose I should briefly mention the other characters, but why bother? It was just a long string of movie clichés--the dippy, socially inept distant relative who's just trying to break into "The Industry", the gruff and long-suffering but somehow still lovable father, the mild- mannered wife who just can't take it anymore (but eventually moves beyond the discord and resignedly comes home), the herd of unhousebroken dogs who like to chew throw pillows while everyone is away, etc.
God, what a snore. I've never been a Diane Keaton fan and Smother only reminded me why. Overacting is overacting, no matter how many pictures you did in your prime. Her attempts at physical comedy were especially humiliating. What was the director thinking?
While I like Dax Shepard and can even sometimes tolerate Liv Tyler, their performances were so lackluster and dull that it was clear that neither actor gave a damn about this movie. That was okay, because neither did I. Keaton's endless self-absorbed prattling was intolerable and at times Shepard's dislike for her seemed genuine. By the end of the movie I wanted to slap her myself.
Awful.
Twister (1996)
Unintentionally hilarious
Twister's special effects are very good. That they've stood the test of time and are still fun to watch even thirteen years later is a testament to how mind-blowing they must have been in 1996. And the film's treatment of Oklahoma and Oklahomans is surprisingly kind; while the storm-chasers are portrayed as lunatics, the locals are not reduced to redneck caricatures, as is so often the case when Hollywood depicts people from the heartland.
But.
Everything else about this movie is dismal, from the melodramatic overacting to the cheesy dialogue to the unbelievably stupid plot. The writing is tremendously bad, and nearly every line uttered in the film is an action movie cliché. The tornadoes growl like animals and have a knack for dissipating at just the right moments. Meanwhile, humans survive storms of debris and high winds without a scratch. The plot is formulaic and predictable; if you don't know who's going to die or what's going to happen at the end, you've never seen an action film.
If you have a thing for bad movies, Twister is a gem. If you're looking for a riveting natural disaster story, skip it.
Chasing Christmas (2005)
Embarrassing train wreck, a cheap mess
Every once in awhile, I decide to watch a movie knowing full well that I'll hate it. Usually I'm hoping it'll be bad enough that a little booze and some similarly critical friends will turn a tedious ninety-minute torture-fest into something that's at least amusing, if not hilariously bad.
We poured some wine, dimmed the lights, and settled in with Chasing Christmas, a made-for-TV movie that should have been gloriously bad but was instead just boring. Tom Arnold stars as Jack, a bitter, angry man with a bratty teenage daughter, a failed marriage, and the worst case of rhinitis since the entire cast of Scarface sniffed their way through years of cocaine addiction.
It seems Jack hates Christmas because he caught his wife shagging some guy in the coat closet at his daughter's Christmas play. The wife, who is unapologetically skanky and slutty throughout the movie, left him for another man and moved to London. At one point, this subplot is showcased in a ridiculous green screen scene with her new paramour, some champagne, and Big Ben seen through the windows beyond.
Like most terrible Christmas films, the movie's plot loosely and tiresomely follows the plot of A Christmas Carol. Except this time the ghosts of Christmas Past and Present have personalities. Past, played by a creepy little man with the soft Southern drawl of a registered sex offender, wants to stay in the past, and leads Jack and Present (played by some blonde Amazon who is neither funny nor sexy) on a series of repetitive, madcap dashes through the decades. Hamfisted homages to other Christmas movies abound and the sets, costumes, and extras are about what you'd expect from a TV movie; that is to say, they are shamefully bad. The "Goofs" section for this movie should be the longest in IMDb history.
Look for Tom Arnold and the slut wife actress playing younger versions of themselves in the latter part of the movie; despite a cheap wig on Arnold and some bad vintage costumes, both are clearly middle-aged and wrinkly. Typical Baby Boomer conceit or mere low budget corner-cutting? You decide! Also amusing is a scene in which Tom Arnold decries the lack of Santa-less Coke cans in a drug store; in the next shot, there's a huge display of non-seasonal Coke cans in the background. Oops.
Chasing Christmas drags on and on and by the end, we were drinking heavily, solemnly, white-knuckled grips on our glasses. All mirth was gone and even Arnold's embarrassing, desperate reformation couldn't bring the smiles back. This movie was tawdry, cheap, ill- conceived, and worst of all, boring. Avoid it.
Bad Santa (2003)
Tedious, ugly smut disguised as comedy
It's not often I consider a film to be so irredeemably ugly and hateful that I can't find some positive quality about it. Even when I hate a movie, I can usually point to something that was done well. But not this time.
I suppose I could say that Bad Santa elicited a few guilty chuckles here and there; I felt dirty and uncomfortable laughing but the sheer ridiculousness of the titular character did, once or twice, bring a sheepish smile to my lips. It wasn't enjoyable, however, and I ardently wish I hadn't seen this venomously hateful wart of a film.
Billy Bob Thornton plays a sodden, sociopathic con man who, along with a smarmy, foul- mouthed midget, uses his position as a shopping mall Santa to break into department stores after hours and crack safes. He is also an abusive, self-loathing sex addict and, as his midget accomplice informs him at one point, everything about him is ugly. He commits random acts of destruction and violence in a sort of drunken haze; this is not a sympathetic character, nor even an antihero. It is clear from the beginning that "Santa" is a very dangerous, chaotic man.
There's so much profanity in the dialogue that it's often hard to make out exactly what the characters are talking about. You can feel the writers' love of potty-mouthed toilet humor, as they interject it unnecessarily into every single scene. There is also a predictable number of graphic sex scenes, crotch-kicking gags, unfunny jokes involving a senile elderly woman and her emotionally disturbed, mentally challenged son, and so forth. Never does the movie tinge its irreverence with even a hint of warmth; this is a coldly cruel production designed to titillate the lowest and worst in its audience.
I came away from Bad Santa feeling unhappy and disturbed. There is no message here, no point, except that calculated nihilism will always win in the end and concepts like love, beauty, and hope are for saps and suckers who exist only as playthings for the antisocial. This is a movie for true misanthropes only.
Scrooged (1988)
A dismal, dreary film with no clear purpose
Bill Murray stumbles through this muddled mishmash of Christmas clichés and vague references to the classic Dickens characters. Scrooged is an ugly mess punctuated by random, unnecessary violence and sexual innuendo. This is indeed a dark film, as other reviewers have noted, but without a deeper meaning or purpose. The writers seem to have written it simply for the dubious pleasure of wallowing in their hatred for the holiday itself.
The predictable ending, which is nauseating in its insincerity, made me cringe with embarrassment for Murray. He rants madly about how he "gets it" and beseeches viewers to spread a little Christmas cheer and goodwill into their everyday lives. And then he smarms his way through a humiliating routine that lasts well into the credits, complete with a "Feed me, Seymour!" reference to his previous cameo in Little Shop of Horrors.
I remember enjoying Scrooged when I was a child; now I wonder why my parents allowed me to watch such pointless, inappropriately sexual and violent "Christmas" dreck. This movie is trash.