The 4th Annual Reel Stinkers Awards

It's that magical time of the year again. As we reflect back on the year that was, the time comes for me to think back on the films that stole 90 minutes to two hours out of my life. Time to count down the worst movies of 2009.

You'll notice some changes here. Usually, I count down the Top 5 movies, then go on to the Dishonorable Mentions - films that were bad, but not quite bad enough to crack the top. This year, I'm going beyond the Top 5, and giving you the Top 10. Yes, 2009 was a treasure trove of stinkers, and there were too many movies that I felt deserving of top spots. So, I'm upping the ante.

As always, my Best of 2009 list is on its way. There are still some films in limited release that I need to see, and I have to give them a chance before I write up my list. So, let's get this ball rolling, and carve up some cinematic turkeys.


THE 10 WORST FILMS OF 2009:

10. STREET FIGHTER: THE LEGEND OF CHUN-LI - This was Hollywood's second attempt to turn the successful Street Fighter video games into a live action franchise, and given how awful their first attempt (released back in 1994) was, this was surprisingly even worse. Kristin Kreuk from TV's Smallville portrays the title heroine as a boring and brooding vigilante. The film itself is kind of dark and murky, which is a complete turnaround from the video games, which are usually bright and colorful. We're left with a plodding action movie with little action, and fights that sometimes end seconds after they start. There's also some hilariously bad casting on display, such as the little girl they got to play Chun-Li as a child (who looks absolutely nothing like Kreuk), and a miscast Chris Klein as a police detective on the trail of Chun-Li.

9. DRAGONBALL EVOLUTION - I almost hate putting this movie in the Top 10, because it's one of those movies that are so bad, it's funny and entertaining for all the wrong reasons. This live action take on the popular Japanese manga and anime follows a young boy named Goku (Justin Chatwin) who teams up with a girl named Bulma Briefs (yes, that is her real name) and a team of young martial artists to track down objects called DragonBalls which, when joined together, can grant a "perfect wish" (whatever a "perfect wish" is). The cast frequently look just as confused as the audience is, the movie is terribly misdirected, and the only joy it creates is from the unintentional laughs it gets. Dragonball hit theaters in Japan a month before the U.S., so word got out quickly to the fans that the film was a total dog, and no one went to see it.

8. FIRED UP - In this pathetic farce, two of the oldest-looking high school football players ever captured on film (played by actors who are pushing 30 in real life) ditch football training camp, and go to cheerleader camp instead, hoping they can score with the girls there. Since the movie is PG-13, the sex is tame, and the raunchy humor is lame. Instead, we get some moldy old high school movie plot cliches. Will the cheerleader dating the school jerk wise up and fall for one of the football guys? Will the school's cheerleader team, which has routinely come in last place every year of the camp's competition, be able to bet their more popular rival team? Will you care? Fun fact - This was supposed to be Maxim Magazine's first attempt at a feature film franchise, similar to National Lampoon. When they saw this clunker, they had their name taken off the film, and all references to their involvement was covered up.

7. TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN - Yes, this movie was the most successful film of 2009, but do you honestly know anyone over the age of 20 who actually enjoyed watching this? Michael Bay's sequel was everything that was wrong about summer blockbusters tossed together into an overly long mess of a film. It was loud, it was it was annoying, it was chaotic, and it didn't make a bit of sense. It was a total sensory overload that seemed like it would never end. Bay's movie has reduced the Autobots and Decepticons (both childhood icons to me) into giant walking pieces of scrap metal that never shut up, and sometimes are hard to tell apart from one another.

6. OLD DOGS - This long-delayed comedy finally limped onto screens over Thanksgiving weekend. What a perfect time for such a giant cinematic turkey! A painfully unfunny mess featuring the very talented Robin Williams and John Travolta reducing themselves to playing a couple of friends who are forced to look after a pair of cute, bland Hollywood kids. Wackiness is supposed to ensue, but all we get is tedium. The film was edited over and over again in a futile attempt to save a doomed project, so we get a movie that seems to have been edited with a chainsaw. Scenes begin and end with little rhyme or reason, and characters fade in and out of the narrative with no explanation. The only amusing thing about this movie is how many talented people were suckered into it.

5. BRIDE WARS - This woeful comedy casts the lovely and talented Anne Hathaway and Kate Hudson as a pair of best friends who turn into feuding "Bridezillas" when their dream weddings are accidentally scheduled for the same time and place. A sensible person could solve this problem easily, but the screenplay has been written for idiots, and takes us through a long and insufferable plot where the two girls turn into obnoxious, screaming harpies who try to sabotage each other's wedding preparations. Seeing Hathaway and Hudson lower themselves to this level was depressing, not funny. The whole thing was a 90 minute exercise on the Idiot Plot, where the characters are forced to act like total idiots, or else the movie would be over in less than 10 minutes. If only the misery Bride Wars brings could be over so fast.

4. THE BOX - I've seen comedies with fewer laughs than The Box. Too bad this was intended to be a tense, psychological sci-fi thriller. James Marsden and Cameron Diaz (sporting one of the worst fake Southern accents in recent cinema memory) find a wooden box left on their doorstep by a mysterious man who has part of his face missing (Frank Langella). He tells the couple that if they push the button on top of the box, someone who they don't know will die, and the pair will receive $1 million. That's the easy part to comprehend. It quickly goes downhill into a confusing and messy sci-fi parable. We get gateways to the afterlife, mind control, nose bleeds, deformed feet, aliens, men who are back from the dead, and water-like vortexes appearing out of nowhere. What we don't get is an answer to what any of this means, and what writer-director Richard Kelly was thinking when he made this.

3. THE TWILIGHT SAGA: NEW MOON - I was not a fan of last year's Twilight, but New Moon was just an interminable and unwatchable piece of junk. No other franchise has mystified me with its popularity like Twilight has. This time around, lead heroine Bella (Kristen Stewart) is forced to break up with her vampire boyfriend, Edward (Robert Pattinson), and then spends the entire two and a half hours of the movie sulking, moping, and hanging out with her hunky best friend (Taylor Lautner), who walks around with his shirt off most of the film in order to show off his chiseled body, and is secretly a werewolf. Bella is one of the most self-centered heroines I've encountered in a movie. She cares only about herself, and routinely puts herself in danger, just so that she can have a vision of her vampire hottie, with no thought to anyone else who may care about her. That's the whole movie in a nutshell, only stretched to two and a half hours, which feel like six while you're watching it. If the glacial pace of the film doesn't get you, then the monotone and wooden performances will.

2. HALLOWEEN II - Rob Zombie's follow up to his 2007 revamp of Halloween is a dark, depressing, unpleasant, badly acted, and incoherent experience. The movie has no vision, and merely wants to be an endurance test to see how much depression and brutality the audience can take before they bolt for the theater doors. Young heroine Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) is trying to forget about the deadly events last Halloween. Meanwhile, the psychotic Michael Myers gets a visit from the ghost of his mom on a white horse (don't ask), who tells him to track down Laurie again. Michael spends days walking to the town, kidnaps Laurie, and then seemingly returns to his hideout in a matter of minutes. (Just one of the many glaring logic holes to be found within the film.) We get a lot of graphic violence with little meaning, and a lot of weird images that writer-director Zombie doesn't even try to explain. Not even an out of the blue cameo appearance by the king of polka parodies, "Weird Al" Yankovic, can salvage this garbage.

1. ALL ABOUT STEVE - This is not only the worst film of 2009, but quite possibly one of the worst romantic comedies ever made. Sandra Bullock plays a woman named Mary Horowitz, who is supposed to come across as quirky and lovable, but often comes across as an insane, borderline psychotic, nutjob. Mary is set up on a blind date with a guy named Steve (Bradley Cooper), a cameraman from a cable news channel. This single date is enough to turn Mary into an obsessed stalker. She becomes so obsessed with the man that it causes her to lose her job, which she sees as a sign that she should devote her life to stalking and following Steve wherever he goes. Remember, this is supposed to be a light-hearted comedy. Instead, it ends up being a repulsive misfire of a movie. Bullock is embarrassing, forced to wear obnoxiously loud clothes, and act like a mentally unhinged 16-year-old with a crush. It gets even worse when Bullock falls down into an abandoned mine, and becomes a hero, because she helps rescue a class of deaf children who were on a field trip to an amusement park, and all ended up falling down into the mine. (I'm not making this up.) It's stupid, it's kind of disturbing, and it's the worst time I had at the movies all year.

Whew...Finally got that done with. Now it's time to move onto the Dishonorable Mentions of 2009. Make no mistake, even though the following films did not crack the Top 10, they are still very bad movies. Approach any of the following films with extreme caution.


DISHONORABLE MENTIONS:

The Unborn, Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, The Uninvited, New in Town, Push, Confessions of a Shopaholic, Madea Goes to Jail, The Last House on the Left, Miss March, Alien Trespass, Fast and Furious, Hannah Montana: The Movie, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, Dance Flick, Year One, I Love You Beth Cooper, Orphan, Aliens in the Attic, The Time Traveller's Wife, The Goods, Post Grad, The Final Destination, Gamer, Sorority Row, Pandorum, The Stepfather, Planet 51, Ninja Assassin, Transylmania, Did You Hear About the Morgans?, The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day


THE INDIVIDUAL REEL STINKERS AWARDS:

WORST SEQUEL:
Tie between New Moon and Halloween II

MOST UNNECESSARY SEQUEL:
The Final Destination

WORST PERFORMANCE BY A RESPECTED ACTOR/ACTRESS:
Anne Hathaway in Bride Wars

WORST OVERALL PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR/ACTRESS:
The entire cast of New Moon

WORST ANIMATED FILM:
Planet 51

WORST TREND IN MOVIES LAST YEAR:
Tie between Romantic "comedies" that are painful to watch, and vampire movies

WORST REMAKE:
The Stepfather (Halloween II is disqualified, since it is technically not a remake of 1981's Halloween II.)

WORST IDEA FOR A MOVIE THAT NEVER COULD HAVE WORKED:
All About Steve

REPEAT OFFENDERS (ACTORS WHO APPEARED IN MORE THAN ONE STINKER IN 2009):
Dakota Fanning in New Moon and Push
Thomas Haden Church in All About Steve and Aliens in the Attic
J.K. Simmons in New in Town, Aliens in the Attic, and Post Grad

WORST ON-SCREEN TEAMING:
Mudflap and Skids, the obnoxious jive-talking Autobots in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

MOVIE BLOCKBUSTER THAT DIDN'T DESERVE TO BE:
Tie between Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and New Moon

STUDIO THAT RELEASED THE MOST STINKERS IN 2009:
Fox for releasing Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, Dragonball Evolution, Bride Wars, All About Steve, Miss March, Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, I Love You Beth Cooper, Aliens in the Attic, and Post Grad. Keep up the good work, guys!

Well, there you have it. The worst of 2009 in a nutshell. Now let us never speak of them again, and hope that everyone involved with them gets to do a good movie in 2010.

Have a great year, and happy viewing to you all!

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