Almost every movie I’ve ever seen, good or bad, has had something good about it. But when I try to think of the worst, I usually only find a few that I can’t think had something good about them. I guess the worst horror movie (my most expert genre) I’ve ever seen would be the 1996 Stephen King adaptation, Thinner, directed by Tom Holland (poor guy, had a great career in the 1980’s).
As for non-horror, there are some freaking unbelievably bad movies. A lot of them movies a lot of people like. Like, I find The Godfather to be so overrated it makes me sick (no offense to anyone who likes it). I don’t like most gangster films anyway (though I love John Landis’s gangster comedies!) and even worse are lame, contemplative, 3-hour long ones that think they’re art-films.
Though, speaking of John Landis, Animal House was putrid! Talk about movies declining I.Q. scores. You also couldn’t pay me (well…you could, but it would set you back a pretty penny) to watch all those Star Trek and Star Wars movies. I also have no interest in Lord of the Rings, Spiderman, Pirates of the Carribean, X-Men, countless other annoying franchises.
I guess I should just…say it: almost all mainstream movies now suck. They’re loud, mindless, pandering, lower-middle-brow bores with music scores that all sound the same, similar camera tricks and visual styles, and peppered with constant, bad one-liners. I don’t know who deserves the blame for this, but I notice this seems to go back as far as 1997’s Men in Black and all those incredibly irritating disaster movies (Armageddon, Independence Day, Twister, Dante’s Peak).
But, I think I know just who to blame… Walt Disney studios (NO!!!). I love a lot of the mainstream movies they were making in the early to mid 1990’s (well the animated ones at least)- Aladdin, Pocahontas, A Goofy Movie, Toy Story. They (at the time) always understood the need for a balance between art and pandering to the mainstream. I dare say, in the face of all the intellectuals who hate Disney because of so-called crimes against classic literature and history and their fear of sexuality, that they were becoming more progressive starting in 1989 (of course, today we see it lead them nowhere).
But all the obnoxious Inside the Actors’ Studio-calibre knuckleheads they kept hiring (perhaps starting with John Candy back in 1990) to do the animal voices were loud and over the top and screeching one-liners constantly. Now we have things like “mm, tastes like chicken” ingrained in popular culture thanks to Nathan Lane (The Lion King), who found a 2nd career in family-genre films (and I personally don’t find his voice that interesting), and Aladdin‘s genie, Robin Williams, who sounded like he was about to have a heart-attack or a nervous breakdown any given second.
Other studios accepted these hundred-million dollar grossing blockbusters as the formula to follow to make their movies hits, hence 20th Century Fox’s animation department rising like a phoenix (Ferngully, Anastasia), as well as Universal (An American Tale, The Land Before Time) and MGM-UA’s controversially violent features (All Dogs Go to Heaven, The Secret of Nimh).
Now those were just films for the kids. But it started to penetrate the mainstream in… oh, I would say 1995. The year of the big-budget blockbuster (Babe, Casper, Jumanji, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie). Now that year wasn’t so bad. I found a lot of entertainment value in all of these movies (as well as 1994’s similarly over the top- but appropriately wacky character-driven fantasy The Mask with Jim Carrey, who became a curse for American comedy on another level- though I personally love Liar Liar and The Truman Show).
But that year became a springboard for a huge wave of garbage that soon flowed in. The remake of 101 Dalmatians, What Dreams May Come, Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, Jingle All the Way, Space Jam, Stuart Little, The Frighteners, a slew of Jonathan Taylor Thomas movies, and many others (I don’t want to think of any more, my head’s starting to hurt). Suddenly it was all fast-paced, loud, brainless, and packed with bad one-liners. Anything for a laugh, or anything the writers assumed families and children would laugh at (this also dominated the gross-out and sex-comedy genres).
The studios just took the formula from earlier films and removed all that was interesting and entertaining about the other movies, or they just kept pushing that formula until it broke. And it broke right away. Hell, Disney had already been dipping in quality in my opinion with The Lion King which was so damn sappy and, was mostly about how to make Jonathan Taylor Thomas sound funny (they failed) and how to push one of those crappy muzak / easy-listening styled ballads (here it was Elton John’s “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?”, in 1991 it was Celine Dion & Peabo Bryson’s “Beauty and the Beast”).
I don’t know if it’s gotten better or worse in the last 6 or so years. There are still way too many studio films that you can’t tell the difference between. Shrek, Ice Age, Snow Dogs, King Kong, The Stepford Wives, Underdog, Transformers, Alvin and the Chipmunks, Elf (and so many copycats), and not just family / gimmick-comedy films either- sports movies, war movies, documentaries, they’re all becoming formula-driven.