OK, a few comments. First off, I tend to like movies that critics like, and since RT is a site that aggregates critic comments, I would have been very surprised to see any movie I liked get one of the worst aggregate scores. I’m more likely to enjoy a film that the critics loved but which audiences hated (a perfect example is my all time favorite film, Magnolia, which made 50 critics’ best of the year lists, won several film festival awards and had an amazing cast, yet most people I know thought it was too long, boring and didn’t make any sense…I however couldn’t stop thinking about it for years).
Now the only beef I’ve had with critics is far too often, they seem to have sticks up their collective asses and can’t seem to wrap their minds around comedies that are supposed to be a little out there, a little off kilter. And as such, the ONLY film on this entire list of 100 with which I completely disagree, even though it was way up at #7 with 0% aggregate score, meaning no critic liked it, was Strange Wilderness. It was a stupid, stoner comedy, and even though I’ve never had as much as a toke in my life, I love movies like that. I guess have an “offbeat” sense of humor…I appreciate the humor that a lot of people just plain don’t get. And I have to assume that critics in this case just missed the point, or were afraid to go against other critics for fear that they would be looked down upon for liking something so “pedestrian” as it were. This was one of those movies that had me laughing from start to finish to the point where I couldn’t breathe I was laughing so hard. It was patently ridiculous, crude, crass and often times stupid as hell, but for me, humor is about building an expectation and then providing something that is so antithetical to your expectations that the laughter is shocked out of you, and that’s what this movie did for me. So even though I have high brow, art film tastes, I loved this movie the way I loved all the Abrahams Zucker & Zucker movies from the 80s (Airplane, Naked Gun, etc.). It was perverse, original, unique and so off kilter that I couldn’t help but love it…and that is the only movie of the 100 that I own.
Now, since RT only aggregates from 2000–2009 (being that they started in 2000) I looked at IMDB’s bottom 100, which was voted on by movie lovers, and I have to say, I am in full agreement with the vast majority of what these true movie lovers have ranked as the top 250 of all time, so it was no surprise to me that I didn’t find a single movie on the bottom 100 on that site that I enjoyed. And I noticed that on a 10 point scale, Strange Wilderness was right in the middle, about 5.1 (bottom 100 ranked at 1.4 or less), which indicates to me it was a movie that some people loved and others hated. But according to movie lovers, it is FAR from one of the worst movies, even your best movies don’t generally score more than 8 or so on this site, so I’d consider a movie ranked at 5 or above on IMDB to be one I’d likely enjoy…it could be “iffy”, but I think in this case it’s one of those movies that some just hated. But you asked me to justify why I liked it, so I’ll give you a few examples of things that stood out ofr me.
The concept of Strange Wilderness was that a TV wildlife show, a lot more akin to say Wild Kingdom than to say Crocodile Hunter, was successful for a man for many years, and when he died, his stoner son and his stoner buddies took over the show, which then began to tank in the ratings, leading them to make one last ditch desperate effort to save the show, by setting off on a quest to find bigfoot. What I liked specifically about the film was the whole concept of these guys who were way out of their league trying to do something they knew nothing about. So, what you would see on the screen was typical nature show footage, with soft spoken narration that in tone sounded pitch perfect for the show, but the content of which was hilariously inappropriate, yet the dialogue was delivered sincerely as if the new stewards of the show remained blissfully unaware of how stupid and inappropriate their narration actually came off. To give some specific examples, the following are a few of the narrated lines from the newest incarnation of this nature show,
Look at the balls on that monkey, or as a lion will call it, a “sack lunch”
Monkeys make up 80% of the world’s monkey population.
Bears take their name from a football team in Chicago.
Bears kill over 2 million salmon a year, while attacks by salmon on bear are much more rare.
No matter how many sea lions are killed each year by sharks, it never seems like enough.
Such is the nature of this film, leading me to suspect that film critics do not understand absurd humor, and/or are afraid to admit it if they do.
Now, to answer two other questions you posed, first, are you the only one, @py_sue who owns any of these movies…answer, I do indeed own Strange Wilderness, but none of the other 99. As for your other question of what your list says about you, and I’ll try to be as delicate as possible….
hottie and the nottie – 67 (only because joel david moore is in it) – You seem to have explained this well, I myself own Embrace of the Vampire simply because Alyssa Milano is topless in it, I understand.
Cheaper By the Dozen 2 (2005) – 98, and yours, mine and ours – 63 (taped it off of on demand tv) – tells me you like light hearted family appropriate, yet highly generic comedy that doesn’t really break any new ground, and which lacks any real originality, but which is mildly amusing and inoffensive.
fear dot com – 30 – much like your taste in comedy, you seem to be OK with generic horror that uses the gimmick du jour to deliver a series of “gotcha” type scares, but which delivers nothing thought provoking, nothing suspenseful, and which goes where a million other movies just like it have gone before. This says to me that perhaps you haven’t seen enough “good” horror movies.
Extreme ops – 81 – never saw it, have no idea what it is, but if I had to guess from the title, I’d guess it’s the action movie equivalent of the type of horror and comedy movies you like, delivers mindless eye candy but treads no new ground…but that’s just a gut feeling.
meet the spartans – 25, epic movie – 21, and date movie – 77 – these tell me that you have no idea what spoof is. I mentioned the films of Jim Abrahams and David & Jerry Zucker, those along with early Mel Brooks (pretty much anything up through Spaceballs), and more recently the Wayans Brothers movies, and these were satirical, spoof movies that used references to other movies, TV shows, and other elements of pop culture to make a humorous movie. The films were dumb humor, and again not what the critics generally liked, but they were roll on the floor funny. The problem with all the “Movie” movies (i.e. “Date Movie”, “Epic Movie”, “Disaster Movie”, and the one without the word Movie in the title, Meet the Spartans) is that they are not funny. What the successful filmmakers in this genre of spoof films have done is to take a bunch of pop culture references and turn them into jokes. What Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, writer of these abominations have done is to find a bunch of pop culture references, and just string them together. Just referring to a scene in or quoting a line from a popular movie is not funny, and you could literally just cut the actual scenes from some of the movies that they “referenced” and string them together in the same order that they did in their so called spoof movies, and you’d have almost the same result. Throw in a couple of lame, told a million times jokes and you’re there.
And basically, these have spawned all sorts of other awful movies that do the same thing…everything from Superhero Movie to My Big Fat Independent Movie…more “Movie” movies that have no jokes. All these Friedberg/Seltzer movies came about because these same two guys worked on several of the Scary Movie movies. Only thing is, each of those movies had 4 other people who were funny (mostly Wayans’) who ensured that the movie actually had some jokes and not just pop culture references. Now if you want to see a “good” “Movie” movie that these two did NOT work on, so you can know the difference between a good and bad spoof movie, check out Not Another Teen Movie…other than the Scary Movie series, the only good “Movie” movie to come out of the 2000s. And of course if you want to see the “Movie” movie that started it all, the funniest spoof comedy “Movie” movie of all time is “Kentucky Fried Movie”. You watch THAT movie, I guarantee you will know why I say those movies you listed are not good.
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