Well, here we are at the end of another semester and another year. Generally speaking, it was not a very good year for movies. Sure, there have been great ones, but for the most part, the cinematic output from Hollywood has been mediocre at best.
So why not take this time to honor the lumps of coal that the industry gave us this year? Here, for your reading pleasure, are the 10 worst films of 2008. Keep in mind that this fair columnist did not see all the bad movies that came out this year, but from what I saw, this was the cream of the crap.
10. "RAMBO" - Sylvester Stallone's attempt to bring back his Vietnam hero turned into a vicious, racist attack on the Burmese culture. Killing untold nameless brown people was the modus operandi for this sequel.
9. "DIARY OF THE DEAD" - Poor George A. Romero. His latest societal diatribe, with zombies, was painfully obvious and shoddily made. It's like a low rent "Cloverfield," but with the dumbest people you'll ever meet.
8. "MIRRORS" - Kiefer Sutherland faces off against mirrors and tries to make it scary. About as misguided as M. Night Shyamalan making a movie where people run away from wind, but not nearly as hilarious.
7. "THE EYE" - Has Jessica Alba ever starred in a movie that was even remotely good? This horror flick, the first remake on the list, was about a woman whose donor eyes carried a terrible curse. Seriously, that was the concept.
6. "10,000 BC" - Roland Emmerich is known for big, dumb action movies, but this is the first movie he's ever made that could be considered boring. The dialogue is laughable, the plot is standard stuff and the CGI in certain scenes is inexcusably bad.
5. "88 MINUTES" - Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Al Pacino slums in a real-time thriller where the killer is revealed within the first 15 minutes, the dialogue contains lines like "I thought your job was to be right!" and Pacino's alarm clock goes off to "Ms. New Booty." This movie sat on the shelf for over a year, and for good reason.
4. "PROM NIGHT" - The killer in this movie stays in the exact same room for most of the runtime, and yet five people manage to get killed under his watch in one night. A PG-13 remake of an R-rated horror movie, with no boobs, blood or scares. Lazy, lazy, lazy.
3. "THE HOTTIE AND THE NOTTIE" - The first hour of Paris Hilton's magnum opus is eye-clawingly bad, and then she goes off-screen for most of the last half hour and it becomes tolerable. The film can be summed up by this bit of philosophy from Paris' character: "A world without orgasms is like a world without flowers."
2. "ONE MISSED CALL" - Nothing I say about this movie can change the fact that there's a scene in which they perform an exorcism on a cell phone. One of the worst horror movies ever made.
1. "COLLEGE" - If this movie weren't so offensive, tasteless and stupid, it would not be this high on the list. It could have been an ordinary college comedy, but then the filmmakers had to make the frat boys sadistic sociopaths, the heroes some of the most annoying people to ever grace the screen, and the girls' vapid breasts on stilts. This is shameful, reprehensible moviemaking from a female director who completely blows an opportunity.
That's it for this semester, gang. Happy holiday film watching!
Wes Lawson can be reached at 536-3311 ext. 275 or w4027@siu.edu.
