No one wants to make a bad movie, but...

I'll pass.

Meet the Blacks is a cheap harmless parody movie with a super super specific target:  purge movies.  I know what you're asking yourself;  aren't those movies still popular and aren't there only a few of them?  Isn't the subject of these parody movies usually films that are on their way out as far as popularity and of which there is a generous pool of content from which to spoof?  Yes, yes, and yes.  But yet, Meet the Blacks still exists (or as the GOP would say, 'persists') and its insistence to exist (say that 3 times fast!) helps no one.

There are some funny lines and I'm not trying to be a buzzkill by saying it's bad, but it is. And it's also really really stupid.  I'm not sitting her seething I paid to see this but I am sitting here wondering 'why does this need to be a thing?'

My formula is very simple, each Wayans adds a letter grade. When you just have one, you're in trouble.

Same comments as Meet the blacks (see #9) except that there's only one movie to draw material from.  I guess you could count the books but let's be honest, no one who isn't a hard up 50 year old mother of 3 has actually read them.  

50 Shades of Black is basically a remake of 50 shades of grey which might be funny if the original film wasn't so laughable.  it's like making a movie ridiculing Gangnam style.  It's already a joke, what's the point?

What this movie really parodies then is people's obsession with 50 shades of gray, specifically white people.  But those white people are already super embarrassed they like this crap so they're not going to show up.  And non white people only know of the books and they don't read them so they're not going to the theatre.  Who's left as your audience?  Well, people who like parody movies like this guy.  Even I couldn't stand this lazy, boring 'straight to video even though that doesn't exist anymore', thoroughly unfunny attempt at cashing in on a fad only future authors of "2010s kids' nostalgia articles will remember.

Run away from this movie and beat the devil

There's a special place in movie hell for someone who takes a pretty cool idea and ruins it.  Enter Incarnate.  It's basically Dreamscape meets the Exorcist and if you have no clue what that means here's the pitch that probably got the movie funded in the first place:  A demon killer enters the mind of the possessed to help them navigate their darkest fears and free them from the evil entity's hold.  Doesn't that sound cool?

It does sound cool but it only takes 10 minutes to figure out that this movie isn't going to do anything more with the premise that gather a a bunch of cliches together and throw them at the audience.  

Aaron Eckhart is the disillusioned doctor who kills demons all the while mourning the death of his son and child and searching for the particular demon that killed them.  Add a couple of disposable sidekicks ,a possessed child, a frightened mother, an estranged father and you have the recipe for...every single horror movie you've seen over the past 30 years.

But it's worse than that.  I suspect that somewhere along the way someone thought either "this movie could make a great tv show" or "this tv show idea could make a great movie."  I say this because everything in Incarnate screams 'pilot.'  The entire story has a 'demon-of-the-week' feeling, the character development is incremental, and the ending commits to nothing. I can practically hear someone say 'we've set up a hell of an arc for this season!"

Yup, it's a pilot and what's more, a FAILED pilot and as someone said years ago, ain't nobody got time for that.

If you watch this, you're in deep...

I'm going to get grief for this one.  How can I put a true story where real people died on a list with a terrible comedy starring Mike Epps?  I blame it on a medical condition.  Over the course of the past half decade I've somehow developed a very serious allergic reaction to Peter Berg.  If you don't think you know who he is, I bet you do.  He's the former actor who directed "Very Bad Things", "The Rundown", "Friday Night Lights", "The Kingdom", "Hancock", and that modern classic, "Battleship."

I happen to like "Very Bad Things" and "Friday Night Lights" but somewhere along Berg's maturing as a director he stopped maturing and is now inhabiting this very particular niche I find annoying.  Let's start with his maturation: his movies all look the same.  Go back and watch his entire imdb filmography and you'll see shaky cam, overexposure, quick cuts and scene after scene of characters exchanging mundane banter which is clearly either improv or meant to sound like improv.  He does this purposely and, I guess, purposefully, to great an 'authentic' feel for his movies.  

His technique worked for the very small, intimate story of "Friday Night Lights" and even "Very Bad Things" but not so much for "The Rundown," which is an action movie.  Action movies which look and 'feel' real end up being quiet boring to look at (think anything Michael Mann does which is more action than drama: Blackhat and Miami Vice, for instance).  By the time he got to his first big budget film, "The Kingdom," I started to see the limitations of his choices.  "The Kingdom" takes place in Saudia Arabia but he shoots it like it takes place in the same small town as "Friday Night Lights."

"Hancock" was better because of the subject matter.  it was subversive.  Hancock was a superhero but one who existed in the 'real world' and his heroics reflect that.  It was okay then that the whole thng was shot like an episode of Cops and that the fantastic was seen through security tapes and news channel helicopters.  

But then came Battleship.  This is a story about an alien invasion.  It's supposed to be extraordinary and the movie sufferred because Berg's directing style demanded it stay grounded.  I didn't want realistic, I wanted ridiculous, and Berg's inability to change the prism through which he views (and shows) a world, couldn't deliver that. 

So what is a good director to do when he has a very limited range?  Well, pick projects that play to your strengths. So Berg began the 'based on a true story' part of his career.  It's okay that he shoots everything as if it is 'real' because it WAS real.  That makes sense, right?

"Lone Survivor" came first in 2013 and I liked it.  But my b.s. detector started working overtime during the last 20 minutes.  There's a huge battle between good guys and bad guys which I suspected, and I've since confirmed, never happened. It feels forced, like it belongs in a typical action movie.  But that's a script issue, and I don't blame Berg for that.  What I do blame him for is that when the movie turns into an action film, his directing style can't keep up.  As misguided as it might be, the script calls for an epic last battle and he shoots it like it's a robbery at a Seven Eleven.  

Now comes Deepwater Horizon and Patriots Day. Both came out this year and both are true stories.  Theoritically, his directing style would be a good fit but here's where my allergy comes in. He's playing it safe.  And when a director plays it safe, they get lazy.  And when they get lazy, all of the urgency and passion in the movie is sucked out.  You may not notice if the script is good enough or if the action is distracting enough, but you do notice when the story is small enough.  Deepwater Horizon is such a story.  It should be an uplifting true drama of real people fighting to survive and get back to their families. It should feel compelling. Instead, if feels dull.  Peter Berg is bored and it shows.  

P.S.  "Patriots Day" has a better script and story (more action, more twists & turns, more characters) which saves it from Deepwater Horizon's monotonous fate.

Insert your own No. 2 poop joke here

I've been hearing about a sequel to Zoolander for years.  I actually got half way excited a few years ago when I read that Ben Stiller and Justin Theroux were writing it because they came up with Tropic Thunder.  It wasn't until I began watching Zoolander 2 that I remembered something I must have suppressed:  the first one wasn't very good either.

Zoolander 2 is not funny.  The jokes are lame and lazy and are mainly about mocking pretty people.  I guess that's fine but you can only hear so many jokes about people being stupid without feeling bored.  I think that has to do with stupid people not being self aware enough to respond in any way to the jokes.  If, as the saying goes,  "acting is reacting," this makes killing off the co star of the original a huge mistake and one from which the movie does not recover.  I don't know if it would have saved the entire film, but without Christine Taylor there is no 'straight' person who can react to the jokes.  Without any context of 'normal,' the jokes fall flat and the audience is left with Stiller's Zoolander just playing dumb.

Thankfully, this is not a fourth sequel to the "1st, 2nd, 3rd or 4th Wave" films

The worst part about the film series Twilight is that it inspired studios to find the next Twilight.  That meant shifting through hundreds of Young Adult fiction with basically the same bones:  cute teenage girl is put in a fantastic/supernatural situation and has to find the strength to survive, all the while trying (and usually failing) to save her family and hook up with the cute guy she's crushing on.  

The 5th Wave is the same damn thing. There's an alien invasion that (mostly) takes place off screen because oh, these movies are worth it to make but they're not worth 100 million dollars to make so they can't really show anything you might want to see.  But it doesn't matter.  You've seen it before and after and there's nothing in the 5th Wave that makes it any different.

forget out of the shadows, how about out of my memory? Rimshot.

Um...can I get my turtles back now?  I'm going to be one of those annoying 90s kid you see quoted in Buzzfeed articles you don't click on by saying 'damn, I feel old. stuff was better when I was a kid. these kids don't have real culture.'

Okay, I'll stop now but that means I have to start talking about this movie.  Yes, my turtles were better because almost ANYTHING could be better.  Filming actual turtles would actually be better than spending 90 minutes on this crap.  

Let me get a bit more specific:  the CGI is mostly fine but at times it  looks very very fake. Faker then say, someone in a rubber suit ala the 90s turtle movies.  It's simple to understand why: the human eye recognizes a rubber suit as more real than computer animation. Alas, we are stuck with CGI.

Next up: the plot.  As one reviewer pointed out, the movie literally throws in the kitchen sink and my head was spinning the entire time I was watching this.  There are like 7 villans, 9 heroes, 10 different storylines and 0 of them make any sense.  Plus, they waste what is pretty great casting: Stephen Amell (Arrow!) as Casey.  And poor poor Laura Linney. I hope they paid her well.  Regrettably, I paid for this one and I'm hoping I can prevent you from doing the same.

To quote Pet Cemetery: sometimes dead is better.

Finally all the questions you had after The Mechanic are answered! Like, will Jason Statham still play the mechanic? and...will that mechanic still fix stuff or...kill people or...save people?? 

Actually, I don't remember much about the original except that even the original was a remake of a movie so it wasn't very original.  I figure if I can't remember a movie it's because it wasn't very memorable.  Why does this one get a sequel when so many other terrible movies don't?  I suspect it's Jason Statham's abs that give extra life to this aggressively medicore non-franchise which feels like a rip from the Transporter series.  

The action is very...east european, meaning loud, cheap and boring, and the story is completely ridiculous.  As I sit here writing this I struggle to remember the plot but I do know that Tommy Lee Jones somehow gets roped into it and Jessica Alba costars as Statham's love interest and in doing so, continues to prove my point about which of the two Jessicas is hotter. Maybe the 3rd one will have Biel in it?  That would make it better.

(Adele voice): "hello...it's me...and I'm a zombie!"

I realize most people didn't see this movie or even knew that it existed but let me assure you that it is real and it's real stupid.

I read the Stephen King book that this was based on and enjoyed it.  I thought at the time that it would make a great movie. That was 2006.  10 years later they did it and screwed it up royally.  

Let's start with what isn't their fault: cell phones aren't really used for talking anymore.  No one (besides steve jobs, RIP) could have predicted that we would be instagramming and snapchatting and bumbling more than actually talking to people on our gadgets but we are.  So...when the movie starts and all these people TALKING on their phones, I was immeidately calling 'bullshit.'  The movie tries to correct this by making anyone USING heir phone also be turned into a zombie but even that's inconsistent.  At one point, two main characters put a cell phone in a freezer and huddle around it as they begin to receive text messages. Are text messages not affected? It's unclear but then again, so is the movie.  The ending is super serious too and if you've suffered through the movie, you don't deserve it.

He looks like that guy from lemony snicket's a series of unfortunate events. What was really unfortunate was that I watched this.

I love Steven Spielberg but what a whiff.  

This movie is so bad that it led to an inner existential debate. About 10 minutes into this turd, I was actually wondering whether something was wrong with me. Had I lost my sense of childlike wonder?   Was I so cynical that I couldn't enjoy a well intentioned kids movie based on a beloved classic? Was I...broken?

I've thought it through and I'm gonna say 'nope'.  This is just a bad movie which is at the bottom of the list because of the wasted talent and money.  I wasn't amused but bemused at the Big Friendly Giant and the word salad that comes spewing from his mouth every time he speaks.  You see, the BFG sometimes can't say words very goodly and it's HILARIOUS, or at least, it's supposed to be.  I didn't care about his friendship with the little girl and I thought the end when the U.K. Government (mercifully, this doesn't take place here at home) attacks the other giants was very stupid and kind of mean (SPOILERS! but I'm saving you time, trust me).  This LPP hated the BFG.