THE TEN WORST FILMS OF 2004
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Written By: John H. Foote
Being a film critic, my friends tell me is easy work. What they do not realize, is that I see all the movies. Everything. The good, the bad and the very ugly. It leaves the mind reeling sometimes to think that the more than two hundred and fifty films I see a year, most are bad.

I have loved movies since I watched Charlton Heston part the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments (1956) when I first saw that epic in 1971.

Hooked, obsessed, mind melded to the movies. They are important to me as air and blood.

What keeps me going?

Every film I see, I say to myself, could be the greatest film I have ever seen. If I approach films with a negative attitude, how quickly I would become jaded, how quickly the excitement about being a critic would be gone. It’s all I have ever really wanted to do, write about film, you know. And how often does someone say they are doing what they dreamed of doing? So, will I gripe about seeing so many bad films? Nope, I will celebrate them as I celebrate the great ones.

From a list of over two hundred films, here are the worst films of the year.

1. CATWOMAN…Halle Berry is an Academy Award winning actress having given what the great Robert Duvall calls the greatest performance by an actress he had ever seen. But here she and this film are kitty litter. Really dreadful, with no plot, no direction and certainly no performance. Berry looks embarrassed, as if she was performing foreplay for the camera and no one was turned on.

2. GARFIELD…If Catwoman is kitty litter, Garfield is a messy, smelly, sticky hairball spewed out of the creators mind and onto the screen. Based on a comic strip that was popular fifteen years ago, the film is terrible, unfunny and at times insulting. Bill Murray, who gave the best performance of the year last year voices the feline computer generated hero, but not even the presence of Murray saves this mess.

3. AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS…Someone show me where in the novel by Jules Verne there is an Oriental sidekick to the hero Fogg who knows martial arts and kicks everyone’s butt over the course of the eighty day journey? Not there? Of course not!!! But somehow the makers of this film managed to turn one of the great novels of Verne into a Jackie Chan film. Tedious, and trust me it only seems like the movie runs eighty days.

4. ALIEN VS. PREDATOR…How low can they go? Obviously at the end of the franchises for both, Fox does what worked in the forties, throwing their monster together to see what happens. To begin with there are so many logistical errors beginning and ending with timeline that the film is just ludicrous. Maybe what they should have done was have Adam Sandler meet the Alien, or The Kids in the Hall meet Predator…at least there would have been some laughs.

5. KING ARTHUR…Not even remotely close to the great works of Mallory, this is King Arthur re-imagined for MTV as a super hero. I kept thinking of John Boorman’s great, dark Excalibur and wondered why anyone would even try making another film of this sort with that one still on DVD? Dumb and uneventful…the actors must be weeping tears that they were ever involved in this disgraceful bastardization of the Arthur legend.

6. SCOODY DOO 2…The first one made my ten worst list of 2002 as it was awful, but it made money which in Hollywood spells sequel. This one is worse, but again made money. The four sleuths and their computer generated Scooby go to war against every monster they ever fought from the wonderful old animated series without one shred of the charm of the cartoon series. Hopeless and terrible and never once funny.

7. SURVIVING CHRISTMAS…When asked what I wanted for Christmas I answered “the knowledge that Ben Affleck will never make another movie”. I am serious. Affleck needs to retire and retire today. He is the luckiest guy on the planet. He has no talent, cannot act, and yet makes fifteen million per picture. Even when they are as bad, as terrible, as insulting and disgraceful as this Christmas film. How bad was it? Seven weeks after opening in theatres it was already on DVD.

8. EXORCIST; THE BEGINNING…Warner Brothers fired the respected director-screenwriter Paul Schrader from this film and hired hack Renny Harlin. Why? Again, I ask why? So Harlin does not finish what Schrader started, he re-shoots the entire film! Badly! Meant to be a study of what happened to the old Exorcist Merrin before the events in the first film The Exorcist (1973) the picture is murky and boring. Not scary, not once, and not even remotely interesting.

9. THE VILLAGE…Well made tripe but tripe nonetheless. My questions begin with the creation of this utopia in which the characters speak Arthur Miller speak from The Crucible. Why? The only person to be able to go to the “towns” is a blind girl…how perfect. The hints are dropped at regular intervals…ask for these medicines, they are readily available?..how many medicines were readily available at the turn of the nineteenth century? And that explanation of why there are no aircraft over the village? M. Night Shymalan finally crashes and burns with this beautifully made mess.

10. TAXI…I do not find it funny when a character portrays a stereotypical image of their particular race, which is what Queen Latifah does here as a knowing, loud smartass taxi driver. She is a disgrace to black women around the world. Where is the knowing and edgy actress we saw in Chicago (2002)? Gone with the Wind apparently.

Runners down; Connie and Carla, Blade: Trinity, The Alamo, Against the Ropes, Eurotrip, Laws of Attraction, Mr. 3000, Raising Helen, New York Minute, Seed of Chucky, The Stepford Wives, Twisted and Thunderbirds.








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