How bad...?

Sometimes the worst movies bring out the best in critics, and this Labor Day weekend offers plenty of opportunities for a few to cut loose.

"Film critics never come home stinking of their honest labor, but the nearest equivalent is covering something like College, which leaves its stain on one's very humanity," writes Nick Pinkerton (Voice). More from Alonso Duralde (MSNBC), Laura Kern (New York Times) and Nick Schager (Slant).

Nathan Lee (NYT): "Disaster Movie, the latest disposable parody of disposable Hollywood movies, has a shelf life of about five minutes, tops, which may be slightly longer than it took to come up with most of its gags." More from Jim Ridley (Voice): "[T]his carpet-fouling mongrel of a movie no more deserves release than do anthrax spores."

"Don't let the title fool you," warns Nathan Lee: "there's nothing generic about Another Gay Sequel: Gays Gone Wild! Written, directed and co-produced by Todd Stephens, this wretched gaysploitation number is, in fact, the worst gay sequel ever." More from Ed Gonzalez (Voice) and Eric Henderson (Slant).

"Just going by the poster and the trailer, you could probably recognize Babylon A.D. as a bloated big-budget science fiction film," writes James Rocchi (Cinematical). "But after viewing the film, and with a few facts to put the film in context - like the fact 20th Century Fox didn't screen Babylon A.D. for critics, like the fact director Mathieu Kassovitz has already disavowed the film, like the numb dumb clang of every line of dialogue in it - you realize that Babylon A.D. is a bad, bloated big-budget science fiction film that doesn't even have the distinction of being memorably horrible or bravely idiotic or fascinatingly inept; it's simply an inert mass, a lump of product, a failure too expensive to simply discard." More from Alonso Duralde (MSNBC), Keith Phipps (AV Club), Nick Schager (Slant) and AO Scott (NYT).

"The BBFC has for the first time cleared the DVD release, with an 18 certificate, of the complete and uncut version of Caligula," sighs the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. "It certainly has archive value as a record of something fantastically terrible, a so-bad-it's-bad nightmare which could only have come from that era of stately art-porn."

Posted by dwhudson at August 30, 2008 5:23 AM