This week, I thought I might move my perspective from great movies to bad movies, the worst of the worst.
On Saturdays, there is a gathering in Hollywood to honor the worst of the worst, the Golden Raspberry Awards, also known as the Razzies.
For this post, I’m going to look back at three movies that snagged the top Razzie prize for the lamest picture of the year.
The hyperlinks link back to Wikipedia articles on the respective movies if you want more info.
Howard the Duck
The weekend this movie came out, I left
my apartment, drove to a theater, paid someone actual good money for a ticket,
hunkered down in a seat in a darkened room to watch this thing.
And I enjoyed it.
Yeah, I know, I know, Howard the Duck is like the litmus test we still use to understand how bad a movie is.
"Boy that new Dr. Dolittle movie with Robert Downey Jr was really bad."
"Well, it's no Howard the Duck but yeah!"
And objectively speaking, yes, Howard the Duck is a bad movie. Howard’s duck suit is by itself a good reason to hate on this movie.
And Howard is not at all likeable.
But I enjoyed it.
I have to admit my bias towards anything with Lea Thompson in it.
Lea seems to be OK with her part in this
spectacle debacle. A few years back
while she was on Dancing With the Stars (where my darling Lea was cheated…CHEATED,
I tells ya….out of winning the mirror ball trophy) willingly and happily posed
in an Howard the Duck jacket. 
Lea Thompson also made an appearance in a recent Howard the Duck comic. That's a photo of Lea posing with artist Joe Quinones and a page of art from Lea's appearance in Howard the Duck.
Also, I recently re-discovered Lea’s classic sitcom Caroline in the City on CBS All Access and there’s a great Howard joke in an early episode.
Caroline and her boyfriend are going to Atlantic City. To curb his potential losses at the gambling tables, he hands Caroline his ATM card with instructions to keep it away from him so he won’t do anything stupid. Except it’s not his ATM card.
“This is your Blockbuster Video card,” Caroline observes. “Are you worried you might rent Howard the Duck?”
Oh, Lea Thompson, you’re such a scamp.
I’ve recently caught Howard the Duck on cable and it is as jumbled a mess as I remembered.
And my darling Lea is a wonderful as ever.
Don’t tell my wife! She thinks the celebrity crust I’m cheating on her with is Tina Fey.
The summer of 1989 was a big one for
movies. Tim Burton’s Batman was tearing up all the box office records. The 3rd
Indiana Jones movie came out and it remains my favorite Indy movie. Trying to
compete for attention that summer was the latest Star Trek movie.
Which I did not go see.
The trailers for the movie convinced me not to invest the time or the money. The movie looked as cheap as an original series episode and I’m talking an 3rd season Fred Freiberger episode.
What I was hearing about the story wasn’t filling me with confidence either. Capt. Kirk meets… God?!?
You have to remember this was all pre-internet so this wasn’t a bunch of unhinged sexless basement dwelling trolls churning the water with bile and blood.
It was many, many years later that I actually took time to watch Star Trek: The Final Frontier, just to be a completest in my Star Trek viewing.
And it is… bad.
I mean, it's no Howard the Duck but geez!
It plays like an extended episode of the original series with the worst tropes of that series on display. An alien uses mind control to take over the Enterprise to take the ship somewhere starships are not supposed to go. There’s clunky dialogue and warped characterizations and a plot too big for its britches.
The Enterprise meets God was a perennial pitch when the series was a thing but it was a pitch that kept getting shot down as a bad idea.
Leave it to William Shatner, making his contractually mandated debut in the director’s chair, to pick up and think that he was the man to finally make it happen.
Shatner got to direct because Leonard Nimoy got to direct and the ever competitive Shatner figured anything Nimoy could do, he could do better.
He could not. Shatner’s lack of skill and flair for directing a movie is obvious.
It did not help that Paramount kept second guessing Shatner. William Shatner once described, for example, a scene with several rock monsters. Paramount kept trimming the budget after the fact, leaving Shatner with one poorly rendered rock monster.
Seriously, the rock monster is… bad.
I
was a big fan of the Wild Wild West TV show when I was a kid, catching reruns in
syndication. Wild Wild West was a spy series set in the old American west. Jim
West (played by Robert Conrad who just recently passed away) was a government
secret agent who travelled all over the west in his own private train with his
sidekick, Artemis Gordon. Artie was a master of disguise and a genius inventor,
developing all sorts of devices for Jim to employ against a litany of super
villains with a twisted array of death traps and many a diaphanous damsel in
distress in need of rescuing.
Wild Wild West was a fun TV series and I looked forward to seeing a big screen adaption.
Then I saw it and it was a thing of unspeakable awfulness.
I’ll let the late, great film critic Roger Ebert do the heavy lifting: "Wild Wild West is a comedy dead zone. You stare in disbelief as scenes flop and die. The movie is all concept and no content; the elaborate special effects are like watching money burn on the screen."
Will Smith was cast as Jim West.
Now, I am all in favor of color blind casting. Just because a character was white in one version of something doesn’t mean the character needs to always be white. But in the case of Jim West, a government agent working in post Civil War America, the idea that a black man in America would have the kind of agency and authority as Jim West really stretches credibility.
But damn it, Will Smith in the 1990s was putting lots of butts in movie seats and Warner Bros. wanted the hottest movie star they could get in their big summertime action movie. Even if that big summertime action movie was set in post Civil WAR America and a black man being a super agent for the US Government did not make sense.
Then again the movie’s movie villain, Doctor Loveless, has a giant mechanical spider so making sense was not a priority.
Will pretty much had the corner on opening summer blockbusters big after Men In Black and Independence Day.
After Wild Wild West, Will Smith no longer had that corner.
The closest I came to seeing a Razzie worthy worst picture was Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice which was nominated in 2016 but did not win. I will say that of the movies covered in this post, I will say Batman V Superman is the worst. Howard, Final Frontier, Wild Wild West were just bad. But even with being bad, I still could find some joy in those movies.
Batman V Superman wasn’t just bad. It hurt me. I knew going into it that it was going to be bad. I had a very, very low bar as to my expectations for this movie when I went into the theater to see it. I wanted it so much to be better than the reviews. And it was not.
So that’s my look at movies I have seen that won the Razzie prize for the lamest picture of the year.
I’m not sure what’s going to be in next week’s Cinema Sunday but I need to get back to something with some quality.
Until next time, remember to be good to one another and keep it down, I’m trying to watch a movie here.
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