By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com
THE TEN WORST MOVIES OF 1997
These are limited to major films by indies or major studios. But don’t look for that 3 a.m. soft porn karate on Showtime to show up. Nor should you look for Gummo, Masterminds, Mr. Magoo, T<strong>he Pest, Playing God or The Postman. I suspect that they are all candidates for this dishonor, but I didn’t see them, so they escape my wrath.
Dishonorable Mentions go to (in alphabetical order): Fire Down Below, Gone Fishin’, Incognito, Out to Sea, A Smile Like Yours and That Old Feeling.
And in the Career Enders category (in alphabetical order): Speed 2: Cruise Control (Jason Patric), Double Team (Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dennis Rodman), Steel (Shaq’s a hack) and Leave It to Beaver (Janine Turner).
10.Mad City, with John Travolta and Dustin Hoffman both trying to “fix” previous failures. Travolta as white trash in White Man’s Burden and Hoffman in Hero, a movie about false patriotism directed by a Brit.
9. The Devil’s Own. Brad Pitt was right when he trashed this one before it hit theaters. Great actors and a very fine director still ended up with mush when the script went soft.
8. The eruptive duo of Volcano and Dante’s Peak. Two bad movies. One took itself too seriously, the other, not seriously enough. Which do you prefer, tires that drive through lava or a character who disappears when the city is about to blow up his new multi-million dollar condo?
7. Jurassic Park: The Lost World, the first Spielberg movie without a heart. It looked good, but it was about as artful as a Fox TV special called When Dinosaurs Attack.
6. The double dip of Excess Baggage and A Life Less Ordinary. They were the same central story except one used Alicia Silverstone’s production company to move it along, the other, angels. Holly Hunter did Less Ordinary instead of As Good As It Gets. A tragedy.
5. Mortal Kombat: Annihilation. When the cheesy effects opened the movie, I thought it was style. It was just cheese. The film was a better representation of the video game and no representation of a movie at all.
4. Kull the Conqueror. Universal tries to make Kevin Sorbo a movie star. Oops.
3. Fathers’ Day, the movie that even Robin Williams and Billy Crystal couldn’t save. A source at the WB says that they re-shot major parts of the film four times. It still wasn’t funny.
2. The product reel of The Bubble Factory, the production company that the Sheinbergs got for leaving the executive suites at Universal. The 1997 line-up was The Pest, A Simple Wish and McHale’s Navy.
1. The Worst Movie of 1997 is Batman and Robin. Maybe not the worst in purely clinical terms, but a true disaster on every single level. Bad acting. Bad writing. Bad effects. And expensive. Though it’s hard to imagine, this film was an even bigger disaster for Warner Bros. than the media made it out to be. Warner Bros. will deny it, but WB sources tell me that the film beat Titanic to the $200 million mark in production costs by months. My goodness, that’s bad!