“Superman IV: The Quest for Peace” (1987)
It feels like we’ve been calling out this one quite frequently of late, most recently as part of our Worst Superhero Villains piece, but lest you think that’s some sort of tacit bid to get ‘Supes 4’ reclaimed as a cult favorite, let us quickly disavow you: this movie stinks. And as bad as the plot and the script are (Luthor creates Nuclear Man to defeat Superman; they fight on the moon; Superman wins) and as utterly amateurish the effects and costumes, the worst aspect is seeing the great Gene Hackman teamed with the most annoying sidekick/nephew character ever created in Jon Cryer’s Lenny Luthor. This film truly put two in the heart and one in the head of a franchise that had been on trembly legs since the dire “Superman III,” and even Christopher Reeve looks profoundly uncomfortable throughout in a role he pretty much owned otherwise.
Nadir: Anything with Cryer in it, but since we can’t find any clips of him (the only explanation is the internet has gone sentient and is protecting itself) here’s a battle scene that hints at what we’re getting at.
No one was really expecting “R.I.P.D” to be good. It was a hugely expensive summer movie that was delayed an entire year, starring the coming-off-a-series-of-flops Ryan Reynolds, and that was released, in a bid to keep marketing costs down, with little fanfare by Universal. But few were probably expecting it to be as bad as it actually was. “R.I.P.D” isn’t a film like “Hudson Hawk” or “Waterworld,” fair-to-middling movies tarnished with the brush of being a gigantic flop. It’s a rancid, unfunny disaster that probably deserved to lose the people who made it the eight figures that it did. A cynical attempt to exactly meld “Men In Black” and “Ghostbusters” (though it is, at least, based on a presumably equally cynical comic book), it pairs an adrift Ryan Reynolds with an over-the-top Jeff Bridges to battle yet another shitting portal in the sky and Kevin Bacon, who you partly suspect might have died early in production and is being pushed around “Weekend At Bernie’s”-style by some poor PA. It’s never funny, the effects and design are dreadful, and it’s never interesting. If anything, it deserved to do worse.
Nadir: The moment where you realize that Ryan Reynolds’ character has literally done nothing the entire film.
Really, the signs were there with the godawful pun right there in the title, but we still came out of “Speed 2” stunned at how risibly awful it was, despite being from the same director as the terrific “Speed” and bringing back newly-minted star Sandra Bullock. Set on an ocean liner this time, with a blocklike Jason Patric making us really miss the comparatively Shakespearean range of Keanu Reeves (I know!), and featuring a villain in Willem Dafoe whose defining characteristic is that he believes in bleeding himself with leeches, there is no point at which this film even scrabbles its fingertips at believability. Which would be fine if it were at all exciting, but you know, big lumbering boats just don’t go that fast—a problem, given the title and supposed premise.
Nadir: People literally strolling away in terror as the ship approaches the marina. Slowly. You get a bit of it in this fan-made homage to the guy who does the knots countdown.
Barring a glorious surprise with the upcoming fourth installment, none of Michael Bay’s “Transformers” movies are any good. But the first film at least has its Spielberg-approved boy-and-his-car story to ground things, and the third has the most impressive mayhem in its admittedly over-extended third act. The middle installment, “Revenge Of The Fallen,” has neither of these things. Instead, it has a generic, formulaic plot that essentially replicates the first film (perhaps a side-effect of the writers strike, though that Kurtzman, Orci and Ehren Kruger were the credited writers suggests that you were never going to get much on the page), noisy action, not one but two resurrections of characters thanks to a bullshit MacGuffin, endless action sequences that still don’t find a way to actually tell the fucking characters apart, an increasingly hateful lead performance by Shia LaBeouf, random pot-brownie gags and an increasingly thick vein of misogyny (Megan Fox posed ludicrously on motorbikes, an attractive woman who tries to seduce LaBeouf only to LITERALLY TURN OUT TO BE A TRANSFORMER), and an even thicker one of racism. Even for defenders of Bay, this one’s inexcusable.
Nadir: The jive-talking robots Skids and Mudflaps, caricatures so racist that they’d be shocking in the 1940s.
“Xanadu” (1980)
We’ve mostly tried to avoid films that fall into the “so bad they’re good” category, but that line is definitely blurred with the almost preternaturally campy disco musical “Xanadu.” While it is undoubtedly terrible, featuring nonsensical plotting and dreadful wooden acting, not least from Olivia Newton-John whose register is stuck on “wholesome Aussie on skates” when she’s supposed to be a mysterious semi-divine muse sent to help lunkheaded artist Sonny (Michael Beck) find his talent, it is so gleefully, day-glo, video-effect terrible that it’s quite entertaining. And there are even (brief) moments when it’s almost good, with Gene Kelly’s flashback dance with a 40s siren (also Newton-John) a creditable routine that’s oddly touching. That said, what’s endearing is the cheesiness of a film that has no idea how bad it is, nor that the flash-in-the-pan roller-disco aesthetic it revels in is not, in fact, going to last forever. Or even the week.
Nadir: Any moment when no one’s dancing or singing or skating and you’re suddenly aware they thought they were making a film here.
