My 100 Worst Movies of the 90's - 72 - Son In Law (1993)

Pauly Shore makes another appearance on my list in Son in Law, a fish-out-of-water would-be comedy about a crazy Californian who is dragged by a friend to visit her family in middle America for Thanksgiving holiday.  Antics ensue because, guess what?  He’s wacky!  So, we get a ton of predicable farming-themed gags, and a group of characters that are much more sane and stable than the character we’re meant to like more (That would be Shore’s).

When Rebecca (Carla Gugino) leaves her family for college in Los Angeles, she is unsure about whether or not she will fit in until she befriends a “colorful” resident adviser named Crawl (Shore).  When Thanksgiving comes around, feeling sorry that he has no family to go home to, Rebecca invites him home to visit her very conservative family.  Upon her arrival home, her family is shocked by her changed appearance and attitude, and even more shocked by the utterly flamboyant and offensive Crawl who is inept and unlikable from line one.  Things get crazy though (WOOOHOOO!) when Rebecca finds out that her long-time boyfriend is going to purpose and has Crawl stop him.  Crawl, dimly thinking on his toes, says he has already asked for her hand and the family is distraught.  Now the two dimwits must keep the ruse up until vacation is over... For some reason.

Son-in-Law is one of those movies where it’s apparent that the jokes were written before the script.  We get a lot of the gags that we’d expect.  Manure in the face, a mouth full of hay, a silly tractor scene, lots of montages, a dance scene, MULTIPLE makeovers ect, ect, ect.  Most of the set-pieces in this film are taken out of dozens of better movies and, despite closely following a well-defined blueprint, this movie manages to go off the rails.  The big problem is the bulk of the comedy leans on Shore’s bizarre behavior.  Since his antics are annoying, not funny, this movie grows pretty old, pretty quickly.  The fact that everyone else in the movie is normal except Crawl makes you less likely to root for him and more likely to cheer for the boyfriend who just had his heart broken.

Carla Gugino is likable here, but the material is far too weak and her only real job is to get upset and storm out of the room in protest.  The rest of the cast is filled with stock characters and stereotypes.  The parents are played by Lane Smith (that guy from My Cousin Vinny) and Cindy Pickett (Ferris Beuller’s mom) and, like Gugino, are given little to do here.  Their job is to react in horror to Crawl and to show disapproval towards Rebbecca.  I don’t really think the supporting cast is to blame here, though.  This is weak material at its core, filled with predictable moments and stock dialogue, and Shore gives the very same performance he always does, though he is a little more subdued here than he normally is, and that is the problem.  

Pauly Shore, as I have said before (and will likely say again), is not funny.  His voice is annoying, his performances are all garbage and he is incapable of carrying a scene so he just waves his arms around and makes noises like a five year old.  I’m glad he no longer gets top billing (I have a movie that will DEFINITELY show up later to thank for that), but in the 90’s he was the “next big thing”.  I think he is the force that filled the vacuum of the derelict 80’s, a decade that produced more throwaway stars than just about any other.  Shore went to movies after gaining popularity on MTV, and just like everything else that goes to the big screen from MTV, he left a massive stain on cinema.

My 100 Worst Movies of the 90's - 73 - The Waterboy (1998)

Ugh!  I hated this movie even as a teenager when it was released, and I hate this movie to this very day.  The Waterboy follows a water-obsessed mentally retarded (I don’t care what you say, he is) man named Bobby (Adam Sandler) who is also a big time mamma’s boy.  He works as the water boy for the Florida Gators college football team.  After getting so pissed at a dude that he saw red, he rushes a teasing football player and knocks him over on the field.  Impressed by his tackling power, the coach puts him on the team.

If you’ve seen the Waterboy, do I really have to explain why I hated this film?  Adam Sandler’s whiny baby voice is too much for a feature stretch and the plot is so thin it couldn’t possibly justify a major motion picture.  The sports scenes are comprised mainly of the same stupid Waterboy tackle followed by reaction shots (Oh, I HATE reaction shots) of just about every other actor in the scene.  Other than that, they are all set up and no payoff.  The football scenes are merely just a setting for this film’s lame gimmick.

That gimmick is that every time Bobby needs to make a tackle, he recalls the teasing from his past and bad special effects take over when the face of the target player morphs into the teasing character.  We get the same lame mocking moments and the same stupid mugging from Sandler followed by the same tackle with the EXACT SAME reaction shot over and over for the entire length of the film.  This is another example of a three minute sketch stretched out across a feature film.  Most sports movies are already weak because there is rarely enough original material to keep the game interesting on screen; Waterboy, in trying to do something different, started with a null concept and was essentially dead on arrival.  

This piece of crap was directed by Frank Coraci who was also behind the cameras for Around the World In 80 Days and the Zookeeper, the former was awful, I have not seen Zookeeper (frankly, I dread it).  Coraci doesn’t really appear to have any idea what he’s doing here.  A year before the Waterboy he paired with Adam Sandler for the Wedding Singer, hardly Hollywood gold but nowhere nearly as bad as this trash.  Here the direction is chaotic, the film is filled with bad stereotypes and unfunny gags.  Sandler is absolutely terrible here, giving one of the worst performances of his less-than-stellar, but still lucrative career.  I would say Coraci’s direction had a lot to do with it, but knowing Sandler’s “style”, I’m pretty sure this is all him.

Really there have been worst leading characters in films (I direct your attention to Roberto Benigni’s Pinnochio and Dana Carvey’s Pistachio Disguisey), but it’s impossible to save a film when the leading character is as annoying as Bobby Boucher.  The rest of the cast, which includes the talented Kathy Bates and Fairuza Balk, are all really just throwaway characters.  Though most of them are the source of Bobby’s anger, which fuels his athletic ability, but the way this is approached is all wrong and is definitely not funny.

My 100 Worst Movies of the 90's - 74 - Getting Away With Murder (1996)

So when does a black comedy become a sick and vile comedy?  It’s kind of a hard line to draw I guess.  The Cable Guy was unsettling, mainly because of Jim Carrey’s creepy performance, but Harold and Maude was a great film and was also quite funny, given the bizarre behavior of the young teen who constantly simulates his own suicide in a comical fashion.  What makes Getting Away With Murder unsettling is pretty much the whole premise, which delves into paranoia, guilt, depression, and makes fun of all of them...  Offensively.  Get ready for a riot guys!


The plot follows a professor(Dan Aykroyd) who becomes convinced that his neighbor  (played by Jack Lemmon) is a famous Nazi war criminal, a former concentration camp officer.  He then decides to execute justice for the supposed killer’s victims and murders the old man.  Raddled with guilt, he begins a slow decline and decides the only way to resolve his own pain is to marry his victim’s daughter (Lilly Tomlin).  So he divorces his own wife (played by Bonnie Hunt) and marries the new woman, who is a little nuts herself.


So this scumbag kills a man, whines about it, then leaves his wife to marry another woman just to feel better about himself.  There are no redeemable qualities to this character.  Jack Lemmon’s Max Mueller seems like a perfectly nice guy, still this film twists and turns the plot points to manipulate every situation, feeling less like paranoia vs. reality and more like the writer was just changing the facts to suit what was happening.  Because this plot is so full of crap, the movie reveals that Max Mueller might just have been this famous Nazi commander after all.  So everything is allllllll right!  No!  No it isn’t!  This is a twisted, vile movie!  

We’re told by this film that just because of this guy’s past he has no rights.  Thus, this movie basically says that it’s okay to kill whoever you want as long as they are bad guys.  Forgetting the twisted message just for a moment, this is just a bad movie.  The acting is dreadful, the story is offensive and the jokes aren’t funny.  

With a terrible screenplay and a very bad performance by Aykroyd in particular, Getting Away With Murder is a perfect storm of offensive and just plain pathetic comedy.  The film even has the balls to try to give us some nonsense about justice and crap.  I hated this movie because of its willingness to completely throw reason out the window in lieu of a dumb morality tale about guilt in the guise of a sick comedy. 

My 100 Worst Movies of the 90's - 75 - City Slickers II: The Legend of Curly's Gold (1994)

City Slickers 2 is the Hangover: Part II of the 90’s.  It is the same as its source film, identical in almost every way, with no original ideas and it doesn't appear that they even tried to have any.  Sequels are supposedly meant to expound on the ideas of the original and up the ante with more at stake for the characters in the story, however, it seems a more common reason for sequels is simply because the first film made money and the studios want to cash in.

The film opens right after the death of Curly (Jack Palance), the eccentric guide from the first film.  Billy Crystal plays Mitch, who is just turning 40, when he discovers a map to a hidden treasure.  The three characters (played by Crystal, Daniel Stern and Jon Lovitz) join together again for a desert adventure and tell the very same jokes that were nailed home in the first film all while following very similar plot points.  Throughout the film, Mitch is haunted by the thought that Curly may not have been dead and keeps seeing visions of the dead guide.  However,it turns out that these are not hauntings or hallucinations but Curly's twin brother, Duke (Ooooh! The contrivances!!!). The only problem is Duke (played by Jack Palance) is not as much of an "outdoorsy" guy as Curly, so hilarity (or a lack thereof) ensues!  Billy Crystal lays out one dry one-liner after another, Daniel Stern shouts, whines and complains through the film, and Jon Lovitz annoys both of the characters on-screen and us thoroughly.

The actors do what they can, trying to breath life into these vapid, empty characters, but there isn’t much that can be done with this dialogue.  Directorially, this film is nothing special.  It fails to really take advantage the natural beauty of the setting, mainly focusing on the actor’s faces as they talk.  Films like the Searchers from 1956 prove that the Old West can be beautiful when shot correctly.  However, despite the film’s visual weakness, the screenplay is really to blame with this one.  While the first one was no great masterpiece, but it had laughs.  The sequel, however, is a special type of bad film.  The jokes do not appear to even try, centering on overused cliches and uninspired banter between the characters.  

Going back to the Hangover sequel reference to close, some films are best described as cynical.  That meaning that the filmmakers and cast are really just out to cash a check for the success of the first film.  The problem with these movies is how deceptive they are.  They are designed to trick fans of the first and draw them in, only to sell them a bill of goods in the end.  This is truly infuriating because it shows just what many in Hollywood think of their customers.  This film makes the 75 spot solely based on how it obviously feels about the audience.  It is a perfect example of why fans of movies should research a film before giving it their hard-earned money.  It's a good thing audiences pretty much ignored this movie, if they had paid money for it, there may have been a City Slickers 3!

My 100 Worst Movies of the 90's - 76 - In The Army Now (1994)

Pauly Shore makes his first of several appearances on this list with In the Army Now, in which he gives his best performance.  Wow, that’s an amazing assessment of his performance in this film.  The plot centers around two slackers (Pauly Shore and, as if he weren’t annoying enough, Andy Dick) who are desperate for money and opt for enlisting into the Army thinking it would be a piece of cake.  In basic training they meet a gung-ho girl played by Lori Petty (who also reappears on this list later) and an excessively phobic man who is trying to face his fears (David Alan Grier).  Both of these additional characters only make the movie louder and more annoying.

During basic training the two narcissistic leads constantly get into trouble until finally getting whipped into shape by a female drill sergeant and shipped over to Chad where their actions as a water treatment crew (Shore’s character’s choice because his brother was a pool boy), lead to a small victory for America.  Between this there are a ton of military stereotypes and bad genre cliches executed with no admiration or inspiration.  

Pauly Shore is a special type of bad actor.  He gives the very same performance in every movie, with his whiny, over-inflecting and his stupid So-Cal slang, he annoys instead of engages.  In most of his movies he contrasts with more subdued performers so we can see how “zany” he is.  In this film, Andy Dick (who’s voice is equally annoying if not more so), is meant to be the voice of reason but his character is just as stupid and insipid as Shore’s.  Therefore, we have to lean on the other two characters, played by Petty and Grier (who are insane in their own right), for a connection to the story.  This is bad, because as there’s nothing there to connect us to these characters, we have no stake in caring about any of them.

In good war films like Platoon, we see an evolution of the main character dropped into a life he is frightened and angered by.  We can see the atrocities on screen and relate to the moral conflict in the hearts of the leads.  This also goes for the Deer Hunter, another affective film about Vietnam, where we witness the after-effects of the devastating impact of war on a man.  In both of these cases we relate, and can see a sort of “before and after” to show how these characters evolved and changed.  In The Army Now more or less makes war out to be a joke, and the only evolution we see is pointed out to us when Shore’s character’s girlfriend notices his abs.  This movie is shallow and, to the extent that it diminishes the impact of war and the strength and honor of our military, offensive.

I may be reading into this movie a little too much on an emotional level though.  Therefore, I will say that artistically, this is a sloppy movie.  The film is divided into the typical war movie segments: life before, enlistment, basic training, after training, battle, victory for the good guys.  However, it doesn’t really get any of these things right.  The basic training is filmed in a confined, closed-quarters fashion, only showing the star’s faces distinctly amidst a bevy of nameless and faceless recruits who do not get any lines because they are not on the film’s poster.  The desert war scenes are equally cramped, lacking depth or any natural feel.  For a setting that is meant to resemble the Sahara Desert, these scenes definitely feel as though they were filmed on a sound stage.  This movie feels tiny, despite its attempt at scale.  With a troupe of only four soldiers central to the plot, very little discernible resemblance to reality, annoying leads and very unfunny jokes this movie is a dud.  It fails at being both a comedy and a war film because it approaches both of these genres incorrectly.

My 100 Worst Movies of the 90's - 77 - The Cable Guy (1996)

Comedy is a delicate genre.  You have to balance believability and the likability of the characters with the chaos and antics of the humor.  The Cable Guy does this poorly.  The problem with the Cable Guy is it takes the stalker story in a direction that is so unnerving, so uncomfortable, that while re-watching this one, I felt a little disturbed for actually liking it as a youth.  

The Cable Guy casts a talented Jim Carrey in a role that was not written with any of his previous characters in mind.  I don’t really blame Carrey for how bad this character is, I don’t think anyone could play this one well.  He plays a cable installer who hooks up a man’s cable after he moves into an apartment during a rough patch with his ex-fiance.  After offhandedly calling Carrey’s character “friend”, the titular cable guy begins to pursue Broderick so aggressively, it’s not funny, it’s just disturbing.  Matthew Broderick really seems out of place here, and I think he’s a little confused about what is going on with the all the lights and the cameras pointed at him, and the fact that there’s a dude shouting “Action” and “Cut” a lot.

The film is the product of screenwriter Lou Holtz Jr.  He has no other film credits to his name.  Ben Stiller directed and makes a brief cameo but it is completely irrelevant to the plot.  In fact, there’s a lot of that in this film.  There’s a subplot where Broderick’s character has plans to go to a concert with Jack Black, and one involving a karaoke party with a group of random characters and neither serve any purpose to the story.  The film’s apparent need to constantly sidetrack the stalker plot proves this is weak material.  The screenplay is riddled with Carrey laying out bad TV-related puns an a voice that makes Bobby Boucher sound like Cary Grant, Broderick seeming surprisingly unfazed most of the time but occasionally mildly annoyed by his admirer's antics and the supporting cast that usually pops up on the opposite end of a phone call to interrupt an already weak scene.  

Now, for why this movie is so creepy.  In the intro paragraph, I referred to this film as “unnerving”.  Carrey’s character (we never get his real name) is so disturbed and unstable from the very beginning of the film that the fact that Broderick continually allows himself to get sucked into his psychotic games makes no sense.  Still, many of the antagonist’s actions in this film are either cringe-worthy or criminal.  When Carrey isn’t trying to kill Broderick (something he does multiple times), he is aggressively inserting himself into his life.  Broderick’s family and inner circle are obviously a bunch of idiots however because they join this obviously insane stranger to play sexually-themed games alongside his target’s parents and girlfriend.  This scene in particular, as Broderick is paired with his mother and pressured (even by mom!) to play Password with sex terms, is so sickening that I have actually seen censored cuts of this movie in the past with this entire section of the film removed (noting again, I used to LIKE this trash... don’t ask me why).  

The Cable Guy is a dark mess and it all falls apart at the end in a scene that feels as though it belongs in a much better movie.  We get Carrey’s lisping villain explaining the reason he is what he is and constantly giving false names that are stolen from television characters while swinging from the top of a television tower after kidnapping Broderick’s girlfriend and forcing her up there with him, threatening to kill her and himself.  

Structurally this movie is messy, filled with holes and unnecessary violence.  The scenes do not really seem to flow all too well and many of the moments feel like sketches with the same characters over and over.  You can literally take many of these scenes and switch them around and have no effect on the actual movie.  There isn’t any cohesion between the events and most of the supporting characters only pop in when the plot needs them to, then they just disappear, some are never shown or even spoken of again.  There is a lot wrong with everything everybody does in this movie.  Nobody with a brain would react to Carrey’s character the way these characters do and that simply means that they only accommodated and tolerated him because the plot said so.  That makes this entire movie completely pointless and, therefore, stupid.

My 100 Worst Movies of the 90's - 78 - The Ghost and the Darkness (1996)

Whooo-boy.  If there ever was a sillier film to take place on the Dark Continent, I would love to find it.  What happens with you take the Bridge on the River Kwai and add just a little bit of killer animals?  You get The Ghost and the Darkness, an absurd movie about a crew of construction workers who, while building a bridge in Africa in the 1800’s, are terrorized by two bloodthirsty lions.  Val Kilmer is the chief engineer in charge of the construction project and Michael Douglas is a big game hunter brought on to take out the hungry kitties.



Usually I'd have a second paragraph devoted to elaborating on the plot summary, but I really can't justify it for this movie.  The story of the Ghost and the Darkness is reportedly based in some fact, and the concept of killer lions attacking workers over the period of several months could work, but this movie is bogged down by hammy acting from all involved, likely the product of Stephen Hopkins' direction.  If you don't know how bad his direction can be, then just watch Lost In Space!!!  Still, the film also suffers from a screenplay that just feels thrown together, which is inexcusable considering it was written by William Goldman, who's other credits include Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Marathon Man, the Princess Bride and Misery.  With this pedigree, you think he'd be able to give us a sensible screenplay, but instead we get a mish-mash of cliched interjections and bad scenes where Kilmer's Colonel Patterson will do something dumb, and Douglas' Charles Remington will make a lame comment about how stupid he is. 


The Ghost and the Darkness is saved by some of its unintentionally funny moments.  The film is so badly shot that you can’t really see any of the attacks all that well when they occur.  Instead, the camera shows the lion, shows the victim, a pelt is swung past the camera so fast you can’t see it, you see a hilarious reaction shot of the soon-to-be-dead-man followed by a scene where he either appears to be wiggling a stuffed animal above his head or is just lying in a bloody pool, or sometimes he just disappears. 


The overall production value of the killer lion attacks are on par with a bad Syfy Original (despite this film winning a freaking Oscar for the effects!) and the Ghost and the Darkness was not a small picture, and it did make its $55,000,000 budget back, but not by much.  Still, its obvious a majority of this film’s budget went to the paychecks of its two stars.  The remaining cast are mostly fodder for the lions and includes Tom Wilkinson and Emily Mortimer but they really aren’t given much to do.  This film is all about da lions, yo!  It’s a shame the lions suck, otherwise this might have been a pretty good thriller.