Worst Actors - Pauly Shore

Pauly Shore.. Being manly
Source: huffpost.com

There are few actors in history that have been so deservedly and universally-hated as Pauly Shore.  Born the child of a showbiz family, Shore started in stand-up comedy in the 80's.  He is mostly known by his persona, a parody of a valley kid from California he dubbed "the Weasel".  It is this character that would define him in the eyes of millions for the rest of his career.  

Shore's first big break came in the late 80's in the form of an MTV VJ gig.  His run on the network would continue until 1994.  In the meantime, Shore would star in five major roles that are now legendary as some of the worst performances of the 90's.  Many called him grating and unfunny, and as films have shown us in the past, just because your standup comedy is funny (Shore’s wasn’t, by the way), this does not necessarily  make you an actor.  This was exasperated by Shore’s use of his Weasel character in almost all of his film roles, likely due to studio pressure as this is how he is known by the public.

Still, like any Hollywood actor, Shore’s beginnings were humble.  It would take him a few years to start draining the life of audiences.  His first major movie was a small part the 1988 comedy/drama For Keeps.  The film was at a point of career-decline for the once-sensational Molly Ringwald and was really not a good movie.  It has been long-forgotten and was a forced, bland story of a two teenagers who pass up on college in favor of raising a kid, who the girl Darcy (Ringwald) conceived accidentally.  It had all the tone and production quality of a made-for-TV after-school special but was actually a major movie brought to us by the director of Rocky!

That same year Pauly Shore was in the long-forgotten George Burns comedy 18 Again!, a one-in-a-million body-swap comedy about an elderly man who gets a second shot at youth in the form of his grandson.  18 Again! was not a good movie.  It was yet another uninspired retread of the Freaky Friday plot done poorly.  Shore’s character was small and left no impact on the audience, despite him being audacious and annoying in his scenes.

He continued to act in awful messes into the 90’s but never really got top-billing.  Meanwhile, he was increasing in popularity on MTV, and as a result, he was rewarded with a more major part in a Hollywood movie was the first major release for director Les Mayfield, a sparsely-working director and producer who would go on to direct such dreadful films as the Miracle on 34th Street remake, Flubber, the Man, and Code Name: the Cleaner.  Encino Man, released in 1992, was an awful comedy about a caveman (played by Brenden Fraser), thawed out in modern day Southern California.  It’s a little like Eegah! only instead of exposition in a cave, we get Fraser grunting and acting like an ass around Venice Beach all the while being exploited by two teenagers (played by Sean Astin and Pauly Shore).  Shore’s move to the foreground, as the character Stoney, was not a welcome change.  The movie had some success at the box office but was ultimately met with universally-negative opinions from critics and fans alike.  Still, the film’s production company, Hollywood Pictures, was not done milking Shore for all he was worth.  

Shore’s next major role came the very next year in 1993 in the comedy Son-In-Law.  The film was instantly hated by most, but has been defended by some as Pauly Shore’s “best” film.  This is not saying much, mind you, but Shore is given a little more to do acting-wise Still, he squanders his potential to strut his stuff in favor of predictable fish-out-of-water schtick and lazy, forced melodrama.  The plot of the film is a pretty typical one: Rebecca (Carla Gugino) is a country-gal who goes to a major college in California where she befriends a neanderthal named Crawl.  Crawl’s behavior is somewhat bizarre but Rebecca begins to trust him.  After finding he will be spending Thanksgiving vacation alone, she invites him home with her to meet her family.  In a very contrived incident in which Rebecca is trying to stall being proposed to by her longtime boyfriend, Crawl interrupts a town celebration to falsely announce her previous engagement to him.  Now the two must keep the ruse up for the duration of the holiday.

Son-In-Law’s typical, uninspired premise was a beacon of warning to anyone who would want to see any future films starring the bizarre performer.  It was an announcement of sorts: that Shore will only star in contrived, cookie-cutter, by-the-numbers plots stolen directly from significantly-better films.  This would become even more obvious in 1994 when Shore would star alongside the equally annoying Andy Dick in the military comedy In the Army Now.  

And... Now you're blind.  You're welcome.
Source: last.fm

In the Army Now is a very basic war comedy in which two slackers named Bones and Jack (take a while guess which one was played by Shore) join the military on a whim to take advantage of an enlistment bonus.  The result has half the film slogging through overused basic-training cliches followed by another thirty minutes of Shore, Dick, the ear-bleeding Lori Petty and the generally-unfunny David Alan Grier parked in some American sand dunes (which we are supposed to believe are in the Sahara Desert) next to a truck arguing with each other.  It is a grating movie from start-to-finish, made worse by the fact that every actor shouts, screams and squeals half their lines, as though these four performers were not already annoying enough as it is without their vocal contortions.

In the Army Now was actually more of a trend-setter than a cash-in, and I want to make a brief aside on the controversial subject of war comedies.  The 90’s saw a large quantity of high-profile military comedies starring washed-up former-A-listers that started roughly around the time In the Army Now was released.  Renaissance Man was released the same year, it bombed, and was followed up by a number of shallow remakes of classic military movies like Mchale’s Navy and and spoofs like Down Periscope and Sgt. Bilko.  This comic sun-genre was likely relaunched due to the critical and financial successes of such movies as Born on the Fourth of July (1989), A Few Good Men (1992), The Hunt for Red October (1990), Casualties of War (1989) and Full Metal Jacket (1987).  This influx in the popularity of war movies was also accelerated by the Gulf War, which ran from roughly 1989 to 1991 in multiple engagements and iterations.  Time has shown that a movie about an ongoing conflict, such as World War II, the Vietnam War, or the current military encroachments in the Middle East, have a degree of success due to interest in the subject by the public at large.  However, many movies on the subject of war released during said war are often not well-received in retrospect.  The extreme polarization in the country during Vietnam had a percentage of the population interested in movies with strong anti-war messages like the Deer Hunter as the wars they depicted were widely unpopular, so they tended to go over well with those that did not support the engagement in the first place

The military comedy, on the other hand, has had a rougher history.  Often following on the success of a major war movie, these films are usually poorly-received by audiences, with the exceptions of some high-quality examples like M.A.S.H. or Kelly’s Heroes.  As a rule, they tend to follow only a few paths plot-wise, and rarely attempt to do anything particularly clever or original.  They also tend to suffer in the budget department as the anti-war sentiment that is strong in Hollywood rarely sees war as a laughing matter, and often rejects or cuts down on the budget of pitched movies in the genre.  This is, unless there is an offer for the film to be picked up by a well-known director or producer with connections, as was the case with Barry Levinson and Good Morning Vietnam.  In the Army Now did not do this genre any favors with its weak premise, obvious budget limitations, cheap sets and all-around poor acting.

Through his run with Hollywood Pictures (Encino Man, Son-In-Law, In the Army Now), Shore had pretty much proven that he is not able to draw a crowd.  His over-the-top acting, crazed self-caricature and cheap, uninspired movies left producers and audiences cold, and he did not return to Hollywood Pictures.  His next major project began shortly after his departure from MTV, during the network’s mid-90’s format shift towards more original programming and less music-centered entertainment.  His leaving could also be attributed partly to the sudden and rapid collapse of Shore’s popularity as a performer.  Jury Duty was released in 1995 to widespread derision.  

The film was a send up of the 1957 Sidney Lumet classic 12 Angry Men, in which Shore plays Tommy (A normal name?! Well… Shit!), a schemer who is called in for jury duty (That's the TITLE!) just as he loses his job.  Tommy manipulates his way into a luxury hotel and, enjoying the taxpayer-funded board in the five-star establishment, he does everything he can to keep the trial going for as long as possible until he is ultimately found out.  The movie could have worked, to be completely honest.  It did not work, however, due mainly to the middle-school-level screenplay and dreadful performances by Shore, Tia Carrere and other supporting cast members like character actor Brian Doyle-Murray and the usually-excellent Stanley Tucci.  The talent in this movie, like the aforementioned Doyle-Murray and Tucci, as well as Abe Vigoda and Charles Napier are just phoning it in.  They really do not give a crap, and they don’t care who knows it.

At this point, Pauly Shore was pretty much washed up and he took the next bit of work that came along.  Unfortunately for everyone, that next bit of work was the notoriously-bad Bio-Dome.  Every few years a movie so bad comes out and just blows everyone’s minds.   The idea that someone, somewhere, with deep pockets and (one would think) some business sense, would green-light something this atrocious, this brainless, this soulless…  It’s just maddening.  To Bio-Dome’s credit, I am certain that there was no attempt to make a good movie here, so at least it knows it is a piece of garbage.  That is more than I can say for most of Adam Sandler’s movies.  Still, there is something to be said about a movie this bad.  It is just… astounding.

Bio-Dome follows two slackers named Bud and Doyle who revel in self-referential homophobia and thinly-veiled, but still very PG-13, misogyny.  The two man-children attempt to escape the reach of their environmentalist girlfriends, who are both trying to get their men to stand up and take part in saving the planet (Environmentalism is the key message of the movie, by the way.  Yeah!  This movie has the BALLS to have a freaking message!  UGH!).  During an outing, they pass an experiment in which five scientists are to be locked in a self-contained environmentally-pure, terrarium for one year.  The two idiots, mistaking the glass structure for a mall, sneak inside (despite obvious heavy-security, they get right inside with a simple distraction).  Now, because this movie was obviously written by mentally-defective fifth-graders, the two jackasses cannot simply be let out, and the experiment be reset.  No, they have to stay inside with the other five scientists for one full year.  Intensely-unfunny antics ensue.  

Bio-Dome is not just a bad movie.  No, it is a legend among bad movies, and film fans have considered it one of the absolute worst comedies of all time.  The extremely-low $15 million-dollar budget was made back, with profit, but this film ultimately killed Pauly Shore’s career, seemingly permanently.  Though he did not stop acting, his top-billed performances in major studio films came to an end.  Critics hated Bio-Dome with a passion, classifying it as one of the worst movies of all time.  The film holds an impressive 5% on Rotten Tomatoes and an even more-proper 1% on Metacritic, cementing Bio-Dome as a monument to bad filmmaking.  

So, what has Shore been doing since Bio-Doom?  He’s appeared in a few smaller films that I have not seen and made a number of guest voice-appearances on various popular TV shows like King of the Hill and Futurama.  His next lead role since the new Millenium was in a mockumentary entitled Pauly Shore is Dead, in which he picks fun of his own failed career.  I did not see the movie because I honestly did not want to waste my time.  Some people did apparently enjoy it, but for the most part it remained under the radar.  He starred in another mockumentary in 2009 called Adopted, where he plays himself traveling to Africa to adopt some kids.  Many of those that claimed to like Pauly Shore is Dead admittedly hated Adopted, calling it offensive.  The film, which was an obvious send-up of celebrity charity, failed to draw an audience, and like, his previous comedy doc, it just sort of came and went.  Shore continued to act in generally-awful movies and small roles in crap like his second attempt at a body-swap comedy in Opposite Day, in which all adults and kids all swap bodies.  It’s zany!  I watched the first few minutes with the full intention of writing a scathing review for it on this blog some time ago, but I could not get past the utterly dreadful theme song that plays over the opening credits, followed by the truly annoying child actors.  

Pauly Shore has continued through the years, doing standup and appearing in roles where he can get them.  Still, at this point Shore is pretty much audience-repellent.  His last major movie was the absolutely abhorrent Bucky Larson: Born to be a Star, in which he had a very minor part, and if you want an idea of how bad this movie is, I’ll just say that Shore is nowhere near the worst thing about it.

Ultimately, Pauly Shore is remembered for being a loud, unfunny flash in the pan.  He contributed nothing of value to acting or to film, his legacy bears some of the worst films of the 90’s and he is by and large one of the most hated performers of all time.  After the mid-90’s, audiences just refused to buy into Shore’s crap, and even though he seems to vehemently refuse to go away for good, nobody really cares about him, and he is pretty easy to ignore.

Worst Actors - Katherine Heigl

Katherine Heigl: "Huh?!  Did somebody
say one-sided feminism?!"
Source: timeinc.net

Hollywood is rough on women.  Stories of corrupt and perverted producers using their power and influence to manipulate women with the promise of fame permeate the history of film and go all the way back to the silent era.  It may seem as though things have gotten worse, but for those that make that argument, I refer them to the 1970’s, when entire theaters devoted to showing movies involving gang rape, exploitation and simulated sexual murder existed.  The famed 42nd street Grindhouse theaters in Manhattan poured out seemingly endless misogyny and it was, at least for the most part, accepted, but not respected.  Over the years, actresses have been more and more outspoken in their desire to be seen as artists, not as sex objects.  

The problem that seems to work against this trend is the fact that such a large portion of the film audience is male.  However, in recent years, the MPAA has reported an increase in size and the frequency of female audiences across the country.  This can be largely attributed to the massive and steadily-growing demographic of teen girls, who have generally controlled mainstream popular culture since the 1960’s.  They are the most devoted and most valuable market in the entertainment industry as a whole.  Still, the overall value of the films aimed at female audiences seems to remain at a steady rating of bleh!

There are a few types of female-centric films. These range from the typical, predictable romance to the movie about a strong female overcoming adversity.  You also have the Jane Austen-style high-art romantic drama that has had ebbs and flows throughout the last thirty years or so.  Do not forget the film about a troubled young girl and her struggles or the coming of age movie aimed at adolescent females.  Still, with all of the cliches and forced drama found in those above categories, the worst sub-genre of them all is the dreaded romantic comedy!  

Rom-coms are no strangers to worst of the year film lists and the Golden Raspberry Awards ceremonies.  This has remained true for decades.  Still, somehow things have gotten worse over the last five or six years.  This is largely due to the fact that a recent trend in romantic comedies is to attract women in their thirties and forties with highly sexual and shamelessly one-sided romance plots.  This is likely the result of the massive spike in divorce rates and the market-tested idea that men are worthless and women should be presented as their superiors.  Now, as a male, I find that offensive, which makes me a chauvinist, at least according to those that push this agenda.  

One such agenda-pusher is Katherine Heigl.  This was a lot of setup, I know, but I’m going to make a point here: Katherine Heigl is a despicable human being.  Most people do not remember her pre-Grey’s Anatomy career.  This is because she spent most of it bouncing between low-to-no budget movies with little-to-no value.  The two most prominent roles of her early career were a fairly large part in the dirt-stupid horror cash-in Bride of Chucky and the asinine Steven Seagal vehicle Under Siege 2: Dark Territory.  In 2001, she had a supporting role in the mostly-forgotten teen thriller Valentine, released in a period where this genre was still riding the waves of success created by the overrated Scream franchise.  This was then followed up by a few seasons spent on the WB series Roswell.  

I breezed through that last paragraph because, despite her having a strong and fairly consistent showing early in her career, she never made an impact on anyone.  This is telling because even Denise Richards maintained some credibility despite her lack of talent, and she was billed above this actress who would go on to have far more success than her.  Heigl was barely a B-lister, floating around from role to role, trying to find that breakout hit.  

In the mid-2000’s, Grey’s Anatomy was looking more and more like a pit stop for Heigl.  The show centered on a group of female medical interns and residents who slept around with each other’s boyfriends, got into bitter arguments and cried about broken friendships and failed romances for five years.  E.R. was a good show.  It was serious, had characters that were likable throughout its run and it felt like there were actual lives at stake in the show.  Grey’s Anatomy, as a rule, put the medical drama on the back burner in favor of a bland-as-hell sex drama focusing on narcissistic and generally unlikable people.  The show was, however, considered by some to be sexually-empowering to women.  I hate the term sexually-empowering, because it really just means, if a woman writes a female character that is a slut, it’s okay.  This trend has kept us from having a strong, engaging female protagonist in a quality film because most of them are still sexual objects, no matter which gender wrote them.  The double-standard here is infuriating.  I don’t like it when men pigeonhole women into sex-centric parts that exist for titillation, so why would I find it okay when a woman does it?  This, by the way, would become the focus of Katherine Heigl’s entire career.

During her run on Grey’s Anatomy, she appeared in several movies.  I’ll talk about them in a second, but I want to focus for a moment on a little 2006 film called Zyzzyx Rd.  The story of Zyzzyx Rd. involves a married man sleeping with a women he meets at a casino.  That woman (played by Heigl), has a psycho boyfriend named Joey who interrupts their little fling at a hotel and attacks her new-found lover.  Joey is overpowered, however and is thought to be dead, but as they drive to the middle of nowhere in the Southern California desert to dispose of the body, Joey escapes and pursues the couple.  It’s a pretty by-the-numbers thriller.  There’s nothing particularly special about it or anything… at least nothing about the plot is special.  No, what makes Zyzzyx Rd. so captivating is it’s post-production history.

It has never been officially confirmed or denied, but the director of Zyzzyx Rd. may have been trying to take advantage of a tax loophole that saves him some coin if his film gets a recognized theatrical run.  That is why, some think, the movie ran for a few days, with only a few showings, in a single theater in Dallas, TX.  The film’s total gross was $30, and all of those tickets went to the director, Heigl and a few other cast members.  Nobody saw this movie.  In fact, Heigl has come out as actively trying to block it from getting a DVD release, something that did not happen until a few years later.  So there you have it, folks!  Katherine Heigl’s most significant footprint in film history: She starred in the lowest-grossing movie of all time.

After the Zyzzyx Rd. debacle, Heigl appeared in the 2007 Judd Apatow comedy Knocked Up.  The film followed a loser who accidentally impregnates a woman after a one-night stand.  It’s a funny indictment of the stay-at-home generation and slackers in general.  As I mentioned in my Adam Sandler article, I believe Judd Apatow is talented enough to wring a good performance out of even Billy-freaking-Madison!  So, how did this pan out for Heigl?  Not good!  She was stiff, obnoxious, unsympathetic and just all-around unlikable through most of the otherwise-good movie.   Heigl actually came out after the movie and said she did not like the character she played and that she thought the movie was sexist.  Heigl has a tendency to lash out at her projects if she feels women are not painted in the proper light and in the case of Knocked Up, she thought the movie made her look like a stuck up woman with no sense of humor or empathy.  So, in response to this, she teams up with her mother (of all people) to write a feminist sex comedy in which she plays a stuck up woman with no sense of humor or empathy!

Heigl is apparently a follower of Zardoz!
"Penis... is... evil!!!"
source: nj.com 

For those who do not know me, I consider the Ugly Truth one of the most purely-awful movies ever made (read my likely-poorly-written review here).  I hated every second of this pandering, sleazy, unfunny disaster of a movie.  Gerard Butler comes off as a complete asshole, and he is meant to be the male proxy of the movie!  He represents ME!?  No!!!  He represents all men!  All men care about is sex.  They don’t want to talk, they don’t have respect for women, they just want one-and-done, bang and gone, here’s $100 now have a nice pregnancy, SEX!  …  PENIS!!!

I laid out my opinions of this film before.  The premise involves a TV executive named Abby (played by Heigl), who’s cat (she’s single with a cat… progressive!) changes her TV channel by stepping on the remote and she ends up on a relationship advice show called the Ugly Truth hosted by a pig named Mike Chadway (Gerard Butler).  Chadway doles out terrible relationship advice from the perspective of a guy who probably learned everything he knows about relationships from beer ads in the late 80’s.  So we get a brief scene where Abby calls the show, instantly gets through (likely because this show probably wouldn’t get more than six viewers in the real world) and attempts to rebuke him to no avail.  Then, the very next day, she finds out that Mike Chadway has been hired on her news program!  Now, let’s put aside the fact that as a producer she would have at least some say in who makes it on her show.  If we actually gave it any thought whatsoever, the entire premise of this movie wouldn’t float in Jello, so we have to just take what we are given.  From here we get numerous scenes where Chadway says things on live TV that would get the show numerous FCC fines and would definitely get him fired, followed by him giving Abby relationship advice from a guy’s perspective, and I’ll tell you, it IS the kind of advice an obviously anti-man writer would write for a male character like this too.  One contrivance follows another until the end.  It was awful.  It still is not the worst romcom I’ve seen, but it’s up there.  It’s really, REALLY high up there!

The Ugly Truth was pretty much a resounding death knell for Heigl’s mainstream career.  She spent the next few years appearing in uninspired romantic crap like 27 Dresses, a movie I did not see, and the absolute epic-fail of a movie called New Year’s Eve, a failed follow-up to the ensemble romance film Valentine’s Day from 2010.  The film was directed by famed TV writer Gary Marshall, who also has a history of directing mostly-bad romantic comedies.  In New Year’s Eve, Heigl plays Julie, an ex-girlfriend of a singer who is scheduled to perform at the holiday ceremonies.  She was stiff and bland as always but she, like everyone else in this movie, is lost in the shuffle.  There are literally a dozen romance plots happening simultaneously in this film at any given point.  It would be even harder to follow if the characters were not all cookie-cutter archetypes living out soap opera romance cliches.  

In One For the Money (2012), Heigl plays an out-of-work, single woman who turns to bounty hunting and then who tracks down bail jumpers for spare cash.  I swear this plot was put together using those sentence refrigerator magnets or worse, the notorious movie plot dart board!  It is so contrived, so badly-acted, and so unoriginal that I actually did not finish watching it.  I started, got to the point where she is assigned to track down a guy with mob ties despite having no training or proper gear… and that was it for me.  I could not take it anymore.  It also brought back horrible memories of the 2010 movie the Bounty Hunter (review here), a film I hated more than the Ugly Truth.  It’s also worth noting that One for the Money tanked at the box office, barely clearing half of its overall budget domestically, and with total worldwide gross totaled in, it still lost roughly $4 million of its $40 million dollar budget.  It’s looking like sunset on this once-praised performer’s career.

Her most recent film is this years flop the Big Wedding.  I did not see it and I do not intend to, really.  I just don’t have any interest in her pandering tripe anymore, not even for the purpose of a review.  Katherine Heigl had a slow rise, and it had nothing to do with the fact that she’s a woman.  No, her issues with breakout out into the mainstream came as a result of her utter lack of anything resembling talent.  She is, and I am saying this with all sincerity, one of the worst female leading ladies I have ever seen in any major Hollywood film.  She makes Tatum O'Neal look like Katherine Hepburn!  She has to be one of the luckiest women alive too, because for about five years, she was one of the biggest new stars in Hollywood, for no reason except that she was attractive.  That’s it.  What’s truly amusing about this is I am not alone in this opinion.  She has been the subject of ridicule for years due to her bad performances and her complete refusal to just go away!  The Onion News Network released one of their funniest segments about her, and she has maintained a fairly steady and justified army of haters ever since 2005.

Worst Actors - An Introduction

Before I begin, I would like to thank readers for engaging and enjoying Godfrey Ho Appreciation Month this year. I was sick for about a week and a half, so I missed a lot writing and I know I'm not exactly... consistent. This is something I'm working to change as I would like to get more articles out there more consistently. I spent a couple weeks away from the series but by the time I felt like writing again, I just needed a change of scenery. Plus, I need to keep some movies available for Godfrey Ho Month next year, sure he has plenty, but not all of them are exactly easy to find. That said...

This new series is going to be… harsh.  The Hollywood A-list is a place of honor for any actor.  Most actors who work in film never achieve the level of influence, value and credibility one would think is required to attain this prestigious distinction among peers.  Now, if you were able to maintain a straight face while reading those last few sentences, then congratulations, you fell for it.

The “A-List”, is branding.  Much like a delicious Angus cow, a Hollywood actor is a product.  They are the pretty face on the poster that gets the viewing audience to fill empty theater seats.  The reason why opening weekend is so heavily scrutinized over the rest of a theatrical run is because the movie is being sold to us long before its release, and the one thing used to push a movie more than any other is the cast.

So, who decides who an A-List actor is?  It all comes down to value.  You will not, in 2013, see Christian Slater getting as much for a role as, say, Ryan Gosling, nor would he deserve that level of pay.  This is because the value of an actor (based on past contract negotiations and the overall budget of a film) being even considered for a role has more value to a film than its screenwriter, its director or (in some cases) its source material.  The general moviegoing audience does not develop a relationship with a filmmaker the way a more enthusiastic and engaged filmgoer does.  No, they focus on the actors.  The result of this is a number of notably awful performers getting a little too much credit for their success.

Now, that said, even the greatest actors have bad films under their belt.  And, as casual film fans are quick to elevate an actor for a good performance or good movie, they are just as quick to cast one aside for appearing in a hot mess.  Many of the most famous bad performances of all time (John Travolta in Battlefield Earth and John Wayne in the Conqueror, for instance) are also visible demarcation points in respected careers.  You can often easily trace the exact point where a notable performer’s status went from respected to laughing stock and it can usually be  narrowed down to a period of a few years.  

All of the actors to be featured in this series have fallen in their own way.  Some of these Hollywood  (mostly former) A-listers have won Oscars, a symbol that once meant something, but now is really about as “honorable” and meaningful to a film or performer’s credibility as a TV Guide interview.  The Academy Awards has become just another venue for Hollywood to sell their product, and it usually blows.  

So, who do I chose for this series, and how did I choose them?  It was not a scientific process by any means.  No, this list is purely emotional.  I am writing this in response to the rising consensus that film fans such as myself should lower our standards to meet those of everyone else.  Are my standards high?  I don’t know.  I like a lot of movies myself that I would not exactly consider to be “great movies” but are certainly entertaining.  I have found enjoyment in many films in many genres and I could not tell you where I draw a line.  I can give examples.  Holy crap can I give examples, but I could not quantify what I find to be “good” or “bad” in a purely general sense.  

I want to note that this started as a Top 10, but I found myself ordering a list with a resigned sigh.  It just did not seem possible or even reasonable for me to pick from the massive scrap heap of formerly famous people for just a few names to focus on, which is why I decided to make this an ongoing thing.  There are a couple of things that need to be said before this series begins.  First, I do not dislike all of these performers.  One of the things I take into strong consideration is how far their star fell.  I could have gone with a list of actors like many of the “worst actors” lists online, featuring names like Hayden Christensen or Miley Cyrus, and while they are bad… really, really bad…  I wanted to go with people that had a run that is or was prominent, impactful and successful outside of a niche.  Or, if I did go with an actor that was only known for a handful of movies or one role it had to be an epically bad one.  Yes, Anakin Skywalker and Hannah Montana are terrible characters and yes, they are badly acted, but I’m trying to weigh just how much impact these characters will have on the public consciousness at  large, and I don’t really see it.  

I’ll be posting entries in this series periodically, with the title “Worst Actor”.  I will do everything I can to justify my decision for them making this series.  I will not just feature a name and a picture to troll their fans (assuming they have any).  I will try to be calculating, and reasonable.  “Try” being the applicable word.  So without further ado, the next article will be my first entry in this series.  Stay posted for more updates in the days and weeks to come.

Revenge of Godfrey Ho Month - Ninja the Protector (1986)

Ninja the Protector (1986)

This is one of Ho’s more confusing, yet more comically-entertaining outings.  Released as Project Ninja Daredevils in 1986 (not to be confused with 1985’s Ninja Project Daredevils), this film was re-titled Ninja the Protector for distribution.  The movie is one of dozens of Ho’s that employs the cut-and-paste editing technique, and it is also one of his more famous entries, alongside Ninja Terminator (1985) and Undefeatable (1993).

There is not much that separates Ninja the Protector from Ho’s other outings, but the silly moments make this one worth watching.  The plot is more or less irrelevant, as usual, and is barely glossed over in the entirety of the film’s run time, which clocks in at under 70 minutes.  Still, for the sake of professionalism, I will do my very best to give an outline of this film’s “story”.

Warren and David are just trying to live normal lives.  They do what they can to survive but they share a secret: they are former ninjas.  As a crime syndicate specializing in counterfeiting rises, can Warren and David face their shared past in order to move beyond it?

Along with Warren and David’s plot, we have cut-and-paste footage to talk about too!  Here we have Godfrey Ho regular Richard Harrison as Ninja Master Gordon Anderson, who is now a high-ranking police official.  After two of his cops run across a wounded ninja, one Anderson himself actually bested, they inquire about ninjas to their boss to which Anderson replies “...they’re just a fairy tale.”  However, ninjas do exist, and there is a constant battle for power in their underground world.

Warren and David’s past finally catches up to them as events start to unravel their comfortable lives and the ninja empire attempts to clean up the past by assassinating Anderson but their multiple attempts fail.  Things become worse after Warren’s girlfriend Judy catches her lover cheating on her with a model, and then attempts suicide.  This is followed by Warren being abandoned by both Judy and his brother, David, then framed for murder by one of the criminal masterminds.

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The boss intends to trap David by ensuring he is informed of Warren’s murder charge, which he anticipated would motivate him.  David storms the gangster’s home and dispatches the charging goons but is eventually overpowered.  When the goons pull out a knife at the boss’s orders to kill David, the hero then brandishes a machete but is ultimately shot.  The boss takes David out easily.  Warren intervenes, seemingly out of nowhere, but is overpowered himself.  David then, severely injured from his wound, picks up a pistol and kills Warren’s attacker, but ultimately dies himself.  

Back in the new Godfrey Ho footage, Anderson receives a challenge from a rival ninja, one that is impossible to refuse.  The challenger is Bruce, the evil ninja overlord, and the ensuing fight begins with the two ninjas engaging each other whilst riding motorcycles and swinging weapons at each pass.  As the two warriors begin their fight on foot, we have a short but well-choreographed fight scene between Bruce, who fights dirty, and the honorable Anderson that ends really, really abruptly.  One of the highlights of this short scene is when Anderson fires smoke at Bruce from the hilt of his sword.  

As you can probably tell, Ninja the Protector does not make a hell of a lot of sense.  Like most of Ho’s films, it is all over the place and much of the film’s plot is lost to the forced and sloppy editing that permeates his work.  Even with a run time that barely clears and hour, this movie is padded with gratuitous sex and some very awkward ninja posing from Richard Harrison.  This padding alone is proof that there was little here to begin with.  So, why do I recommend this movie?

Ninja The Protector is an awesome mess.  The editing is awful, the camera work is hilariously inept, the acting is off and the dub is comedy gold.  This is one of the most riffable movies in Godfrey Ho’s collection, and all of the little “inadequacies” add up to one big successful failure.  Sure, it does not work as a ninja thriller, but it does work as a comedy, so, like most movies that are so-bad-they’re-good, Ninja the Protector is an anomalous “good” bad movie.  Watch this one for a laugh.

The Revenge of Godfrey Ho Appreciation Month - An Introduction

Godfrey Ho; Image source: popmatters.com

One year ago, I dubbed August “Godfrey Ho Appreciation Month”, named for one of my favorite schlock directors of all time.  I love his over-the-top dub acting, the silly plot lines and, of course, his legendary cut-and-paste editing, which mixes two entirely unrelated films together.  At one point I actually really hated this director’s films, but over time they grew on me, and now I enjoy the insanity.  So, last year, I dedicated a series of articles to some of his films.  This year I will continue in that tradition.

There is something to be said about Godfrey Ho’s films.  They aren't exactly unique, as there are a ton of these poorly-dubbed, poorly edited, kung fu/ninja films out there from the 70’s and 80’s.  What makes Ho’s different, if not slightly so, is the way he would often film new footage, usually with white actors, to edit into the old footage, often attempting to change the context of the film entirely.  Sometimes this actually works.  As silly as it is, Ninja Terminator sort of works as a movie plot-wise.  Most of the time, however, it’s a mess; a beautiful, hilarious mess.

So how did Godfrey Ho make it in America?  Well, it all comes back to the home video market, which opened the doors for hundreds (if not thousands) of wannabe filmmakers and foreign veterans to begin inexpensively releasing their films in the U.S.  Early on (mostly in the 70’s) distribution of these films was pretty much chaotic, but generally easy, since there was no stranglehold on the home video market from larger studios, nor were there any strict laws about content (in the form of censorship; because that is what it is) from the government.  If you could make a movie, and the master could pass customs, you had a release.  

The rise of home video stores in the 80’s fed this push and ultimately, it collapsed as the studios began to crawl out of their fifteen-year-hole as the mid-to-late 80’s saw blockbuster after blockbuster begin to make huge sums of money.  They bought up most of the distributors they could, and, for the most part, the mostly-free home video market died in the early 90’s, leaving only a few of the original distributors (pretty much the ones who were already big enough to stand on their own two feet) to ultimately die a slightly slower death.

Godfrey Ho did continue to release films into the 90’s, thanks to revenue he earned in the 80’s, and is, I think, largely responsible for the rise in popularity of ninjas in pop culture, though you may not know it.  Yes, his movies were goofy, but they predated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and they followed an extremely popular kung-fu craze in the 70’s and early 80’s.  Godfrey Ho released dozens of ninja films in the 80’s, and yes, they made money.  So, it stands to reason his ubiquity would lead to influence somewhere.  Could Godfrey Ho be the reason for the massive popularity of ninjas in pop culture?  I dunno.  I just think it would have been one hell of a coincidence if he weren't.

So, I start this month with a very... special movie.  Ho’s attempt at making a Kaiju film.  Well, sort of a Kaiju film anyway.  It is a hilarious mix of a child’s pet story, mixed with an evil overlord trying to take over the world’s food supply.  I’d say that’s a perfect way to start things off this month, wouldn't you?