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The Worst Films of 2015 (Brad and Dave Edition)
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Date Aired
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January 15th, 2016
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Running Time
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1:20:12
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Website
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Introduction[]
Brad: It's the most wonderful time of the year, where we get to remember the shit we watched.
Dave: Well, it's good 'cause we get to purge it all out, and then we start right into January horror movies.
Brad: Yes. We start right into the January movies that, come January next year, I'm gonna have to remind myself that I even fucking saw.
Dave: [looking at list on a sketchpad] That's half my list right there, like, "oh, yeah, I saw that."
Brad: Yeah, and with my list, I... it was more, what am I going to leave off? Because it's been suggested before that we make these twenty, and I don't wanna do that.
Dave: It's too much. It's too much, 'cause what happens is, your top three bad ones really stick out, but the next seven, it's really a battle to figure out what order you put 'em in. It's not like "this was definitely the fourth worst movie of the year," it's more "what movie pissed me off the least?"
Brad: Yeah, it's kind of turned into...I don't wanna do twenty because I feel like you have to think about it more when there's ten. You really have to be like, "yeah, some real shit's getting left off," but it takes more effort to condense it into ten.
Dave: Yeah, because...I think, on the list you sent me of movies I'd seen that I'd reviewed on the site that I didn't like, there was like 16 movies. And I'm sure I've seen four other movies this year that I didn't like.
Brad: Outside of the Midnight Screenings.
Dave: Yeah, that I could add to the list, like, I didn't see Jurassic World at the Midnight Screenings, I saw it on my own, I didn't like it. I could add that and probably a few others to it, but the fact of the matter is, it's like, there were some...that were on the list that even you sent me, it was like, "oh yeah, you didn't like this," and it's like, yeah, I didn't like it, but...
Brad: It was just me sending you every single one that had a negative review. And since we were living in kind of a post-Pure Flix world, [laughing] that's a funny thing to say. Since we're living in a post-Pure Flix world, I judge things differently now. Now there's...it's less ranking which one pissed me off the most to "#10 pissed me off, but not as much as the rest." There's a lot more objectivity thrown in there as well.
Dave: It's like, am I gonna give this one slack because I liked this one performance in it? It's like, I hated the writing, but the acting was good. Or it was really well-filmed, but it was still a shitty movie.
#10[]
Dave: #10, Aloha, which could be higher on the list. I mean, it was a fucking shitshow of a movie.
Brad: Uh-huh. We're at a Krasinski movie tomorrow.
Dave: Yeah, and that's the thing. I was like, I really didn't like that movie, but all I remember in that movie was how amazing John Krasinski is. Like, off the top of my head, this was like, Krasinski was awesome! So I wanted to give it some slack, so I put it at 10. It's a shitshow of a movie. It's Cameron Crowe's...easily his worst movie. It's an amalgam of everything he's done before, plus a little bit of WarGames.
Brad: [laughs] This sounds...everything I hear about this movie sounds amazing. WarGames, John Krasinski speaks only with his facial features, there's a satellite...
Dave: Bill Murray's the bad guy.
Brad: Yeah, Emma Stone is, like, Hawaiian or some shit.
Dave: She's supposed to be half-Hawaiian. A half-Hawaiian redhead.
Brad: This sounds like the best film of the year.
Dave: It's just a fucking hot mess of a movie. But the intentions there are still good, and it's still got some of that good Cameron Crowe dialogue. But there's just too much...it's like the screenplay must have been for an eight-hour movie, but the studio just started cuttin' shit.
Brad: I didn't see it, which is a phrase I'm sure is gonna come up a lot during this. I didn't see it, but also, all I remember about it was us getting out of the theater, and you guys were in the middle of your review when whatever the fuck I was at that night got out. So I get out, you see us walking there, and you lean out the car and just scream "goddammit!" And then Ryan or Brian, whoever I was with was like, "well, I guess they didn't like it," and I say, "well, he went back in the car, maybe we didn't hear the end of that. It could've been, "goddammit, that was fucking underrated!'"
Dave: It was...I could go on a whole rant about Cameron Crowe right now, about how...he used to be one of those filmmakers that like, I would look forward to Cameron Crowe movies. And the last few, it's just been like, Cameron Crowe, quit writing the same movies.
Brad: Stop making "so what" movies.
Dave: Yeah, and that's really what they are. It's like after Almost Famous, he's just like, "ah, fuck it."
Brad: Yeah.
Dave: And for the most part, they're still like...We Bought a Zoo is not a great movie, but it's not a bad movie. It's very just...watchable. Aloha was bad. Aloha was a bad movie, and it's heartbreaking when someone whose work you used to respect, and still can look back and respect quite a bit of it, you just look at it and go "ooh..."
Brad: There is nothing on my list that I can even come close to saying something like that about. Like, my #10, um... We were talking earlier about looking at things slightly more objectively, and this movie at #10 did really, really piss me off. But there were other movies, there were a couple movies that maybe pissed me off more. Okay, for instance, Unfinished Business and Hot Tub Time Machine 2 aren't on my list, and I had...when I was looking at #10, it was like those two movies and this one. And honestly, where I came down is, at least Hot Tub Time Machine 2 and Unfinished Business, bad as they are, looked like something you would see in a theater. It's like, okay, these are terrible, but I don't feel like I'm watching a TV movie. My #10 is The Loft, which, did...
Dave: I've heard all about this fucking movie.
Brad: Yeah, honestly, yeah, 'cause me and Sarah were at that, she was telling you all about it the other day.
Dave: Yeah.
Brad: It was...there is no reason why, even as a fucking January movie, there was no fucking reason that we were seeing that shit in a fucking theater. That movie was...it was like some awful fucking pilot for, like, a sexy cable show that's not fucking sexy, and it's got dialogue in it where everyone is kind of speaking in double entendres that make no sense. Like, "oh, I see you're holding the queen of hearts. Don't stab me with those ace of spades." What does that fucking mean?! I don't know, I think they're blackmailing people. I don't know.
It's all like rejected Christian Troy dialogue from Nip/Tuck. That's really what this fucking movie seems like.
Dave: Like someone just walked into the Nip/Tuck writing room, picked all the pages up off the floor, uncrumpled them, taped them together into a screenplay?
Brad: Nip/Tuck is a show where a woman answered the door holding a cat, and Christian Troy says, "nice pussy." So that made it in that show, and this fucking shit just seems bad enough for even, like... The final season of Silk Stalkings is better than shit you see in this movie. We ranted about this movie hardcore when we were outside the car, and I don't know if we pre-video ranted about those other movies, but me and Sarah just had to with this movie, so that's my #10.
#9[]
Dave: Yeah. Well, since we touched on it a minute ago, my #9 is Hot Tub Time Machine 2.
Brad: Have at it. That movie sucked ass.
Dave: It did, and I understand it didn't make it to your list, 'cause... Honestly, the last six months, I haven't been able to go see that many movies, so I missed a lot of bad ones because my job kept me safe.
Brad: Maybe in the back of my head, I was like, "well, it'll be on Dave's list."
Dave: Yeah. God, that was a piece of shit. What really stung about Hot Tub Time Machine 2 is, the previews looked terrible. The movie didn't look good. There was nothing that looked good about this movie. But what stung about it was, the first one's a really good movie.
Brad: I loved the first one.
Dave: The first one's a good, solid comedy. The second one's not.
Brad: It's hard to believe that that movie has the same director and the same writers as the first film.
Dave: And for the most part, the same cast. I think what it was was, the first one, they wrote this intimate little movie about rediscovering your self, and the second one, they're like, "let's go to the future and just bat for the fucking fences."
Brad: Well, it was...everyone who had learned their lesson in the first movie seems to have forgotten that in this film. They're all stereotypes of the characters they were in the first film. Yeah, you had dickheads in the first one, but at the end of the day, the first movie had heart. The second one's funniest sequence is a rape scene.
Dave: And I'll give the rape scene credit. It was funny, mostly the fact that I was sitting there going, "are they actually fucking doing this?"
Brad: Apparently, they are.
Dave: Yeah, and...the one thing I'll give the second one, it had the benefit of Adam Scott as the straight man.
Brad: Which is always a magical thing.
Dave: Yeah, Adam Scott's great. And it's one of those...I can't blame the performances from anybody in that movie. It's just so shittily written. Even the first one had...it had some stupid fucking teenage gross-out stupid humor, but it was in small doses, and it worked for the movie. And this one, that was just what they had.
Brad: No, I totally agree. It was a group of talented people coming together to fall on their faces in a way that's up there with Caddyshack II.
That honestly goes into my #9, which also has...
Dave: Caddyshack II? Are we bringing it back?
Brad: Yeah, you know, it had its anniversary re-release this year...27th anniversary? No, mine's Vacation. This one just flat-out pissed me off.
Dave: I know. You ranted about that movie for like a week.
Brad: I did. I did. It was...where do I even start with this fucking movie? This is a movie that seems like it was written by people who just didn't even see the other movies. Even the bad sequels to Vacation, like European or Vegas Vacation. Even that, it is humor that is not existent in those other movies. There's no jokes in it. At least Hot Tub Time Machine 2, Unfinished Business, things like that, they had jokes, they just weren't very funny. This doesn't have jokes, it's just gross-out humor. It's supposed to be funny because he's holding a handful of pubic hair, and he thought it was a sponge.
Dave: And that's not what the...the originals are all... And the fact that it's Rusty, and Rusty's that much of an id... Rusty was the straight man!
Brad: Yeah! If anything, talk about needing Adam Scott for a role!
Dave: You know what? Fuck that. I love Adam S...
Brad: Needing Anthony Michael Hall?
Dave: Damn right! Damn right! He's alive, he's working, it'd be great.
Brad: Yeah, no, this just turns him into like...he's flopping around, there's turbulence on the place, his face lands in some titties, and it's funny 'cause it's supposed to be awkward. Like the first movie...the first movie had a couple of raunchy things in it, but there was always... Okay, when Clark is eating the sandwich that's been peed on, that's part of the joke, but the joke isn't just dependent on he's eating a piss-stained sandwich, it's that he's holding this while trying to act smooth while making eyes with Christie Brinkley. There's more to that joke than...
Dave: It's not "ooh, pee!" It's, "oh, God, don't do that, man."
Brad: And he spits it out, throws it on the ground. There's more to the jokes in that movie than just something R-rated is happening. And this was...I don't know how they fucked this up. I mean, the only parts that got kind of a chuckle out of me were the opening credits that's playing "Holiday Road" and when Chevy Chase shows up in it later. That's a few seconds' worth of "heh."
Dave: Yeah.
Brad: But this movie...this was during the Brad and Sarah Show, and this was by far the worst, and we saw Pixels that week.
#8[]
Dave: Fantastic Four.
Brad: I'm so glad 'cause it's not on mine.
Dave: Listen, no matter what, it was gonna make it on mine.
Brad: Uh-huh.
Dave: It's a testament to the other movies I've seen this year that it's only #8.
Brad: Yeah? It's a testament to mine that it's not even...'cause this movie is dogshit, and it's a testament that I've seen so many bad movies that this isn't even in the 10.
Dave: No, I mean, I've seen every superhero movie, I think, that's ever come out at this point. Fantastic Four is one of the worst...five, maybe? I'm trying to think of ones that were worse than Fantastic Four.
Brad: There's been some that have pissed me off more than this, but objectively speaking, this is fucking terrible.
Dave: Well, I mean, yeah, it pissed me off...all right. I'd rather watch Fantastic Four again than Man of Steel, but Man of Steel is at least a well-made movie. Yeah, like, it gets everything wrong, in my opinion, but it's cohesive. Fantastic Four is not fucking cohesive.
Brad: No, it has a chunk of the movie missing.
Dave: And it does the same thing that Man of Steel did—it doesn't hit me to the core of my geekiness as much as Man of Steel did, but it's almost more personally insulting—it got the characters so wrong. Just like, trying to... Let the Thing have "it's clobbering time" not be about him gettin' the shit kicked out of him as a kid. Like, why would you do that?
Brad: And give him some pants.
Dave: Yeah. Some pants
Brad: Give him a dick...or something.
Dave: Pants. Like, everybody bitches about the fucking Tim Story ones, about the Thing costume from those. And I look back at that and go, you know, the face wasn't quite right, the right shape for the Thing, but it didn't look that bad, and he had fucking pants on. The Thing in the new one looked so much worse to me. It looked fake. It looked so fake. He was in every other shot of the movie, and it was such bad CGI.
Brad: Oh yeah. I mean, you could...it's disappointing because you could see where Josh Trank thought he had a good idea, and probably did. I mean, who knows what happened between conception of this and what ended up on the screen.
Dave: And that's the other thing, it's... All these thing that I was reading, that he wanted to try and do, and the tone, and the things he was looking at for...like...inspiration, all built to what could have been a really cool movie, but no matter what, it would've been a very bad Fantastic Four movie.
Brad: It was like he was trying to...well, you have elements of this movie that are a lot like The Fly. It's obvious he was trying to go for like, a body horror film.
Dave: Yeah, some Cronenberg stuff, which...you could read into that into The Fantastic Four if you're not a fan. And there comes a point where it's...yeah, there's a lot of directors-for-hire, filmmakers-for-hire that'll just make fucking anything, and that's fine. But if you're gonna make one of these movies that have 60+ years of history behind it, and so on, and so forth. Like, even the young adult novel movies and shit. Get somebody that actually gives a fuck about it, and have them make the movie. 'Cause even if it doesn't make you, it'll at least be some passion behind it.
Brad: Well, I'm glad you mentioned the Thing earlier because that's something that I've felt like I need to clarify since we did the Midnight Screening. We've gotten people on the comments for that who've yelled at us for saying that we thought that Man of Steel was a worse movie than that. And what I wanted to clarify...
Dave: No, I hate Man of Steel more!
Brad: That's what I...no, no, no, yeah.
Dave: But is it a worse movie? Objectively, no, it's not a worse movie. Now, will I still say it was my least favorite or the worst movie of the year it was from? Absolutely.
Brad: It was on my list of the worst movies of that year, Man of Steel was, but objectively speaking, that is a better film than Fantastic Four.
Dave: It's a better film, it's just not a good...it's still a shitty film.
Brad: Oh, yeah, yeah. Fantastic Four didn't piss me off as much, which...yeah.
Dave: It's kinda like saying I'd rather eat a handful of rabbit shit other than a big steaming pile of dog shit. It's still not something I wanna fucking do.
Brad: But it's gonna be in 3D. [and laughs]
Dave: Go to your #8.
Brad: My #8...might also be on yours. My #8 is Unsullied.
Dave: [realizing] Oh, I fucking forgot it; it wasn't on my list!
Brad: I sent it to you because I had to remind you about it the other day, remember? [Dave pulls out his phone and looks up the email] When I was like... when you were like, "Unsullied? What the fuck is Unsullied?!" And even in like, telling you the plot, you were like, "I don't remember..." I'm like, "remember? Simeon Rice directed it."
Dave: [shows him that...] Yeah, you didn't put it on my list, man.
Brad: I didn't?!
Dave: No, I forgot about that. I gotta adjust things now.
Brad: [while Dave goes over his list, weighs films, and ultimately writes down his pick] Oh, that's fine. Unsullied is this movie that... Okay, I see movies like this a lot. And this movie, I wasn't necessarily sitting there mad. It feels like...it feels like it's the kind of movie that like, Brian would show me that he found on Netflix at 2:00 in the morning, like, "you gotta come over and see this piece of shit I just saw." It's like this... These two guys kidnap women and set 'em loose in the woods and they hunt them. I mean, it's one of those kind of movies. You've seen this kind of movie many times before, and if I was just seeing a movie like this on Netflix, I would see it and not think anything of it and go about my day. It's just, I've seen this kind of movie several times. But the fact that this...
Dave: Fuck it, it's my #7 now. I just took something else out of the list and put in Unsullied.
Brad: There you go.
Dave: It's an objective decision I had to make after some brief soul-searching. So let's just get this...this is his #8, my #7.
Brad: Excellent,
Dave: Fucking hell.
Brad: It is the kind...the fact that this somehow, and I'm guessing it's because Simeon Rice directed it and he somehow got this into several theaters, and we had to pay full theater prices to go see this in the theater...wow, this is one of the worst things you could've paid to go see in the theater.
Dave: Oh, wow, it was fucking...it was awful, and it's just the fucking...bros that wanna hunt and kill humans. It's like it was trying to have a political message, but it wasn't subtle enough to be clever, and it wasn't overt enough to make sense.
Brad: He wanted to make an exploitation film, and...
Dave: Which is great! Everyone should!
Brad: Absolutely! Yeah, absolutely, but he made the kind of movie that better people have made, and with a bunch of hack bullshit where she's a track star, and then she's on the run from these guys who are hunting her, she trips, and then it flashes back to her and her sister, and her sister's like...
Dave: The whole sister thing. I forgot about the sister thing.
Brad: Remember that? The sister's like, "you gotta get up and run!"
Dave: It's the linchpin of the whole movie, and it makes no sense whatsoever. God, that was awful.
Brad: If you're gonna make something like this, just throw it out on some streaming service. Send it direct-to-DVD.
Dave: It was very much a direct-to-DVD movie, like something we'd walk through Family Video and be like, "what's this? Like, Unsullied? I'm high enough."
Brad: Yeah, and then I would stop watching it about a half an hour in, or I would be like, "Brian, why are you making me watch this?"
Dave: "Well, thank God it only cost me a dollar to rent."
Brad: Yeah, and then I would forget about it. But...even the guy at the movie theater didn't know what fucking movie it was. He was like..."Two for Unsullied," and he's like, "do you guys know what this is?" We're like, "barely."
Dave: Kind of?
Brad: Didn't even have like a fucking mylar, it was just a printed-out sheet of paper that printed Unsullied on it.
#7[]
Brad: So is your 7 now tied with Unsullied?
Dave: No, I'm just replacing it. I had to think about it for a second, if I was just gonna leave Unsullied off my list, or if I was gonna replace something. And so my #7...honestly, it was kind of a filler movie. I had Project Almanac.
Brad: [laughs] Oh! Oh, Brian had that on his.
Dave: It wasn't good, but it's one of those things that's just like...that movie is gonna be forgotten by time so quickly. Who gives a shit?
Brad: I barely...considering we got trailers for that for like a fucking year when it was called Welcome to Yesterday or whatever the fuck it was called.
Dave: No, and everything else on the list is way worse than that. I put it at 7 because...honestly, at least Aloha had something going for it, Fantastic Four at least tried, and Hot Tub Time Machine 2 had Adam Scott.
Brad: [laughs] Project Almanac had...I don't know, I didn't see it. That was the night I was at The Loft...I think.
Dave: You didn't miss anything.
Brad: I didn't think so from the trailer. My #7...dear God, did you not fucking miss anything. My #7 is Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse.
Dave: Ugh, even the previews for that made me upset.
Brad: Same, and then seeing the entire 90-minute fucking movie just... Of all the movies that Violet and I have gone to together, that's the one that she's gotten pissed off at the most. And this movie is a prime example to why zombie movies just need to fucking die for about ten years, and then come back, 'cause I'm sick of it.
Dave: Well...yeah, and it's one of those things that... As long as Walking Dead is getting good ratings, people are still gonna want to make zombie movies and cash in on it. The fact of the matter is, for every 15 zombie movies that are made, two are watchable, and one's good.
Brad: Uh-huh.
Dave: And it's always gonna...it's becoming...it's the same thing with vampire movies...or slasher movies. For every 15 that are made, two are watchable, one is good.
Brad: In that same week that we saw Scouts Guide, we also saw Freaks of Nature, which had vampires and zombies in it. Not a great movie, but watchable.
Dave: Well, that's...that's kind of the state of things. I...always loved zombies, us growing up, fucking Dawn of the Dead, I don't know how many times we watched that movies. All the Romero ones, some of the Italian ones...
Brad: Return of the Living Dead.
Dave: Oh, I loved Return of the Living Dead. That was my first movie with titties. My older brother rented it for me, it was fantastic.
Brad: Nice.
Dave: And I was young enough that I remember watching that movie in a fort I had built. That's how young I was.
Brad: Me and Dave watching it. We were in fifth grade, and we watched Return of the Living Dead. But like, there wasn't this...just thousands of them a fucking year when we were growing up.
Dave: No, there wasn't. Well, and that's when the zombie boom happened a couple years ago. For a little while, I was honestly kinda psyched. I was like, "fuck yeah, zombies!" But now there's...what's your interpretation of a zombie, and so on and so forth. I don't... I don't care, just make it good!
Brad: Well, Scouts Guide was such a forced meme of a movie. Every single line of dialogue, every single piece of action seemed like it only existed to make animated GIFs to throw on Tumblr of it. Like "I'm not a stripper, I'm a cocktail waitress [cocks rifle]," and shit like that. You know what? Okay, that's cheap and really forced, but maybe... I would still criticize that, but if it also had any kind of likable character, which it doesn't. Every character in this is some douchebag, like, taking selfies with a zombies, ogling at zombie tits as if the Internet doesn't exist. It was a miserable, miserable fucking experience. It was us in the theater watching this at some point in the morning, and some guy sitting in the back who I swear to God, the only reason he was in there in because it was kind of cold outside. So if Violet was here, she would probably say that's her #1, but I've seen worse, so it's #7.
#6[]
Dave: Hot Pursuit.
Brad: That's all you, man.
Dave: Well, this was one of those movies that...this happens every year. Brad'll go through the website, write us all a list of the movies that we gave negative reviews to and send it to us, and then I'd go through, you know, the list of everything I've seen for the year, and I'd mix and match. Hot Pursuit was on the list that Brad sent me, and I was like, "did I see that? I don't remember that."
Brad: You got a poster for it.
Dave: I must've seen it. So I got on Wikipedia to read the synopsis of it to remind myself, and I read the entire page, like, every piece of the article, and I still went, "I still don't remember seeing this movie." I honestly don't remember a fucking thing! [Brad laughs] So it means either I blocked it all out because it was that bad, or it was just that fucking unforgettable [sic].
Brad: You predicted that in your video. That was one where I was in the backseat, I think, and you had...you and Irving said...you had said to Irving like, "I know what this is gonna be. This is gonna be, when it comes time to do the Worst lists, this is gonna be that fucking movie that Brad sends me, and I'm gonna have to ask him what the fuck he's talking about."
Honestly, even when you guys reviewed that, it was quick.
Dave: I remember that it was Sofía Vergara and fucking...
Brad: Reese Witherspoon.
Dave: Reese Witherspoon, and Reese Witherspoon was an annoying little cop, and Sofía Vergara was a mumbling cunt, and that's all I remember.
Brad: Yeah, even in you guys's [sic] review, which I think the review part was maybe like five, ten minutes, and it was mostly, "Ive already forgotten this movie," and the rest was, like, the trailers. And I was like, "you guys have gotten the trailer for Spy," so Irving was talking about Melissa McCarthy for a while.
Dave: And sometimes, that's the way it rolls.
Brad: Absolutely. Like, there's been movies I've been to where I'm just begging to just talk about the trailers.
Dave: Yeah, it's like, I've got nothing important to say."
Brad: Yeah, like, "all right, Sarah, look at the trailers on your arm."
My #6 is The Letters. Is it on yours?
Dave: It's on mine, it's my #4. So we might as well get it out of our way.
Brad: No, no, I'll just...
Dave: Do your bit, I'll save mine.
Brad: Yeah, I'll just do my bit on it. So...all right, The Letters, I actually thought it would be... I'm surprised mine's lower than yours is, 'cause I think I hated that movie more than you did. The Letters is a movie that is just wholly uninteresting. Every single piece of this movie feels like it's done by somebody who has never done their job before. The editing feels like it's done by someone who's never edited a movie, so you have scenes that should have cuts, but they don't, so one person has to walk all the way to this side of the room, all the way back with no soundtrack, no music playing in the background. It's a monotonous fucking film. The acting is flat, boring. The dialogue, in terms of screenwriter, is all exposition dialogue, so you'll have a character talking about a thing they're going to do, cut to a character talking about them doing that thing, and then the next, somebody telling somebody else about the scene we just saw of this character doing that thing. It was... as a bad film, it was just flat. It was flat, and because it was so boring, it was just pissing me the fuck off because you could make... You could make an interesting story about a character like...or a person like Mother Teresa, who is having a crisis of faith in this movie and things like that. This movie does none of that, and it was... I saw Spotlight that night, so that got...I got one good movie in that night, so...
#5[]
Brad: All right, what are we on? #5?
Dave: #5. All right, #5, The Longest Ride.
Brad: Ah yeah, that's right.
Dave: Oh, yeah, Nicholas Sparks. There's one a year, pretty much.
Brad: There's one coming out in a couple of weeks, The Choice.
Dave: Well, hopefully I'm out of town.
Brad: What did you think of this [poster of...] compared to The Best of Me?
Dave: They're very similar. Like, all Nicholas Sparks things are very similar, and The Best of Me is ridiculous in its way, but The Longest Ride is ridiculous for a whole lotta other ways.
Brad: Is that, like, the bullfighting one?
Dave: Not bullfighting, it's bull-riding, which, right there, I don't give a shit. Immediately, don't give a shit. If one of the central themes of your movie has anything to do with, you know, cowboy hats and there aren't six-shooters, I don't fucking care.
Brad: [after a good laugh] Yeah, 'cause even McConaughey in Magic Mike had some fake six-shooters.
Dave: Listen, McConaughey is a trump card.
Brad: Yeah. Fuck yeah.
Dave: Like, McConaughey? I would watch two hours of that man eating cereal and still probably say, "he deserves an Oscar!"
Brad: Yeah. I would watch three hours of him just sitting on space porch with that robot from Interstellar.
Dave: Oh, God, that would've been an amazing movie.
Brad: Oh God yeah.
Dave: Just drinking a beer, 'cause eventually, like, in an hour or two and a half, he'd get a good buzz going and just start rambling.
Brad: McConaughey in Longest Ride would change it to one of the best movies of the year.
Dave: Yeah. It's just fucking...awful. Honestly, it was an awful movie. And everyth... there was nothing good about it. It's weird casting...
Brad: Scott Eastwood?
Dave: Sco... you know what? He didn't upset me as much as...
Brad: I'm just, in my head, trying to, 'cause I mean, you've seen these movies, but for me, having seen the trailers...
Dave: Scott Eastwood and some blonde girl that was in something else in the past year or so. But I mean, really, all...it was more about Alan Alda in it. 'Cause Alan Alda playing a character that's supposed to be...probably somewhere between 15 and 20 years older than Alan Alda is. And then flashbacks to a younger actor who's supposed to be Alan Alda in, like, the '40s, who looks nothing like Alan Alda.
Brad: Oh, so it's the Luke Bracey/James Marsden...?
Dave: Yeah! So there's that going on, and just that Nicholas Sparks back and forth in time bullshit, and none of it makes sense or lines up, and there's some bullshit heartfelt lesson at the end. It's the same fucking story every time with different bullshit around it.
Brad: [looking on his phone] Because his most successful one was...
Dave: The Notebook.
Brad: The Notebook, and so that's...
Dave: And it's just one of those things that's... It has an audience, I'm sure, or it had an audience ten years ago, but no one gives a fuck anymore. So it's #5, and it sucked.
Brad: My #5 is—I wish you were at this movie. Well, I do and I don't. I do in that you would've loved this, and I don't in that this was one of the first ones Violet was in. [Laughing] Faith of Our Fathers.
Dave: I wish I was at that movie, too.
Brad: This movie purely...
Dave: The Lord! And Nam!
Brad: Fucking Nam, my friend.
Dave: But the whole review would've been us making Bradstreet jokes.
Brad: Yeah. Oh yeah.
Dave: Which...that's a story I don't know if we've ever told on the website.
Brad: I'm sure somewhere in the Midnight Screenings, it's come up, where Tim Brads...your brother-in-law.
Dave: We were...late high school, maybe?
Brad: Yeah, I think so.
Dave: My brother-in-law was in town visiting, and we were all sitting in my parents' basement playing GoldenEye, and Brad is...
Brad: A motherfucker.
Dave: He's just mean-spirited, and... I'm good at GoldenEye, I can still only win in certain scenarios on GoldenEye against Brad.
Brad: Uh, prox mines in the complex?
Dave: I'll destroy anybody with prox mines in the complex. But Brad and Tim are playing, and Brad's just chasing Tim around, fucking shooting him in the back.
Brad: I can't have him get a gun, or else he'll shoot me.
Dave: Bradstreet, who, at that time, probably in his late 30s.
Brad: Yeah, I think so.
Dave: Tim's a big guy, just puts down the controller, looks over at Brad, and goes, "you Vietnam, shoot-'em-in-the-back motherfucker!"
Brad: Anytime he brings up Nam, it's great.
Dave: And he does a lot!
Brad: A lot. Like at the campout, when he comes out of his tent, and he's like, "God, it's so fucking misty here, it's like fucking Nam!" So he would've loved this movie. This movie, it's purely objective reasons, it's fucking horrible, but it's fucking hilarious. It's two guys, one's an atheist, the other's not. One's name is John Paul, and the other's name is Wayne, so a character named John, a character named Wayne. And the John guy's named John Paul...no, his full name is John Paul George, and they call him Ringo throughout the whole movie. And it's a road movie in which it's all in front of a green screen, and at one point, the fucking green screen is going backwards when it shouldn't be. You motherfuckers are driving in reverse. It's got a character...
Dave: Pure Flix for the win!
Brad: Oh, for the total win. Candace Cameron is the fiance, and she only speaks in exposition dialogue. She says to him, like, "I can't wait to move in with you next month after we're married." I lean over to Violet like, "I'm so glad she clarified that, I didn't want 'em to be living in sin."
Dave: Fucking...that would be un-Christian.
Brad: It's got Stephen Baldwin in it, and this movie takes place in the '90s, and the only reason it takes place in the '90s is just because they couldn't...they didn't have the budget to make Stephen Baldwin look that old. Old enough to where, like, okay, you could see him in Nam, and then you see him in the '90s. "All right, we'll put some gray in his hair," and shit like that. They wouldn't have had the budget to make him look 40 years older. So for no reason, this is in the '90s. And it's starring Fun Preacher from God's Not Dead and Fun Dad from Moms' Night Out. And it's got one of those bullshit things where they almost get arrested at the end because I think they're involved in some kind of almost robbery or something. Something, I can't remember. And Stephen Baldwin is the sheriff in this town, and he was the lieutenant in charge of their dads in Nam, so he's like, "I remember you boys. Come with me." And he doesn't arrest them; instead, he lets them use his car. [Laughs] It's one of those, and it's awful.
Dave: Sounds amazing.
Brad: I can't wait for you to see this.
Dave: Not going to.
Brad: Really?!
Dave: No.
Brad: Aw, man, this would be a great Bad Movie Night.
Dave: No, this is...there have been so many Christian movies lately that I feel that, in between them, I need to build it back up so I have some hate to unload. So I can't watch any in between the theater releases, or I'm just gonna sit there and go, "eh..."
Brad: It's true. We need to build it back up for God's Not Dead 2.
Dave: It's like doing ecstasy, you know—you gotta take a break in between so it still feels good. [Laughs]
Brad: Exactly. These movies are our ecstasy.
#4[]
Dave: Oh, fuck. 4, like I said before, it's The Letters.
Brad: Go for it, man. All you, I said my piece.
Dave: Yeah. And you know, the thing is, I don't know that I was so venomously angry at the movie afterwards like you were, but my thing was, I was just so fucking bored. And yeah, the screenwriting was terrible, the editing was awful with the like, "this year," "this year." The unnecessary title cards or, you know, captions. It's only been six months; nobody gives a fuck. Just keep going, you haven't left that city. You don't need to tell me where you're at.
Brad: Or in the first two minutes, with the unnecessary here's something in 1930, here's something in 1960, here's something in 2000.
Dave: Yeah, and also, the bookending is ridiculous, and the movie... You don't pay to go to movies to be bored. Like...you know, if Aaron Sorkin wrote the fucking script, it could've been fun. Well, not fun, but interesting to watch. And yes, the acting is forced through most of it. It's either really dead acting, or in the case of some of the supporting characters, really forced acting, which there is no middle ground, so it's just...you're being pulled. And the movie has... One of the unforgivable sins in cinema is, it wasted Rutger Hauer.
Brad: Yeah, you have Rutger Hauer and Max Von Sydow, and you don't give a fuck.
Dave: And they're wasted. And you have two such fantastic actors, to just have them be wasted on film. No.
Brad: And they don't give a fuck, not in the entertaining sense, like, "oh, we're gonna be over the top 'cause we don't give a shit." I mean "don't give a fuck" as in just, "dear God, get me through this fucking thing."
Dave: Yeah, exactly. Like, "this is a paycheck. This is a paycheck." It's just...it didn't need to exist in any form. It did not need to exist. It wasn't interesting; it wasn't so bad, it was funny; it was just bad.
Brad: It was for people who...it was a little suspicious that it was released around Spotlight. [Laughs] I don't know.
Dave: It was a shitty made-for-TV movie that was an hour too long, and just so tedious. It was painful.
Brad: How could I forget this? #4 is Jem and the Holograms. [Dave laughs] A movie that's fucking made for nobody. I didn't grow up with this show. I barely remember it, and I watched a lot of stuff like that back then; that one just...went right by me for some reason.
Dave: Well, it's one of those things that's like...I watched a lot of He-Man when I was a kid.
Brad: So did I.
Dave: But I didn't watch She-Ra.
Brad: But I knew of She-Ra.
Dave: Well, because it tied in with He-Man.
Brad: Yeah, there was stuff I didn't necessarily watch that I kind of knew of. This one just kind of went right by me, and...but with that being said, boy, could I tell this movie was bullshit. This is...it's the most cynical film I've seen all year because it's...it's just a name-only product, and they thought, they legitimately thought, that just calling it this, "we can, you know, only spend $5 million, blah, blah, it's this bullshit YouTube movie," whatever. They thought like maybe people would need to satisfy their curiosity to go see this in the way that...in the same way that...you know, not a lot of us were looking forward to the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. We didn't think the trailers looked good or anything like that, but we still went to see it. I mean, yeah, us for the site, but even aside from that, people went to see it.
Dave: But see, the thing is, Jem and the Holograms was like a footnote of the era, whereas Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was the biggest thing in the fucking world for quite a number of years.
Brad: Yeah, that's very true, but even... Okay, how about sequels then to Transformers, where people who even hate the others, still go see them to satisfy their curiosity? With Jem and the Holograms, it wasn't just that, oh, the fans went to go see it and then nothing else; no one. Everyone stayed away from this fucking movie.
Dave: Well, and the Jem and the Holograms fanbase is, you know, that fucking big. If you want to bring in audiences into something that niche, you gotta try.
Brad: Yeah, you have to satisfy your audience, not piss off your audience, and then make a movie that's so...that looks so bad, your audience isn't gonna see it, and then people who aren't your audience is gonna go see it. This is...all it is is just...it's unnecessarily two hours long, and it's got such a low budget that it seems like only 20,000 people exist in this universe, because they're the #1 pop stars in the world, and they're playing at a venue that's supposed to be huge, but looks kind of like Viele's Planet. [Dave laughs as Brad explains] It's this local place in town that's small.
Dave: It's about the size of this room.
Brad: Yeah. And you see the same extras pop up in the background, and it's padded out by showing actual YouTube videos, Like, it was reminding me of like in House of the Dead when they would just cut to the game, only in this case, they would mention a YouTube, and then it would proceed to show said YouTube video just in case you didn't know what, like, Water-skiing Squirrel was. "Oh, there it is. Cool. Thanks, movie."
The only positive thing about this was, thank God that Brian and I were by ourselves. By the way, this was a Saturday night on opening weekend, and we were by ourselves at this fucking thing. We're the only people in Springfield to fuck...to fucking go see this movie. But it was nice to see Molly Ringwald back, I'll say that. She's in it.
Dave: It's always a joy to see Molly Ringwald back.
Brad: Yeah, and Juliette Lewis was...like, the evil...villain in it. I mean, she was having fun, but just wasted potential, man. You got Molly Ringwald, you got evil Juliette Lewis, and you're selling me this shit? Goddamn. Fuck off. You wanna know anything else, watch our video, it's like an hour. We go through the whole thing.
#3[]
Dave: What are we at, 3?
Brad: 3.
Dave: Unfriended.
Brad: Are you just saying that to me, or is that your choice?
Dave: How many years have we been doing this? Oh, wait, wait, I gotta do some math. We've been friends for...
Brad: 33 years.
Dave: Almost 33 years...32 1/2 years at this point, we've been friends; I've been going to review these shitty movies for you for...going on four years now.
Brad: Yeah. That's not even counting all the shit, like, in high school, like, "Dave, we should watch this. I got the fucking Star Wars Holiday Special here, man."
Dave: No, see, in high school, it was different because we were discovering these shitty things together.
Brad: Yeah, and we were really high.
Dave: And I was constantly stoned. So in high school, it was different because it was shitty things that brought us joy, not shitty things that made me furiously angry.
Brad: That we're doing a list out of.
Dave: Yeah. No, fucking...you got ten more years of shitty movies before I unfriend you, I think.
Brad: [laughs] Yes. I got a decade left.
Dave: I think the ratio needs to be, if a quarter of our friendship is filled with this crap, I'll be done with you.
Brad: I hope they give us some good movies over the next ten years.
Dave: I'm never getting rid of you; I've been dealing with your ass this long, it's not ending now.
Brad: Yeah, but we haven't seen the Michael Bay Benghazi movie yet.
Dave: Whatever, that's gonna be glorious.
Brad: I hope so.
Dave: Broghazi.
Brad: It'd better...aw, man. Fingers crossed, man.
Dave: Oh, man, but fucking Unfriended is my #3. I don't even know if this made your list.
Brad: It didn't. I mean, I didn't like it, but it's not on my list.
Dave: Very few movies this year made me as unbelievably angry and cynical as Unfriended did, because it was, A., a horrible fucking concept. Just horrible concept, horrible execution. Just watching the movie itself was uncomfortable and painful because there's fucking five screens on the screen. So it's like if you hooked up five TVs in your living room, and those five TVs were talking to each other, but they were all idiots. And that's the thing, just, like...I love a good, low-budget murder, revenge, ghost anything movie. But I don't wanna watch douchebag teenagers Skype.
Brad: Yeah.
Dave: Ever! Ever!
Brad: It's a gimmick I didn't like.
Dave: It's a shitty gimmick. It was a shitty movie, the acting was awful, the writing was awful, the editing was...there was nothing redeemable about that movie. The only thing anybody could ever say for that movie was that they tried something different, and it wasn't even that different.
Brad: And if you like the gimmick, then you'll have that going for you, but I'm with you. I didn't like it.
Dave: No, it was a shitty gimmick. That's not why we go see movies in a giant screen in a theater. We go for something larger than what we can experience ourselves in our everyday life. I mean, yes, there are great movies about small things, too, but it's...you know, the people in those movies are at least better looking and smarter than us. You know? I don't go to movies to watch fucking four jack-off teenagers swearing at each other and type. Half the movie was typing!
Brad: No sound, no anything. Hovering over there, debating on whether they're gonna erase what they wrote. Like, I don't...this is not interesting to watch.
Dave: There's a fucking Wikipedia search in the movie.
Brad: The Chatroulette sequence.
Dave: No, it was awful.
Brad: Phelan did an episode on it, and...totally check it out. He runs down everything that's wrong with this movie, even some stuff I didn't even notice, where when a window is open and you can see that a character that's supposed to be onscreen, in the background has, like, gotten up or is, like, not even typing when they're supposed to be typing. Like, little flaws like that. Man, he watched this movie really close.
Dave: But that's not a little flaw, that's a huge fucking flaw.
Brad: No, I agree.
Dave: The only reason they probably put it on the screen in the first place is, even in the theater, it was that big a fucking viewing area. That movie was awful.
Brad: At least...the nicest thing I'll say about it, the other movie that night was...Paul Blart 2. At least we weren't at that.
Dave: I'd have rather seen Paul Blart 2.
Brad: I wouldn't have.
Dave: No, I would much rather have seen Paul Blart 2 because I would've been angry still, but I wouldn't...I would at least feel like I had been reviewing a bad movie.
Brad: No, I get that. Me personally, I would rather sit through a bad horror movie than a bad comedy.
Dave: Well, for me, it's a crapshoot. You know going in, Paul Blart 2 is gonna be bad, but any more, 90% of comedies are fucking awful.
Brad: Yeah, the ones that we go see.
Okay, this is the movie that pissed me off the most this year. It's not in my Top 2 choices, and I'll get to that later. But my #3, and I just did a Snob episode on it, is Old Fashioned. This movie still disturbs me to this fucking day.
Dave: Well, this just showed you that you're living in sin.
Brad: I've always known that, I don't need to see a fucking movie about it. I was blindsided by this movie. Like, at least the other two movies on the list, I kinda knew what I was getting into. This movie...all I knew about it—I hadn't seen any of the trailers—all I knew what that...it's like a religious counterpart to Fifty Shades, so I was like, "okay, so it's probably just this kind of quiet love story where...I'm sure they probably save themselves for marriage or something like that." All right, whatever, okay, fine. That is not what this movie is. This is a movie that is somehow more disturbing than Fifty Shades of Grey. Both movies are about control, both movies are about odd obsession in indocrining [sic] this person into your crazy-ass world. If that movie is a bad representation of BDSM, this movie is a horrible representation of a Christian because this movie is about a guy who refuses to be alone in a room with a woman unless he's married, refuses to kiss her except on the cheek. He also...oh, man, I just fucking watched this movie the other day, what the fuck else does this motherfucker do? He can't have a conversation with this woman; they have to go to their church on the first date to get books, religious books that give them questions, one of which that he asks on the first date is, "how many children do you plan on having?" And when she doesn't have an answer for how experienced she is with children, he takes her to his friend's place and has her cut up...practice cutting up baby food...or pears to feed to her baby.
It's this weird, sick little disturbing film. I've known religious people all my life, I went kindergarten through senior year in Christian schools, I've never seen this. I've never seen a person like this. I've seen positive reviews for this movie, which is a little disturbing. I've seen one-star reviews for this movie that are only one-stars because they thought the movie was too filthy...because there's a scene in a bar and a scene with a stripper that he totally insults and screws her out of her fucking tips. I could go...I know I could a fucking hour on this movie because I did when I saw it. You have plenty of shit to choose from with this. You could watch the Snob episode, or you could watch the Midnight Screenings. I will say this. I've done over [title card for the Snob episode] 300 episodes of The Cinema Snob. "This movie is the most disturbing thing you've ever done." I've gotten the most comments like that on Old Fashioned. In the past, yeah, I've gotten that before, not as many as on this. Like, "wow, I couldn't even make it through that. This is just weird, sick, creepy shit." Old Fashioned, and it's only #3. What the fuck?
#2[]
Dave: #2, Do You Believe?
Brad: Go for it, man, that didn't make mine.
Dave: [surprised] Really!
Brad: No, it didn't 'cause there were just...there were just other things that...God, Do You Believe? is a piece of shit.
Dave: Well...all of these Christian movies are awful, but you have to, like...there's a sliding scale of it, too. There's Little Boy, which is just like, ehh...
Brad: Captive was good.
Dave: But there was something about Do You Believe? that just rubbed me...rubbed me the wrong way. And it wasn't the "this is overly creepy," and it wasn't God's Not Dead full of bullshit and offensive. It's just something like...it was... It was overreaching in a way that was like, when they were making that movie, they were very much trying to do like a "everything's gonna interconnect and go together," and all these stories are gonna fit together, and it's just...none of them did really well. None of the acting's that good,
Brad: Except for Brian Bosworth.
Dave: It's Brian Bosworth. And it's just...that one, it just...it did something inside that made me a little...dark, you know? It's just rrrrggghhh! And it did another...it wasted an actor they had. It wasted Delroy Lindo.
Brad: Yeah, between that and Point Break.
Dave: You don't waste Delroy Lindo, you just let that motherfucker go crazy.
Brad: It was...remember that just monotone soundtrack that was playing through the whole movie?
Dave: Well, and that's part of it, too. It was very much, like, just tones and it's just...
Brad: I think the reason why it didn't make mine—and I agree with everything you said, it's a terrible movie—but I was mostly bored at that movie, so because in my head, I'm kind of comparing that in my head to The Letters, which I thought was just ungodly boring.
Dave: But The Letters was, I remember that for being boring. And the other thing with Do You Believe? was, I had to think about that movie to try and remember it. Like, I remember the poster, I remember going to the theater, I didn't really remember much about the movie, which...to be, that's a bigger sin in a movie than almost anything else you can do. If I've seen the movie in the past 12 months, and I forget that I've seen that movie, that's a problem. And that's not because we see so many movies, it's because that movie was so, to its core, forgettable.
Brad: I think the reason why I would put The Letters worse is, The Letters was through and through, consistently uninteresting, whereas Do You Believe?, in its last ten minutes, went from zero to about a hundred with that car crash.
Dave: Oh, yeah, the car crash, and there's some gang violence, and it's just like... But the whole time, I'm watching that movie... Like, some of the other ones, you watch 'em and you're like, "I get what you're trying to do." With Do You Believe?, I was sitting there watching and going, "who are you trying to convert?" Because that movie was obviously trying to convert people, but no one that went to see it, besides the two of us, isn't already that kind of Christian.
Brad: And I feel that way about a lot of these movies, that they are just...they're preaching to the choir.
Dave: Right, but Do You Believe? wasn't, Do You Believe? was trying to convert. It was trying to reach out and pull the sinners in, and it's like...they're not watching this piece of shit. There's a bunch of Christians that already believe in the message, and then there's me and Brad, that aren't falling for it.
Brad: Other than we can't wait for this to come out. {Laughs] I hope The Masked Saint comes to Springfield.
Dave: Oh, that's one I'm actually forward to.
Brad: I am, too; I hope it comes here.
Dave: Mexican wrestling, vigilantism, and God? Oh, yeah.
Brad: Yeah, please, please, Parkway, please give us this movie.
All right, my #2, I have a feeling I know what you're #1 is.
Dave: It's probably your #2.
Brad: Yeah, my #2 is War Room. So I'll say my thing about War Room here. In comparing War Room to Old Fashioned, Old Fashioned is a movie that... It infuriated me a lot more than War Room did, but if I could compare the two of them. I knew what to expect out of War Room, and Old Fashioned kind of blindsided me, but Old Fashioned had—aside from its lead—Old Fashioned at least had a couple of performances in it, whereas War Room, the acting is through and through atrocious, and it was impossible to take any of it seriously. It was impossible to get really pissed off, but it's also a worse-made movie than Old Fashioned was, too. But War Room is a fundamentally more dangerous and offensive piece of propaganda. I mean, it's, in that regard...in that regard, it's absolutely the most dangerous film of the year.
This is a movie about a really troubled marriage in which the husband is verbally abusive, and your way to communicate and to try to save that is not through any kind of counseling or any...or anything like that. Therapy...you know, whatever, any of that. It's...you gotta just pray for divine intervention, for Jesus, for God to make this cheating husband of yours not cheat on you, by giving him food poisoning. Not by choice, not by any act of free will, just he will get food poisoning when he's about to bang somebody, and that...that saves your marriage. But even aside from that, this...they're using language in this movie like, "we're all prayer warriors, we're using prayer as, like, this militaristic form of creating miracles. We made this room in our house that we go hide in, and we bury ourselves in our room." In this woman's case, buries herself in her closet to pray that her husband won't cheat on her. That's scary in and of itself.
But at the end of this movie, when it's doing this montage where the old woman in the movie is saying, "this is a call to arms. We need to rise up. We need to train our new prayer warriors," and already there, I'm like, "can we stop with the fucking military analogies already?" But then, when it's showing babies being born, people on little league teams, and then Washington, DC...subtle. And like, "we need to raise more prayer warriors who can speak for us." And then it shows the title at the end that has a bulls-eye in the middle of the O.
Dave: Yeah, the crosshairs, ugh!
Brad: That is just dangerous fucking filmmaking, not in any kind of good way at all. It's a horrible form of propaganda. Thank God this movie is so atrociously acted that it's impossible for any rational person to take it seriously. But even that this was #1 at the box office—granted on the slowest fucking weekend of the year, it fucking crawled to #1—to me, that makes it objectively and even morally a worse film than Old Fashioned, which is already a pretty repulsive fucking movie.
#1[]
Dave: Well, my #1 was War Room.
Brad: Go for it. Tell us all about War Room.
Dave: Well, it's the same things. It is morally and politically, really kinda scary, the implications of the language used in the movie. It really is. And this whole idea of, like, taking yourself and your own actions and your own strength as a human being and all your self-respect and all your power as an individual out of the equation of your life, and putting it all in blind faith, which...blind faith can be a beautiful thing. But at the same time, this movie, it's like it's trying to...build an entire generation of fucking doormats who justify being personally weak and cowardly by putting this false front of faith on it. Like, "Jesus is gonna save me from everything." Well, it's like...this motherfucker is cheating on you...
Brad: Verbally abuses her.
Dave: Verbally abuses her, ignoring your child, and all these other horr... Like, get yourself out of that situation, 'cause a lot of times, that fucking escalates. And if it's something you want to save, if you think there is redemption there, you're not gonna get that redemption, you're not gonna activate change by hiding in a fucking closet on your knees, staring at a fucking wall! It's not gonna... and then, to indoctrinate your child into that and let them think that that's okay. Like, message-wise, that movie was terrifying.
Brad: Yeah, but it's such a poorly acted and poorly scripted movie that it's hilarious. It has unintentionally hilarious parts.
Dave: Oh, yeah, but the other...we'll get into the technical aspects here in a second. But the other moral, it's...the man's a felon! He's practically a fucking drug dealer.
Brad: Oh, but it's okay 'cause he admits it, so he's like...
Dave: It's okay because he admits it.
Brad: [laughs] When his boss comes over and is like, "I walked around all night just thinking about how I've never seen that before, someone admits to something like this. Well, I can't give you your job back, but I am not pressing charges."
Dave: Bullshit! It's not a matter of you pressing charges; the man committed a felony! If you do not report that, you're committing a felony!
Brad: You remember the other guy who wanted to report him, but it's okay, he makes it all right with him because I think he, like, changes his tire or something?
Dave: Yeah! Yeah, it's okay that I stole from the company, committed fraud!
Brad: There was a part in this movie where, I think it was the part where she's telling the old woman...this is basically...this is like the worst Madea movie if Madea was played by an actual older woman.
Dave: The only thing that would've made that movie tolerable in a funny movie is if that woman was Madea. The same exact movie, same exact script, but Tyler Perry is that old woman, because you know what? If you're gonna have an old woman played by a 40-year-old, it might as well be a man, and it might as well be Tyler fucking Perry!
Brad: And the abusive husband would've been Terry Crews.
Dave: Oh, God! And then you would've been like, "yeah, man, talk shit to her!"
Brad: I think it was the part where the old woman says...when the wife says to the old woman, like, "oh, me and my husband are working things out," and then the old woman goes, "yeah, devil, you done just got your butt kicked!" And I leaned over to you, and I go, "I am so glad I'm here."
Dave: But beyond all the horrifying moral implications and fucking life lessons in the movie, it was one of the worst written, acted, and made films I think I've ever seen. No one in the movie is an actual actor.
Brad: No.
Dave: They're all like executives at the company that made,,,
Brad: They're all, like, motivational speakers and like...
Dave: Yeah, none of them are actors, and it's very obvious. Very obvious, none of them are actors. And then technically, it's just kind of slapdash, shitty, like... We're amateur filmmakers. If our movies are overlit, it's okay because we didn't spend $5 million making it. Like, we have an excuse. We understand that that's there, too. That movie cost millions of dollars, and it's overlit and washed out and fucking shitty...or underlit. And it had eight fucking endings. The whole hopscotch, jump rope bullshit!
Brad: Yeah, the double dutch shit.
Dave: The movie was over. The movie was over. The part of the story that was the crux of the movie was over and solved, and then the him stealing from his bosses was over and solved, neither of them in a satisfactory or even sane way. But the movie was over, and it continued for another 20 fucking minutes to throw in some sports shit.
Brad: Yeah! I thought that, like, because I had seen the running time before the movie, and I'm like, "fuck, are you kidding me? It was, like, fucking two hours?" And when it was wrapped up about 90 minutes in, I honestly thought like, "okay, maybe they messed up the running time," which has happened.
Dave: Nope!
Brad: No, they don't! Huh-uh. No, they kept going. It kept going, man. Holy shit.
Dave: No, it's...just the implications of what that movie was trying to do frighten me. And I have nothing...as we've said, I have nothing against Christians. Your faith is your faith, and that's fine. And if you use that faith to help people, or if you want to spread the word of your faith in some way that is sane and reasonable, great. Do so. But this whole...the militaristic wording of everything was really fucking frightening.
Brad: It was really uncomfortable.
Dave: It was like, fuck, are we gonna do the Children's Crusades again? What the fuck is happening?!
Brad: This isn't Christian, something like Old Fashioned is not Christian. I don't know what it is, but it's not that.
Dave: It's borderline cult. It's borderline cultish, like someone's drinking the fucking Kool-Aid in the fucking back.
Brad: And we're there to go, "two for War Room."
There's...I'm the odd man this year. I'm like Brian from last year where we all had Kirk Cameron's Saving Christmas, but Brian had The Best of Me. I'm the only one who doesn't have War Room, but this is a movie that only I saw...well, me and Violet saw. And it is...it's a worse acted, worse made, one of the most poorly made movies I've ever seen on a big screen before. It's kind of like Kirk Cameron's Saving Christmas from last year where it was like, this is one of the best experiences I've had in a theater...
Dave: Oh, yeah.
Brad: ...Obj...no, you go ahead.
Dave: No, Kirk Cameron's glorious.
Brad: But objectively speaking, there's no part of me that can't say that this isn't the worst film of the year, 'cause it is. It's this movie that Violet and I went to go see, and it's called Dancin' It's On!
Dave busts out laughing
Did I tell you about this movie?
Dave: No, but I love the title.
Brad: I didn't tell you about Dancin' It's On!? Oh, my God, this was only playing in, like, a hundred, two hundred some theaters. It's from...the guy who wrote it and directed it, he's a dance choreographer, he worked on, like, West Side Story and stuff like that—but he also directed, like, Space Mutiny with Reb Brown—and he put out a dancing movie last year, and it's called Dancin' It's On!, and it is starring contestants from So You Think You Can Dance, and it makes From Justin to Kelly look like Saturday Night Fever.
It's...I'll just describe these little things about this movie. The entire movie is ADRed horribly. It's all shot like it's a tourism video. It's ADRed...the best way I can describe this is, do you remember that rough cut that Ryan put together for Paranoia, where the ADR wasn't...it matched, but it wasn't right?
Dave: Yeah.
Brad: That whole movie is like this. That whole movie sounds like this. It's jarring,' 'cause you know none of this is being spoken in this scene, and it's... It's a typical kind of dance movie where, like, rich girl comes to town, and she's...her dad owns a hotel—her dad's Gary Daniels—owns a hotel, so she's, like, in love with a dish washer. And there are scenes in this movie where she is sad because they're on the outs, and it's a montage in which a sad mime is following her around, re-enacting her sadness, and then it shows her love interest, who then is doing his own angry dance where it then suddenly cuts to stock footage of a helicopter exploding in Nam. That then cuts into, the helicopter was being dreamed about by the dance instructor who's also the director, whose son died in the war, and he's having visions of his son dying in the war, and stock footage, like, fucking helicopter explosions. And he's the one who's teaching him how to dance, this guy is, so he gets to say lines like, "you can play baseball and you can play basketball, but you can't play dance."
And it's got this dreadlocked guy in the movie who looks like Jar Jar Binks, who is...like the magical token black guy of the movie, who just... He's called the Captain, and he's the doorman at this hotel. And he just walks into the scenes he's in, "wicka, wicka, wicka, here's what I think you should do, girl."
Dave: I wanna see this movie.
Brad: It's...I can...this is easily the worst fucking thing that you could see in a theater.
Dave: It sounds amazing!
Brad: It is. It's the Kirk... This movie, when it comes on DVD, it needs, it needs to come the next Miami Connection. It was definitely this year's Saving Christmas. It's basically like discovering Birdemic for the first time, but no one else has seen it.
Dave: It sounds glorious.
Brad: It's like, imagine Birdemic if the birds never showed up. That's this movie, it's that poorly made. It was insane that we were seeing this in the theater. The opening credits [audio cut out] looked like just...someone went to, like, a high school who was filming a cheerleader tryout, and they just wrote the opening credits on the fucking thing like it's a football game. It's fucking insane!
And there was one other guy in the theater who left halfway through, which, at that point, stay. You've already made it through half of this.
Dave: Unless you decide, like, I'd rather just go drink.
Brad: Yeah, maybe that's why he was there, he was another guy who was maybe like, "it's cold outside." We went to go see this at the most purgatory-looking movie theater outside of Detroit. It was a United Artists Theater, and it was really darkly lit, the halls were very long. It was so creepy. It was just creepy being in this theater, and the fact that I had to say, at this dark fucking afterlife-looking theater, and just the words, "two for Dancin' It's On!" Fuck!
But like Kirk Cameron's Saving Christmas, you just feel like you've just discovered something.
Dave: How did this...I wish this had come to Springfield.
Brad: Boy, I wish it did, too. If I didn't see this, War Room would've been my #1, but seeing this movie. It really was like you are the first person to have seen Miami Connection, Birdemic, Troll 2, The Room, things like that. I know that like, "it's this blah-blah-blah's The Room." I know that gets thrown around a lot; that really is the case with this movie. It needs to become that kind of cult, legendary bad film.
Dave: But probably won't be because it's about dancing.
Brad: But it's starring the cast from So You Think You Can Dance, so I can see how this could get like a small following online of the same...how like The Room got a following and things like that. I really see this as like, a year from now, we'll see a Rifftrax of this thing. I am definitely planning on doing a Snob episode on it.
Dave: I can't wait to see this movie.
Brad: I think it comes out on DVD or Blu-ray, like, in April.
Dave: Comes out on, like, fucking Betamax.
Brad: It fucking should. It really, really fucking should.
Dave: That'd be great.
Brad: The evil girl in the movie's name is Shotsy, and then, when she hooks up with the evil guy in the end, she's like, "I want you to know, I am just in this to win this," and then the guy goes like, "Shotsy, you're my kind of girl." It's really the last we see of them; they end up together, I guess. There's the dance competition in the end where, 'cause of course, and they're dancing onstage. The dancing's perfectly fine in the movie. They're dancing onstage, but the audience is all like fucking stock footage of something else, that they are not watching this. And her dancing is so good that it brings back together her divorced parents. It's got one of those soundtracks where it describes what the character's doing, when she's alone in her room and the soundtrack's like, "sittin' around in my room, nothing to do, wanna go outside." I've actually got a couple clips on my phone, I'll show it to you. I'll show it to you when this is done.
So that's it. That's our...we didn't...I don't think we went as long as Brian and Sarah.
Dave: No, you cut, like, an hour out of theirs!
Brad: That was originally two and a half hours.
Dave: Jesus Christ. Like, half of these movies, I forgot I fucking saw. I can't give, like, an intense fucking plot breakdown.
Brad: I will always remember Dancin' It's On! 'Til the day I die, I will remember Dancin' It's On!
Dave: I'm gonna remember you describing it to me.
Brad: I'll show you some...when we're done here, I'll show you some clips, but...we're gonna be at some movies tomorrow, and we'll be at movies all fucking year long. I hope you enjoyed our annual Worst-Of rant.
Dave: Yeah, yeah, and I know it wasn't as exciting as a lot of years, but it's still a good, solid list, I think.
Brad: I think so. Absolutely, we have to think what goes on there, what gets left off. There's plenty of material. See ya.