Another summer, another stench circling U.S. movie theaters. As stinky as many of last year’s films were, it still gave us one of the most solid summer line-ups we’ve seen in years and one could only hope that this would be a trend that would grow.
Fat chance.
Summer of 2004 will go down in history as one of the worst seasons for movies ever…except for the indies of course. Films such as Open Water, Napoleon Dynamite, Super Size Me, Fahrenheit 9/11, Garden State and Saved! profitted from the studios’ atrocious titles disappearing from the multiplexes only after a few weeks of release, leaving more room for these smaller movies. It should also be noted that just recently, Zhang Yimou’s long-awaited theatrical release of Hero claimed the number one spot at the box office two weeks in a row. Guess it won’t be long before we see his latest, House of Flying Daggers, hitting theaters.
While these indies and more kept this summer movie season alive, they weren’t alone. Sam Raimi did comic book fans proud with Spider-Man 2, Anchorman proved to be a Will Ferrell fan’s dream come true, “Harold and Kumar” turned out to be smarter and funnier than those two dudes who lost their car and in Collateral, Michael Mann took us through a violent tour of Los Angeles in a way only he could. And while some of us here a Film Threat HQ didn’t care for the latest Harry Potter movie, many proclamied it to be a worthy addidition to the film series while doing the book it was based on justice. Each to their own.
We’ve talked about the good, now let’s get into the bad and the ugly. What follows are the major studio releases that caused us the most stomach distress. These are the movies that made many of us start smoking again, just so we had an excuse to vacate the theater every ten minutes. So without further delay, here they are, the top 15 worst films of summer 2004, because a top 10 just couldn’t do this shitpile justice, listed from bad to worse to full blown hate!
Get stinky in part two of SUMMER OF STINK 2004>>>
