While other media outlets celebrate the obvious and the overplayed movies of the past year, Film Threat would like to pay tribute to unseen cinema. However, the ten worst are more than well-deserving of their obscurity. And now, at the other end of the entertainment spectrum, here are the Ten Worst Unseen Films in 2000:
1. THE PRICE OF AIR ^ Josh Evans, the son of legendary producer Robert Evans and actress Ali MacGraw, proves that talent is not inherited with his abysmally amateurish tale of a would-be drug courier on the run. If Evans gets behind the camera again, will someone please make a citizen’s arrest?
2. THE WOLVES OF KROMER ^ In a quaint English village, two silly but evil old ladies plot to murder their sour employer and blame the crime on a community of gay werewolves (played by pretty men wearing fur coats and bushy tails). Huh?!?
3. THE HOLLAND AVENUE BOYS ^ An excruciating home movie pretending to be a documentary which follows the less-than-thrilling lives of a group of kids from the Bronx who achieve professional success and stay friends over the years. Zzzzzz.
4. WICKERMAN: YEAR 0 ^ You can blame Canada for this Canuck-yuk about two idiot wedding videographers who get entangled with a dubious Y2K cult. The idea of releasing a Y2K film in the middle of 2000 is even more ridiculous than the finished production itself.
5. PLAYING MONA LISA ^ An icky sitcom-on-steroids centering on the dumb adventures of a piano student whose life falls apart when her boyfriend dumps her. Alicia Witt is beautiful but monotonous as the idiot ivory-tickler while Elliott Gould, Marlo Thomas and Harvey Fierstein are completely wasted in worthless supporting roles.
6. THE BRIDGE ^ Glamourous Carole Bouquet is inanely miscast as an ordinary small-town housewife who takes a job as a maid and falls wildly in love with the architect (a cadaverous Charles Berling) who is also the employer of her lug of a construction worker husband (Gerard Depardieu, who also co-directed this Gallic junk).
7. (Tie) JULIET’S LOVE & SINBAD: BEYOND THE VEIL OF MISTS ^ Inept animation was woefully featured in two painfully bad examples of cinematic slop art: “Juliet’s Love” is a shoddy Korean fairy tale that mixes stale-sugar romanticism and anvil comedy to no redeeming effect, while “Sinbad: Beyond the Veil of Mists” is an Indian production that offered the very worst computer-generated animation this side of a DOS shareware game.
8. A FLY ON THE WALL ^ Would-be documentary finds filmmaker Mike Messmer (affecting the persona of an arrogant jock) interviewing his guy pals about the mysteries of women after he gets dumped by his girlfriend. You go, girl!!!
9. WHAT HAPPENED TO TULLY ^ Quotidian rural coming-of-age drama about a farmboy-stud who stops banging the babes long enough to learn the meaning of true love and a few obvious family secrets. This utterly predictable effort captured a few awards at some minor festivals during the year and (be forewarned!!!) it is set to get a 2001 theatrical run under the title “The Truth About Tully” (don’t ask why they changed the name of the film).
10. THE TERRORIST ^ Some critics went absurdly orgiastic over this badly-made, intellectually-evasive Indian thriller about a teenage girl in a rebel army who is assigned to assassinate a government minister. Allegedly “inspired” by the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi (who, for the record, was not killed by a teenage girl), the film lacks purpose, point, passion and pulse. Give us a Bollywood musical instead.
Dishonorable Mentions: 100% ARABICA, a silly mess involving musically-oriented miscreants within an African neighborhood in Paris; LA NOUVELLE EVE, an intensely obnoxious drama about a hedonistic woman’s obsession with a married socialist; NIGHTLIFE, another boring entry in the teenagers-in-mischief genre; and A TIME FOR DRUNKEN HORSES, a dismally dull Iranian drama on a family of Kurdish smugglers (this one is getting a wider release than it deserves, for some reason).
Get the complete story and read our companion piece, THE TEN BEST UNSEEN FILMS OF 2000.
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