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Worst films of ’07: Awful is the new awesome

The bad movies that blow your mind, the kind that plop into your life like magical bird droppings on your brain are the ones we bring you here.
/ Source: msnbc.com contributor

Good movies, even mediocre movies, are a dime a dozen. So are wretched wastes of film stock that no one should ever lay eyes on — stuff like “Date Movie” and “Epic Movie” and just about any limp satire for eight-year-olds with the word “movie” in the title.

But the bad movies that blow your mind, the kind that plop into your life like magical bird droppings on your brain, those that excel at badness in a virtuosic way, the kind that make you wish you could peer inside the brains of the people who made them so you can see what crazy actually looks like, the kind that make you glad you’re alive and living right now and able to scratch your head in puzzlement over their very existence, instead of having to live back in the olden days, back when life was boring and they didn’t have movies at all, those are the ones I bring to your attention here.

“Southland Tales”

This movie had two competing flying vehicles, a zeppelin and an ice cream truck. Inside that zeppelin was Sarah Michelle Gellar singing a song called “Teen Horniness is Not A Crime.” Inside the ice cream truck was Seann William Scott playing twins fighting each other. So take that “Grease” and “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.” You both only had one flying thing.

On the ground, Justin Timberlake played skee ball and lip-synced a Killers song. Janeane Garofalo was in it for exactly one half of one second. It all took place in the future — 2008 —after a nuclear bomb goes off in Texas. That “Sparkle Motion” lady was in it too.

I could actually spend my entire assigned word count just telling you stuff that happened in this movie and who did it without ever telling you why any of it happened. I could do the former and not the latter because I have no idea why any of it happened.

Here’s more stuff: Amy Poehler read a goofy poem. The woman who sang “Crying” in “Mulholland Drive” sang “The Star Spangled Banner” on that same zeppelin that Sarah Michelle Gellar was on. Mandy Moore does something, too, but I can’t remember what. In 30 years, college kids are going to smoke weed and watch this movie and believe it to be amazing. Because it kind of is. I think.

“Wild Hogs”

Touchstone Pictures

If spiritual defeat had a human face, whose face would it have? Would that embodiment of existential misery wear a bandanna on its head and fake-ride a motorcycle being pulled by a trailer and shriek and snarl every time another human being got within 18 inches of its personal space? Would it glower and skulk and bark like a beaten-down and rabid beagle and snap back when questioned about its choices because it had finally appeared in a film so genuinely misanthropic and diseased as to give thinking viewers itchy rashes on their souls? Does co-star (and least culpable hog) William H. Macy wake up screaming in the night, begging the universe for forgiveness? Is this the movie equivalent of hell on earth? Can you turn your eyes away from the abyss?

“Mr. Brooks”

Remember when Kevin Costner was like America’s dude sweetheart? That “Bull Durham” sure was fun. And then came “Dances With Wolves” and he got an Oscar and then something… turned. I think he must have dug up some bones from an Indian burial ground and used them to make a water treatment system in his front yard because it’s been nonstop DO-NOT-WANT ever since. In this movie he’s one of those meticulous, corporate-drone serial killers that symbolize the big plastic hassle of modern suburban life. It’s pathetically adorable when movies express contempt for the suburbs. That’s because most people in the film business grew up in them and were unpopular and vowed to take revenge some sweet day. Well, you did it. Now you can all go home to your class reunions and be Hollywood big shots. You win. But guess what? You’ll never make “American Psycho.” Someone beat you to it. Just like they did with all the other good ideas you never had.

“Across The Universe”

In “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” they had the Bee Gees and a robot that sang “She’s Leaving Home.” This movie has neither one of those excellent features. It does, however, have Bono, who is sort of like a robot. When you watch this at home on DVD, you can make it into a drinking game, downing one every time a woman comes in through the bathroom window or references Apple Records. Just don’t play the game alone or you’ll end up weeping. Maybe driving somewhere. Then you’ll be Mel Gibson. Do you want that?

“Evan Almighty”/“The Reaping”

If you read the story of Noah or any tale of plagues in the Old Testament, you really can’t get around the idea that it’s God that lays down the hammer. You got frogs raining from the sky and splatting on your head? God’s tryin’ to tell you something. You drowning in a flood? You’re being punished. By God. But here were two wacky movies in which locusts and Katrina-level disasters are visited on humanity and both plots twist themselves into Velveeta-filled pretzels to let the Creator of The Universe off the hook, both films rushing to emasculate God to the point of making that entity an irrelevant tease. Sorry, it was Satanists that made the swamp turn to blood. Sorry, it was you schmoes ruining your own environment that made the dam break and destroy your homes. In other words, both films are, at heart, crazily atheistic, making “The Golden Compass” look reverent.

“I Know Who Killed Me”

The “Showgirls” of 2007 and the best “erotic thriller” since “Basic Instinct 2.” Everything in this movie, my favorite Lindsay-Lohan-as-twins movie since “The Parent Trap,” is heavingly, wrongly sexy. I mean, you do think amputation, fake fetuses, miserable pole-dancing, stigmata, people being buried alive, psychic twins, wacky tortures and parents that withhold major, plot-twisting, life-altering information is sexy, don’t you? Erotically thrilling? OF COURSE YOU DO. One day, in the future, when Lindsay Lohan is back on her feet, clean and sober, happy, stable, an Oscar-winner for her indie-film comeback vehicle, allowing herself to age wisely and gracefully without cosmetic surgery and Botox, she’ll look back on this movie and chuckle warmly to herself every time she cashes the residual check from the DVD and cable sales. She deserves that much.

Dave White is the film critic for Movies.com and the author of “Exile in Guyville.” Find him at