Scott Von Doviak's Top Ten Worst Movies Ever

1. CANNONBALL RUN II (1984)
2. BABY GENIUSES (1999) 
3. HOWARD THE DUCK (1986)



Howard was a sardonic, sarcastic character trapped in a satiric and surrealistic “world he never made” — a seventies cult hero, part and parcel of his time. By 1986, he was long gone in a cloud of acrimony (on the part of creator Steve Gerber) and lawsuits (on behalf of the Walt Disney corporation, fiercely protective of the pantsless waterfowl image). That didn’t stop George Lucas, looking for something to pass the time during his fifteen year vacation between Star Wars trilogies. As much fun as it is to blame Lucas for every pop cultural misstep of the past three decades, in this case he is mere co-conspirator with director Willard Huyck and screenwriters Huyck and Gloria Katz. Assuming they looked at Gerber’s comics at all, this is what they absorbed from them: duck puns are funny. They then spent millions of dollars in a fruitless effort to prove it. Today even the worst comic book movies attempt to offer up some sort of production design or visual appeal, but Howard the Duck can’t even be bothered with a little Cleveland ambiance, unless you count the punk rocker who proclaims, upon seeing our hero for the first time, “I’ve been doin’ too much toot!” The general reaction to Howard’s presence is summed up by the bouncer who snorts, “That costume don’t fool me!” No shit.

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This week, a handful of the most acclaimed films of 2008, and an animated classic gets released from the Disney vaults again.

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Forget Ishtar, Heaven’s Gate, Howard the Duck and all the other renowned turkeys of cinema history. The Guardian delves into the depths of the IMDb’s 100 lowest ranked movies to find the truly toxic, the absolute worst of the worst. As Sam Richards writes, the IMDb list “differs from most critic-voted ‘worst movie of all-time’ lists, in that any film that's memorably bad - say, Swept Away - tends to get just enough positive responses to save it from total ignominy. The Bottom 100 exists to catalogue films that have been viewed out of error, obligation or last-turkey-in-the-shop desperation.”

Richards sampled a handful of the lowest-ranked entries “in a Ludovico technique-style experiment.”

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A long time ago when the world made sense, there were two kinds of comic books: DC comics and Marvel comics. And while Marvel reigned supreme at the comics shop, the company dearly wanted to break into the lucrative and ego-stroking business of licensing it characters for major motion pictures, and it was there that DC pantsed Marvel and took its lunch money. While DC was the home of Superman and Batman, Marvel was the home base of Howard the Duck. For years, Marvel's role in the Hollywood fod chain was epitomized by the 1994 Fantastic Four movie, a cheesy, cheap-looking affair that Marvel put into production without bothering to inform the people who worked on it that they had no intention of releasing it to theaters or even home video but were contractually obliged to make something if they wanted to hang onto the film rights to their own characters. All that started to change in 2000 with Bryan Singer's X-Men, whose success the director was unable to duplicate with his later stab at rebooting Superman. A couple of years later, Sam Raimi's take on the Marvel flagship hero Spider-Man launched a major franchise and proved that Marvel could sire a blockbuster movie without Singer or Hugh Jackman modeling a haircut that could open bottles and cans.

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