The Screengrab

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

At last, it’s Ed Wood! For months I’ve been dutifully trudging my way up this list of the 100 worst movies of all time, and somehow made it a third of the way through without encountering a single work by the man celebrated far and wide as the worst filmmaker ever. I suppose that makes sense, in that the most notorious Wood works – the likes of Plan 9 from Outer Space and Glen or Glenda – must be lurking near the top of the chart. It so happens that I’d never seen Wood’s second feature, Jail Bait, so this promised to be quite a treat. We’re huge jailbait fans here at the Screengrab…er, in the cinematic sense, that is.

Wood’s work is tough to rank on the Unwatchable scale, just because he’s usually at his most watchable when he’s at his worst. That is, his bizarre mix of enthusiasm and incompetence only soars when he goes completely off the deep end, as in Plan 9 or Bela Lugosi’s infamous “Home? I have no home” monologue from Bride of the Monster. Jail Bait is as shoddily constructed as you’d expect, but the goofy juice doesn’t really get flowing until the last ten minutes or so.

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Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

It’s an unfortunate coincidence of timing that finds Nine Lives at the top of my Unwatchable queue on the same day I’ve reviewed Donkey Punch. There are some notable similarities between the two movies: a predominantly British cast of young unknowns, a confined setting, a Ten Little Indians structure. But Nine Lives has a secret weapon: Paris Hilton.

The presence of Paris probably ensured Nine Lives a spot on the Bottom 100 list, even if the movie had otherwise been good. (It’s not, but we’ll get to that.) Check out Ms. Hilton’s IMDb page, click on a few titles, and you’ll find that Nine Lives is far from her only effort to engender widespread scorn and derision among the users of that fine site. My guess is that Nine Lives would never have made the list without her participation; it’s hard to imagine anyone even bothering to hate it otherwise.

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Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

No, loyal Unwatchable readers, you have not missed an installment. Number 69 on the big list of failure is last year’s The Perfect Holiday, which will not be released on DVD until November. We’ll get back to it then, but meanwhile, let’s move on to the 1996 family movie that made you believe in Shaquille O’Neal as a seven-foot-tall rapping genie.

To his credit, Shaq does an admirable job of convincing us that he is, in fact, seven feet tall. Honestly, I would place little of the blame for Kazaam’s failures at the big man’s big feet, even if they are encased in goofy pointy-toed genie shoes for much of the running time. True, his rapping ability is largely a figment of his imagination. But the fact remains that someone in an office somewhere decided it would be a good idea for the genie played by Shaq to rap, and we can hardly blame the amiable giant for going along with the plan.

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Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

How could you do this to me, IMDb Bottom 100 list? After all we’ve been through together, how could you make me sit through two Friedberg-Seltzer spoof movies in a single week? It was only last Friday that I took on #72 Meet the Spartans, and now you present me with the diarrhea duo’s previous exercise in pop culture regurgitation, Epic Movie. Look, I was patient and understanding when you made me watch two Kickboxer sequels. At least you gave me a few weeks to recover between them. But now you’ve crossed a line, IMDb Bottom 100 list. We’ll continue to do business together, but we’re no longer speaking.

The only good news is that, much like Spartans, Epic Movie barely crosses the 60 minute mark before the extended credits, complete with dance sequences and hee-larious outtakes, begin. Also, the word apparently had yet to reach the top Hollywood agencies that they would serve their clients best by destroying all query letters from Friedberg-Seltzer Industries; there are actual recognizable faces on display here in addition to the usual sort-of-look-and-sound-alikes. Kal Penn, Jennifer Coolidge, David Carradine, Crispin Glover (!) and perhaps most dishearteningly, Fred Willard, all show up and do their best to survive with their dignity intact.

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Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

Based solely on its critical reception, it would have been easy to confuse the release of Gigli in theaters with the release of a notorious child murderer from prison. The title became an instant punchline, made even funnier by the fact that no one could pronounce it. (As the title character informs us repeatedly throughout the movie, it “rhymes with really.”) Few movies could be as terrible as it was purported to be, and indeed, Gigli isn’t one of them. In fact, it seems as though America has re-evaluated the movie since its release. I expected to find it much higher on the Bottom 100 chart, but #71 sounds about right.

The wave of bad publicity that crushed the movie can largely be blamed on the off-screen shenanigans of its stars, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. You could argue that it was unfair of reviewers to take out their frustrations on the movie itself, and you would have a point, but let us not forget how truly obnoxious the whole Ben ‘n Jen circus became.

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Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

Here’s a serendipitous turn of events – not for me, of course, but maybe for somebody out there. On the very day that Disaster Movie, the latest parody from the writing-directing team of Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg, is released in theaters, our Unwatchable selection of the day just happens to be the humor-challenged team’s previous effort, Meet the Spartans. (And when I say effort, I don’t really mean it in any traditional sense of the word.) This is purely coincidental, but if I can do anything to dissuade even one person from spending money on Disaster Movie this weekend, I’ll consider this post a success.

I doubt that’s going to be possible, though, since it seems highly unlikely that any regular Screengrab readers would be seeing Disaster Movie in the first place. For my part, Meet the Spartans was my first experience with the Seltzer-Friedberg team, but I can’t say I was completely unaware of what to expect – basically, that these bozos are Zucker-Abrams-Zucker for people who were often dropped on their heads as children.

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Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

It’s time for another Unwatchable substitution. As regular readers of this column may recall, occasionally there is an entry on the IMDb Bottom 100 that I am unable to lay my eyes on. Usually it’s a foreign film despised in its own country but unknown and unavailable in mine. That’s the case with number 73 on the list – that is, the list I’m working from, which I downloaded back in April – the 2004 German film Daniel - Der Zauberer. I do wish I could have found this one, the plot of which is described thusly on IMDb: “Evil assassins want to kill Daniel Kublbock, the third runner up for the German Idols.” Alas, my efforts fell short, but we can at least enjoy the trailer together:

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Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

As regular readers of this column are all too aware, I am occasionally perplexed by the movies deemed worthy of inclusion on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Actually, I’m often perplexed by the movies themselves; what I mean to say is that sometimes I’m not sure how a given movie acquired enough detractors to propel it to such derogatory depths. For instance, I can’t quite figure where all the You Got Served hateration is coming from. This isn’t because I think it’s a good movie – rather, I think it’s a movie of such generic mediocrity, I’m baffled that it’s been singled out from the ranks of Victory Through Dance cinema.

Here’s the deal (or the “dilly-o” in the very current and credible hippety-hop parlance of this 2004 release):

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Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

We are now one-quarter of the way through our mind-and-butt-numbing journey up the IMDb’s Bottom 100 list, a quest every bit as fraught with peril as the one Martin Sheen endured in Apocalypse Now. (It remains to be seen whether Marlon Brando is waiting at the end.) According to my rough calculations, this means we still have three quarters of the list to get through – a prospect that would bring many a cinephile to his knees, sobbing and begging for mercy. As always, I must simply remind myself that this is a marathon, not a sprint, and I can only play the game on the schedule in front of me. In this case, that game is The Last Sign, a 2005 supernatural thriller starring Andie MacDowell.

I’m immediately suspicious of any movie that opens with a shitload of logos for companies I’ve never heard of.

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Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

The Internet Movie Database is a powerful engine that can be used for both good and evil, and those of us who have ceded a portion of our lives to its control can find ourselves victims of some capricious whims indeed. In the early days of the Unwatchable project, long before I’d been beaten down by the likes of It’s Pat and Anus Magillicutty, I first encountered the Kickboxer series in the form of episode four, The Aggressor. Now, more than two months later, I find myself face-to-face with Kickboxer 3: The Art of War.

Some confusion results.

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Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

No, this is not a rerun. Unwatchable is back from a brief (but oh so blissful) summer hiatus, and we’ll continue our march up the IMDb’s list of the 100 worst movies ever made next time with #76. But as you may dimly recall, I was forced to skip #88 initially because it had not yet been released on DVD at the time. It was a better world back then, a world in which College Road Trip was not available on video, and I miss it so. But we can’t go back. College Road Trip is now out on DVD, it will always be out on DVD, clogging landfills and supporting drinks on coffee tables, so let’s just get it over with.

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Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

Here’s a nice change of pace. In our last installment, we looked at the zombie western The Quick and the Undead. This time it’s the vampire western BloodRayne 2: Deliverance. If there are any mummy westerns awaiting further up the list, well, I’d just as soon be surprised.

BloodRayne 2 is the first Uwe Boll movie we’ve encountered on our journey up the Bottom 100 chart, but I’m confident it won’t be the last. Boll is, of course, the renowned videogame-to-movie schlockmeister and favored punching bag of internet movie geeks. And true to form, BloodRayne 2 is a videogame adaptation, although I must confess to being familiar neither with the game nor the first BloodRayne movie. Because I care, I did a little research before settling down to enjoy the film. Here are my findings:

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Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

First, my apologies to those of you expecting to see the latest installment of Summer of ’78 in this space. It will not appear this week due to technical difficulties beyond my control. And by technical difficulties, I mean it’s Netflix’s fault. They had to ship this week’s DVD from their Outer Mongolian branch for some reason, and it won’t get here until Saturday. Honestly, I think Netflix is just very disappointed in me. Until recently, it recommended only the most respected classics and toniest arthouse fare for my viewing pleasure. Then it noticed I was ordering the likes of It’s Pat and Battlefield Earth on a regular basis. “Oh,” Netflix sniffed. “Just another dumbass after all. Here – perhaps you’ll enjoy Encino Man.” If only I could explain to Netflix that I am, in fact, performing a valuable service for the Screengrab readership. But Netflix doesn’t listen. Anyway, the point is: look for a double dip of Summer of ’78 next week.

On to the next order of business, in which we find ourselves in a situation similar to the recent Levottomat 3/Soccer Dog: The Movie imbroglio.

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Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

I’m not going to lie to you folks. This project has been a struggle at times. Devoting my full attention to such works as Track of the Moon Beast, Marci X and Soccer Dog: The Movie is not easy, but all along I’ve known that if I just kept plugging away, eventually I would be rewarded with Anus Magillicutty.

It’s true that I knew nothing about Anus Magillicutty aside from the title, but that only added to its mystique. I had to know more, and I had to share my knowledge with you fine people, because you have been anticipating this moment as eagerly as I have. Who is Anus Magillicutty? Is he man or myth? Does he bring vengeance in tiny boxes for us to unwrap? Or is he simply an asshole, repugnant in every way, just like the movie that bears his name?

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Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

Take a look at that DVD cover and you’ll probably think you have a pretty good idea what to expect from The Smokers – a “chick clique” flick in the vein of Heathers, Mean Girls and Jawbreaker. At times it does play like that sort of movie, but at other times, it strives to present some big ideas. Some big, dumb ideas.

The Smokers was clearly made by someone who once read that a gun introduced in the first act must go off in the third, but didn’t get much beyond that chestnut as far as the finer points of storytelling are concerned.

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Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

This entry requires a bit of an explanation. As I’ve mentioned before, the IMDb Bottom 100 list is a fluid entity. There is no single version of this list because you, the loyal bad movie viewer, alter it every time you cast your vote. I am working from a version I downloaded two months ago when I began this project, and although that list may have many crapulescent movies in common with the current version, they may rank higher or lower on the list – and of course, many entries have since been supplanted by fresh, steaming piles from the cineplex.

So why am I telling you this? Well, for the first time since I began the Unwatchable project, a Bottom 100 entry has defeated me. I don’t mean I couldn’t get through the movie – that would be antithetical to everything I stand for – I mean I couldn’t find the movie at all.

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Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

I must admit that the 2005 Iraq war movie American Soldiers had managed to elude my notice until now. I’m still not sure how enough people have seen it to qualify it for this list: it doesn’t appear to have received a theatrical release, but I guess the generic DVD box depicting two grim-faced young men in camouflage gripping enormous automatic weapons simply sang out from the Blockbuster racks. Before watching the movie, I had two competing theories on why it might have made the Bottom 100: Either it was a conservative take on the Iraq war and the liberals were pounding it, or vice versa. As it turns out, journeyman director Sidney J. Furie (the man behind both Iron Eagle IV and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace) has managed to make an Iraq movie that both sides have equal cause to consider complete bullshit.

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Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

I’m not the world’s biggest fan of writer-director-cottage industry Tyler Perry. I know he’s got a loyal following that will fill theaters every time he serves up his patented mix of sermonizing, self-help platitudes and ham-handed ensemble comedy, and I’m fine with that. It just so happens he makes the sort of movies that are the exact opposite of anything I’d find entertaining. But having said that, I would gladly sit through a triple bill of Diary of a Mad Black Woman, Daddy’s Little Girls and Why Did I Get Married? if it meant I would never have to see First Sunday again.

You know Perry has truly arrived when the cheap imitations of his work start showing up, and that’s what we have here, despite an ad campaign designed to trick the slow-witted into thinking First Sunday is the latest installment in Ice Cube’s Friday series.

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Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

When we looked at Hobgoblins the other day, I mentioned that it might be possible to construct a Bottom 100 list made up entirely of Gremlins ripoffs. Now it occurs to me that you could probably do the same with Saturday Night Live spinoffs, a thought that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. What horrors await me further up the list? Coneheads? Superstar? A Night at the Roxbury? But after watching It’s Pat, my mind was put at ease. For there to be another SNL movie on the list, it would have to be worse than It’s Pat, and science has proven this to be impossible.

By “science” I mean “me sitting through all 77 minutes of It’s Pat.”

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Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

Welcome to a very special edition of Unwatchable! What’s so special about yet another crappy movie, you ask? Well, for the first time since I started this project, the movie in question is one that I have already seen! This may not make it special for you, but Hubbard knows it couldn’t have come at a better time for me. It’s also special because, unlike all of these unworthy Mystery Science Theater subjects, Battlefield Earth has truly earned its position on the Bottom 100 list. Here are the top three reasons why:

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Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

I haven’t done the math, but it’s within the realm of possibility that you could fill out an entire Bottom 100 list made up of nothing but Gremlins knockoffs. There have been at least four Critters movies, four installments of Ghoulies and a trilogy of Munchies, as well as lesser-known attempts like Beasties, Spookies and Kamillions. And then there’s our topic for today, 1988’s Hobgoblins.

I’ll admit to being unfamiliar with the work of writer/director Rick Sloane before now, and based on the evidence onscreen in Hobgoblins I would have been willing to bet it was his first and only movie-making effort. But I would have lost that bet. By the time he made Hobgoblins, Sloane already had several horror shows under his belt, including Movie House Massacre and The Visitants, which has a catchy title if nothing else. He is also responsible for six, count ‘em six installments of the Vice Academy series, which presumably bears the same resemblance to the Police Academy collective as Hobgoblins does to Gremlins: a smudgy, degraded Xerox of the original.

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Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

The eagle-eyed and mathematically inclined among you may have noticed that we’ve skipped from #89 to #87 in our little survey of the shittiest. The reason is simple: #88 on the list is the 2008 Martin Lawrence comedy College Road Trip, which will not be released on DVD until next month. Since I somehow managed to miss its theatrical run, we'll catch up with it later. For now we’ll move on to 1969’s The Sidehackers, which proves to be a change of pace from the mutant insects and quicksand-ridden islands we’ve been dealing with lately.

What, you may ask, is a sidehacker? Well, silly, a sidehacker is one who sidehacks! And what is sidehacking?

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Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

The exclamation point means extra thrills! At least, I wish it did. Alas, 1961’s Bloodlust! is just another B-movie from the bottom half of a drive-in double feature, even if it does feature one of Robert “Mike Brady” Reed’s earliest leading roles.

I’m not gonna lie to you folks. I’m now a dozen movies into this experiment and it feels like I’ve watched merely five times that many. Only now are the full implications of sitting through 88 more of these crimes against cinema – all of which have been deemed by you, the movie-ranking public, to be even worse than the ones I’ve already seen – beginning to sink in.

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Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

It’s been quite a journey through the animal kingdom here lately in our Unwatchable series. We’ve met the marsupial werewolves down under in Howling III and the mutant arachnids of Horrors of Spider Island, but nothing can prepare you for the bat people of, er, The Bat People!

In this 1974 tale o’ terror, Dr. John Beck is a bat specialist with a seemingly permanent “Who farted?” expression pasted on his face. His wife Cathy just wants to do a little skiing, but this is a working vacation and there are caves to be toured. She’s reluctant to go along, but once she’s down in the dank underground, the thought hits her: hey, we’ve never done it in a cave before!

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Okay, so there's a new Uwe Boll movie coming out.  Big deal, says we.  Sure, we're curious about how the Teutonic uber-hack managed to get Dave Foley to star in his new film (Postal, opening in limited release today).  And sure, we're even more curious about how he got Dave Foley to do a nude scene.  And yes, we must admit that there is something oddly compelling about a filmmaker so universally reviled that a chewing gum manufacturer has helped sponsor a petition to get him to stop directing movies, and who is himself so adamant that he is a cinematical genius that he has challenged his critics to meet him in the boxing ring.  But however rotten this German-come-lately may be -- and he's plenty rotten -- for us here at the Screengrab, there is only one true heir to the crappy moviemaking throne vacated by Ed Wood, and that man's name is Albert Pyun.  The Hack From Hawaii -- who directed his first film in 1982, only four years after Ed Wood's death -- has been responsible for over forty films and direct-to-video releases, at least one of which has already turned up on movie janitor Scott Von Doviak's "Unwatchable" list.  Both in his ridiculously prolific output and his utter lack of talent and shame, Albert Pyun leaves Uwe Boll in the dust.  So instead of trying to find a theater willing to screen Postal this weekend, why not settle down for a film festival with our man Big Al?  To help you in this terrifying endeavor, we've assembled a list of five of Pyun's best works -- and we use the word "best" in the loosest possible application to which the word has ever been put.

THE SWORD AND THE SORCERER (1982)

Albert Pyun's first screen credit -- as both director and writer -- is a real doozy that sets the tone for his innumerable too-cheap-to-be-camp movies to come.  A standard-issue steel-and-spells epic ripped straight out of Albert's Friday night dorm room Dungeons & Dragons games, The Sword and the Sorcerer cost about nine dollars to make, with a script too dull for TV and special effects that would have seemed hokey in 1972.  The real treat here is the cavalcade of has-beens populating the cast:  there's well-past-his-prime teen idol George Maharis, his suntan decaying before our very eyes; future Murphy Brown fixture Joe Regalbuto; hulking, self-serious Night Court golem Richard Moll; coked-out Nina Van Pallandt, a million miles from The Long Goodbye; unreconstructed manimal Simon McCorkindale; and, in the lead, none other than Matt Houston star Lee Horsley!  Sadly, this collection of fourth-stringers would be the hottest cast Pyun would ever work with.  It would be all downhill from here.

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Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

So far we’ve encountered the lame (Kickboxer 4), the cheesy (Howling III) and the downright silly (Bolero), but none of the entries to date truly lives up to the moniker Unwatchable. I’m talking cinematic atrocities here, people – no holds barred, claw your own eyes out and pray for death bad. Horrors of Spider Island makes a pretty good run at achieving such status, but falters in the stretch run.

A 1960 German production shot in what was then Yugoslavia (perhaps you know it by the original title Toter hing im Netz, Ein – literally A Corpse Hangs in the Web), Spider Island has little use for the conventions of the horror movie. You know, like scary things happening. The opening music has such a jaunty, cocktail hour vibe you’d think one of the Thin Man movies is starting. The first ten minutes are taken up with a rather free-form audition process as a string of hopeful lasses are paraded through the office of a sleazeball putting together “a dancing troupe tour to Singapore.” Some of the girls are asked to dance, some just stand around, and one takes her clothes off without any prompting. (She’s hired on the spot.)

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Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

For a movie made in 1944, the exploitation cheapie I Accuse My Parents boasts a very modern message: “It’s everyone’s fault but mine.” I wouldn’t be surprised if the Menendez brothers studied it in preparing their defense. The film opens in the courtroom where Jimmy Wilson stands accused of manslaughter. As he explains to the judge, it’s really mom and dad who are to blame.

The story unfolds as Jimmy’s flashback – even the parts of it he wasn’t present for and thus couldn’t possibly remember. It starts on a high note, as Jimmy wins his high school essay contest. He seems surprised by this turn of events, even though he appears to have at least 15 years on his classmates – plenty of time to have honed his writing craft. Seriously, the IMDb doesn’t provide the date of birth for actor Robert Lowell, who plays Jimmy, but the guy had to be pushing 30 at least. So it’s just a little difficult to get worked up over the horrors of his troubling home life. For instance, we are informed that Jimmy sometimes has to get his own breakfast before school. Imagine, if you dare, the trauma of pouring your own bowl of Frankenberries. I think we can agree this is a shocking state of affairs, but that’s only the beginning!

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Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

Here I face a similar problem as with the earlier entry Kickboxer 4; I went into the 1987 horror sequel Howling III without having seen its predecessor Howling II…Your Sister is a Werewolf. (I'm pretty sure I've seen the original Howling, directed by Joe Dante and co-written by John Sayles, but that didn't really help.) For all I know, I will encounter Howling II later in this process – as I've mentioned before, I don't peek ahead. It's possible that if I had seen Howling II, I would have been less confused by the beginning of Howling III. It's hardly possible I could have been more confused.

I knew I was in for something special right from the opening credits. Let’s start with the title. Ooh, scary! If there’s a subtitle less capable of striking fear in my heart than “The Marsupials,” I’m not sure what it would be. Howling III: The Fluffy Bunnies? Even that scares me more, but then again, I’ve seen Night of the Lepus.

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Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

Regular readers of this column could probably guess that Invasion of the Neptune Men is the latest Unwatchable entry to find its way into the Bottom 100 thanks to its appearance on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Fortunately, I am able to bring you an untainted analysis of this 1961 sci-fi spectacular thanks to the good people at Dark Sky Films, who have released Neptune Men as part of a Drive-In Double Feature DVD, complete with vintage trailers and announcements from the snack bar. If only I had a DVD player in my car, I could have picked up a six-pack, a couple hot dogs and a bucket of popcorn, driven out to a field somewhere and watched it as it was meant to be seen, thus officially becoming the biggest dork in the universe.

Ah, who am I kidding? I’m watching the 100 worst movies of all time – I’m already the biggest dork in the universe.

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Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

I don’t remember lapsing into a coma or being cryogenically frozen at any point during the summer of 2003, but something must have happened, because I have absolutely no memory of the existence of Marci X. The IMDb tells me it opened on 1200 screens on August 24th of that year, earning a not so robust $872,950 in its opening weekend en route to a total gross of just over $1.6 million. That would be a flop, sure, but I saw plenty of flops that summer on behalf on the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Maybe Marci X just never made it to Texas, but somehow enough people saw this Lisa Kudrow/Damon Wayans vehicle to secure it a spot in the Bottom 100.

“Hip-hop meets shop ’til you drop” says the poster, and I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to learn that’