EPIC MOVIE (2007)

We're less than a month into the year 2007, and it is with great astonishment and considerable mental anguish that I already proclaim the winner for the title of the year's worst movie.

I knew from the ads that EPIC MOVIE would probably suck, being the latest dropping from some of the "talent" behind the SCARY MOVIE franchise and the universally reviled and fascinating anti-comedy that was DATE MOVIE, but nothing could have prepared me for a purported comedy where there is not one — not ONE!!! — laugh in its entire running time. The movie is nothing more than appearances of characters from other movies allegedly lampooning the source material, but every single joke falls flat, and when you really look at them, are they actually jokes? For example, the filmmakers throw in a pointless bit that apes NACHO LIBRE (a major box office failure, and in no way an epic) for no apparent reason, a Narnia-based "Cribs" gag that goes on way too long, and an absolutely meaningless appearance by Borat at the very end of the film, none of which adds up to even a dribble of humor.

The utterly beside the point "plot" is a poorly wrought collage culled from at least two dozen films and television programs, finally kind of gelling into a dead-in-the-water sendup of THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE that even throws in an appearance by a James Bond substitute that has no joke whatsoever to make it in any way relevant to the story, or even funny.

I guarantee that the writers simply said, "Hey! Since they're assembling heroes for the final battle, let's throw in a quick shot of 007! It'll be fuckin' hilarious!" Well guess what? It wasn't.

Many of the attempts at jokes are repeated immediately after they are made, possibly to bolster whatever impact they were intended to have, or maybe to test the theory that a joke gets funnier with repetition, but the whole thing comes off like the result of two guys getting wasted all weekend on Jaegermeister and really bad ditch weed. There is nothing even resembling a script, and the end result is a complete embarrassment to everyone involved that leads me to wonder how the damned thing got the green light in the first place, and how the studio could consider this outright comedic Chernobyl to be the slightest bit release-worthy.

Now, I love bad movies, but there are a great many such films that are terrrible yet entertaining (DEATH WISH 3, SORCERESS, and PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE immediately come to mind), but EPIC MOVIE possesses not one nano-second of entertainment value in any sense of the word and just lays there like a dead cat. After I saw the reviewer's copy that I acquired, I said aloud, "Holy shit, that was a bad movie." I then sat in silence for another minute or so and then blurted out, "Holy SHIT, that was a BAD movie!!!" It's simply impossible for me to communicate how terrible this film is, but the user comments section regarding it on the IMDB get across the sheer torture of sitting through this fiasco in a fourteen (!!!) page cornucopia of negative reviews, the most eloquent of which describes EPIC MOVIE as "the worst piece of garbage to touch the face of this planet since Vlad the Impaler."

No joke, EPIC MOVIE is up there with such watermarks in human achievement as human skin lampshades, female genital mutilation, and slavery. Trust yer Bunche and avoid this film at all costs, even when it hits cable; this film is grand larceny of nearly ninety minutes of time that could be spent vomiting painfully after too much tequila and bacon grease, or removing your own pubic hair with Naval Jelly (a corrosive gel used for cleaning the hulls of sea vessels). And, incredibly, this film was number one at the box office last weekend! We'll see what word of mouth does about that...