We are nearing what may be one of the most amazing, entertaining, thrilling, orgasm-inducing, eyeball-exploding summer movie seasons of all time here in 2008. Iron Man looks great. Will Smith is going to make us laugh and shout (and possibly twist and gangsta-boogie) in Hancock. Indiana Jones has snapped the shackles of development hell and returned to kill more of America’s mid-20th Century enemies. Oh, and then there’s The Dark Knight, which promises to put a smile on that face whether you want it there or not.
That’s right, this summer is going to physically disfigure you with its awesomeness.
Nonetheless, if you listen closely on nights when all else is silent, you can hear the murmurings of haters ready to denounce this summer as one of the most over-hyped and pathetic summers to ever trot its filth before the eyes of filmgoers.
So, for some perspective, I’ve decided to provide a history lesson on actual horrific summer movie seasons and what makes them so completely evil. First…
A Couple of Rules
1. I’m declaring the summer of ‘89 the first real summer movie season
Anyone fancying themselves a “film buff,” “film geek” or “brotha who knows some shit about movies” knows that Jaws is generally given credit for birthing the concept of the summer blockbuster. Given that it was made in 1975, you might be wondering why I’ve decided to make “1989 the number” (to quote the almighty Chuck D) as opposed to viewing it as just “another summer” (to refute the assertion of Chuck D, the jerk). Well, ‘89 was the year that Tim Burton’s Batman struck with an unprecedented media blitz that stopped just short of deploying an army of Bat-droids to force everyone in the country to watch the movie at Batarang-point. It basically set the standard for advertising your film like it’s an impending meteor strike.
On top of that, you had Indiana Jones coming back for one last crusade to murder all of the Nazis he didn’t get around to in the first flick, plus you had Ghostbusters II and Lethal Weapon 2. It was basically the first summer intentionally loaded with action / adventure oriented blockbusters.
2. We’re measuring the summer as a whole.
No summer movie season is completely bad or completely good. So while each of these summers had some cool movies, the cool movies were ultimately forced to tap out to the devastating armbar applied by the lame movies.
That’s pretty much it for the rules. Now, finally, on to the humorous ridicule of others’ creative efforts!
1990: The ‘89 Hangover (Or “The Summer That Wasn’t”)
What Made it Bad?
In short, the fact that the biggest movie of that summer turned out to be fucking Ghost. A movie with this poster…
…ruled the summer box office, beating out the likes of Die Hard 2 and Total Recall. Note the disturbing dearth of explosions, robots, superheroes, swashing and buckling in the above poster. It’s one thing to let a vulgar sex-comedy become the surprise hit of the summer, but a supernatural romance? It especially stands out given that it’s sandwiched between summers that brought us Batman and Terminator 2. This summer was like the two NBA seasons that interrupted Jordan’s six championships while he was away playing baseball; people forget it even existed, and rightfully so.
This summer is also responsible for bringing us the franchise-souring sequels Robocop 2, Another 48 Hours, the unspeakably abysmal Ghost Dad, and the underwhelming Dick Tracy, which was supposed to be the Batman of that summer, but ultimately had its throat ripped out by Swayze–Road House style.
1995: The First Mega-Lame Summer
1990 was bad, but in its defense the summer movie season was still in its infancy, and hell, it did bring us Die Hard 2. In 1995, however, not even John McClane teamed with Samuel L. Jackson dropping f-bombs while disarming actual bombs could salvage the summer from the mega-bombs blowing apart theaters left & right.
Let’s check the culprits.
…and the poster boy…
…I’ll give you a second to recover from all of the wackness-induced eye-vomiting (sorry about that).
Okay, I know Waterworld wasn’t as bad as it was initially made out to be when it first arrived, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t terrible. I remember Congo being built up as a sort of “Jurassic Park with apes,” and what audiences got instead was “a fucking horrible movie with apes.” Batman Forever kicked off the demise of a franchise, and Judge Dredd is quite possibly the most egregious film adaptation ever.
Sure, 1995 also gave us two Oscar winning flicks (Apollo 13 and Braveheart), but what kind of super-nerd who got his nerdiness courtesy of a radioactive-nerd bite expects their summer to deliver Academy Award worthy dramas based on actual events?
The most fun movie of the ‘95 summer? Mortal Kombat. God’s sake… I don’t even know if I should continue, every other lousy summer has to look at least “okay” in comparison, right? Nonetheless…
1997: The Sins of the Awful
To be fair, this is more of an “honorable mention,” as this summer really wasn’t that bad. Men in Black was good, The Lost World was solid (I don’t care what anyone says, the T-Rex rampaging through San Diego was outstanding cinema, damn it) and Nicolas Cage anchored two dumb-but-fun shoot-em-ups (Con Air and Face / Off… I still don’t get the gratuitous slash in the title, but ah well).
Still, it must be addressed, as this was the summer that saw the release of both Volcano and Batman and Robin. The former is bad enough to make you think it might actually be a practical joke (Ah… you got me! You had me thinking this was gonna be cool! Not shitty! Ah man, good one!) and the latter is the only movie I’m aware of that comes with its own apology for being made when you purchase the DVD.
It took aliens, dinosaurs AND stylized gun violence to prevent this summer from being truly atrocious, which is a bit of a coincidence given that the next year, aliens and stylized gun violence kicked off a shitty summer that was promptly stepped on by a gigantic dinosaur…
1998: God-Ageddon!! (or “Arma-Zilla”… nah, definitely sticking with God-Ageddon)
To begin with, this summer season actually started in April, with Lost in Space, which was programmed to erase itself from your memory after consumption. Later in the month we got The Big Hit, which took the John Woo “Heroic Bloodshed” formula and somehow figured that stripping away the grit and replacing it with bubble-wrap would make it more appealing. Because who wouldn’t like an Americanized version of a Hong Kong action flick where the hitmen look like members of a boy band?
By the time Deep Impact finally came the summer had already taxed your faith in humanity so much that you sort of wanted the comet to win. We were also fed Small Soldiers, Six Days, Seven Nights and the X-Files movie that made us all believe in the existence of extra-terrestrials infinitely more than the possibility of the TV series ever being good again. Bad as those flicks are, they still aren’t the primary reason why ‘98 was so, so awful. The villain here is, of course, Godzilla. Brought to us by the same team that gave the world the highly enjoyable idiocy of Independence Day, the expectations for Godzilla were the size of giant lizard capable of destroying New York City. Which… you know… apparently is an inexact size that fluctuates on a scene-to-scene basis because nobody can be troubled to pay attention to such continuity-related trivialities. I’ll spare you the diatribe, as this is already one long ass posting and everyone pretty much knows why Godzilla sucks. All that needs be said is that, when it hit the big screen and eviscerated its own hype with almost admirable zeal, Godzilla single-handedly ruined a whole summer movie season. The post-traumatic-disappointment of Godzilla was so severe that people thought (and some still insist) that Armageddon was a good movie, the same way starving people would probably consider Applebee’s leftovers a delicacy.
2001: Dumb & Fun Split Up: Fun Takes a Summer Off While Dumb Explores a Solo Career
You see what I did there? I anthropomorphized “dumb” and “fun” and turned them into an entertainment duo that has creative differences and… *ahem*… right, right, I’ll just keep it moving then.
2001 gave us the kind of gratuitous badness that borders on malicious. The Mummy Returns decided to forego much of what made the first film so entertaining (e.g. simplicity and not taking itself seriously) and tried to transform itself into something epic. Unfortunately me, you, your momma and your cousin too went to see it, so director Stephen Sommers thought “Apparently people love pretentious self-importance sprinkled into their mindless pulp adventures!” and gave us the same shit with Van Helsing three years later. (The alternate theory is that Van Helsing is so bad that it actually traveled back through time and stamped its formula for badness on The Mummy Returns. Anyone who’s seen Van Helsing knows that this is entirely plausible, maybe even probable.)
Pearl Harbor coupled a pair of actors wooden enough to draw termites (and hey, I think Affleck gets hated on too much and I actually think Hartnett is cool despite his limited range, but putting them together was just a bad, bad idea) with an action movie director who is religiously opposed to both restraint and takes that last longer than 3 seconds. I’m sure you can guess the results. Jurassic Park III turned the scariest, most dangerous place on Earth into a place where a fucking twelve-year-old can survive alone for days until someone shows up to save him! Hell, if the place is that safe you might as well open it up to the public and let people tour Isla Sorna unguided.
The ‘01 summer also brought us the brilliance of Tomb Raider, Fast and the Furious, and the tepid, celluloid-middle-finger-to-film-fans that was the Planet of the Apes remake.
Other than all of that though… you know… great summer at the movies…
Since Then…
The last years have been bumpy, but not quite as disastrous as the years mentioned above. I was tempted to add 2008 as the year of the Big Letdown given the number of ambitious profile sequels that fell far, far short of expectations (Pirates of the Caribbean, Spider-Man 3, Shrek the Third, Evan Almighty) but I don’t think that the worst of those flicks (Spider-Man 3) is quite as bad as people make it out to be, and there were enough good / fun flicks (The Bourne Ultimatum, Ocean’s 13, Transformers, Superbad) to make up for each failure.
So there we have it folks. A breakdown of the worst summer movie seasons since the beginning of the summer movie season as we know it. I’d like to remind everyone that The New Cool is not liable for the psychological agony that bringing up the memories of any these films may have caused, and invite you to come back soon!
