This was a year in which you could fill a year's worst-movie list with moronic teen flicks. But where's the fun in that?
We prefer to cite the 10 worst movies that we thought had a chance to be good or at least watchable, judging from cast, concept or story line. You thought "Pearl Harbor" was hackneyed? Get a load of these:
1. "Freddy Got Fingered": Well, OK, no one expected a Tom Green comedy to be good. But this compendium of gags about animal genitalia, kinky paraplegics and newborn babies twirled by their umbilical cords is so horrible that it makes just plain bad look good. Know what I mean?
2. "John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars": The worst movie of the summer of 2001 is about miners on the Red Planet driven mad by an evil force that compelled them to kill other humans. Or maybe they just sat through this violent, stupid clunker.
3. "Scary Movie 2": The first one contained more disgusting sex-oriented jokes than an issue of Penthouse, but it was funny. The second one -- didn't they promise "no sequels"? -- isn't.
4. "Kiss of the Dragon": Not every martial-arts movie is "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." But most of them aren't as shrill, idiotic and badly edited as this stinker starring Jet Li, who left his charisma at home.
5. "Thirteen Ghosts": Even our horror-film lovin' boss, who thinks "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" should have won an Oscar, hated this ghastly ghost story.
6. "Tomb Raider": Angelina Jolie is Lara Croft, and she's the only good thing about this movie based on a video game, a genre in which the quality and the profits are as illusory as the special effects.
7. "Original Sin": Jolie again, this time in full crackpot mode as the mail-order bride of Antonio Banderas (like, why would he need one?). She's only slightly less overheated than this tropical potboiler.
8. "Rock Star": Inspired by the true story of a singer in a cover band hired by the supergroup he worships. That's the only inspired thing about this cornball flick. And, oh, the singer is from Pittsburgh. Just our luck.
9. "Focus": A hopelessly outdated, heavy-handed movie about anti-Semitism based on a 1945 Arthur Miller novel. It wants us to believe Laura Dern looks Jewish. Oy.
10. "Zoolander": Lame spoof of the fashion industry featuring Ben Stiller as a talentless, self-absorbed male model. This kind of parody is all too redundant.
