Cinema's 50 greatest flops, follies and failures: part 2

In Part Two we encounter racist dogs, floating corpses, dancing globes and stripping starlets, plus one very crabby folk singer and a whole boatload of misguided Britpop twerps...

40. Sleuth (2007)
Directed by Kenneth Branagh
Footlights follies
Picture the scene: maverick RSC mainstay-cum-hazardously dodgy middle-brow director Kenneth Branagh is gleefully micturating on the grave of Old Hollywood golden boy Joseph L Mankiewicz while Harold Pinter is stage left sobbing his sweary heart out. That pretty much sums up what Branagh did with his woeful updating the 1972 version of ‘Sleuth', a flapping-mad turkey which died a death both critically and commercially. Certainly the prospect was intriguing: Pinter returning to Hollywood screenwriting; Michael Caine going mano-a-mano with Jude Law; Branagh's first non-Shakespeare adap in donkey's years. But the execution was laughable, amounting to a film which comprised little more that two men shouting at each other across what looks like a Swedish furniture outlet. And on that note, let's also say that Branagh's upcoming take on Marvel's ‘Thor' comic book has yet to moisten our filmgoing slacks. DJ
Watch Jude Law trying hard to make the film sound interesting

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39. Enter the Void (2009)
Directed by Gaspar Noe
Giving up the ghost
Apparently it's the film that confrontational Argentina-born, France-based director Gaspar Noe has been eking towards his entire career, and it's a high-rise, sense-battering balancing act that topples almost instantly, then keeps tumbling for the entire near three hour runtime. Originally inspired by a accidental late-night viewing of Robert Montgomery's 1947 film ‘Lady of the Lake', parts of which are told from the perspective of a dead person, ‘Enter the Void' employs some of the woozy, POV camera techniques used in his previous film ‘Irreversible' to tell of a young drug dealer's out-of-body plight after he is gunned down in a Tokyo nightclub. His ghost floats around the neon-lit city as we slowly discover the circumstances of his death and the fate of his expat sister who works as a stripper.

Following its premiere at Cannes in 2008, the film drew parallels to both the eye-zapping ‘third-age-of-man' fx reel at the end of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey' and the tedium of a screen saver custom built by Athena. Beyond that, it's a movie hampered by single-minded visual ambition (uterus-cam anyone?), wildly oscillating between dreamcatcher profundity and gross puerility and constantly pushing at visual and aural boundaries at the expense of character, logic and clear themes. As much as any cult movie can be deemed a folly, this one will undoubtedly draw a small but adoring late-night crowd, but we sincerely hope that this is one that Noe needed to get out of his system as opposed to a template for future mind-frags. DJ
Watch an eye-ravishing visual effects reel

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38. White Dog (1981)
Directed by Sam Fuller
KKK-9
Uncle Sam Fuller made a habit of stubbing his fat stogie out on the cinematic rulebook, tackling interracial love (‘The Crimson Kimono'), FBI incompetence (‘Pickup on Southstreet') and US army savagery (‘The Steel Helmet') at times when those subjects were just not kosher. Endgame for Fuller came with his 1982 film ‘White Dog', which was considered so politically incendiary and downright out-of-order that it was buried by producers Paramount and remained ‘lost' for close to 30 years. Focusing on a white dog who has been trained by a past owner to attack black people, the film traces the dog's incremental rehabilitation. Of course, seeing it now, it's quite clear that its message was initially misconstrued, and that it is in fact a plea for tolerance, understanding and education, and not, y' know, a celebration of violent racial hatred. DJ
Watch a brutal scene from the movie

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37. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
Directed by Andrew Dominik
Outlaw blues
"They got their company rules, and I got my mean streak - and that's how we get things done." So intones Brad Pitt's Jesse James while robbing a mail train early on in Dominik's elegant revisionist Western. It's a phrase that could serve as a rallying cry for many of the films in this list. Surely no one involved in the great many of these hugely expensive movies could ever imagine they would make back even a fraction of their often vast budgets. That isn't to say that many of them are not fine pieces of work. ‘Jesse James' is a case in point: a beautiful, mournful, riveting film that we should be endlessly grateful for, it's a folly all the way. But if Hollywood continues to gift us films of this quality whist still managing to balance their budgets, then we'll all get along just fine. ALD
Watch the wonderful opening passage to ‘Jesse James' here

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36. Masked and Anonymous (2003)
Directed by Larry Charles
You got a lotta nerve
Untouchable though he is with a battered acoustic on his knee and a blues harp in his word-hole, Bob Dylan's intermittent attempts to forge a big screen career have only ended up making David Bowie look like Brando. The signs were all there in the lamentable emo goof-around, ‘Hearts of Fire', where he plays a bubble-permed folk troubadour ‘with a past' who has to battle for the affections of a fiery strumpet with Rupert Everett's moneyed, PVC-clad Le Bon-a-like synth monster. But special mention this time goes to 2003's direct-to-DVD oddity ‘Masked and Anonymous', which is not so much a train wreck, but 4256 trainwrecks converging on the site of a children's hospital. Dylan (who contributed to the screenplay) stars as Jack Fate, a cowboy minstrel looking to re-find fame in a bizarre, ‘Repo Man'-like dystopian future peopled by Hollywood B-listers. Though taste calamities abound throughout, the main problem is that Dylan mistakes movie dialogue for inscrutable rock lyrics, so you're choked on meandering monologues like:

‘Things fall apart, especially all the neat order of rules and laws. The way we look at the world is the way we really are. See it from a fair garden and everything looks cheerful. Climb to a higher plateau and you'll see plunder and murder. Truth and beauty are in the eye of the beholder. I stopped trying to figure everything out a long time ago.'

Even Uncut readers gave this one a wide berth. DJ

Watch Ebert and Roeper give Dylan's disaster a big thumbs down

35. Showgirls (1995)
Directed by Paul Verhoeven
‘I'm erect. Why aren't you erect?'
Violent femmes, bisexual bitch fights, sex in the swimming pool... it must be a Paul Verhoeven/Joe Eszterhas collaboration. High on the success of icepick-wielding bonkfest ‘Basic Instinct', the duo decided to take one step closer to cheap porn and accidentally made a giant leap into camp cult classic. A flop at the box office, the story of the supposedly sassy stripper (a blank-faced Elizabeth Berkeley) became celebrated on video and DVD, when students could enjoy it in the privacy of their own rented accommodation, rewind the gratuitous sex bits and howl with ironic laughter at the risible dialogue. The thought that Verhoeven intended it to be taken seriously is the joke that keeps on giving. AS
Watch an awesome DIY stage tribute to the movie

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34. Guest House Paradiso (1999)
Directed by Adrian ‘Ade' Edmondson
Rock bottom
This mile-high tsunami of bogies marked the closing chapter in the near 30-year comedy partnership between Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson, and what a tawdry, vile and mirthless affair it is. This flat-footed big screen outing took everything that was naff about the (intermittently superb) BBC sitcom ‘Bottom' - the play fighting, the crude innuendo, the pound-shop special effects - and supercharged it into an embarrassing mess of a movie that looked like a cross between an intensely blue Roy Chubby Brown routine and ‘Noel's House Party'. In the end, it falls between the failure and folly stools, as we all know that when Rik and Ade are on form, filthy gems like ‘Mr Jolly Lives Next Door' can worm on to our screens. DJ
Watch the boys engage in some misc pan-fighting

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33. The Boat that Rocked (2009)
Directed by Richard Curtis
Shit floats
Winsome bourgeois romcom rejuvenator Curtis had already taken a shot at crafting an epic failure with his rambling, teeth-hurtingly sweet portmanteau plodder ‘Love, Actually', but much to everyone's surprise it actually made money. And so Curtis upped anchor and set sail for the '60s - or at least some sickeningly twee version of same, where men wore frilly shirts and women kept their mouths shut, where marriage was accidental and rape just another wacky coming-of-age adventure. ‘The Boat that Rocked' truly is a seedy, objectionable little film: devoid of narrative drive, character development, warmth or genuine good humour, drowning in sickly ITV clichés and barefaced sexism, sucking any sense of excitement or danger from what should have been a timely celebration of cultural rebellion. Falling flat with British audiences thanks to its punishing 135 minute runtime, the film was heavily edited for US consumption, but still managed to flop there. Despite remaining in demand as a screenwriter, Curtis currently has no more directorial projects in development. Please, God, keep it that way. TH
When even Tony Blackburn can't find a nice word to say, you're in trouble

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32. Ishtar (1987)
Directed by Elaine May
‘Dune' of the dunes...
In the case of some of the mega-budget skidmarks that crud up this list, you can at least look up at the screen and see where all the money went. Elaborate set pieces, massive sets, casts of thousands - none of these come cheap (or at least they didn't until CGI came along and took a dump in the laundry basket). With others, however, you're left gaping up at the screen and wondering just which galactic orifice all those millions disappeared into. ‘Ishtar', for instance, is a film about two jobbing New York musicians getting a gig in a fictional North African country and finding themselves lost in the desert. A couple of exterior NY shoots, an airport set and a few closing scenes in the Mojave and you'd have a perfectly serviceable direct-to-vid mid-'80s comedy starring, perhaps, James Belushi, or, if you're lucky, John Candy. But factor in the star wattage and renowned perfectionism of multi-take merchants Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman and the same exact flick ends up being filmed in Tunisia and costing $60 million. None of this would matter if the film showed the barest flicker of humour, invention or charm.
But. It. Don't. ALD
Watch Siskel & Ebert dismantling the film here

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31. The Great Dictator (1940)
Directed by Charlie Chaplin
He's got the whole world in his hands
It wasn't long after its 1940 release that history took a studded cosh to Chaplin's double-barrelled satire of fascist sturm und drang: when news made it to the West of the vile extent of Hitler's atrocities, the jokes just didn't seem so funny any more. The pomp and pageantry of National Socialism - specifically how it was viewed from outside Germany - were gustily lampooned in this story of Adenoid Hynkel (Chaplin), the ruthless, comically effete dictator of the fictional state of Tomainia whose persecution of local Jews leads him to get embroiled with a World War One grunt (Chaplin again) who later assumes his identity. The film was a huge hit upon its release, working as much as a slice of rallying wartime propaganda as it did a seat-filling high-class blockbuster. And it contained some of the director-star's most memorable work, not least the famous scene where he waltzes with an inflatable globe. Yet the film has fallen out of favour somewhat, its closing to-camera plea for tolerance and camaraderie coming across like an uneasy peace of soap-box hectoring suggesting Chaplin had perhaps lost confidence in the visual potency of the medium, a potency that had made him a silent era star in the first place. DJ
Watch the beautiful globe dance here

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See 30 through to 21

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