15. Con Air: Perhaps the 90s had equally good cheese. Here, we get the standard run of the mill Jerry Bruckheimer action flick: loud, in your face, over the top with incredibly preposterous action sequences. But through it all, the cast looks like they are having one hell of a time with it. They’re all bad guys or crazy guys and they ham it up more than a national 4-H convention. I mean, just Steve Buscemi’s crazy guy alone is enough to recommend this movie. Want a loud, dumb, fun as hell action film, look no further than Con Air.
14. Ace Ventura 1 & 2: The second one was just on over the weekend and I was able to see exactly why it was such a critically trashed film. It is so incredibly over the top in its ridiculousness, so unnatural with not just Ace himself but how everyone else around him just treats his psychological disorders as a simple tick. Yet, I still get so much amusement out of it. I love that it goes so over the top and makes no apologies for how incredibly bizarre they are. I love how over the top Jim Carrey takes his performance and what delicious insanity only he could bring to this role. It’s dumb, it’s insane, but it makes no apologies for it. Have a ball!
13. Judge Dredd: If you ever wondered what a movie made out of every cliché in the book would look like, I give you Judge Dredd. Let’s count, shall we? We have the rookie cop fresh out of the academy that is killed in the first ten minutes, the thousands of bullets that are fired none of which hit our heroes, the reunited partners that say “it’s good to be back” just seconds before getting killed, the villain that LOOVES to monologue, red digital display countdown bombs…the list goes on, but what an over the top list it is! This is a movie where all of its clichés and corniness are matched in its production. It’s a huge scale, it’s loud, it’s over the top and it makes no excuses for what it is. Michael Bay, take note, THIS is how to make a guilty pleasure action movie.
12. The Polar Express: When I first saw this movie, I loved it. I loved the tale of the boy who goes on a midnight journey to the North Pole to see Santa Claus, but he’s not sure if he really believes or not. There was something so charming about a boy who was growing up too fast going on a childlike adventure like we used to imagine. Yet, the more reviews I read and the overall audience reaction to the movie (Shrek 2 ended up making three times more than Polar Express that year), I began to think the rest of the world didn’t embrace this movie the way that I did. Still, for better or for worse, I still love this movie as a charming holiday staple and for some incredibly well done visual effects for 2004.
11. The Blair Witch Project/Cloverfield: I like to look at these two as the real found footage movies. They don’t have the luxury of tripods that Paranormal Activity had or the “professional crew” that The Last Exorcism had. No, Blair Witch and Cloverfield are TRUE first person movies, the ones where your eyes are the camera lenses and you are seeing everything they see (or hearing what they don’t). It’s a genre that’s a lot like Orson Welles’ radio broadcast of War of the Worlds, where they utilize the medium to their fullest to pull off their tale in a convincing manner that makes you feel like you are truly experiencing this medium. That being said, I cannot begin to tell you the number of people I have talked to about these movies that have said, “I couldn’t watch it because of how shaky it was”. (Yet, inexplicably, we have to watch their home movies with even worse camera work.) I will forever defend these movies by saying yes, the footage is shaky, but you try either running with a camera or standing in the same place as that creepy noise right next to you. The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield: two movies that get bad reps because of their medium, but are really well made if you like giving yourself over to a movie.
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