If you’ve been paying attention – at all – then you’ve probably noticed that January movies usually suck. That’s not a coincidence. January is a month when movie studios typically toss out their low-concept comedies, dumbest family movies and cheapest horror films, because nobody is paying close attention and a few box office bombs won’t have a visible impact on their bottom line. Hollywood is busy preparing for Oscar season, and those awards season hopefuls are taking up more and more screens to drum up buzz. There’s no point in releasing a prestige picture, or even an ambitious blockbuster, when you want all eyes on the films that just came out in December.
So January is a great time to dump a movie, because nobody’s watching. And even if they are, these January movies are usually forgotten. “Usually.” Some January movies are so legendarily awful, so ill-conceived and dumb, that they have essentially become the de facto face of the month, at least as far as moviegoers are concerned. Even when a good film does come out in January, like The Grey or Haywire, it’s usually declared an exception to the rule, because thanks to films like these, the month is considered reserved for rapping kangaroos and feature-length blarting.
Let’s take a look at the 12 movies that, probably more than any others, are responsible for ruining the good name of a whole goddamned month. Whether they’re genuinely awful or they just looked bad on paper, these films were so terribly embarrassing that they now seem to represent the purest form of cinematic badness. They are the ne plus ultra of awful. These are the lamest January movies, which were already pretty much the lamest movies to begin with.
12 Movies That Turned January Into a @#$%-ing Joke:
Photo: Warner Bros.
William Bibbiani (everyone calls him ‘Bibbs’) is Crave’s film content editor and critic. You can hear him every week on The B-Movies Podcast and watch him on the weekly YouTube series Most Craved and What the Flick. Follow his rantings on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
12 Movies That Turned January Into a @#$%ing Joke
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Body of Evidence (1993)
How do you one-up the smash hit erotic thriller Basic Instinct? You cast erotic icon Madonna as the femme fatale, and you turn the murder weapon into sex. And even with that lurid marketing gimmick - the promise of Madonna fucking men to death - nobody cared about Body of Evidence. Uli Edel's erotic thriller was low on eroticism, lower on thrills, and high on unintentional hilarity.
Photo: MGM
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Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace (1996)
The sequel to a movie that only teenaged boys wanted a sequel to in the first place, Lawnmower Man 2 was made with 1/10th the budget it needed and 1/100th the intelligence. The simpleminded Jobe (now played by Matt Frewer, acting his head off) has invaded a future where the internet is all-powerful, even though hardly anybody's connecting to it. Only a shaman hacker and his homeless teen sidekicks can stop the online apocalypse. Jobe is eventually defeated when somebody cleverly yells "Egypt" in his face. Sequels don't get much dumber.
Photo: New Line Cinema
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Snow Dogs (2002)
Cuba Gooding Jr.'s career rather famously took a nosedive after he won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, but somehow, Snow Dogs wasn't his nadir. (That would be Boat Trip. Look it up. Or don't.) Snow Dogs stars Gooding as a dentist who discovers he's the bastard lovechild of Alaskan dogsledders, and then he struggles to train dogs with CGI facial expressions. It's one of the most famously bad movies of the 21st century, but Snow Dogs was a hit anyway, grossing over $115 million, because there was hardly anything else to see in January.
Photo: Buena Vista Pictures
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Kangaroo Jack (2003)
A violent crime comedy that was watered down in post-production to play up the cutesy animal angle, Kangaroo Jack tells the anything but wholesome story of two criminals who lose $50,000 in mob money when they accidentally put it in the pocket of a kangaroo. The rest of the movie is all about them trying to get it back, but now it's punctuated with CGI kangaroo antics and a dream sequence in which "Kangaroo Jack" raps. Like Snow Dogs before it (which also exaggerated a talking animal dream sequence in the trailers, to make it seem more kid friendly), this was good enough for January. Kangaroo Jack made an astonishing $88 million.
Photo: Warner Bros.
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The Collected Works of Uwe Boll (2005-2008)
There are many who consider German filmmaker Uwe Boll to be the worst filmmaker in the world. He's not, but he's still really, really bad. His strange brand of inept video game adaptations, packed with confusing action sequences and laughable dialogue, somehow attracted big enough stars that they warranted theatrical releases, albeit usually in January. Alone in the Dark starred Christian Slater as a kung fu private detective and Tara Reid as a science person, Bloodrayne starred Ben Kingsley as an evil vampire who refuses to leave his chair, and In the Name of the King stars Jason Statham, Ray Liotta and Burt Reynolds as medieval warriors, wizards and kings who look like they have no idea what they are doing or why. All three films were awful, and probably should have gone straight to video. Instead... January!
Photos: Lionsgate / Romar Entertainment / Freestyle Releasing
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Paul Blart: Mall Cop (2009)
Any film that calls itself Paul Blart: Mall Cop was destined to be scoffed at, and sure enough, many were willing to write off this Kevin James comedy, about an overweight security guard who defends a shopping center from armed criminals, sight unseen. The damned thing is, the first Paul Blart isn't that bad a movie. The sequel is, but that came out in April, not January. Still, naysayers still point to Paul Blart - and its overwhelming financial success ($183 million!) - as evidence that January is a piss-poor time of year for movies. Fair or not, the month was still besmirched.
Photo: Sony / Columbia
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Tooth Fairy (2010)
Dwayne Johnson is a Tooth Fairy. Get it? Now watch an entire movie milk that one dumb joke for all its worth, and somehow drag Julie Andrews and Billy Crystal (who came out of retirement for this) down with you. That's the recipe for Tooth Fairy, a bad but mostly harmless low-concept comedy that made $112 million in 2010, proving once again that January totally sucks.
Photo: 20th Century Fox
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I, Frankenstein (2014)
A movie so astoundingly and incompetently awful that we had to record a 90-minute commentary track just to explain every single thing wrong with it. Aaron Eckhart plays the Frankenstein monster, and gargoyles are fighting to stop him from being the guy who does the thing that destroys the other thing. Also there's a Franken-rat. I, Frankenstein is one of the worst movies in many years, and of course, it came out in January.
Photo: Lionsgate
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The Legend of Hercules (2014)
Renny Harlin, who used to make halfway decent action movies like Die Hard 2 and Cliffhanger, rushed this sword and sandal fantasy into production to compete with Brett Ratner's Hercules, which nobody cared about either. Kellan Lutz plays the beefy hero, Scott Adkins plays the villain with his fists surgically attached to his waist, nothing makes sense, all the CGI is terrible, and even the gay subtext isn't gay enough. Nothing about The Legend of Hercules works.
Photo: Lionsgate / Summit
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Strange Magic (2015)
Disney concluded 2015 with the mega-hit Star Wars: The Force Awakens, but before they could do that they had to dump Strange Magic, and they had to dump it hard. So into January this animated LucasFilm musical went, where the uncomfortable character designs, shrill (and non-stop) jukebox musical renditions of classic pop songs and a total bastardization of Shakespeare could flop, largely unnoticed, and pretty much forgotten by the time The Force finally awakened. This kind of film is exactly what January is for. January is for shame.
Photo: Disney / LucasFilm
