Not since Battlefield Earth has one film been so loathed by so many. But to tell you the truth, Gigli isn’t even the worst film on this list! That dubious honour goes to The Cat in the Hat, a movie so awful it had us asking, “Mr. Brown can boo! Can you?”

Then again, Gigli certainly isn’t the best film on this list, either. That would be The Matrix Revolutions, but bear in mind that the term “best” is relative when we’re talking about the worst films of the year. Taken on its own merits, Revolutions was a so-so action-fantasy flick with some impressive effects and a heavy conceptual debt to James Cameron’s Aliens. But as the closing chapter in the saga that began with 1999’s jaw-dropping The Matrix, it was a bitter disappointment. Between the pseudo-philosophical bafflegab passing as dialogue and a climactic Neo-versus-Agent Smith showdown that looked like a high-tech Punch and Judy show, Revolutions squandered the immense possibility of its own premise. Fortunately, Peter Jackson finished out the year with The Return of the King. Now that’s how you cap off a trilogy!

This year’s honourable mentions are From Justin to Kelly and The Real Cancun, two films that brought the minuscule production values and empty-headed “personalities” of reality TV to the big screen. With reality like this, maybe The Cat in the Hat wasn’t so bad after all!

Boat Trip – Ever since his cocky, charismatic turn in Jerry Maguire, Cuba Gooding Jr. has steadfastly refused to show us the talent. And this film, an unfunny two-minute gay-stereotype gag that somebody decided to improve by making it feature-length, only made the Cuban Fizzle Crisis worse.

Cold Creek Manor – What the hell? Where did the spooky haunted-house movie go, and when is something—anything—going to happen?

Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat – Strictly a litterbox leftover, this latest inexcusable insult to dearly departed Dr. Seuss was somehow even more abysmal than the Jim Carrey Grinch movie. What’s next, Horton Hatches the Bomb?

Dumb and Dumberer: When Harold Met Lloyd – This far dumberer prequel to the dumb but inexplicably funny 1994 Farrelly brothers flick didn’t have Jim Carrey, Jeff Daniels, or a Farrelly brother in sight—unless you count the kiss-of-death “based on characters created by…” credit.

Gigli – Turkey time! Bennifer will always have this little gem as a memento of their ill-fated relationship, but the rest of us will always have it as a reminder of why couples should never, EVER make vanity-project pictures together.

The Matrix Revolutions – This final installment in the Matrix trilogy wasn’t really one of the year’s worst films, but it was the year’s most disappointing let-down. The creative decline was already apparent in Reloaded, but watching the Wachowski brothers flail around for an ending was like choking down the blue pill without water—a most unpleasant exit from the dreamworld of the Matrix and back into crappy Hollywood reality.

Timeline – This Richard Donner flatliner, based on one of author Michael Crichton’s more recent straight-to-screenplay doorstops, ran just shy of two hours. It made us wish we could travel back in time to get those two hours back.

When it comes to bad movies, 2002 will be remembered as the Year of the Rehash. All seven of the creativity-deprived films on this list are either adaptations, remakes of older films, or sequels.

We also came very close to including another Eddie Murphy film (The Adventures of Pluto Nash) and another Adam Sandler film (the animated Eight Crazy Nights), but that would have meant ditching the rehash theme. Besides, Murphy and Sandler deserve their own separate worst-of lists.

We’d love to say it doesn’t get much worse than this, but next year would only prove us wrong.

I-Spy – Eddie Murphy was funny when he played an ass in Shrek. But as a champion boxer-turned-partner to Owen Wilson in this asinine adaptation of the old Bill Cosby/Robert Culp TV series, Murphy and his nonstop braying become intolerable. If you spy anything else in the video store, rent that instead.

Jackass: The Movie – Apart from masochism, there’s a reason Johnny Knoxville and his cohorts take it to the next level in this compendium of videotaped stupid stunts. They’re stupid.

Men in Black II – Will Smith and an ancient-looking Tommy Lee Jones are even less interested than the audience in this slack offering of spliced-together leftovers from the first MiB. We wish someone in black would come along with a memory-blanking pen and make us forget this film.

Mr. Deeds – Adam Sandler plays a hoodie-clad man-child who wins over a beautiful woman with moronic charm. We’ve seen this before from Sandler, but any resemblance between this claptrap and the Jimmy Stewart original is strictly nonexistent.

Resident Evil – You know you’re in trouble when the movie has less atmosphere and worse graphics than the videogame it’s based on. And unlike the videogame, you can’t shut off the movie when you get tired of it.

Rollerball – John McTiernan’s remake of the 1975 Norman Jewison cult classic is like TV’s American Gladiators with camera work by a three-year-old on rollerblades. Except not as good.

Swept Away – Madonna and Adriano Giannini are swept away by a sea of crap in Guy Ritchie’s waterlogged remake of Lina Wertmüller’s 1974 commentary on sex and class warfare. Notice the theme of lousy rehashes yet?

As much as we hate to dwell on films that didn’t succeed for whatever reason, it’s just too damn much fun to pick on them again at the end of the year. As usual, summer flicks (which now begin screening as early as May) were some of the most egregious offenders (and to make matters worse, at least two of our picks will almost certainly spawn miscreant sequels).

On the bright side, the events of Sept. 11th made a lot of people (briefly) examine their taste for idiotic popcorn flicks, and the sure-to-be-horrid Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Collateral Damage was delayed until 2002. On the not-so-bright side, the trailer for Sam Raimi’s sure-to-be-spectacular Spider-Man, which prominently featured a certain pair of towers, was hastily edited in a display of knee-jerk oversensitivity that affected many other imminent and existing films. Critics everywhere, used to having their chorus of boos ignored by studios and moviegoers alike, dared to hope the ripples from the world-shaking disaster might reach all the way to Hollywood, ushering in a new age of meaningful, artistic American cinema.

Fortunately, Hollywood’s period of introspection was over by mid-November, which means we’ll have lots of crappy movies to pick on next year, too.

Evolution – Ivan Reitman’s attempt to recapture his Ghostbusters glory went bust. Watching David Duchovny and Orlando Jones struggle to be funny as alien-busters was about as enjoyable as being slimed by a gigantic extraterrestrial asshole.

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider – In the tradition of such cinematic triumphs as Super Mario Bros. and Street Fighter, Simon West’s Tomb Raider was based on a mega-selling videogame. But instead of providing audiences with hours of entertaining action, it left them with an Indiana Jones. West and star Angelina Jolie should have read the box for the Tomb Raider computer game. It says, “Sometimes, a killer body just isn’t enough.”

Monkeybone – This catastrophic failure from Henry Selick was a Freudian flop, a bargain-bin Beetlejuice trapped in limbo somewhere between dark comedy and stultifying boredom. It did, however, confirm our long-held theory that Brendan Fraser has the lousiest agent in Hollywood, and made us wonder when Whoopi Goldberg was last funny.

The Mummy Returns – Stephen Sommers’s follow-up to his surprisingly successful 1999 remake of The Mummy was so Rock-bottom, Boris Karloff is still doing pirouettes in his sarcophagus. It had all the entertainment value of watching a slack-jawed skateboarder play a videogame for two hours.

Planet of the Apes – The year’s biggest disappointment was Tim Burton’s “re-imagining” of the 1968 sci-fi classic. Despite Rick Baker’s expressive ape makeup and Tim Roth’s snarly chimp villain, the movie suffered from a script seemingly hammered out by monkeys on typewriters, and ended up being a damn dirty shame.

Rat Race – This would-be zany stinker from Jerry Zucker, a large-cast chase caper like 1963’s It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, was a bad bad bad bad movie. It also extended Whoopi Goldberg’s unfunny streak.

Swordfish – The year’s most gratuitous stunt wasn’t the bus-airlift chase scene in Dominic Sena’s pyro masturbation fantasy of a movie; it wasn’t even Hugh Jackman trying to hack a government server while getting a blowjob. Nope, the year’s most gratuitous stunt was the two seconds of Halle Berry’s tits that way too many young males paid way too much money to see.

Although it didn’t signal the end of the world, the year 2000 was an exceptionally poor year for movie lovers. Coming after a year of such quality that pundits were predicting a revival of the 70’s auteur boom, this year’s sudden downturn bore a strange similarity to the fate of dot-com startups on the NASDAQ index. Faster than you could say “poor notices,” a wave of crappy movies washed over us like that towering breaker in The Perfect Storm. The most disheartening trend this year was the Pointless 70’s Remake—witness Shaft, Gone in 60 Seconds, Bedazzled, Charlie’s Angels, Get Carter, etc., etc.—a trend that proved last year’s pundits only half right. Also enjoying a resurgence was gross-out humour. The Farrelly brothers traded on the success of their 1998 smash There’s Something About Mary with Me, Myself & Irene, while the Wayans brothers scored a huge hit with Scary Movie, which featured a man getting spiked through the head with an erect penis. Come to think of it, maybe 2000 was the end of the world.

Normally we pick seven movies to single out for punishment, a sort of “seven cinematic sins” that wasted our time and money. But this year was such an off year for movies, we’ve decided to add an eighth selection. It’s only fitting, considering how overwhelmingly the year’s lousy films outnumbered the good ones.

As an added bonus, we’ve included two “dishonourable mention” movies so crappy, we didn’t even see them!

Bless the Child – Kim Basinger, the Pets.com of the Hollywood Stock Exchange, continued her streak of post-L.A. Confidential duds with this blasphemous nonsense about a messianic little girl threatened by a new-age Satanist. Do what thou wilt, but stay the hell away from this movie.

Dude, Where’s My Car? – Dude, where’s the humour? This mind-numbingly stupid stoner fantasy couldn’t even make a pot-smoking dog seem funny, let alone career dimwits Seann William Scott and Ashton Kutcher.

Dungeons & Dragons – Basing a feature film on the pen-and-paper-thin plots of the popular role-playing game was a bad idea. Robbing it of the game’s imaginative appeal was a far worse one. We hope a benevolent wizard locks this film away in a magically sealed dungeon for all eternity.

Eye of the Beholder – Blame Canada for this made-in-Montreal pile of merde. Ewan McGregor went from Obi-Wan to just plain wan, and Ashley Judd failed to convince us that she deserves better than third-rate thrillers. Apparently, talent is in the eye of the director.

Gone in 60 Seconds – The most pointless of the year’s Pointless 70’s Remakes (and that’s saying a great deal), this Nicolas Cage/Angelina Jolie lemon featured Dukes of Hazzard-level writing and worse acting. Watching it was like inhaling the tailpipe emissions from a ‘67 Shelby GT500 for two hours—sleep-inducing and damn hard on the brain cells.

Mission to Mars – Written by the same two hacks as last year’s worst movie (Wild Wild West), and directed in Brian De Palma’s haphazard, openly derivative style, this mission should have been scrubbed on the launchpad. Woe to anybody who went in thinking they’d be seeing Tom Cruise in a John Woo movie.

Nutty Professor II: The Klumps – Eddie Murphy served up an unwanted second helping of lumpy, Klumpy gravy—fatty, tasteless, and poorly prepared. We sent it back to the kitchen with our lowest review of the year.

Shanghai Noon – Warning to all Jackie Chan fans: if a Chinese guy named Chon Wang in a Western called Shanghai Noon is your cup of green tea, feel free to rent this drivel and laugh your mentally-challenged ass off. Otherwise, spare yourself the sight of your hero in what amounts to an Oriental minstrel show and pick up The Legend of Drunken Master instead.

There’s no question that these movies were awful. Just thinking about them again makes us want to run out and see Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon again, to get the taste of them out of our mouths. But before we do, we have one more thankless task to get out of the way. You see, there are two movies we failed to mention. Even more than the ones listed above, these two atrocities were responsible for making 2000 a year to forget. In fact, they were so bad we couldn’t bring ourselves to see them. Luckily, you didn’t need a critic to tell you to avoid them; the box office numbers spoke for themselves. Still, we’d be remiss if we didn’t at least mention these two unmentionables:

Little Nicky – Adam Sandler’s Son of Satan was a sneering moron with a bad haircut and horrid fashion sense. In other words, Adam Sandler.

Battlefield Earth – John Travolta’s ill-advised vanity project, an adaptation of L. Ron Hubbard’s notorious tome, was a sneaky attempt to drop a Scientology tract into a theater near you. Fortunately, nobody picked it up.

As always, we want to hear from you. Drop us a line and let us know which films you think should have made the list, and which ones don’t belong there. We’re always happy to hear the opinions of others before disregarding them completely.

In our Best of 1999, we said we didn’t like to dwell on crap. But here goes anyway. Though it may have been a banner year for good movies (and even great ones, like American Beauty and The Sixth Sense), there were enough clunkers, dogs, and miserable failures to make even the most dedicated pessimist think the new millennium might be a better one for the movies.

There was a noticeable trend this year: the bigger the star, the harder the fall. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Will Smith, and Adam Sandler all figure prominently on the list, and the litany of big names in the cast of Terence Malick’s The Thin Red Line just added up to a more spectacular train wreck (cinematography and ambitious direction are all that kept it off this list).

The films that follow are so bad, we’re confident that if you’ve made the mistake of seeing them, you’ll agree with our opinion. And if you haven’t seen them, consider yourself lucky—and consider this a warning!

Big Daddy – Adam Sandler’s infantile shtick was funny in Happy Gilmore. It hasn’t been very funny since, but it’s never been less funny than in this colossally insipid movie. We think it’s high time Sandler’s daddy spanked him right on his stupid ass.

Black Mask – The Japanese title of this Jet Li martial-arts flick is “Hak Hap.” Does that mean “Haphazard Hack Job” in English? It should. Robbed of the balletic beauty of Li’s better films by lousy fight choreography and worse editing, this film was a black mark on the wushu master’s resume.

End of Days – Trading on Y2K hysteria, this Ahnuld-versus-Satan showdown was a diabolical disaster of Biblical proportions. Director Peter Hyams compensates for a lack of ideas by showing bare titty and lots of explosions, one of which happens courtesy of the Devil’s highly flammable piss. Too bad he didn’t splash some on the negative of this film.

Entrapment – The cinematic equivalent of a black velvet Elvis, this movie was dumb and tacky, and featured a star way past his prime. Sean Connery dodders his way through as an aging jewel thief whose attraction to Catherine Zeta-Jones, 39 years his junior, is just as creepy as it sounds. Anna Nicole Smith probably liked it, but we didn’t.

Life – Eddie Murphy used to be funny, and Martin Lawrence never has been. Put them together in a flick about two guys who grow old together in prison, and you have what amounts to your own life sentence in a theatre.

Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace – No, it wasn’t one of the worst movies this year, but it did feature the worst character of the year, amphibious hands down. Whether or not you agreed that “synthespian” Jar Jar Binks was an offensive racial caricature, you couldn’t help hating him. Even if that is the path of the Dark Side.

Wild Wild West – One of the worst movies ever made, Barry Sonnenfeld’s cowboy catastrophe was a watery bowel movement of a film, the apotheosis of summer event-dreck. Starring Will Smith and his egregious ego, it left those few who sat through it gaping in awe at the spectacle of someone who has bought too much of his own hype.