1GF Presents: The 2nd Annual That's Not Cinema Awards

Damn, that would be unlucky.

Worst Comedy

Lol no.

Downhill: Having not seen the French film Downhill is based upon, as someone with zero base of comparison I can confirm that this film is frustrating even to fresh eyes. Both Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus look like they're being forced to play this movie deadpan and are resisting the urge to go zero-to-sixty on their comedic personas. It's likely done to try and match the tone of the original film, but it always looks like they're repressing the urge to make the movie funnier (or funny at all).

The Hunt: This satiric black comedy often loses sight of what it's supposed to be mocking, often underlining it with the most dim-witted commentary you can imagine. While decent gags are played out with slapstick gore, the movie's dialogue just doesn't keep the movie afloat.

Impractical Jokers:  The Movie: When the Impractical Jokers are doing their Impractical Joker schtick, the movie is hit or miss. Some scenes did make me laugh, while others more or less felt like time killer. Then you get to the storyline the movie shoehorns in, and the movie just becomes a chore to watch.

Like a Boss: Like a Boss is one of those comedies that will do a visual gag and then have a character describe the visual gag while it's onscreen to make sure the audience understands that it should be laughing right now. Humor is played broadly and it feels stale and tired. And worst of all, gag description like that makes it apparent that the movie doesn't even trust the audience to think it's funny.

The War with Grandpa: The War with Grandpa's use of war tropes in a familial setting is kind of charming, the problem is the movie is not very funny. It's very silly, don't get me wrong, but it's silliness rarely equates to a laugh. And even when it gets to booby trap slapstick humor, Home Alone this is not.

And the Marty goes to...

Damn, I was pulling for Money Plane.

Worst Horror/Thriller

When 2020 started, some people thought the Grudge reboot was the worst horror film we'd see all year.  Oh how lovably naive we were!

Becky: Haphazard attempt at a novel premise, Becky drops the ball with its obnoxious and undercooked screenplay, ensuring most who watch it will turn it off before the halfway point before the splatter begins.

Brahms:  The Boy II: I didn't see the original The Boy. It looked like ass. The second movie looked even more like ass, but I saw it anyway. It was ass.

Fantasy Island: You know you've made a bad horror movie if you can make the argument that the stupid movie would have been better if it wasn't horror at all.

The Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson: Tacky, tasteless, and trashy, The Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson is an account of a true crime that makes you feel like it's rubbing salt in the wound of a real life tragedy.

The Turning: Good elements are wasted on pacing issues leading to an abrupt ending that will satisfy no one.

And the Marty goes to...

The Hurts So Good Award

Before we list our bottom 10 of 2020, we are going to give out the most prestigious award of the night: The Hurts So Good Award. If you only watch one bad movie this year, this is the one. Let's go through our so-bad-it's-good nominees one more time.













And the Marty goes to...

10. Becky

Directed by: Jonathan Millett, Cary Murnion
Written by: Nick Morris, Lane Skye, Ruckus Skye
Starring: Lulu Wilson, Kevin James, Joel McHale, Raul Hernandez
Distributor: Redbox Entertainment
Country: Some cabin in the woods
Language: Incoherent Screaming
Rating: I gave it an F
Running Time: 93 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: Don't remember
Format: Movie
Date released: Who cares
Date seen: A dark time in my life
Worldwide Box Office Gross: $19.4 million wasted
# of Oscar Nominations: 0
# of Marty Nominations: 3 (Supporting Actor, Overrated, Horror/Thriller)
# of Marties Won: 0

The worst films of 2020 took me on a range of emotions: indifference, boredom, hilarity, cringe...Becky is probably the one movie of the year that actively went out of its way to annoy the shit out of me. This idea of meshing teen angst with hyperviolence seems fine on paper, but the issue is that the movie does very little to make the title character an interesting and/or non-selfish protagonist. Part of the point of the film is that by the end she's a borderline psychopath, but what it this does is force the audience to waste their time sympathizing with an unlikable character during the movie's build and actually find themselves not caring if Neo-Nazi's kill her during her war against bad guys. The movie seems oddly aware of this by making Becky the lesser of two evils because the bad guys are bad enough that they kill a dog and nobody wants to root for the guys who kill a dog. The problem is that it just results in me wanting everyone to die instead.

8. I Still Believe

Directed by: Andrew Erwin, Jon Erwin
Written by: Jon Erwin, Jon Gunn, Madeline Carroll
Starring: KJ Apa, Britt Robertson, Melissa Roxburgh, Nathan Parsons, Shania Twain, Gary Sinise
Distributor: Lionsgate
Country: God's country
Language: Christian Rock
Rating: NC-17
Running Time: 116 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: God's eye
Format: Like A Star is Born but bad
Date released: 2020 probably
Date seen: I must have been really bored
Worldwide Box Office Gross: $16.4 million
# of Oscar Nominations: 0
# of Marty Nominations: 2 (Forgettable, Drama)
# of Marties Won: 0

Saying I Still Believe is one of the worst movies of the year might be a little mean, because it's really harmless. Had last year played out like normal, it probably would have been knocked out of the bottom ten by something else, who knows what. But the thing about this movie is that it's so fucking plastic. Everything about it feels fake, and that's not to knock Jeremy Camp or his personal tragedy, and I'm sure it was an important story for him to want to get it out there. It just deserves better than this movie, which takes the story of his wife's death and turns it into a stilted PG version of A Star is Born. If this movie were about me and my wife, I'd be pissed.

6. The Rhythm Section

Directed by: Reed Morano
Written by: Mark Burnell
Starring: Blake Lively, Jude Law, Sterling K. Brown
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Country: ALL THROUGHOUT EUROPE
Language: English in a foreign territory, my favorite
Rating: Lively's character got a solid three stars out of five from her hooker customers
Running Time: 109 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: The long one
Format: GRITTY-VISION
Date released: Nobody noticed
Date seen: I was the one guy who saw it
Worldwide Box Office Gross: $6 million
# of Oscar Nominations: 0
# of Marty Nominations: 2 (Editing, Action/Adventure)
# of Marties Won: 2 (Editing, Action/Adventure)

The Rhythm Section was already pissing me off before it came out. I was still riding high on my Unlimited pass and every single movie I saw had a trailer fo this movie. And it's a really fucking shit trailer. Less of an advertisement and more of a music video, that trailer only passed vague details before just flashing random images against its blaring music. The fact that Paramount was pushing so hard on this movie without really telling people what it was really felt like they were basting a turkey. The advertisements didn't work, and the film was avoided like the plague. Those who did see it got a really weak revenge thriller about a hooker-turned-assassin that was poorly shot, poorly edited, and just generic and boring. Blake Lively at least seems game for this movie and is ready, willing, and able to headline her own Bourne-style franchise based on this book series. I wouldn't hold my breath on that, but kudos to her.

4. Songbird

Directed by: Adam Mason
Written by: Adam Mason, Simon Boyes
Starring: KJ Apa, Sophia Carson, Craig Robinson, Bradley Whitford, Peter Stormare, Alexandra Daddario, Paul Walter Hauser, Demi Moore
Distributor: STX Entertainment
Country: Quarantine
Language: Muffled face mask tongue
Rating: CDC Approved
Running Time: 85 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: Wide lenses for a mostly indoor movie
Format: Sterile
Date released: Released during pandemic to remind people about pandemic
Date seen: Before Valley Girl
Worldwide Box Office Gross: $400,000
# of Oscar Nominations: 0
# of Marty Nominations: 4 (Supporting Actress, Make-Up and Costumes, Redeemer, Drama)
# of Marties Won: 0

Poor KJ Apa wound up headlining another pile of crap this year.  This one has one thing in common with I Still Believe: sterilization. Except Songbird takes it that as its concept instead of execution. The movie was conceived during the pandemic as sort of a timely story of life in a forever pandemic. Perhaps they were hoping the pandemic would be on the tail end by release, but a certain you-know-who helped prolong it with a misinformation campaign that resulted in nothing except the deaths of thousands and "owning the libs." Songbird instead came out in the middle of it, when nobody wanted a fucking movie about living in quarantine for five years. To add insult to injury, the movie is also a piece of shit, forcing bizarre plot lines interweaving to create some sort of half-assed conflict trying to make the movie interesting. It's not and Songbird winds up being a movie made for nobody.

2. The Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson

Directed by: Daniel Ferrands
Written by: Michael Arter
Starring: Mena Suvari, Nick Stahl
Distributor: Quiver Entertainment
Country: OJ DID IT
Language: OJ DID IT
Rating: OJ DID IT
Running Time: 82 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: OJ DID IT
Format: OJ DID IT
Date released: OJ DID IT
Date seen: OJ DID IT
Worldwide Box Office Gross: NORDBURG DID IT!
# of Oscar Nominations: 0(J did it)
# of Marty Nominations: 8 (Horror/Thriller, Director, Actress, Supporting Actress, Screenplay, Cinematography, Make-Up and Costumes)
# of Marties Won: 2 (Horror/Thriller, Supporting Actress)

I don't know if Daniel Ferrands is planning on making a career out of making trashy Z-grade soap opera thrillers based on actual murders, but I'd like to ask him to reconsider. Doing a movie like this is already in bad taste, but the way it fetishizes the killing of Nicole Brown Simpson is both creepy and offensive. It feels like this is the type of movie an actual serial killer would be jerking off to in his basement full of human skins. That alone makes this movie worth skipping, but Ferrands can't even craft an effective horror movie out of this idea of a victim having a relationship with her killer. Ferrands even goes the extra mile to rip-off a famous sequence from Nightmare of Elm Street which saw a teen being murdered by Freddy by sliding up a wall before getting gutted. It's literally the exact same scene except it's a dream sequence here and has no bearing on anything, making the rip-off so pointless that the only reason it's in the movie is to be there. The only reasons this movie isn't the worst of the year are that Mena Suvari doesn't wear a bra throughout most of it and Teryn Manning is so bad in it that she's actually pretty funny.