How To Make A Shit Film and Antagonise People

At school, when things went wrong our teachers would claim it was "a small minority of troublemakers ruining it for the rest of us."

I get that feeling from time to time in adult life, be it the whole nine-eleven thing (now I can't take nail scissors with me in my wash bag. Thanks guys.) or bad drivers, rogue traders and inconsiderate surf kayakers -that last one might be a touch on the esoteric side, granted; but you take my point, right? It's all about a few arseholes ruining everyone else's fun.

It's the same in the film industry. When you consider the amount of labour, time and money required to put a movie together and then get it into cinemas so the great unwashed can go and see them; it's a miracle anything sub-standard ever comes out at all. I always used to think going to see a film at the cinema was a pretty safe bet. -Avoid the bullshit, by all means, but with the right actors, studio and budget it's bound to be watchable; yeah?

So it's baffling when a film like "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People" is allowed to be written, cast, filmed, edited and aired.

The film is like having a fat, hairy Greek man urinate onto your head for an hour and a half, pausing now and then to molest your immediate family and kill kittens with a hammer. Don't be fooled by the cast: just because a film has Simon Pegg, Gillian Anderson, Kirsten Dunst and Jeff Bridges in it doesn't mean it will be any good.

HLFAP should have been good: (Jeff played Lebowski, after all; and Shaun of the Dead was frickin marvellous) but it was so consistently, offensively, shockingly awful that there were moments as I sat squirming in my stained and odourous cinema seat that I thought it was all some kind of big joke at my expense and at any moment the lights would come up and a TV crew would appear, telling me I'd "been had".

No such luck.

I'm not going to bother reviewing this leaking sack of pig spunk; it simply doesn't deserve the effort. What I will say is this: of all the hundreds of people involved in making it (I know who you are: you're in the final credits -arguably the best part of the whole fucking abortion you dare the call a "film") why didn't one of you stand up and say: "Wait a minute guys, isn't this just shit?"

I mean, come on.

The whole cinema experience was, for me, comparable to the feeling you get at the end of a busy day of root-canal surgery, prostate exams and scrotal-hair removal. Painful, humiliating, expensive and distressing.

I got the times wrong, you see (we wanted to go and see Taken but arrived 40 minutes early) and rather than hang around with the ugly, inbred, stinking zombie-locals drooling on the garish cinema carpeting we thought we'd take a gamble and go and see Simon Pegg and Jeff Bridges doing something funny. But before we'd even had the chance to realise the enormity of this mistake, things started going very wrong.

I tried to buy a hot-dog, but the machine was broken. How a hot-dog machine can be "broken" I don't know, but broken it was. So instead I made the near-fatal error of buying some "nachos" -a humble pile of fairly stale, Doritos knock-offs in a flimsy plastic container like a prison-food receptacle, but of poorer quality and design, accompanied by two of the most repulsive, un-refrigerated, synthetic "dips" I have ever had the tremendous misfortune to evacuate from my body at high-speed mere hours later. This, for about £5 per head.

It took forever to get served and the sight of the acne-covered, sweaty, slack-jawed vagrant dishing up our "food" was enough to make my already apprehensive stomach churn and bubble like the putrid pus in the centre of that vile teenager's many zits.

There were about 7 such wasters behind the food counter; engaging in some kind of ritual which involved a lot of nose/arse/groin-picking and staring vacantly into space. I am usually fascinated by the habits of primitive cultures, but being so close to these specimens was more frightening than educating and my spider-sense was acting up, so I grudgingly parted with £10 of my earth pounds and turned my back on them, taking the "nachos" with me.

“Maybe this is just the world we now inhabit.” I thought to myself, five minutes into one of the worst pieces of cinema I have ever seen. “Maybe I turned my back for a few minutes and suddenly everything, everywhere was just shit.”

As this thought crossed my mind I heard a (presumably) severly retarded young man laughing very loudly at an appaulingly written and delivered gag before predicting (incorrectly) in a loud voice what he thought was going to happen next.

The good thing about HLFAP is that it gives you a lot of time to think about other things and ponder the decline of our species. As such, I spent the majority of the film, when I wasn't exhaling loudly or squirming in my seat, trying to work out the five worst films I have ever seen at the cinema.

Here goes:

1.) "Hearts in Atlantis" -Allegedly a Stephen King story, which should be sufficient warning for most people aiming to avoid a dreadful film, this garbage features child actors (who are almost always annoying) and around 2 hours of incredibly poor dialogue. And absolutely no plot. Nothing happens.

2.) "G.I. Jane" -Demi Moore is always awful; which makes her the most consistent actress in Hollywood, and you've got to respect her for that. I was about 15 when I saw this in the cinema and spent the entire film making out with my rather homely Polish girlfriend; which although basically a bit unpleasant was significantly better than GI Jane.

3.) "America's Sweethearts". It's a sad day in any young man's life when he realises that John Cusack is a stink-machine. His droopy face, limited acting ability and single facial expression, however, are the best parts of this film. Simply ghastly. I would literally rather crawl inside a long-dead sheep on a hot day with Noel Edmunds in a thong than watch this again.

4.) "Troy." -Dude.

5.) "Alexander." -There mere thought of Alexander makes me gag like someone's opened an out-of-date, sun-warmed can of sardines in peri-peri sauce under my nose on the morning of a severe hangover. Because Colin Farrel can't do accents, they decided to make everyone in Greece Irish. They show one battle, than skip through all the others using a kind of "flashforward" narrative device, then flashback for the final battle, by which time I had left the cinema and was arguing with the swamp-donkey at the box office about why she/it should give me my money back.

What was your worst cinema experience? Maybe you could email me the name of the film and how it made you feel: admin@gophuramungus.com and we can compile the definitive list of stinkers.

Adios.

FG