THIS ENTRY SUBMITTED BY THE BRILLIANT:
Before we get into this mercilessly shit movie, I have an announcement to make. This is the last movie entry for Shitfest 2015! Tomorrow will be the big WHOSE BOOBS reveal and champion and Friday will be the big Closing Ceremony! I can’t thank you all enough for all of the support this year! This has been incredibly fun! But more on that Friday!! Here we go (oh – and the Stone pictures are there because, well, you know):
This is my first time taking part in Shitfest, and at first I thought it would be easy – find a shit horror movie & trash it. But then I remembered that I have a terrible habit of ENJOYING shit horror movies. So I racked my brains for a movie that I would surely despise, a movie that would be so hateful that I would take joy in trashing, and settled on Movie 43. Now that I have seen it through, I have changed my mind however – this is not a review. This is not a funny little piece on how bad the film is. This is a warning. I will never laugh again, never smile, never find joy in life thanks to this fucking abomination of a ‘comedy’, and I feel only sorry for the various talented actors (victims) who were tricked or harassed into starring in this. So to save further hurt being caused I take this opportunity to talk you through the experience that is Movie 43.
Movie 43: I Watched It, So You Don’t Have To
or
A Hundred Minutes in Hell
The film’s segments are presented by the overarching storyline of a screenwriter pitching various ridiculous movie ideas to a studio boss. However, since the makers clearly apparently didn’t care that the whole premise is so throwaway and pointless the version of the film I saw (the one released in the UK and a few other places) has a totally different storyline. Here two teenagers are pranked by the computer genius little brother of one of them, so in retaliation they convince him to find “Movie 43”, a banned online video that only the strongest can endure without vomiting, passing out or so on. Their description rings alarmingly true to the reality of watching this festering pile of filth. The overarching story lasts far too long & somehow results in the end of the world but it’s so lazily carried out that there’s nothing more to say about it – the segments are no better but whatever, let’s do this.
The Catch
Victims: Kate Winslet & Hugh Jackman
Two attractive, well-off people meet for a first date in a very fancy restaurant. The man has a scrotum on his neck. That is the punchline straight and simple, “look a scrotum!”, which might have been funny if it was a blink-and-miss-it gag in a Naked Gun movie or the like, but it is the only purpose of the sketch and it spends the next 10 minutes re-treading the same joke, giving every excuse for Hugh Jackman to wobble his head, dip his neck-balls in his soup, and to rest them on a baby’s head (yeah, seriously). That’s it.
Homeschooled
Victims: Liev Schreiber & Naomi Watts
Two couples meet for lunch and are discussing the home-schooling of one of their children. In order to give him a true high school experience though, the parents don’t only teach him but bully him, because abusive parents are hilarious, and provide him the ‘coming-of-age’ moments of growing up; i.e. he loses his virginity to his mother & his Dad awkwardly comes out as being gay, liking him. These scenes are genuinely uncomfortable to watch, it’s clear the actors are hoping this film doesn’t see the light of day. The final punchline comes when we see the horrific mental impact this abuse has had on the young man. Because that’s really funny too.
The Proposition
Victims: Chris Pratt & Anna Farris
A couple have a romantic picnic & each has an important question for the other. While he intends to propose, she wants him to “poop on her”. So follows a sketch written for a seven-year-old who thinks poo is funny. My spirit had been crushed by the end of this sketch, I felt like I couldn’t go on, but a certain hypnotic wonder forced me to stay and witness this car crash of an anthology.
Veronica
Victims: Emma Stone & Kieran Culkin
A recently broken-up couple have an argument at the store where he works as a cashier, leading into explicit lamentations of their relationship, all broadcast over the shop’s intercom. Clearly improvised, it’s an unwatchable montage of silly phrases and obscure sex references with no punchline and certainly no point, except for the fact that Emma Stone is unbelievably beautiful and I will fight anyone who disagrees with me.
iBabe
Victims: Richard Gere, Kate Bosworth, Aasif Mandvi, & Jack McBrayer
“Naked lady hahaha” is the main joke here, as the iBabe is the new media player; literally a life-size, realistic-feeling nude woman with a screen on her torso. Teenage boys have been getting mutilated by the unfortunate placement of the cooling fan; this joke risks becoming mildly amusing but we’re saved from laughter by the introduction of the “Special Edition iBabe” which is a nude black woman. Richard Gere proudly declares “Now people will have a choice of colour!” I realised by now that more than anything, I’m glad to be watching this on my own because if anyone I saw it with was laughing I would kill them as some sort of service to better mankind’s future – a sort of forced natural selection.
Superhero Speed Dating
Victims: Justin Long, Jason Sudekis, Kristen Bell, Leslie Bibb
The joke of popular superheroes like Batman, Robin, Wonder Woman & co. dating each other, cheating on each other & generally being bad, foul-mouthed people might have been edgy 20 years ago before it was done 100 times in much funnier ways than this sketch ever comes close to. It lasts unbearably long & none of the cast seem to be even slightly interested.
Machine Kids is a fake advertisement, spoofing child neglect charity campaigns by depicting children living inside ‘abused’ technology such as vending machines & photocopiers. I can genuinely take a joke about anything provided it is actually funny, but once again there is no humour here and I feel we’re expected to laugh at black & white images of supposedly neglected children – it’s incredibly mean-spirited and not the only moment this movie crosses the line from being not just unfunny, but actively disgusting.
Middleschool Date
Victims: Chloë Grace Moretz & Christopher Mintz-Plasse
Moretz plays a 13 year old girl who gets her first period while at her boyfriend’s house. Directed by Elizabeth Banks, this segment could have some room for some delicate, observant humour but instead the joke is just “Look! Periods!” and the sketch features some men running around screaming about how disgusting it is with the boyfriend’s father explaining to his son that the only solution to this is to, I quote, “insert his erect phallus” inside the 13 year old girl. Paedophilia is funny too! The sketch – I shit you not – ends on the father farting, and segues into a Tampax commercial where a swimmer gets eaten by a shark because her inferior brand tampon leaked. I can’t say it was actually funny, but during this faux-commercial I did feel my cheeks contract slightly as though attempting to recreate this “smiling” gesture that I have vague recollection of, in a time long before I selected Movie 43 on Netflix.
Happy Birthday
Victims: Johnny Knoxville, Sean William Scott & Gerard Butler
A man surprises his best friend on his birthday by gifting him a Leprechaun he has trapped in his basement. We get all the “Irish Midget” jokes out of the way for Gerard Butler’s foul-mouthed Leprechaun to get beaten up a bit before his brother arrives, hidden in a pot of gold. Another fight breaks out, both Leprechauns are killed, leaving the two men with a lot of gold. Luckily there’s a Fairy upstairs who gives blowjobs in exchange for gold coins. Apparently written by a horny 14 year old, Brett Ratner moved on from fucking up the X-Men franchise to direct this.
Truth or Dare
Victims: Stephen Merchant & Halle Berry
Another “first date” set-up, here Berry is tired of the same old pleasantries so suggests a game of truth or dare. Zero chemistry between the two makes the whole thing difficult to handle from the beginning, and Merchant visibly falters on a mashed-in Holocaust joke, before the dares start getting more and more extreme to painfully unfunny effect. The final dares bring the couple to get plastic surgery, where the punchline is that Stephen Merchant looks like a stereotypical Asian man (because this short was actually made in 1972) and Halle Berry has ridiculously large boobs. “Hahaha, big boobs!”
Victory’s Glory
Victim: Terrence Howard
Howard takes a well-deserved break from punching people to star as a 1950’s basketball coach in this incredibly ill-advised short where the one joke is that all black people are good at sports. Countless comments about big penises are made as well, and it’s interesting to note that when the all-white opposing team start taunting them the script shies away from using THE “N-word”, instead using “Negro”. This shows a vague understanding on the makers’ part that racism isn’t okay, but raises the question of whether they really think that writing an entirely racist sketch is fine just as long as they don’t use “that word”?
Beezel
Victims: Josh Duhamel & Elizabeth Banks (“wait, she directed an earlier short – she’s fucking in on this whole thing!”)
I’m horrified to note that this was directed by James Gunn of Slither, Super & Guardians of the Galaxy. Featuring Beezel, a really badly animated cat, fighting for the affections of his owner against his girlfriend, humour is supplanted by all-out disgust as Banks walks in on Beezel masturbating to pictures of Duhamel, followed by him spraying her in gallons of piss, much like I feel this film has done to my brain for the last 95 minutes or so. Banks gives a “me or the cat” ultimatum to her boyfriend so he agrees to rehome Beezel. Here follows a ghastly mental image I’ll never lose as Beezel watches the two have sex, he is sobbing uncontrollably while humping a soft toy & sodomising himself with a brush. The climax of the sketch has Banks beating the cat with a spade in front of a child’s birthday party, prompting the children to stab her to death with plastic forks.
It’s over. It’s finally over! I’ve already started to move on from the horrors I’ve witnessed but I don’t think my life will ever be the same. I wouldn’t have believed it was possible to watch a film which is non-stop comedy for 100 minutes, and not laugh once. The very worst spoofs like Meet the Spartans have at least a few funny moments and I even laughed twice when I saw The Hangover 2. But here it is. Movie 43 doesn’t land a single joke, and left me feeling beaten & disgusted. It isn’t even worth watching out of morbid curiosity, it’s such a hollow experience that I think it could legitimately be the worst movie ever made; it doesn’t deserve a rating, the only way to concisely express my feeling is with this image:
On a side note – most of you Most Beloveds who have been around before Shitfest know that I am usually repulsed by the vile movies that win Academy Awards. In my opinion, most of them are pretentious pieces of shit that I refuse to lay eyes on, ever – I’m talking to you The King’s Speech. Wanna make me watch one??? Test your mettle and your resolve by taking the A Few Good Men Quiz over at movierob’s joint. As nice as I am, you can click Colonel Jessup’s happy face below and head right over there! #freeparking
