The comedy movie Roger Ebert refused to give a star rating: “I felt like an eyewitness at a disaster”
Comedy is an entirely subjective art form, and a movie that leaves one viewer doubled over in fits of laughter can leave another entirely unmoved. That said, Roger Ebert wasn’t in the minority when he blasted one comedic caper as being among the worst films he’d ever had the misfortune of watching.
In fact, it’s hard to find anyone who has anything even remotely positive to say about a unanimously derided feature that couldn’t scrape together a positive review to save its life and deservedly bombed embarrassingly hard at the box office after recouping less than 8% of its budget back in ticket sales.
No filmmaker sets out to make a bad movie on purpose, but sometimes, it happens. Ebert’s job required him to sift through the good, the bad, and the ugly of cinema to pass judgment on which pictures deserved to be praised and which needed to be panned, and he hated one so-called comedy so much that he refused to give it a star rating.
While multiple films earned that unwanted distinction from the legendary critic, 1992’s Frozen Assets might be the only one for which Ebert volunteered to break into screenings across the country to shepherd the audience out of the auditorium and to safety; such was his determination that nobody should be subjected to such a reprehensible affront to celluloid.
“I didn’t feel like a viewer during Frozen Assets: I felt like an eyewitness at a disaster,” he wrote in his review. “If I were more of a hero, I would spend the next couple of weeks breaking into theatres where this movie is being shown and lead the audience to safety. And if I’d been an actor in the film, I would wonder why all of the characters in Frozen Assets seem dumber than the average roadkill.”
The story finds Corbin Bernsen’s Zach Shepard thinking his career is on the up when he’s hired as the president of a bank, only to discover that it’s a sperm bank. To drum up business, he decides to hold a fundraiser to find a contributor with the highest sperm count, and the results are every bit as unfunny as they sound.
Entirely accurately blasting Frozen Assets as “seriously bad,” Ebert was adamant that “no adult could possibly enjoy a single frame of the film” and that, from his perspective, it “was not made with any possible audience in mind.” Sure enough, he was proven correct when it limped to an anaemic box office total of less than $380,000 in the United States.
Ebert also wondered “how at any stage of the production anyone could have thought there was a watchable movie here.” Offering his heartiest recommendation, the critic branded it “a movie to watch in appalled silence” and suggested it would be “a kindness” for Frozen Assets to be called one of the year’s worst, especially when there were plenty of other – and harsher – descriptors he could have used.
