The “pile of crap” Ron Howard movie disowned by its writer: “Please forgive me!”
While he’s definitely made a few sketchy movies and dropped several cinematic stinkers, Ron Howard hasn’t helmed anything that can justifiably be called one of the worst films ever made.
Hillbilly Elegy sucks, though, and it’s easily the worst of his 28 features. The fact that Glenn Close landed on the Academy Awards shortlist for ‘Best Supporting Actress’ continues to boggle the mind, especially when she was much more deserving of her place on the Razzie roster for ‘Worst Supporting Actress’.
The Da Vinci Code trilogy wasn’t up to much, either, but Howard was paid millions of dollars to cavort around Europe with Tom Hanks and a starry supporting cast in tow, so he wouldn’t have lost much sleep over it. The two-time Oscar winner admitted that The Dilemma was so bad it scared him away from returning to comedy ever since, but you can’t win ’em all.
A fortunate byproduct of Howard deciding to retire from being a full-time actor in his late 20s was that his chances of appearing in a disastrous picture he couldn’t control from the other side of the camera dropped exponentially, which doesn’t mean anyone should forget that he voiced Tom Colonic in Osmosis Jones, with his character, performance, and the movie all coming straight from the arse.
He hasn’t played a fictional character on the big screen since the infamous animated bomb was released in 2001, and he hasn’t played anyone other than himself on television since 2016. As things stand, then, 1965’s Village of the Giants is going to continue standing tall as the single worst-reviewed picture Howard has ever been part of as a strictly on-camera talent.
To be fair, it wasn’t his fault it was so woeful, since it was only the sixth movie he’d ever been in, and he was only 11 years old when it arrived in cinemas. Designed to appeal to the teen market and screened largely at drive-ins, co-writer, producer, and director Bert Gordon’s Z-grade flick cast Howard as a boy genius who grows food in his laboratory that makes his peers grow to gigantic size.
Not the stuff that awards season campaigns are made of, but still bad enough for Gordon’s fellow screenwriter, Alan Caillou, to issue a profuse apology to the former actor and high-flying filmmaker for doing such a terrible job of loosely adapting HG Wells’ The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth.
“It was not the happiest event ever, obviously,” he told Tom Weaver. “I’m very happy when I’ve got a good show going, but when it’s a pile of crap, you hope nobody’s looking!” Village of the Giants was very much a pile of crap, and while it didn’t affect Howard’s career prospects in the slightest, Caillou still felt obliged to let him know how bad he felt about writing it.
“I’m glad Ron Howard has gone a long way there,” he said. “I don’t know him personally, but I’d like to run into him one day and say, ‘Hey, you played in the first picture I ever wrote. Please forgive me! Village of the Giants was probably the worst motion picture that anybody ever wrote in their life.”
