The “perfectly awful” 2000s movies Stephen King described as being “exceptionally bad”
Even though he isn’t directly responsible, Stephen King has nonetheless been associated with plenty of bad movies by association, an inevitable risk that comes with being the modern era’s most heavily adapted author.
Whether he was heavily involved in their production or not, which isn’t always the case, anybody would be thrilled to have their name permanently associated with The Shawshank Redemption, Stand by Me, Carrie, or The Green Mile, which all hold up as classics in their respective genres.
At the same time, the endless Children of the Corn films, The Dark Tower, Dreamcatcher, and Graveyard Shift are all rubbish, but the one thing all of those titles have in common is that they’re Stephen King adaptations, which has given him one of Hollywood’s most inconsistent filmographies by default.
He’s entirely to blame for Maximum Overdrive, though, a cocaine-fuelled bout of madness that convinced the scribe that he was capable of stepping behind the camera and helming his own feature. Obviously, he wasn’t, and it was so bad that he’s never come close to trying to write those wrongs by doing it again.
Outside of the pictures based on his back catalogue, King is known for casting his eye over the good, the bad, and the ugly of cinema. There are a lot of movies that he adores, and they cover action, thrillers, drama, and sci-fi, as well as his favoured arena of horror, but there are also those he can’t stand.
The only thing worse than a bad movie is an indefensible one, and there were two prime candidates in the early 2000s that stuck out like a sore thumb. Objectively, they’re two of the very worst that the 21st century has had to offer, so it’s not as if King was going against the grain, but the way he summed them both up captured just how risible they were, never mind how they’ll be remembered.
“Most films are neither good nor interesting,” he prefaced. “I think we know this. Occasionally, one so exceptionally bad shows up, I’m thinking of Gigli and the perfectly awful Freddy Got Fingered, that we marvel over it. For such history-making excreta, we have the Razzies.”
Truer words have never been spoken. Freddy Got Fingered, which nobody despised more than Roger Ebert, won five Razzies from its eight nominations, including ‘Worst Picture’, ‘Worst Director’, and ‘Worst Actor’. Inexplicably, it’s developed a loyal following in the 25 years since, but that doesn’t make it any less shite.
Gigli, meanwhile, went one better by claiming six Razzies, adding a seventh when it was named as the worst comedy in the awards ceremony’s first 25 years of existence in 2005, and did an impressive job of almost ruining Ben Affleck’s career. In short, King isn’t wrong, because both of those flicks are abjectly, irredeemably, and catastrophically abominable.
