Tyler Perry as Alex Cross as Denzel Washington in Flight. I told you he was so undercover.

I can’t sugarcoat it: this is a terrible week for new DVDs.  Besides Alex Cross and Flight (which, to be fair, many people liked), there’s new films starring Kevin James, Andy Samberg, Christopher Walken, Olivia Wilde, Miley Cyrus, Ving Rhames, and Rob Schneider.  There’s movies about musicians, the mafia, and the mechanics of making movies. There’s criminals, florists, and mixed martial artists.  There’s even a movie about talking babies!

The DVDs:
Flight
Alex Cross
Here Comes The Boom
Celeste And Jesse Forever
A Late Quartet
Deadfall
So Undercover
Mafia
You May Not Kiss The Bride
Yelling To The Sky
In Our Nature
Side By Side
Little White Lies
Caught On Tape
Toys In The Attic
The Bouquet
The Dynamiter
The Solomon Bunch
Baby Geniuses And The Mystery Of The Crown Jewels
The Whole Truth

Streaming: Check out your choices here.

Want to know which movie is about talking babies?  Continue reading to find out. Intrigued by the The Dynamiter?  Well then, continue reading.  Already recognize titles like So Undercover and want to head straight to the Netflix page?  Click the link above and this week nobody will hold it against you, but if you do you’ll never know about Rob Schneider and the bicycle bell sound effect.

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After last year’s Worst Movies feature, I received feedback from some readers and Twitter folk about me possibly being “too negative” and “mean” when it came to criticizing films that I chose to watch for this annual hate crime report. Some people even pulled the “What movies have you written?” card, which is cheap because I can just turn around and ask what dog they’ve ever photoshopped a mustache on, and BOOM – argument over.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of films are made each year, and a lot of them are bad. That’s not just by my standards; that’s by the standards of the majority. I have never, in the several years that Vince has let me poison the quality of his website, proclaimed to be a critic. I am just a bro who likes watching movies, and I have a naïve innocence that lets me still believe that people in Hollywood care about making quality films. Then I watch Bucky Larson and that gullible side of me is shoved into a wood chipper.

So how, then, do I determine which of the many, many mainstream films that I have watched in 2012 are the absolute worst of the worst of the WORST? It’s a little pinch of common sense mixed with a dash of “Come on, that’s just f*cking awful”. But I also have some rules, and let’s review them now…

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One of our biggest fears heading into the UFC 153 live discussion at With Leather on Saturday night was that the event was going to be soaked in the stink of Here Comes the Boom previews, and I was even betting that Kevin James and Adam Sandler would show up as Stephan Bonnar’s ring entourage, which would have been fitting considering the beating he took. Fortunately, not only was the event free of Happy Madison lackeys, but I only remember seeing one preview for the film. Even more fortunately, Here Comes the Boom finished No. 5 at the box office this weekend, which is yet another sign that maybe, just maybe the nation has had enough of these guys.

Or maybe not, because the film still made $12 million and averaged $3,981 per screen to Seven Psychopaths’ $2,889 average, and that’s depressing. I don’t want to live in a world in which Christopher Walken is appreciated less than Kevin James.

Meanwhile, Taken 2 remains the No. 1 film in America, as moviegoers proved they’d rather watch Liam Neeson beat the crap out of foreigners than Salma Hayek pretend she’d ever reveal the holy chesticles to Paul Blart. Argo opened strong at No. 2 with a $20 million weekend, which also proves that we’ll always take shoot ‘em up style over clever escape plans. This is America, dang nabit!

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"We're here for the gangbang."

Opening Everywhere: Argo, Sinister, Seven Psycopaths

Opening like the Gates of Hell: Here Comes the Boom

FilmDrunk Suggests: This is a good movie weekend. Three out of four of these films should be great. One of them should be the worst thing ever. Can you guess which one will suck? Take your time, it’s a tough one.

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Normally I have a little rule I try to stick by when I’m reviewing a film. If a film is clearly, expressly not intended for me, I don’t review it (provided a publication hasn’t specifically sent me there on assignment). It just seems unfair for a belt man to review suspenders, so to speak. I allow for the possibility of inaccurate or poor marketing campaigns, but sometimes, you can just tell. “Here Comes the Boom,” for instance, was directed by Frank Coraci of Click and The Zookeeper, was written by Allan Loeb, the worst screenwriter in Hollywood (or at least, the most prolific bad screenwriter¹), and takes as its title a 2001 Christian Nu Metal song by POD. Considering I’ve often said that I feel the same shame about the American Nu Metal era that Germans must feel about the Third Reich, Here Comes the Boom might as well have had a buzzing, blinking neon disclaimer shouting “THIS FILM, VINCE MANCINI, IS NOT FOR YOU.”

And yet… I couldn’t help but feel a connection. I made an MMA-saves-the-rec-center joke when I was writing about Never Back Down four years ago, a post I finished with the line “GRR, RAP METAL’S STILL COOL.” And now, here was a movie, named after a rap metal song, that was literally about mixed martial arts saving the rec center². We quickly dubbed it Paul Blart Presents: Mixed Martial Farts, and dedicated entire podcasts to fart-centric, “Paul Blart Presents” pitches. Perhaps most importantly, I’m a UFC fanatic, and the UFC is practically sponsoring Here Comes the Boom. Meaning that I’ve been subjected to at least 1200 commercials for it and an entire segment on The Ultimate Fighter where Dana White took the fighters (normally cooped up in a house together) on a field trip to a Here Comes the Boom screening, complete with confessionals afterwards where they all told me how good it was. So, maybe it’s not for me, but someone spent so much money trying to convince me that it was, I owed it to them to at least call their bluff.

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