Not having Siskel & Ebert, or any worthy successor since Ebert & Roper (despite many attempts), has been a severe cultural disadvantage in America for the last couple of decades.
@@Rickyroo1980 I would probably agree with you on that point. But no movie reviewers since S&E have had sustained national reach. This includes Roger's later shows and the many attempts by others.
@@tomjones8610 Arnold put it out there that he wanted to star in the movie to bait Stallone. When Stallone was asked to do the movie, he jumped on it so Arnold wouldn't get it lol
Arnie's commentary on Stop Or My Mom Will Shoot?? Omg best idea ever. He would explain the trick in the first 10 minutes, and then rip off Sly for the remaining 80. Amazing.
Why? The bald one was garbage. He tried to doxx the actress who played Mrs Voorhees in Friday the 13th. He tried to put her life in danger because he didn't like the movie. Absolutely pathetic.
If the movie had been about the strudel it might've been good. I love a good strudel film, and there aren't enough of those being made. Movies about strudel are _sehr gut._
I was still in high school when this episode aired! I watched this show every weekend on WBBM CBS here in Chicago. Siskel & Ebert are Windy City icons and they are missed.
@@scattau41 There I know from watching their Holiday Video Gift Guide that it was on Saturday nights at 6:30. In NY it varied a bit over the years and moved to several different stations.
Sylvester Stallone was on a sports show (The Best D*mn Sports Show Period on Fox Sports) and someone told him, "I went on a date back in 1992. We saw a movie called Stop Or My Mom Will Shoot!, and you owe us twenty dollars!" Sly agreed, slapped down some money, and added, "I owe everyone here twenty dollars!"
I'd love to tell him also that Rocky is such a funny movie when it's not supposed to be. I think the accents make it funnier when the characters get mad at times in it.
That Melanie Griffith monologue is something else. Quite often when movies are panned I think that the critics are being too hyperbolic in their rush to skewer them, when much of the time such films are just bland, but that monologue... it’s like a parody of bad acting. It’s so flat and uninflected, she sounds like a child reciting lines in a nativity play. Like she doesn’t altogether understand the words but has learned them by rote. To be fair, it’s probably also bad writing (“I want you to taste my strudel” is not a line that should be written to carry any dramatic weight) but yeesh, she could have made something out of it. You know the acting’s bad when you’re not sure whether it’s supposed to be seductive or sad.
Roger said it in his "Leonard Part 6" review, but it bears repeating here: When you're an actor on a TV show, you only have three months out of the year to make a movie. So you've got nine months to have your agent read scripts and advise you on which movie he thinks you ought to do in that window. Now, Corbin Bernsen and Shelley Long were both in some entertaining flicks (for Corbin, "Shattered" and "Disorganized Crime"; for Shelley, "Outrageous Fortune" and "The Brady Bunch Movie"). What were Corbin's and Shelley's agents smoking when they advised them to do "Frozen Assets"? There is exactly one (1) joke in that movie, and it gets old after the first time they tell it. The movie's so ponderous you can't believe it, and it's about as funny as a dead dog on the side of the road.
To be fair to actors who came up in the old networks-only/Nielsen-driven/September of one year to May of the next structure, they also had to pick projects based on what was available in an inelastic timeframe, and TV actors were very rarely big enough draws on their own to even have the chance to choose prestigious projects during their hiatus times (Bill Cosby was an outlier here because he was seen as a major draw for filmgoers, at least in the 1980s). Part of the draw of the current streaming-cable-network/etc. galaxy and shorter seasons approach is that people on TV shows can do them and make movies during most of the year, so they have more choices.
@@xdmaster7888 Well, prestigious is one thing. Bad-beyond-belief is something else, you get what I'm saying? I can't believe _anyone_ looked at the script for _Sour Grapes_ and said "This is good! This is funny and original and it'll help my career!" It may not be the case with all of them, but there's no bigger dream for a TV actor than to branch out into movies and become a movie star, a dream that _looks_ so easy to attain (a lot of actors have done it; many more have failed). So I'm not saying those guys should look for the next _Citizen Kane_ to star in, but they could at least have the wherewithal to know a good (or at least OK) script from a terrible one. George Peppard said, "Don't anybody criticize me because I was in a lot of crap. Sometimes you're lucky to just get crap!" And that may have been true, for him. Both Corbin and Shelly are very gifted comic actors. They were both hot and bankable (I'm not saying George wasn't). It's tough for me to believe they were so desperate they couldn't do better that that piece of junk.
@@hmdwgf I've never saw "Frozen Assets" on TV such as Lifetime and WE because RKO Radio Pictures made this long-awaited troubled production and it wasn't profitable at all. But for some others, nobody didn't want to see it either.
Wow, that "taste my strudel" monologue from the ww2 movie was something else. It just went on and on, awful flat line readings from the actress interspersed with reaction shots where the actor just stands there looking constipated... Amazing. I can believe the movie was one of the worst.
My Best and Worst List of 1994 is, Best Movies to Watch repeatedly. 1. 3 Ninjas Kick Back. 2. Ace Ventura Pet Detective. (You Gotta Love Jim Carey). 3. Aladdin: The Return of Jafar. Animated. 4. Andre. 5. Angels in the Outfield. (Christopher Loydd a National Treasure, a Living Legend, He has a long Legacy of Roles that he's been in that could Gag a Horse with). 6. Baby's Day Out. 7. Black Beauty. 8. BLANKMAN. 9. Blank Check. 10. Blue Chips. (you Gotta Love Nick Nolte's Character walking in and out of the locker room). 11. Camp Nowhere. 12. City Slickers 2 The Legend of Curly's Gold. 13. The Lion King. Animated. 14. D2 The Mighty Ducks. 15. The Flintstones. 16. Forrest Gump. 17. Immortal Beloved. 18. Interview with the Vampire. 19. The Jungle Book. (Best Acting by Jason Scott Lee, Carey Elwes, and Sam Neil). 20. The Land Before Time 2 The Great Valley Adventure. Animated. 21. Lassie. 22. Little Giants. 23. Little Women. 24. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. 25. Miracle on 34th Street. 26. My Girl 2. 27. The Next Karate Kid. 28. North. 29. The PAGEMASTER. 30. Richie Rich. 31. The River Wild. 32. The Santa Clause. 33. The Shadow. 34. Squanto a Warrior's Tale. 35. The Swan Princess. Animated. (R.I.P Jack Palance). 36. THUMBELINA. Animated. 37. A Troll in Central Park. Animated. Worst Movies that's not even worth watching. 1. The Client. (Best Acting by Susan Sarandon and Tommy Lee Jones). 2. Cobb. 3. The Crow. (Best Acting by Brandon Lee (R.I.P) and Ernie Hudson). 4. Disclosure. 5. Dumb and Dumber. 6. Getting Even with Dad. (Best Acting by Macaulay Culkin and Ted Danson). 7. House Party 3. 8. I'll Do Anything. 9. I.Q. 10. Junior. 11. Legends of the Fall. 12. The Little Rascals. 13. Nell. 14. The NEVERENDING Story 3 Escape from Fantasia. 15. Quiz Show. 16. Serial Mom. 17. Speed. 18. The Stand. 19. Star Trek Generations. 20. Stargate. 21. TIMECOP.
16:13 the strudel monologue. The delivery. The slow zoom on Michael Douglas's face, which somehow expresses exactly how I feel while listening to this. 😂 What the heckin dang
@@BarberJ95 That was a more enlightened era, in many ways, than this one. Maybe there have been some gains against misogyny, I don't know, seems much the same to me in that regard.
@@billscannell93 Seeing the various amounts of movies that movie critics have to see every year can perhaps enlighten people’s sense of consciousness, especially a man’s.
The funniest scene in Stop or My Mom Will Shoot was when a heckler in the audience yelled after the mom shot the gun, “That would have knocked her on her a**!”
The one movie that always got MST3K'd at the screenings I attended was Batman & Robin. I saw it three times because I was in total denial that a Batman movie could be that bad, and each time I got to hear some golden zingers from other audience members. The one that I remember most came from a teen boy shouting at the screen, "I do too!" after Schwarzenegger's Mr. Freeze said, "I hate it when people talk during the movie."
"Shining Through" is a strangely fascinating movie: the cinematography (by Jan De Bont), costumes and production design are impeccable and it has a great supporting cast (LIam Neeson and Sir John Gielgud) but Melanie Griffith was badly miscast. Just as she was in "The Bonfire of the Vanities" and Sidney Lumet's "A Stranger Among Us." The movie was originally meant for Christmas (and Oscar consideration, lol) in 1991, but when Fox saw the finished product they bumped it to the spring of 1992. Griffith could be very good in comedies, but after her "Working Girl" Oscar nomination she chose "prestige" projects which failed miserably. By the time she changed course and went back to light comedy, her star had dimmed so badly that she was getting terrible scripts like "Milk Money," the subject of one of Ebert's funniest reviews.
I like what Ebert said about having bad movies as a measuring stick. I mean every time someone says a certain movie is like the worst thing ever - even if it's a movie I don't like - I just think: Maybe it's the worst thing ever if you've only seen 3 movies! Like have you seen An Alan Smithee Film? Or Santa Claus Conquers the Martians?
That strudel line reading is just about the worst I've ever heard. I can't believe someone filmed that and kept it in a movie that was published and released to the public. Kids in high school plays do a lot better than that.
I would assume Roger Ebert researched Babe Ruth's private life at some point, which would explain the barbs he tossed both at him and "The Babe" in this video. In addition to the films present in this video, Gene had Robert Zemeckis' "Death Becomes Her" (which later became a cult hit in the LGBTQIA+ community), "Trespass" and the infamous "Shakes the Clown" on his print list of the worst films of 1992; he also said that "You LIked" "Home Alone 2: Lost in New York", "Encino Man" and Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven" and he didn't. (SOURCE: Chicago Tribune, December 20, 1992)
A lot of those flicks weren't doing very well at the box office to say the least. For those examples, Susan lssacs' Shining Through and Barry Levinson's Toys were box office bombs and both of them didn't make any money at 20th Century Fox. Both films were produced by Sandollar and Baltimore Pictures, of which Fox distributing two titles. Sony had a rough year on Freejack, Shadows and Fog, Article 99, Gladiator (not the 2000 version), City of Joy, Love Field, Criss Cross, Diggstown etc. Same goes for Paramount, Universal, Warners, Lionsgate and others too.
I agree with them on every single movie here. I think Toys could have been redeemed, as Ebert suggests, just for the amazingly beautiful set design. This was before CG compositing techniques, so most of it was real and truly incredible to see. But the script sucked, and the movie wasn't funny at all. Unless you really, really love everything Robin Williams does.
No doubt, maybe there's some Robin Williams purists out there that see something I don't. I sat through an hour of this turkey and took a walk, what a horrible movie. It's not just because it was unfunny, I'm all good with a funny guy doing a serious movie--but he's gotta pull it off! This movie was just bad, real bad, by just about anybody's standard.
Holy crap I had forgotten about Shining Through. I used to have a couple of friends I went to movies with back then and we would rotate who got to choose the flick. This was not one of my choices. LOL
It’s funny. I’m a huge film buff and I also love Siskel & Ebert. Maybe it’s because I was busy in college at this time, but I have no recollection of the film, Frozen Assets, at all!! I’m sure there’s a reason for that in that it was so bad, but I don’t remember it. I seem to also recall there were two Christopher Columbus movies at that time (500 years) but I only remember the 1492 film, which I also have not seen. Man, Hollywood sure cranks out some garbage. Even more so now!!
The one they talk about on here was also produced by the Salkinds, who did the Christopher Reeve Superman films. This was the last one Ilya did with his dad Alexander, who died a few years later.
In addition the Salkind family has also served as consulting executive producers on the Emmy nominated Superboy from 1988 to 1992 for Viacom. Ran for four successful seasons on syndication.
“Spending time with this guy was like spending a 3 day bus trip crammed into the corner by a mean drunk”. I suppose thats a fair assessment of The Babe.
Besides the film's financial success was lots of overlapping dialogue, effects and music were all done together. It was both mixed at Todd-AO Studios and edited at SoundStorm nearby the Katharine Hepburn stage at Sony Pictures Studios. "The Babe" was a co-production of Waterhorse Productions & Finnegan/Pinchuk Productions in association with Barwood Films and released by Universal-International on June 5, 1992.
I think it could be mine aswell. I was so hyped after the trailer somehow, and then infinitely bored while watching it. I think it might've been the first movie that I walked off from in my life.
Toys got a HUGE amount of hype--it's a movie where the trailer is more famous than the film itself. People who were around then certainly remember Robin Williams talking to us in the open field and telling us he's actually in a studio, it was so ubiquitous that The Simpsons parodied it. But there's just no substance to the movie itself. As Gene said in his original review, "Does this movie have anything to say besides, 'War is bad and toys are good'? I don't think so."
@@ELEKTROSKANSEN Hey, the trailer is one of the all-time greats and got parodied to hell back in the day. That's the one with Robin Williams standing in a gorgeous grassy field and talking to the audience.
The original poster for Whispers In The Dark is at least compelling. I saw it in video stores before I could read, and found it alluring and terrifying. I didn't know until this very moment what movie it was for, but I may never forget that image of the thumb on a woman's lips.
While Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct was Lionsgate/StudioCanal's highest grossing thriller with Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone in the summer of 1992 - June 12, fans were very excited about this, despite its controversy and legacy. The film was nominated for 2 Oscars for both Jerry Goldsmith's "all-stops-out" original score and Frank J. Urioste's excellent editing in 1993... but Whispers in the Dark didn't have any big names in this box office flop which it didn't do well, a year later, according to the executives at Paramount/Viacom.
I like Sean Connery and Lorrain Bracco, and I saw it more than once on TV in the mid 90s, I wouldn't say it was great but definitely not bottom 10 of the year for sure.
14:24 ... Tom Selleck is The Face of Bewilderment and Boredom. It's like he's sitting there thinking, "My dream of making the transition from the small screen to the movies is now OVER." 😴
Schwarzenegger was out to torpedo Stallone's career, being a lead competitor for the same roles. He read the script for "Stop or My Mama" and recognized how awful it was. He then spread rumors that he was interested in taking the lead part. So Stallone got excited and tried to beat Arnold to it. Stallone fell for Arnold's bait--hook, line, and sinker.
In the early 90s Robin Williams was apparently doing any movie his agent told him to do. It looks like he was happy if one out of every three movies he did wasn't a disaster.
I hate the fact that the last movie that I saw with my grandfather was Medicine Man. He must’ve assumed that it was going to be good since Connery was in it.
Wow. 1992 was (as of today) the halfway point of my life. I happened to have been too busy that year to take the time to see any movie, let alone waste precious minutes on such awful cinematic fertilizer. Good thing i can at least so many years later get a few good laughs about it all, thanks to these late greats.
The story behind stop or my mom would shoot is Stallone and Schwarzenegger were fighting over roles and the rumor is Schwarzenegger supposedly made it known he really wanted that role and Stallone took it from him but it was a joke Schwarzenegger did on Stallone
😂😂😂 Michael Douglas with the “I’m going to absolutely kill my agent for getting me into this crap” look. This was one of the best “Worst of” shows. Both guys in rare form, torching everything in their path.
She was WAAAAAAY past regretting leaving Cheers by this time. She had had a couple of hits ("Outrageous Fortune" and "The Money Pit") but those didn't rely on her charm. Then came the two that really made her re-think things: Hello Again and Troop Beverly Hills. I think Frozen Assets was a need to do anything because she wasn't being offered much.
@@tomjones8610 After a series of TV and feature flops, Emmy winner Shelley Long of the Walt Disney Company has made such a remarkable comeback when she appeared two successful "Brady Bunch" features from 1995 to 1996 for Paramount Pictures, Mandalay Entertainment and the Ladd Company along with a few TV movies of the week and dozens of TV mini-series of the week. Now she really made re-think many things: joining Icon Productions under the guidance of Mel Gibson, Stephen McEveety, Bruce Davey & Mark Gooder from 1990 thru present for help overseeing every frame of TV and feature, such as "Hacksaw Ridge." Also, they re-acquired PSO, MDP, Vision International and Delphi libraries from Lionsgate. And in 1993, she made her final appearance in the 11th and final season on "Cheers" on NBC.
They filmed the Toys exterior parts near a place called Spangle, WA. It's not to far from where I grew up. That was our big claim to fame around that time 'Toys' and 'Benny and Joon.' :)
Roger inadvertently predicted the "MST3K Party", where you have friends over, watch a dreadful movie, and make fun of it throughout. My favorite one of those from my own youth involved renting "Showgirls" and someone busting out "I'm so excited! I'm so...scared" during the _rape scene._ You know a movie is atrocious when even what's supposed to be a sexual assault is funny.
TOYS taught me a tough but necessary moviegoing lesson: when a director has a "passion project" that he or she has wanted to direct for a long time, and a studio finally gave that project a green light based on their other successful productions? Don't bother seeing it. Because it was in development hell for a good reason.
Tom Selleck was in two of their worst films. They didn't mention he was in Christopher Columbus: The Discovery. Maybe they felt they had trashed him enough with Folks.
@@thekingofmovies193 I thought it was.....................I was hoping for at least a couple of laughs, but I didn't laugh once. It's just not funny---and I love Tom Selleck, but I'd avoid this one.
In the animated TV show, Home movies (which I co-created with Brendon small), my own character, Jack McGuire (who I voice in the show) is a movie critic and he walked out in the middle of frozen assets a very dumb movie and he gave it a negative review. Jack McGuire is a very good and kindest man in the series. Also he got cheated on by his wife Loni McGuire for another man, Anderson (played by Jeff bridges) in the series premiere.
@@mr.froglegs I even wrote the screenplay for and produced and directed the, the home movies movie based on the animated TV show Home movies, distributed by paramount pictures (90th anniversary), Tom Snyder productions and soup2nuts, which also has the voices of Robert de Niro and Lily Tomlin as the bad, Al Pacino John Goodman and Jimmy Smits as some funny cops and also featuring the voices of my Frasier co-stars Kelsey Grammer John Mahoney and David Hyde Pierce, and Meryl Streep as Jack's great aunt, Janet McGuire.
I love the fact that they didn't like The Babe because it was TOO realistic lol cause yes unfortunately the true story of Babe Ruth is a story of a very unathletic, unhealthy man who was playing baseball in a time where baseball players were like the rockstars of their time in the sense that they'd drink, smoke, chew and do drugs.
LMFAO I died when the first line is just "...TOYS!" I was thinking of that movie today and yeah, it ain't too great, but it IS great to look at! Hoooooly!
2 Columbus films came out that year as part of his 500th anniversary, and both were various degrees of terrible, but at least in one of them, the native girls were all naked. /snark And all for a terrible mariner who had no idea where he was going, a murderer, and this country's first European slave trader to visit this continent. We should NOT be celebrating this man!!
Man, I think I remembered seeing Folks on TV when I was a child. It's a vague memory, and I had no clue what the title was, and with a title like Folks, it's hard not to see why. I'm sure I'd hate it if I saw it now, but somehow, I was entertained by it as a child.
Looking at these clips... They really DON'T make movies this bad anymore. Problem is they don't make movies as good as the BEST movies of this era, either.
@@iluvmylovebirdandmybudgiet7729 Yeah, I've watched plenty of them and then 1/2 an hour into it said, "This turkey of a movie is going nowhere!", clicked out, and selected the option to make it not appear on any recommended lists (you can do that on Amazon Prime). It's a harder decision at the theater, it feels like you're throwing away money on a movie that might turn around (they never do, go with your gut). At home while streaming, who cares? "This thing sucks, I'm out!"
"Bicentennial Man" was one of the worst experiences I ever had in the theater. I was 10 and my dad took me. We both spent most of it sitting there and mocking the damn thing. I remember my dad kept repeating out loud "End it already! End it already!".
That movie was AWFUL. Can't believe I saw it in the theater.....................still waiting for someone to give me 90 min. of my life back! (Great sdtrk., though).
In one of his books, Alan Alda tells a story about how, while making Whispers in The Dark, due to it taking three hours to apply and glue the grappler's hook in his forehead, he would sometimes have lunch on the set while wearing the hook. If Gene had a big laugh seeing it on screen, he would have died laughing if he had been on set and saw Alda eating with the hook in his head.
I actually enjoyed the movie up until Alda's later scenes. The story was building up to Sciorra or Leguizamo as the killer and then they just dump Alda without any viable clues and you're just like, what? Why'd they do that?
I think part of the problem with current cinema, along with gross negligence and far too much attention to agendas, is that we don't have greats like Siskel and Ebert tearing apart stinkers like these.
I'd be interested to see how many Sylvester Stallone movies showed up on S & E's "worst of the year" lists over the years. Also: For some reason, Melanie Griffith's entreaty to "taste my strudel" reminded me of Mike Myers' Dieter -- the humorless, avant-garde host of the German talk show "Sprockets" on SNL -- imploring his guests to "touch my monkey!"
Alot of these movies were just really, really mediocre, but alot of the movies from '91-'95 feel this way. Looking back they just all seem to mesh together.
Can't agree, there were some excellent thrillers made during these years, and some fun action-scifi flicks. In fact, the first half of the 90s is one of my favorite periods in cinema, it was the bridge between CGI and the old techiques and so many movies looked great because of this. Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, Batman Returns, and many more, they all look amazing.
@@Harkness78 Really? I remember her being simply awful - like, irredeemably awful. Flat line readings. She was like a concrete slab on the screen. With nice hair.
I would have loved to have asked Roger, "Here's something. You picked Shining Through as the worst film of 1992. So why give it 2 stars in the paper?????"
Remember that, as they explained earlier in previous Worst of shows, they aren’t really choosing the VERY worst shows of the year, more like the biggest disappointments instead. If someone told me the basic premise of Shining Through and that Michael Douglas was the leading man, I might have been tempted to see it too in 1992. If you look at others on this show- Toys, the Babe Ruth film etc. they could have all potentially been great but in the majority of cases were let down by very poor scripts and/or certain actors.
@@scottyunitedboy2925 Well, the other films he gave less than 2 stars to. Frozen Assets (zero), The Babe (1), Christopher Columbus: The Discovery (1), and Medicine Man (1.5).
It's really bad, you might be able to argue it is Robin Williams worst film ever, which definitely would get it in the top 100 worst overall. But yeah if that is the worst movie your friend has ever seen they haven't seen too many movies. At least it has some interesting visuals.
Say what you will, Toys didn't work for me. At least the filmmakers owe me lots of money back in the bank a few years later in 2002. They gave $20.00 extra dollars for something else on the go which was very nice to help out. All I can say is to the filmmakers: "Thank you."
I miss the days of actual critics that knew about what they were criticizing. These days, any attention seeking clown with a keyboard and internet connection can deem themselves a "critic" and spout a bunch of nonsense.
I went to see "The Babe" in theatres when I was 9 with my parents, I barely remember any of it because it was so boring and depressing. I didn't even like baseball. Toys is also terrible, saw it on video that same year. Holy shit that Christopher Columbus movie looks awful.
