2014 Year in Review: Part Four

Best Scene Featuring an Animal or Animals

Reindeer, White Reindeer

The fantastic work of the bull in Song of the South

The pigman in Deathstalker, contemplating a cooked pig head

The Billy the Bass pride in The Act of Killing...because who wouldn’t be proud to own that?

Ernest Borgnine with those goat horns

The talking rabbit from The Nasty Rabbit

Bart the Bear in The Edge

Freddie Jones’ quacking and the pigeon talk in Wild at Heart

that bunny twitching his little CGI leg in the Hobbit movie

A pigeon in Amour

Tai as Vera the elephant in Larger than Life

The beheaded rooster in Faces of Death

That snake-in-the-bathtub scene in Deadly Blessing

The giant fish demon at the beginning of Journey to the West

The random penguin in Terror of Tiny Town (I know it shouldn’t be eligible since that movie was a repeat, but I didn’t notice it before)

The winner: Gargamel’s cat (subtitled “Are you dead?”) in the charming The Smurfs

The “Thank God That Scene Was Unnecessarily Long” Award

J-Lo doing Yoga for a half an hour in Gigli (Go ahead and add this to my "wife" category)

Something That I Haven’t Mentioned But Want To

That scene where June Squibb lifts her skirt at the graveside in Nebraska

Best One-and-Done Performance

Catherine Gaffigan as crazy Arlene in Sisters and Kevin Farr, the fat Amish kid in Deadly Blessing--both good. But Gary Poulter’s disturbing and sometimes hilarious G-Daawg in Joe is perhaps the best one-and-done performance of all time.

The E.T., Exceptional Use of Product Placement in Film

I’m giving this award to E.T.

from poprewind.com

The Shlammalammadingdong, Worst Movie Twist

The end of Forbidden World. It's a real Ding Whopper! (I'm not sure I've ever made less sense on this blog.)

Best Nicolas Cage Moment

The yellow suit and the “I love co-cock!” in Sonny, the famous Nicolas Cage Point in Wild at Heart, the pair of Elvis songs in the same movie? This award goes to one of my favorite Nicolas Cage moments and the origin of my new band name--”I had a boner with a capital O.”

Best Crispin Glover Moment

Watching him attempt to act like a normal teeneager in Teachers, making sandwiches or doing a roach-in-underpants dance or trying to contain a black leather glove in Wild at Heart or Olivia Newton Bomb in The Beaver Trilogy. Or maybe just his Marlon Brando impression in that movie. We don’t need a winner here, do we?

Best Animated Movie

A pretty strong field in a year without a Pixar release! We’ve got Song of the South, only slightly racist; the Russian Winnie the Pooh (Vinni Pukh); the fun Lego Movie only slightly marred by the appearance of Will Ferrell; the brilliant stop-animation of Toys in the Attic. The winner is the most recent animated movie I watched, however--Don Hertzfeldt’s It’s Such a Beautiful Day.

Worst Animated Movie

Planes

The Wiseau

I’ve dreaded having to do this one, the award I give for a trifecta of ineptitude in writing, directing, and acting. And I’m sorry, Robert Rundle. You did something special, something else special, and then something else special in Cybernator, and if this was another year, you’d have a shot of winning. But two guys set the bar mighty low here. We’re talking movies worthy of being mentioned in the same sentence with Tommy Wiseau and The Room. Yes, that kind of brilliance. Choosing between Sam Mraovich with his gloriously inept Ben and Arthur and Michael Mfume and his shockingly terrible Ax ‘Em is one of the toughest decisions of my entire life. Now I know how the Academy Award people felt when trying to decide between Goodfellas and Dances with Wolves! I’m going to give the Wiseau to Sam Mraovich, who gets the edge because he had an agenda with Ben and Arthur which just makes the failure a little more profound.

Best Documentary

The Bridge, The Battered Bastards of Baseball, A Band Called Death, Invisible War, Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, Cutie and the Boxer, Tabloid, Twenty Feet from Stardom, and Searching for the Sugar Man, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, Reel Injun, These Amazing Shadows, Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, and The Final Member were all good, but The Act of Killing was the best documentary I saw this year.

Most Unpleasant Movie Experience of the Year

It doesn’t seem that I was forced to watch anything against my will this year, so I only have myself to blame. Junior, Trespass, Fred and Vinnie, Planes, R.I.P.D., and Blah Blah Blah Charles Swan III were all dreadful, but the worst bad movie I sat through this year was easily the Kennedy assassination movie Parkland which, as I previously said, I now own. Thanks, Josh!

Best Actor

More tough competition--Love all the following performances:

John Turturro, Miller’s Crossing

Hoosier James Baskett, South of the South

David Kross, The Reader

Denis Lavant, brilliantly versatile in Holy Motors

Taika Waititi, Boy

Philip Seymour Hoffman, lots of things but especially Doubt

Ulrich Muhe, The Lives of Others

Rick Moranis, Ghostbusters II

Bruce Dern, Nebraska

Tom Hanks, Saving Mr. Banks or Captain Phillips

Jared Leto, Dallas Buyer’s Club (although McConaughey’s good, too)

Nicolas Cage, Joe

Gary Poulter, Joe

Tom Hardy, Locke

Lew Zealand, two Muppet movies

Joaquin Phoenix, Her

young John Huck McAbee, Crazy and Thief

Those are all great, but in a bit of a surprise, the Best Actor Award goes to Hank Azaria’s brilliance as Gargamel in The Smurfs.

Or maybe Gary Poulter. . .

Best Actress

Brigitte Helm, Metropolis

Strother Martin, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

Kate Winslet, The Reader

Marissa Mell, Danger: Diabolik

Meryl Streep, Doubt or Ironweed

Faye Dunaway, so brilliant in Mommie Dearest

Sandra Bullock, Gravity

Emma Thompson, Saving Mr. Banks

Judi Dench, Philomena

Cate Blanchett, Blue Jasmine

the great Ruth Gordon, Rosemary’s Baby

Terrific performances but the only woman who can win this award this year is Scarlett Johansson in various things. Well done, Scarlett! Let me know if you want to come over and pick up your award.

The Torgo, Worst Acting Performance

When you intentionally watch as many bad movies as I do, this is always going to be a tough category. There are a lot of names here that you’d expect to see in a Worst Acting Performance list:

Nicolas Cage was on the Best Actor list but makes it here, too, for what he did in Trespass

Schwarzenegger was terrible in Junior but not as bad as he is in Jingle All the Way or Kindergarten Cop

William Shatner gave a wonderful performance in Devil’s Rain but was Torgo-blocked by Ernest Borgnine and especially Woody Chambliss in the same movie

Hulk Hogan brought his A-game to No Holds Barred but was overshadowed by the terrible villain in that movie played by Kurt Fuller who gave Bad Movie Club the word “jockasses”

The great Adam West showed up drunk for Omega Cop and not quite as drunk in Zombie Nightmare

Clint Howard performed that aforementioned puppet show and threw down a lot of bad puns in Ice Cream Man

Even Tommy Wiseau made an appearance in a short, “The House That Drips Blood On Alex”

And I’ll always contend that Charlton Heston gave a Torgo-worthy performance in The Planet of the Apes

As with the Billy Curtis, I’ve always wanted a woman to win this award. There were a lot of great candidates:

Liz Renay, in both Desperate Living and The Nasty Rabbit

Edith Massey, Queen Carlotta of Desperate Living

Mink Stole, also from Desperate Living

Whoever played the mother in If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?

Ellen McElduff as Wanda June in Maximum Overdrive

Princess Livingston was as almost as good as she is good looking in Mudhoney

I’ve put a lot of thought into this (as I always do) and don’t think the men and women should compete for the Torgo any longer. Therefore, the first ever winner of the Livingston Award for Best Worst Performance by a Female goes to Princess Livingston for her work in Mudhoney.

Now back to the Torgo. Rounding it all out, we’ve got the following:

Hal Hopper, also in Mudhoney, snarling and hollering every one of his lines

Fred Stoller, a guy who should never have been called upon to carry an entire movie in Fred and Vinnie

Sam Mraovich, our Wiseau winner

Max Alvarado, the actor who played Best Auxiliary Character Lupo in D’Wild Wild Weng

John Terlesky, a gum chewer in Chopping Mall

Ted Prior, Deadly Prey, showcasing the best-worst tough guy voice I’ve ever heard

Brent Huff, The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik Yak

Terence Jenkins with that terrible German accent in Vampire Cop

Ed Cannon, Vampire Cop himself

R.J. McKay as Raymond, also in Vampire Cop

Lonnie Schuyler and his eyebrows, Cybernator

Thomas Ian Griffith, evil Terry in Karate Kid III, with help from a ponytale and comically malicious bird noises

Kurt Thomas, the hero of Gymkata

Richard Ruxton, doing his best Jimmy Stewart impression in half a t-shirt in Galaxy Invader

Dean Hagopian, Zombie Nightmare’s medical examiner

Gregary Josiph [sic], the coolest demon ever in Miracle Man

Whoever plays the guy in the wheelchair in Miracle Man

Bill Freed, Hitler’s head

I’m torn between three here, but the winner of the Torgo for 2014 has got to be Richard Ruxton for the job he did in Galaxy Invader. To stand out in a movie like that takes a special kind of performance.

The Manos

Curse of the Bigfoot (really should be on the bad-bad list instead of this good-bad movie one), Deathstalker, The Fantastic Four, Forbidden World, The Apple, They Saved Hitler’s Brain (same as Curse of the Bigfoot), The Devil’s Rain, Megaforce, No Holds Barred, Chopping Mall, The Nasty Rabbit, BMX Bandits, Deadly Prey, The Howling III, Mutant Hunt, Omega Cop, The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik Yak, Creature, Beaks: The Movie, Robowar, Attack of the Beast Creatures, Creepozoid, Gigli, Ice Cream Man, Zombie Nightmare, Undefeatable, Robo Vampire, Tammy and the T-Rex

If you’re looking for some good-bad movie fun, almost all of those would work for you. But the Manos can’t go to all of those. I narrowed it down to ten finalists:

D'Wild Wild Weng

Mosquito

Cybernator

Galaxy Invader

Vampire Cop

Miracle Man

Ax ‘Em

Ben and Arthur

If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?

Hard Ticket to Hawaii

And the winner of this year’s Manos, one of the most prestigious awards here at shane-movies, is Ben and Arthur. Congratulations, Sam Mraovich. Let me know if you want to come pick up your award, but it can’t be when Scarlett Johansson is here.

Best Movie I Saw This Year

As always, I’m excluding things I’d already seen. That leaves out Casablanca, Miller’s Crossing, Metropolis, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Fist of Fury, The Usual Suspects, Black Sunday, Boogie Nights, 8 ½, Happiness, To Kill a Mockingbird, Night of the Hunter, Wild Strawberries, Koyaanisqatsi, Dog Day Afternoon, The Sting, Tootsie, Saturday Night Fever, King Kong, West Side Story, Rosemary’s Baby, The King of Comedy, Buffet Froid, The Exorcist, 12 Angry Men, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

So the candidates are the following, in no particular order:

I Hired a Contract Killer

Me and You and Everyone We Know

No Man’s Land

Black Sabbath

Danger: Diabolik

Holy Motors

Doubt

The Lives of Others

Amour

Inside Llewyn Davis

The Lone Ranger

Gravity

Nebraska

Grand Budapest Hotel

The Wolf of Wall Street

Saving Mr. Banks

The Beaver Trilogy

Her

Crazy and Thief

Sisters

Little Fugitive

Viy

The Machinist

Doggie Woggiez Poochie Woochiez!

The winner: Grand Budapest Hotel

Thanks for reading.  I appreciate it.