#7: Southland Tales

Southland Tales
Directed by Richard Kelly
Written by Richard Kelly
Released November 14, 2007

This is one of the worst movies ever made. No question about it.

For his sophomore effort, Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly overstuffs his story and his cast with everything but the kitchen sink in a "comedy"/social satire about the end of the world. I put the word comedy in quotes because I'm quoting Richard Kelly from a documentary in the DVD bonus features. Had he not called this a comedy, I wouldn't have known what the fuck it was trying to be.

As the movie opens, we see from the point of view of a couple of kids playing with a video camera. For the rest of the movie, I wondered if those kids were still at the wheel. Kelly's script feels like it came from the mind of a teenage boy, with ironic casting (Bai Ling, Cheri Oteri, Christopher Lambert, that little creepy lady from Poltergeist and so on), chapters with names taken from alt.rock song titles, and lame dialogue like, "The fourth dimension will collapse upon itself, you stupid bitch."

Christ. It's the kind of movie where Mandy Moore out-acts the entire cast.

I'm not even going to bother going into the story. If you need to know details: World War 3 happens, The Rock plays a Republican action star with amnesia, Justin Timberlake is a soldier suffering from some Post Traumatic Overacting Syndrome, and Sarah Michelle Gellar is a porn star who comes nowhere near anything resembling nudity. It so wants to be Blade Runner meets Brazil, but it's more like Pluto Nash meets Caddyshack 2.

While director Kelly does not appear to be hopped up on coke in the documentary about the movie, you clearly need a pile of nose candy to make sense of this mess. Is it any coincidence that Dwayne Johnson's alter ego is named Jericho Kane? Say that name out loud and yell out when you can tell me what drug name you hear hidden in there.

I'm not even going to include any links with this post. No IMDB or Wikipedia information. No links to buy the DVD. I'm saving you the trouble. I'm giving you the gift of 2 hours of life that I no longer have. Go play with a puppy. Call your grandmother. Grind your genitals up in a blender. You can't do any worse.


Don't believe me when I say this thing stinks of poo? Check out the official movie trailer: