My Christmas Tradition

Every year I give the gift of lousy cinema to a friend. He gives me a bad movie in return and then we watch them both and try and decide which is worse. Its a fun tradition and has lasted over 10 years. I have listed all the results here.

We both look hard for a bad movie. Sometimes I end up buying a 1/2 dozen films because I keep finding one that looks worse. It's not enough to just grab a copy of "Gigli" and be done with it. We both try and find the "so bad it's good" type of film. We actually have to watch these so we always hope for something fun.

Over the years we have seen Burt Reynolds teach football, Orangutans sing about Teddy Roosevelt, Tony Danza as a hitman and the mom from Lassie playing a ninja.


This year he brought this:




"The Final Goal" is an awful soccer film that stars Erik Estrada as a dude who wants to fix the World Cup... I mean The Global Cup. The DVD cover says it's The World Cup, but it also uses the word "exciting" to describe the film. It's full of lies.
The plot is so convoluted I had trouble following it, but here is the best summary I can do:
Estrada plays a former soccer player who was injured during a game. Now he's an angry millionaire who wants to destroy the sport by fixing a game and then exposing that he fixed it so that Americans will stop watching soccer and return to watching baseball. Oh yeah, this film takes place in a alternate universe where more Americans watch soccer than baseball.
So Estrada pays off the players to throw the game. Then he kills some of them. He kills the ones that ARE in on his scam to scare the ones that aren't. Not sure why he didn't just kill the ones that WERE'NT in on it...
The hero is the backup goalie who is mad at a teammate for putting his brother a vegetative state by hitting his head against a soccer goal... rather gently.
Later that bad guy gets hit harder in the head with a frying pan and recovers quickly. This killed my theory that this film was in an alternate universe where humans had no skull.
The film ends with a delightful "Global Cup" game where the stands have about 12 people in them but the movie dubs over crowd noise that sounds like they are playing in a packed LA Colosseum.
I brought this:




This late 1970s Disney flick was based on the Mark Twain story about a modern person who ends up in King Arthur's time.

In this version it's a NASA robot builder and his robot twin who accidentally get stuck on a rocket that inexplicably ends up in the era of Merlin & the knights of the round table.
Special effects are beyond laughable. We see plastic models hang from strings as they shake the camera to simulate movement.
The lead actor was such a dud I assumed that he never acted again. This was pretty much true, but he directs all of Adam Sandler's films. This means he likely has more money than everyone I ever met... combined. It made it less fun to laugh at him.

Anyway, both flicks were perfect! Bad movies that were a blast to watch... but "The Final Goal" was worse.