Anybody can make a movies nowadays, and that's ultimately a good thing: without that kind of thinking we might not have low-budget classics like Reservoir Dogs or Monsters. But there's a flipside to be considered. Because sometimes, a person who should be doing anything else but writing or directing a motion picture manages to get themselves onto a set: here, they adopt a baseball cap and a smug sense of superiority, and they start telling the other people with cameras and boom mics what to do. This is made a zillion times worse if twenty or thirty of these guys - in some unexplainable twist of fate - are miraculously brought together on a single project. That's the only way any of the films on the following list can be justified: they were made by large teams of people who had abandoned all sanity. Large teams of people who had volunteered to test an experimental new drug, or were under the influences of a smooth-talking alien who tricked them into producing his shitty first screenplay based on a week's observations of "earth-folk." Because these films aren't just bad, they're absolutely dumbfounding in their genetics: how the heck did these obscenities ever get through the pitch stages and into production? Better yet... why did some of the actors who read these scripts sign on for the inevitable massacre of their beloved medium? Here's a list that proves sometimes people don't care about anything.
5. Baby Geniuses (1999)
Everybody knows that smart kids are super annoying, especially in movies. No movie has ever been improved by the presence of a smart child because A) the little fellas aren't very good at acting and B) it's impossible for them to come across as witty or funny or clever without appearing like annoying, smug know-it-alls. Usually children serve as that basic element of plot that adults have to impress, or save, or learn to love, but as actual sentient characters with things to say they're just plain infuriating. So imagine a film whose entire premise is that babies are more intelligent than adults. Throw in Kathleen Turner, Christopher Lloyd and Kim Catrall and you've got one of the worst films about any subject matter ever made. The idea driving this catastrophic lapse of human judgment is that babies are actually really smart and their inane babel doubles as a secret language that they use to talk to one another. Kathleen Turner plays a major bitch who wants to harness this so she can take over the world or make money or something, and that's pretty much the extent of the story. The babies say things to each other and the adults don't understand. So the joke is on the adults over and over again until the film finally ends after an agonizing 95 minutes of frankly terrifying superimposed talking lips. It's not just a surprise that somebody with a desk and an office at Tri-Star greenlit the project, Baby Geniuses actually comes from a director of fair talent: Bob Clark. Clark was the man behind both A Christmas Story and Porky's and some other worthwhile flicks, but there's no reason he should have ever got involved with something of this burnable quality. At least he went out with some respect before his untimely death in 2007: Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2 was his final film. Oh.