January 19, 2000
Web posted at: 4:11 p.m. EST (2111 GMT)

By Reviewer Paul Tatara

See also: 'Boys Don't Cry' tops 10 best films of '99

(CNN) -- It beats working in a coal mine, but I actually had to watch these...

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1. "End of Days"
Directed by Peter Hyams. Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gabriel Byrne and Kevin Pollak. Rated R. 158 minutes.

Millennial madness taken to its illogical extreme, "End of Days" is allegedly a thriller in which Satan journeys to Earth to find a mate. But it's really an aggressive, nihilistic, hugely idiotic attempt to pack video-rattled teens into the theater. Kids will instinctively reach for their joysticks during the action sequences. Schwarzenegger -- whose character repeatedly swigs vodka and weeps over the murder of his wife and child -- nearly pulls his atrophied acting muscle. Rod Steiger plays a histrionic priest who ties people to beds in a church basement, attaches monitoring devices, and performs exorcisms over their writhing bodies. One would assume that the program was not funded by Catholic Charities.

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2. "Jawbreaker"
Directed by Darren Stein. Starring Rose McGowan and Rebecca Gayheart. Rated R. 90 minutes.

Less vile but arguably even more stupid than "End of Days," "Jawbreaker" is one of those self-satisfied movies that features 23-year-old "teen-age girls" who wear incredibly tight clothing and smirk a lot over other people's misery. Top-heavy mannequin McGowan (who gives the least performance-like performance of the year) plays the hotsy-totsy leader of a group of vixens who accidentally choke their friend to death when they shove a huge jawbreaker in her mouth during a "humorous" kidnapping. To cover their tracks, they throw her on her bed, rip her underwear and hope that the cops think she was raped and murdered. The funniest thing about the entire undertaking is that some studio executive gave it the green light. Gayheart, by the way, is forgiven. She might actually be talented.

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3. "Detroit Rock City"
Directed by Adam Rifkin. Starring Edward Furlong, James DeBello, Giuseppe Andrews and Sam Huntington. Rated R. 95 minutes.

It's 1978. A gang of unwashed stoner dudes road-trip to Detroit, where they attempt to secure tickets to see their heroes, the apparently still-shameless rock group called Kiss. The kids are straight-up chowder heads, but we're supposed to applaud their raucous lack of brainpower. Because KISS ROCKS MAAAAAN! Whatever scruffy charm there might have been in this endeavor is quickly overwhelmed by Rifkin's Theorem, which states that if a scene is worth shooting, it's worth shooting at 35 pointless angles. A pizza gets thrown at a Trans Am. A beer pitcher is filled with vomit. The whispered word "Rosebud" is eventually revealed to be the dying billionaire's childhood sled. Wait a minute. I've mixed up my notes.

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4. "Pokemon: The First Movie"
Directed by Michael Haigney and Kunohiko Yuyama. Starring Pikachu and Mewtwo. Rated G. 89 minutes.

If you're like most people over the age of 11 and are dumbfounded by the current Pokemon craze, don't come here looking for answers. There's virtually no explanation of what's taking place on the screen, and the animation owes a hell of a lot more to "The Hair Bear Bunch" than it does to "Fantasia."

Basically, a gang of colorful, ill-defined creatures wage colorful, ill-defined battle against each other while lightning bolts shoot through the air. The creatures yelp and screech a lot, but that could have been the kids in the theater. This one checks in at No. 4 instead of No. 3 only because Pikachu doesn't puke into a beer pitcher.

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5. "Baby Geniuses"
Directed by Bob Clark. Starring Kathleen Turner, Christopher Lloyd and Peter MacNicol. Rated PG. 94 minutes.

Thank God someone finally made "Look Who's Talking" for Mensa members. Turner and Lloyd star as evil scientists who devise techniques that can transform regular babies into very, very smart babies. So smart, in fact, that they can blurt out wiseacre remarks that are supposed to be hysterically funny only because babies are saying them.

This one is truly mortifying. Asinine pop culture allusions -- like a toddler performing disco moves while wearing a white suit -- are interspersed with ponderous chase scenes in which grown-ups fall over go boom. If Turner's career is the movie star equivalent of Wile E. Coyote falling off a cliff, this film is the little puff of dust when she hits bottom.

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6. "The Bachelor"
Directed by Gary Sinyor. Starring Chris O'Donnell, Renee Zellweger, Ed Asner, Hal Holbrook and Peter Ustinov. Rated PG-13. 101 minutes.

If you're rash enough to remake a 74-year-old Buster Keaton classic, shouldn't you at least update the characters' world views? Humanoid extra-thick milkshake O'Donnell stars as a man who's forced to get married in 24 hours if he hopes to inherit millions of dollars from his deceased grandfather (Ustinov). O'Donnell's character is fearful of acquiring a ball-and-chain because he yearns to run wild and chase women and blah-blah-blah.

Unfortunately, his insensitive, lame-brained proposal to his marriage-desperate girlfriend (Zellweger) forces him to seek a bride elsewhere. He eventually goes public with the situation, and women line up in droves to get hitched. Has anyone here ever heard of Gloria Steinem, or even the 1960s? You can't miss 'em. Just turn left at the Nixon-Kennedy debate and head toward the burning bras.

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7. "True Crime"
Directed by Clint Eastwood. Starring Eastwood, James Woods and Denis Leary. Rated R. 127 minutes.

Humdrum isn't the word for this aimless, wrongly convicted prisoner drama. The script is a catastrophe, but the real kicker is Eastwood's insistence on acting like a sex symbol when he's about 30 years older than King Tut. He plays a crusading newspaper reporter who supposedly lost his previous job for sleeping with the boss' 18-year-old daughter. No one bothers to point out that Dirty Old Man Harry has turned 18 at least four different times by now, provided you start over again at zero every time he reaches the milestone. Personally, I'm waiting for Betty White to get it on with Leonardo DiCaprio.

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8. "The Other Sister"
Directed by Gary Marshall. Starring Juliette Lewis, Giovanni Ribisi, Diane Keaton and Tom Skerritt. Rated PG-13. 130 minutes.

Lewis plays a mentally challenged young woman who falls in love with an equally challenged young man (Ribisi). The two want to get married, but Lewis' uptight mom (Keaton) won't have it. She changes her mind, though, once Lewis and Ribisi kiss, talk cute and dress up like funny animals on Halloween.

This is a nice movie about being nice and the niceness of how nice it is that everything, even after some arguing, always ends up nice. Not Marshall's worst movie, but only because he once directed an S&M sex comedy starring Rosie O'Donnell and Dan Aykroyd. He'll have to go into training to top that one.

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9. "The Loss of Sexual Innocence"
Directed by Mike Figgis. Starring Julian Sands, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers and Saffron Burrows. Rated R. 106 minutes.

Easily the most laughably pretentious film of the year, this is the sort of movie that's supposed to be deep because the director refuses to let the audience in on exactly what's going on.

Figgis is apparently examining his own sexuality through a series of vignettes that range from the absurd to the plain old dull. We get repeated visits with an especially hot Adam and Eve, who look like nude escapees from "Vogue" magazine; allusions to self-gratification; Sands' character having dispassionate sex with his wife while she chops up a phallic carrot at the kitchen sink; and Burrows wordlessly passing her doppelganger at a busy airport, which has nothing whatsoever to do with sex but looks good anyway.

Faux-significant title cards are meant to hold it all together. Why anyone outside of Figgis should care was apparently never broached at the production meetings.

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10. "Girl, Interrupted"
Directed by James Mangold. Starring Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie. Rated R. 127 minutes.

In my original semi-pan of "Girl, Interrupted," I said that it was one of the best films of the year. You just have to be a hyper-sensitive 17-year-old girl to think so. Imagine my surprise, then, to recently see ads for the movie that read, "'One of the best films of the year!' Paul Tatara, CNN.com." In the spirit of creative context, I'd now like to say that "Girl, Interrupted" is one of the worst films of the year. The marketing department at Columbia Pictures should feel free to quote me. They can even add another unsolicited exclamation point if they're really excited about it.