The Stepford Wives: especially bad!
We watched the new version of The Stepford Wives. And it was bad. It was incredibly, stupefyingly, nerve-deadeningly, IMPRESSIVELY bad. It has officially displaced “Event Horizon” as my canonical WORST MOVIE EVER. Every scene was painful to watch, every line of dialogue like nails on a chalkboard. Who wrote this? These jokes wouldn’t make it on Everybody Loves Raymond! And how can Christopher Walken and Nicole Kidman (who should be enough to make any movie successful) be delivering these grade-school grade lines without becoming physically ill? This movie didn’t wrap around from bad back to good like so many movies do, it just went off in some new direction of infinite inexhasutible BADNESS.
Another cute feature: the entire movie doesn’t make any sense. It seems that part way through shooting they decided to replace the original concept (wives replaced by robots) with a new one (wives “enhanced” with remote-control microchips), but didn’t bother to go back and fix all the earlier scenes with robotic women. Maybe they thought we wouldn’t notice? Actually I think they reached a point where they just didn’t care any more. And then it seems that some studio executive decided they needed a twist ending, because all movies have twist endings now. So they decided to make Christopher Walken, supposedly the architect of Stepford, actually a robot! And say that they town was actually created by his wife as a paradise for WOMEN??!!? WHAT?
Looking for the bright side, Jenny said at least she can cross it off her to-watch list. I said that I see it this way: that which does not kill me only makes me stronger.
A chilling footnote: several movie sites report that the actors were called back just before the movie was released to reshoot several scenes after the movie was panned by test audiences. Does that mean that an EVEN WORSE version of this movie existed? IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE?
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…why on earth would you even have thought to watch such a movie in the first place?
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Well, we both like Nicole Kidman and Christopher Walken, and with both of them in it, it was hard to avoid seeing it eventually.
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I declare that answer not good enough. I require some sort of excuse equivalent to “Jenny had a competitor’s coupon that required renting something with Mathew Broderick in it…. and Inspector Gadget was out.”
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I completely agree. I heard really good things about the book, and never watched the first version. So my friends and I decided to watch the movie. What a mistake. The only positive thing that I remembered was that the homosexual guy was funny at times.
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Although I haven’t seen the new version of The Stepford Wives, I’m curious as to whether you’ve seen Pavilion of Women (based on a novel by Pearl S. Buck), which is my canonical WORST MOVIE EVER:
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Haven’t seen that one, but strangely I did just read “The Good Earth”, another novel by Pearl S. Buck. It was great! There’s an old movie version of this novel, and Jenny wants to start a letter writing campaign to get them to make a modern version.