A candidate for Worst Movie Ever?

If you've watched the NFL or the baseball playoffs lately, you've seen the trailer for this new Adam Sandler movie called "Jack and Jill." If you haven't, stop for a second and watch. You really need to see this.



Let's start with the possibility that any movie could be a five-star movie, but various aspects of the movie could cause it to lose stars. So, based on the trailer:

-- It's an Adam Sandler movie. (Minus 1 star.)

-- It's an Adam Sandler movie where he dresses in drag to play his own twin sister. (Minus 3 stars.)

-- It's an Adam Sandler movie where he dresses in drag to play his own twin sister, and Al Pacino (playing himself) has the hots for the twin sister. (Minus 37 stars, and Pacino has to give back his Oscar.)

Somehow poor sweet Katie Holmes ends up in the middle of it all. We can only assume that Tom Cruise was at home jumping around on the couches, and she said yes just to get away for a few weeks.

Now... it's possible that the rest of the movie could be full of uproarious gags and tender reflections on the duality of the human spirit. But you'd think that if they had any of that, they would have put some in the trailer. Maybe in place of the "Twister with your sister" line.

The truth is, this trailer leaves me a little giddy. Because we might have a new candidate for Worst Movie of All Time.

There are lots of bad movies out there, of course. But to make a run at Worst Movie of All Time, you have to be special. B-movies don't count. Some of them are good, some are terrible*, but they're playing under different rules -- you can't count Arena League records in the NFL.

*I worked at a drive-in theater in high school and a couple of summers in college... we specialized in three types of movies: first-run movies after the indoor theaters got tired of them; X-rated movies with all the X-rated parts cut out; and random B-movies. Having seen hundreds of B-movies, I can state without a doubt that the best bad movie of all time is "Gymkata." A spy is sent to a distant country to run through the woods in a game to the death. His special survival skill? Gymnastics. Which comes in handy when he arrives in a village of crazed killers -- and there, in the middle of the town square, is a pommel horse. All I can say about this clip is, well, you're welcome.



So, to have a shot at Worst Movie of All Time, you have to have the money and stars to make a good movie; you have to be trying to make a good movie; and you have to fail totally, utterly, miserably.

About 20 years ago, my friend Matt Brunson had a couple of extra passes for a screening. So I went with Matt and our buddy Joe Posnanski to see a comedy called "Hudson Hawk." It starred Bruce Willis (coming off the first two "Die Hard" movies), Danny Aiello (so good in "Moonstruck" and "Do the Right Thing") and Andie MacDowell (not long after "Sex, Lies & Videotape"). Willis and Aiello were master burglars, MacDowell the love interest... we figured it had a chance to be good.

Instead, for the next two hours, we watched a trainwreck on the screen. What was this movie not? Let me count the ways: Not funny, not smart, not clever, not well-acted, not interesting, not compelling, did I mention not funny? The main thing I remember, 20 years down the road, is that the villainous mobsters were called the Mario Brothers. Like the video games. I had forgotten, until I read the Wikipedia entry, that the other bad guys (there were lots of bad guys) were named for candy bars. Here's part of the plot synopsis:

Kit Kat and Butterfinger take Anna to the castle. Tommy trips Snickers, causing his bomb launcher to shoot a bomb onto his head. Hudson and Tommy escape while Snickers and Almond Joy are killed when the bomb goes off.

Sorry for the spoilers.

Afterward we stood outside in the parking lot, and we could barely talk about it -- it was like trying to review somebody belching the national anthem. To this day no bad movie I've seen has topped it, by which I mean, bottomed it.

But "Jack and Jill" has real potential. There's a moment in the trailer when you see Adam Sandler, in drag, wearing a trenchcoat. I'm guessing, at some point, the trenchcoat comes off. And when it does, Worst Movie of All Time might be in play.