ROB REINER GOES NORTH W/ ONE OF THE WORST MOVIES EVER

YEAR RELEASED: 1994

Director Terry Gilliam's first directed feature outside the Monty Python spectrum is TIME BANDITS, where a lonely, imaginative pre-teen, ignored by a pair of boorish, overly-typical suburban parents, is thrust into a portal where he discovers, along with a handful of thieving dwarves, the kind of manly dream-dad he, and any kid, would want in Sean Connery's brave, middle-aged from the Middle Ages warrior, much like an intrepid and serious version of our NORTH narrator Bruce Willis, who Elijah Wood finds after running away — ala Drew Barrymore in a courtroom liken to IRRECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES — from a terribly depressing, equally annoying home-life, and he serves as a sort of mentor/guide, appearing as various characters, from a man in a bunny suit to a cowboy to an eskimo, for guidance beyond mere parental wisdom; more of a cool uncle but "enough of my yackin'... Here's a movie that killed a sublime winning streak of director Rob Reiner, who reigned in a decade of great to very-good movies from SPINAL TAP to PRINCESS BRIDE to MISERY... This is possibly the worst motion picture ever made, and one that might be suited to the "So Bad it's Good" category but really more of a "So Horrendously Awful it's Torturous Yet Intriguing, somehow..."

Young Scarlett Johansson

As kind of an "expert" on the subject of awful movies, having appeared in the TROLL 2 documentary titled BEST WORST MOVIE for having written a 130-page unofficial sequel script for no reason but to do it, there's a vast difference between something called "The Worst Movie Ever Made" or "The Worst Movie I've Ever Seen"... This is more the latter: with bonafide Hollywood backing and A-List actors... In that, any movie by Ed Wood Jr. or a low-low-low budget like MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE or THE ROOM shouldn't be considered in an "Ever Made" example of Worst Movies since it didn't take a lot of money or risk to make... Certain really bad movies seem more of a personal dare... 

NorthScore: 1/2

But a film like NORTH, made by one of the (at that time) top directors, written from an adapted novel by one of the SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE chief scribes with a collection of genuinely big actors, the NORTH phenomenon goes far beyond being horrible, and its existence is a shock that probably still reverberates throughout particular offices in Hollywood...

No camp following's been made of it like THE CONQUEROR, ISHTAR or HEAVEN'S GATE, but, having hidden away on expensive-rare VHS for years and finally turning up online for streaming on Amazon, there's more than one reason it vanished: As one of the Worst Movies Ever Made... just take the emphasis off "Ever" and put it on "Made," because the bigger a production is, the harder it crashes: NORTH is one of those uncomfortable catastrophes that feels like there's no director at all, the jokes coming and going in a sort of empty vacuum... where... nothing... exists...