The Nineties are remembered as a golden age of big-screen comedy. The highs were certainly glorious – from Doug Liman’s deadpan Swingers (which made “You’re so money!” a catchphrase for 15 minutes in 1996) to uproariously lowbrow Farrelly brothers chortlefest There’s Something About Mary – the Citizen Kane of movies about getting your junk caught in your zipper. But amid such chucklesome triumphs, the decade was strewn with laugh-free clunkers.
Here is a countdown of the anti-laughter zones that brought lasting shame on late 20th-century Hollywood.
16. Picture Perfect (1997)
The success of Friends had made Jennifer Aniston one of Hollywood’s hottest properties. But it also convinced casting directors that she could only play variations of her self-obsessed and clumsy Friends character, Rachel. Alas, all of Aniston’s comedic skills were worthless as she was marooned in Picture Perfect, a lustre-less romcom about a desperate-for-a-boyfriend singleton who convinces random acquaintance Nick (Jay Mohr) to pretend to be her partner – largely to make Kevin Bacon’s bad boy Sam jealous. It later emerged that Aniston had blanked Mohr on set – she was supposedly miffed his part had not gone to her then-boyfriend Tate Donovan. On his podcast, Mohr said he had been so upset by Aniston’s hostility that he went home to his parents one weekend and cried his eyes out. Audience members who laboured through this disaster will have had a similar response. Keep your eyes peeled for future Big Bang Theory mega-star Kaley Cuoco, playing a little girl at a wedding.
15. Doctor Dolittle (1998)
The curse of Doctor Dolittle spans generations in Hollywood. The original 1967 adaptation of the Hugh Lofting novels about a man who natters with animals is regarded as a charmless folly with a runaway budget that soared three times over the original estimate. Meanwhile, the less said about Robert Downey Jr’s 2020 take on the tale, the better – it took a global pandemic to erase memories of the CGI slop-fest. Amid such undistinguished company, it says something for Eddie Murphy’s scatological Dr Dolittle that it is by far the worst of the bunch, featuring crude gags and a listless performance by Murphy. Dead behind the eyes, he is out-acted by his animal companions – including a guinea pig voiced by Chris Rock and a dog played by Ellen DeGeneres.
14. Inspector Gadget (1999)
Inspector Gadget is still fondly remembered in the UK as an Eighties cartoon with a catchy theme song. In the US, it was rebooted as a horrific action comedy starring a wildly miscast Matthew Broderick – no match for the great Don Adams, who voiced the cartoon – up against Rupert Everett’s villainous Dr Claw, masked in the original but here with his mug on full display. To quote one review from the time, it was “a downright dumb movie that, with its breathless pace, lack of character development and uninventive gags, might be torture for even the kids to sit through”.
13. The Pallbearer (1996)
Friends-mania provided its cast with steady movie offers from the mid-1990s onwards. David Schwimmer decided to cash in his Ross Geller chips with the bizarre black comedy The Pallbearer. He plays a disillusioned Gen-Xer who agrees to help carry the coffin of a former high school classmate who died by suicide – even though he has no memory of the kid and may have never actually known him. Along the way, he sleeps with the dead man’s mother (Barbara Hershey) and fixates on Gwyneth Paltrow, playing a pioneering version of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl that would become a tiresome feature of early 21st-century romcoms. It’s a queasy combination of death, sex and unrequited love that first-time director (and future Batman whisperer) Matt Reeves lacks the experience to bring together.
12. Home Alone 3 (1997)
By the late 1990s, Macaulay Culkin was too far into his awkward teenage years to reprise his iconic part of blood-thirsty cherub Kevin McAllister. And so the Home Alone baton was passed to eight-year-old Alex D Linz for a third movie that – for complicated and tedious reasons – finds North Korean cyberterrorists trying to break into the Chicago home of Linz’s character (also named Alex) after he skips school to recover from chickenpox. Written by Home Alone creator John Hughes but directed by first-time director Raja Gosnell, the clunky and laugh-free comedy cried out for Culkin’s charisma. In fact, Home Alone 3 is notable today primarily for a cameo by an 11-year-old Scarlett Johansson as Alex’s older sister.
11. Coneheads (1993)
The Blues Brothers and Wayne’s World were examples of characters originating on American sketch show Saturday Night Live and making the successful leap to the big screen. However, not all SNL sketches spread their wings beyond the mothership. One of the biggest flops was Coneheads, a $30m disaster adapted from a long-running SNL skit about pointy-headed aliens living in suburban America. Despite enthusiastic mugging from Dan Aykroyd as the Conehead dad, the film’s aliens-in-America premise proved too flimsy to sustain an entire standalone movie. Still, Coneheads would have a surprising afterlife, with wife-and-husband writers Bonnie and Terry Turner and star Jane Curtin (who played Aykroyd’s wife) reworking the formula into hit sitcom 3rd Rock from the Sun – about a family of aliens marooned on Earth (minus the pointy heads).
10. Flubber (1997)
Not even top-class gurning from Robin Williams could save a moribund remake of 1961’s The Absent-Minded Professor – renamed after the sentient green goo Williams’s character cooks up in the lab and which goes on to wreak havoc in his neighbourhood. Williams goes all in here, but not even a comedy legend firing on every piston could redeem a script that appears to have had all the laughs extracted at gunpoint.
9. Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995)
A bloodless attempt by Mel Brooks to resurrect the anarchic zing of his 1974 classic Young Frankenstein and apply it to the story of Dracula, Dead and Loving It is undone by a toothless script and wooden acting by Leslie Nielsen as the iconic Count (Brooks played his sworn enemy, Van Helsing). Reviewers drove a stake through the film’s heart, and Brooks did not take it well. In a confrontation with esteemed critic Roger Ebert, he didn’t hold back. “Listen, you, I made 21 movies. I’m very talented. I’ll live in history. I have a body of work. You only have a body.” However, such ranting was in vain, and 30 years on, Dead and Loving It is correctly regarded as one of the worst things Brooks has ever done.
8. The Beverly Hillbillies (1993)
Big-screen remakes of beloved TV shows were one of the great obsessions of Nineties Hollywood. From The Flintstones to Lost in Space, the results were invariably disastrous – and none was more cack-handed than The Beverly Hillbillies, about a family of heavily stereotyped Arkansas yokels who become rich after oil is found on their farmland and move to California to live it up. The project was a huge disaster for director Penelope Spheeris, who had struck gold the previous year with Wayne’s World (and whose background was in gritty punk documentaries). Three decades on, it’s only worth watching for a cameo by Dolly Parton as herself.
7. Beethoven (1992)
John Hughes directed iconic 1980s teen movies The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles, but his creative powers were waning when he co-scripted the inane story of a hulking pooch who teaches valuable life lessons to its adoptive family. Mawkish, dull and lacking in laughs, Beethoven nonetheless features a nicely villainous turn by a young David Duchovny as an evil venture capitalist trying to swindle Beethoven’s family, and an even younger Joseph Gordon-Levitt as an extra. Beethoven was a huge hit, spawning four direct sequels, three standalone reboots and an animated spin-off. Not that Hughes was exactly basking in the glory – having fallen out with Universal Pictures before the cameras even started rolling, he insisted on being credited as “Edmond Dantès” – the hero of Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo. Meanwhile, a fun fact for trivia fans: the 12 “Beethoven” dogs used in the film were owned and trained by Eleanor Keaton, widow of silent movie great Buster Keaton.
6. Look Who’s Talking Now! (1993)
When people talk about John Travolta’s career as having been in a dark place before Quentin Tarantino overruled studio objections and insisted he be cast in Pulp Fiction, they are referring to films such as Look Who’s Talking Now! Travolta and Kirstie Alley return for a threadbare third entry in a bafflingly successful series (combined box office earnings of over $200m). But instead of Bruce Willis ginning up laughs as the internal voice of a baby – the infantile formula that made the first two films bearable – this time we have to deal with a duo of dogs adopted by the family. Their thoughts are given voice by Danny DeVito and Diane Keaton, who must have wondered how she’d gone from The Godfather and Annie Hall to pooch purgatory.
5. Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo (1999)
The Nineties sex comedy reaches a grim nadir with this tale of a financially challenged fish tank cleaner who becomes a male prostitute. Jokes about overweight and disabled “clients” of Rob Schneider’s character – including a woman with Tourette syndrome played by a young Amy Poehler –were tasteless even by Nineties standards, while later attempts in the film to add a feel-good factor by having us see Deuce as a hero butterfly misfire.
4. Mr Nanny (1993)
With Kindergarten Cop and Junior, Arnold Schwarzenegger pioneered a new genre of cinema in which a musclebound lunk is chucked into a slapstick comedy and left to sink or swim. The actor was also blessed with enough droll charisma to stay afloat and extract genuine laughs from the action-hero-out-of-water premise. But WWE star Hulk Hogan had none of Schwarzenegger’s deadpan charm on the big screen. The point was painfully proved in Mr Nanny, where there was no sense he was in on the joke while playing a former wrestler looking after three out-of-control kids.
You have to credit Hogan for subverting his tough-guy reputation. In one memorable scene, he tries to bond with the kids by donning a pink ballerina tutu and mugging for all he is worth. However, cinemagoers didn’t see the funny side – Mr Nanny was a body-slamming flop, bringing in a pitiful $4.3m on a $10m budget.
3. Wild Wild West (1999)
One of Will Smith’s biggest disasters this side of the Oscars slap was his attempt to revive the old 1960s sci-fi western Wild Wild West, which proved an expensive mistake. It wasn’t all Smith’s fault – Kenneth Branagh puts in one of his worst turns as a scenery-chewing former Confederate evil genius. Meanwhile, Kevin Kline visibly sleepwalks through the inert script as the reluctant accomplice of Smith’s character. Likewise snoozing at the wheel is director Barry Sonnenfeld, who slaps on the CGI with a steampunk trowel while neglecting plot or dialogue.
2. Ghost Dad (1990)
Bill Cosby’s fall from grace was still decades away when Hollywood legend Sidney Poitier cast him in his ghoulish comedy about a dead dad who haunts his grieving kids – with supposedly heart-warming results (his spirit is finally reunited with his corpse, and he comes back to life). As the star of The Cosby Show, Cosby had a special place in the heart of American audiences – but he squandered that high standing with this thumpingly unfunny film.
1. Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot (1992)
Hollywood folklore has it that Schwarzenegger knowingly made an idiot out of his action rival Stallone by pretending to be all in on this dreadful script about a police detective and his bossy elderly mother. Catching wind of Schwarzenegger’s enthusiasm, Sly is said to have vowed to secure the rights – which he duly did, leading to a titter-deficient turkey that counted as his biggest fumble since he played football against the Nazis in Escape to Victory. Estelle Getty, who portrayed the mother of Stallone’s character, was famous for the sitcom The Golden Girls – though her comedic talents met their match in the dreadful script. Years later, Stallone would single out Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot as one of his biggest regrets.
