Ticket Stubs #22: The Bad, the Ugly, and the Uglier

Thanks to your unwavering readership, dear Ticketholders, Just the Ticket and all other contributions to the Ticketverse have passed the 5,000 readership mark. Welcome to the Dead Parade's Slither issue is still #1 with nearly double the readership of its runner-up, Just the Ticket's A Little Piece of..., which has me incredibly shocked since A Little Bit of Heaven was suck such a terrible movie, but I appreciate the readership, guys. So keep the +1's coming and tell your friends to get my numbers up because Safeway pays the bills, but bitching about life and pop culture fuels my soul.
Speaking of bitching and fueling my soul, the whole Retribution debacle has me in a greater state of depressed aimlessness than usual. So to get back on track, I thought another exhibition of cinematic degeneration would inspire me to kick off another round of Ticket Stubs. So without further ado, here comes an update of The Bad, the Ugly, and the Uglier:

FROM July 11, 2004 (SW@ Ticket #9: The Bad, the Ugly, and the Uglier): I can't get any worse than the crap I saw this week unless I really try.

The Bad this week is a forgotten review from two weeks ago: Bad Santa. Billy Bob Thornton (Bad News Bears), John Ritter (RIP), Bernie Mac, and Lauren Graham (Gilmore Girls, Parenthood) star in a movie about a department store Santa with a sailor's dirty mouth and love of booze who makes a yearly fortune robbing malls. The usual crime caper constraints, combined with countless cursings, copulations, and crude comedy compose a compelling piece of crap toward its climax. The dirty cop who wants in on the action, the female distraction (who wants in on a different kind of action), the backstabbing partner, and family obligations make things at once disturbing and funny as hell. If slow children, drunken Santas, horny waitresses, foul language, and crime gone awry are not a few of your favorite things, rent something else. But if you went "ooh!" or "ahh!" at any time while reading this, Bad Santa is for you. Since I didn't see it this week,
B-

The Ugly refers to the incredibly boring Station Agent. An introverted little person (Emmy-nominated Peter Dinklage of Game of Thrones) inherits a train depot from a dead friend, gets run off the road by a woman he later falls in love with (Patricia Clarkson, Shutter Island), and is annoyed daily by a loudmouth buddy-buddy hotdog vendor (Emmy-nominated Bobby Cannavale, Nurse Jackie).
The first ten minutes or so involves the main character being ridiculed for his size, followed by another ten minutes of him walking as many miles (or more) to his new depot. Intermittent pity parties remind us of the character's size between comic exchanges with woman and vendor, then drama is heaped upon the viewer for the last half hour or more of the film. Props for packing emotion into scenes without using cheesy dialogue, but that's about it.
C-

Getting even Uglier, we go into a film that tries and fails to be many things at once. Epoch: Evolution is a gov't/religion cover-up (as per the Left Behind series), action-romance, scifi-disaster film (as per Independence Day). Or rather, it is none of these things.
As crappy as Left Behind was (when Bible-thumpers are your chief demographic and the best leading man you can land is Growing Pains' Kirk Cameron, it's time for another trip to the drawing board...if someone hasn't already carted you off to the loony bin, that is), Epoch 2 fails to live up to even that. The characters and dialogue are so stiff that more believability and emotion could have been squeezed out of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Demi Moore, and Vin Diesel.
As for the disaster film aspect, a few mediocre supercells and poorly created earthquake effects are shown on the news and Armageddon is mentioned in passing, but no human casualties are actually shown as a result of these natural disasters. The aliens responsible are predictably scripted as being from Mars, and there's no nookie. So they can take that cookie and stick it up their Yeah!
F-

"Nookie" is (C) and (R) by Limp Bizkit and Flip/Interscope Records.
All Rights Reserved.

Why did I wait so long? Why did I take so long to figure it out? But I did it and now I'm ready to kick off a series dedicated to trashing the many horrible horror movies I reviewed in my SW@ Ticket days, starting with a film featured in my What If? trilogy (other non-horror What Iffers included, free of charge). Stay tuned.