Putrid, yes, but not rotten

WASHINGTON -- I love my job.

The worst movie I saw last year in my capacity as film critic? “Punisher: War Zone.”

Here’s a film that inspired a critic from USA Today to ask, “Why punish us?” A film that features, in the role of the comic-book vigilante of the title, Ray Stevenson -- I had the same reaction: who? -- jamming a pencil up his nose to reset some broken cartilage. It’s accompanied by a wet, gristly sound effect that suggests someone deboning a chicken.

And yet I say: Thank God.

Apparently I dodged a bullet here. “Punisher: War Zone” isn’t even one of the 25 worst movies of 2008.

We asked our friends at RottenTomatoes.com to send us a rundown of the 25 most egregious duds of the last 12 months, based on the website’s highly sophisticated “Tomatometer” ranking system. Here’s how it works:

Any movie that received at least 30 reviews from a list of approved critics was eligible. Each review is assigned a numerical grade, based on the critic’s rating (or, if no rating is given, on an assessment by Rotten Tomato’s editors). Those grades are then averaged into an aggregate score, from 0 to 100, just like in elementary school. In the case of a tie, the movie with the most reviews was considered worse.

Last year’s Hall of Shame includes “Made of Honor” (score: 11), “College Road Trip” (12) and “Superhero Movie!” (15), a parody of “Spider-Man” and its ilk whose bravely optimistic exclamation point was, apparently, not enough. By way of comparison, “Man on Wire,” a documentary about tightrope walker Philippe Petit, got a 100. The animated charmer “Wall-E,” about a lovable robot, got a 96.

So. The best -- that is, least awful -- thing on the Rotten Tomatoes list of 25 bombs? M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Happening.” That apocalyptic horror film gets a Tomatometer grade of 19 out of 100. As a comparison, “Punisher: War Zone” earned a whopping 22.

Other films that beat out “Punisher” in the race to the bottom include “In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale” (4), “Meet the Spartans” (2), “Fool’s Gold” (10) and “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” (10).

Everyone, it seems, has an opinion. And these days, it’s all too easy to share it, especially if you’ve got access to a computer and a lot of free time. Which is why it’s all the more important to pause at this time of year, a time when the elite movie world seems to fall into lock step, with best-of lists featuring such names as “Frost/Nixon,” “Wendy and Lucy” and a handful of others.

Let us consider, then, “The Hottie & the Nottie.”

There’s a lesson to be learned from that misogynistic Paris Hilton vehicle (No. 7 on our stinker hit parade, with a score of 5), which Richard Roeper, in a fit of adverbial excess, called “excruciatingly, painfully, horribly, terribly awful” and the Chicago Tribune “a pea-brained vanity production.”

That lesson is: Making fun of bad movies is easy. Making good ones is hard.

Nobody sets out to make a lousy movie. Among the more high-profile titles on a list that includes such flashes in the pan as “Prom Night” and “Shutter” (a horror twofer tied for No. 8) is “The Love Guru.”

The stakes could not have been higher for that summer comedy, produced and co-written by its star, Mike Myers, about a long-haired prophet of self-help named Pitka. To restore his street cred, onetime comic genius Myers, who hadn’t appeared in a live-action film since 2003’s disastrous “The Cat in the Hat,” needed to make us laugh again, and badly.

Unfortunately, that seems to be exactly what he did.

“If you’re in the mood for a delightful tweak of today’s self-actualizing New Age gurus,” wrote Entertainment Weekly, of what Rotten Tomatoes calls the 19th-worst film of the year, “look elsewhere. If, on the other hand, you want to see gags about boogers, elephant poop, and mano-a-mano duels with mops drenched in urine, then this is for you.”

Ouch.

It certainly isn’t the only example of how the mighty have fallen.

Al Pacino, in the thriller “88 Minutes,” was described in the Washington Post as “over-mannered and near-histrionic.” Another critic compared the actor’s performance to a “festival of hair.” According to the New York Post, the only suspense in the film -- about a forensic psychologist with less than an hour and a half to solve his own impending murder -- came from audiences wondering “until the very last minute whether this is the worst Al Pacino movie ever made.”

Oh, I don’t know about that. Does anyone other than me remember a little something called “Simone,” a 2002 satire about a creatively blocked filmmaker so desperate that he creates a digital actress, who then becomes more famous than he?

But now, for the news you’ve all been waiting for.

The worst movie of the 2008 is -- drum roll, please -- “One Missed Call.” Tomatometer score: 0. That’s right, zero, zippo, zilch.

How is that possible? And what do you mean you never heard of it? Surely someone out there liked this remake of a Japanese horror film, starring Shannyn Sossamon and Edward Burns, about people who get creepy messages on their cellphones from their future doomed selves.

But maybe not. Among the film’s kinder notices was the review by WaffleMovies.com, which called it a “turkey of a bomb of a debacle.” The only thing missing, WaffleMovies said, was . . . Lindsay Lohan.