As I was finishing up my article on Cobra Kai yesterday, something occurred to me. This is the second hit in the last month that built its story around the villain (Infinity War was the first). In the past, this kind of storytelling was relegated to dark indie dramas and Westerns, and even then, the characters were more antiheroes than villains. But Cobra Kai and Infinity War prove that villain-protags can be used in populist entertainment as well. I’m still mulling this over so don’t go writing your serial killer superhero screenplay just yet. But it’s definitely an interesting topic for discussion.

We’ve got a really eclectic group of scripts this weekend. We’ve got mermaids. Shades of The Running Man. And apparently cars are hot in Hollywood as we have TWO concepts built around them. As you guys know, the rules to Amateur Offerings are simple. Read as much as you can from each script and vote for your favorite in the comments. The script with the most votes gets a read next week!

And if you believe you have a screenplay that’s better than anything sucker Hollywood is making, submit it for a future Amateur Offerings! Send me a PDF of your script, along with the title, genre, logline, and why you think people should read it (your chance to pitch yourself or your story). All submissions should be sent to Carsonreeves3@gmail.com.

Title: Most Dangerous
Genre: TV Pilot (Drama)
Logline: In a dystopian future where death comes early for most, the hyper-violent game of Bullseye keeps the downtrodden masses pacified. The stars of the game trade a shortened life expectancy for luxury and carnal pleasure. But when Bullseye’s most famous star tries to retire, it’s the seed of resistance that ultimately leads to a revolution led my the men and women who play the most dangerous of games.
Why You Should Read: This script originally started as a feature spurred on by an article you wrote about mining public domain IP for ideas. I was going to write an adaptation based on the famous short “The Most Dangerous Game”. Set in a dystopian future, in my story the island is used as a place to hunt famous athletes who dare to leave a violent sport called ‘Bullseye’. Then something happened. After the 1st act, I didn’t want to go to the island for the rest of the story. Rather, I wanted to continue to explore the characters and world I had created.

So I hit on another Carson mantra, always have at least one pilot in your arsenal. While I have written 9 features, this is my first pilot. And I discovered that I enjoyed this format much more than I ever anticipated. One last thing – I’ve been writing for a good fifteen years now. Writing screenplays is much like climbing Mount Everest. You actually have to go backwards a few times before you get to the top, and there’s no guarantee you’ll ever get there. Most writers fall into a crevasse and are never heard from again. I’m hoping this script is my rope bridge to the summit. I’d appreciate anything the SS community has to say.

Title: BLOOD HARVEST – Based on Hamlin Garland’s short story “Under the Lion’s Paw”
Genre: Western
Logline: A humble family, driven away from their home by locusts, is persuaded to settle on a vacated farm by an older couple whose extreme generosity hides something malicious.
Why You Should Read: There’s been a lot of talk on the site about slow-burn vs boring scripts, and more specifically in regards to westerns. Like someone said, slow-burn still means that there’s a fire, and we may not see it, but we can smell the smoke. That’s exactly what my intentions were with this script, a situation that escalates until it blows up. An unlucky family taken advantage of by greedy men. A father willing to do anything to defend his loved ones. A conflict where the law doesn’t seem to be synonymous with justice. If these themes seem to resonate with you, then you should give my 93-page script a shot. And for anyone who does, a million thanks in advance.

Title: The Traitor Who Loved a Mermaid
Genre: Spy Thriller
Logline: A naval intelligence officer falls in love with a co-worker only to discover that she’s an embedded spy from the secretive world of mermaids, and he’s unwittingly become a traitor.
Why You Should Read: There hasn’t been a good American movie about Mermaids in far too long; 34 years by my count. They’re such mesmerizing creatures. They’re exotic, dangerous, and romantic — and deserve a grand adventure on the big screen. Since summer is here, I thought it might be fun to offer up a big summer movie idea that is meant to be the ultimate date movie. It’s got all of the action and pyrotechnics adventure seekers adore, and the grand old romance that movies have been missing lately.

Title: Hang On
Genre: First half, engaging Drama. Second half, gooch-clenched Thriller.
Logline: During an interstate move, an anxiety-stricken mother and her family find themselves in a desperate struggle for survival after their SUV plummets from a mountain road, leaving everyone trapped in the wreckage at the bottom of an isolated ravine.
Why You Should Read: I guarantee you’ll be entertained. I guarantee not to waste your time. There’s a transient hobo-creeper with a MAGA cap that’s an unpredictable threat. I guarantee goals, stakes, and insane urgency. I guarantee a strong female lead. I guarantee a white-knucklin’ nailbiter. I guarantee fewer than 10 adverbs. I guarantee <5 typos. I guarantee Jennifer Lawrence is perfect for the lead. I guarantee Jason Bateman is perfect for her hubby. And I guarantee I need help for dream-casting their genius 12-year-old son character. So, why should you read? Cause this is a clautrophobic, anxiety-laden, semi-contained thrill ride. AND! I will guarantee you won't be disappointed. If you are, then I was wrong, and I will field the gripes. Here's my phone number to voice complaints: 323-555-5555. I will also send nods, shakes, waffles, and roses to the troubled. (PS: Anyone have a contact with A24?) About Me: Currently a cop supplementing a shitty cop-income with cop-related screenwriting gigs. I quit the pre-med program my freshman year in college to become a cop because of Lethal Weapon and Training Day. It was way cooler on screen, but now I’m 16 years in and “making a difference.” I’m married to a wife who’s riddled with anxiety but madly supportive of my screenwriting pipedream, who birthed a stupid-smart kid named Maverick that weighed two pounds at birth, along with two German Shepherds that speak English, but shouldn’t. If this were Twitter: #Blessed. I love them all.

Title: The Car
Genre: Supernatural Horror
Logline: A young mechanic buys a 69 Chevy Nova haunted by the vengeful spirit of a teenage girl who was murdered in the back seat and together they avenge her murderers one by one. A supernatural horror set in Detroit in the vein of It Follows and Let The Right One In that explores guilt and redemption.
Why You Should Read: This is a script I wrote a good number of years ago but I’ve now rewritten it a good bit having learnt more about the craft of screenwriting (I think!). With 50% of the movie being set in the car I believe it’s contained enough to be made well on a low-budget I am a director too and would plan to direct this film and want to make sure it’s developed well enough. I’d be grateful of any feedback if selected.

We’re so close to Avengers Infinity War I can taste it like I can taste a ripe tomato on a freshly fried In and Out burger. I can feel it within my talons – the biggest superhero movie ever made. Yet I have to wait an entire week to sample the goods!? What country do I live in! Syria!? I have no doubt life hates me. And on top of that you casually drop the news that the Kardashians have closed all their Dash stores?? Where is a fashion-conscious person supposed to shop dammit!!! It’s like I’m literally watching Armageddon rain down around me.

Which is why I’m so so happy to interrupt this awful news with… (shouting from the rooftops voice) “AAAMMMMMATEEEEEUR OFFFERRRRINGS!” It’s the place where you, the mild-mannered screenwriter, the little guy with a big idea, can be featured in a one-weekend battle royale style tournament, and IF YOU WIN, you get a review on the site next Friday. What could that review lead to? Try money. Fame. Hundreds of adoring Twitter fans. I call that the sweetest deal on the internet.

Don’t be shy folks. If you believe you have a screenplay that is reverse-Armageddon worthy, submit it for a future Amateur Offerings! Send me a PDF of your script, along with the title, genre, logline, and why you think people should read it (your chance to pitch your story). All submissions should be sent to Carsonreeves3@gmail.com.

Rules of amateur offerings: Read as much as you can from each script and vote for your favorite in the comments!

Title: Messiah Complex
Genre: Crime/Thriller
Logline: A Salt Lake City P.I. is put directly in the crosshairs of a deranged cult when he’s hired to find the sister of an ambitious public official.
Why You Should Read: I’ve been sending this one out to contests after it got decent coverage. Eager to see what the scriptshadow community thinks. If you like neo-noir, mystery, dark humor, cults, etc., you’ll enjoy this incredibly twisted rabbit hole. Hard-boiled, quirky, and even shocking.

Title: Murder In Grave
Genre: Thriller
Logline: Facing the prospect of permanently losing her hearing, a music teacher gets an artificially intelligent cochlear implant that convinces her to commit mass murder.
Why Should You Read? What would you do if the only thing that gave you meaning in this world was to be taken away forever? — If there was an experimental procedure, with untold risks, that could prevent that scenario, would you undertake it? — Murder In Grave is a slow burn thriller, that has been crafted with the sole purpose of emotionally strangling the main character from page one until fade out. A hurdles race where the obstacles get higher and faster the further you go on. — Naturally, as the stakes increase, something always has to give.

Title: Bet Your Life
Genre: Dark Comedy
Logline: A suicidal gambling addict is drawn into a plot to rob the betting office she used to own.
Extended logline: … But between her dysfunctional support group friends, an ex-fiance who doesn’t want her back, a magpie that won’t leave her alone and a dice-wielding, luck-obsessed psychopath, it appears that Lady Luck may have other plans for her life.
Why You Should Read: This is that script that I’ve never been able to cut my losses on (ironic and topical). And recently, after a creative buzz, I tore off my shackles, leaned into my weirds and killed a few babies (in screenwriting terms only, I’ve only killed one baby* in real life, and that was an “accident” – we’ve all been there, an annoying baby screaming in his pram, the top of a grand staircase and Leslie Nielsen nowhere in sight and whoops an “accidental” passing nudge). Anyway, I digress….

This script is very In Bruges-y in tone, part comedy, part drama but with female central characters. It draws heavily on themes of luck and addiction with some serious scientific examination thrown in for good measure… That being how high up you’d need to be to guarantee instant death if you threw yourself from a building. Important stuff. — As for me, I’ve been writing (in my spare time) for nearly ten years. I have a receipt from a UK University saying this is more than a just a hobby so I hope to tickle your fancy, your balls and/or your boobs (yes, potentially both. Inclusive, so…) and invite you to indulge in my script.

*That baby was really ugly. And he had the look of a baby who would grow up to kill babies.

Title: Sentinel
Genre: Sci-Fi Thriller
Logline: After the U.S. government unleashes a terrifying secret weapon to hunt down illegal border-crossers, a female border agent is forced to work with a vicious cartel gangster to ferry a young migrant to safety.
Why You Should Read: Sentinel was a semifinalist at the 2012 Nicholls and came in 2nd place in the sci-fi/action category at the PAGE Awards. This script landed me a manager and was sent around Hollywood. (The logline was actually selected by Scriptshadow in a Top 100 loglines contest–it was called Coyote back then). — Sentinel received a lot of great responses from agents and producers but back in 2012-13 the general consensus was that illegal immigration was not a saleable concept. Well fast forward to 2018 and Trump is building a wall and movies like “Get Out” and “A Quiet Place” are proving that tough topics and sci-fi monster stories are alive and kicking. — Sentinel is a tight, relentless thriller that tackles racism, illegal immigration, and redemption in a bold new way. I think Scriptshadow readers will really enjoy it.

Title: Skin and Sinew
Genre: Historical Thriller
Logline: When a Confederate raid on his small Native American tribe results in the death of his Queen and people, an ancient creature with the ability to assume any human form embarks on a mission to hunt down the general responsible for the massacre.
Why You Should Read: If I were to play the comparison game and elevator-pitch my movie, I’d say it’s “Under the Skin” meets “The Revenant.” Set during the closing years of the American Civil War, “Skin and Sinew” is brutal, violent and grim; a down-and-dirty B-movie revenge story not unlike the classed-up exploitation flicks that S. Craig Zahler has excelled in. If you’re looking for a head-smashing, bone-crunching good time, give this bad boy a shot. Many thanks to anyone willing to check it out; I look forward to reading what the community (and, God willing, Carson) has to say about it!

So what’s the big news I was teasing on Twitter the other day? We’re going to write a screenplay! That is correct. Every Thursday over the next three months, I am going to take you through each step of the process, leaving you with a finished screenplay to go out into the world with. How cool is that??

What’s the idea here? A few things. First, to help those still trying to figure out how to write a script. Those of you in the beginning stages confused with all the jargon and the rules, I’m going to take you step by step through the process, making it as painless as possible.

Second, to give those of you with your own writing process a new way to look at things. I’m hoping that a fresh take on the process will allow you to see the craft in a whole new light. Even if you don’t adopt the process I lay out, I’m sure you’ll take a few things with you moving forward.

Third, and most importantly, I want you to have a finished screenplay. Writing is synonomous with procastination and we often find ourselves eight months into a script with no idea where to go next. With me breathing down your neck, you won’t be able to make excuses for not writing anymore. We’re going to have deadlines every week. And I’m going to make sure you meet them so that at the end of three months, you will have a 110 page screenplay.

To make this fun, at the end of the process, we’re going to have a tournament. I’m going to pick the top 40 or so loglines/pitches and stagger a series of Super Amateur Showdowns (10 scripts instead of five). We’ll have a quarter-finals, a semi-finals, and a finals, where you guys will vote the best scripts through.

During that time, you’ll be allowed to use the notes you get from each showdown to improve your script for the next round. This is what Scriptshadow does better than anywhere else – crowd-sourcing feedback. We’re going to take advantage of that to make these scripts the best they can possibly be.

Now I know a lot of you are rushing to meet that May 1st Nicholl Fellowship deadline. So we’re going to wait until that’s over and you’re free of any script commitments.

But that doesn’t mean you’re off the hook. Since we’ll be starting in two weeks, YOU NEED A CONCEPT. The concept is the most important part of the process. If you don’t have a good concept, nothing you write during those three months will matter.

So here’s the deal: start thinking of concepts. Start sharing concepts with your friends. You can share them here in the comments or if you’re a private person, ask people to share privately via e-mail. But I strongly encourage you to get feedback on your concept(s) before committing. If people don’t sound excited about your idea, come up with something else.

In fact, I’m going to allow you each to send me a single e-mail with up to 5 loglines (carsonreeves3@gmail.com) and I will give you a 1-10 rating on each. If your logline doesn’t at least get a 7, go with something else. And because I’m going to get a ton of e-mails, I WILL NOT be able to get into detail about why I gave your logline the rating I did. This is just meant as a way to give you a quick opinion on if your loglines are working.

We’ll get a little more into concept next week, and then the week after, WE BEGIN. So sharpen those pencils cause we’re going to write a F&%$ING SCREENPLAY!

Genre: TV Pilot – Sitcom
Premise: A 30-something writer for an outdoors magazine suffers an injury that forces him to work back at the company offices, where the magazine is run by a bunch of delicate millennials with zero outdoors experience.
About: This is a new sitcom coming to CBS which snagged the most in-demand comedy talent on the 2016 market in Community star Joel McHale. McHale will be joined by McLovin who is mclovin the fact that he’s finally got a job.
Writer/Creator: Mike Gibbons
Details: 46 pages

As those of you who follow me on Twitter know, Joel McHale and I are workout buddies. And by workout buddies I mean we work out at the same gym (Gold’s Hollywood if anyone wants to join us) and occasionally use machines that are in close proximity to one another.

Okay, if we’re being totally honest, this proximity thing has only happened a couple of times. But there was one time when Joel was walking towards me and smiled in such a way that it was either meant for me or the guy behind me. Which it’s fair to say can be counted as a half-smile towards me. Which basically means we’re best friends.

In all seriousness, after a few complaints in the comments section of Pilot Submission Saturday, I felt bad that I didn’t choose a single half-hour comedy. In my defense, I don’t understand the appeal of shows like The Big Bang Theory or Mom. And a lot of that comes from the fact that the half-hour comedy has evolved out of the 3-camera format into something more creative, thanks to shows like The Office, Modern Family, and Community.

So consider today’s a review a test. Because I LOVE the talent involved in today’s pilot. You have my buddy Joel McHale. You have McLovin, who’s so cool that his famous character is just as popular today as it was ten years ago. And you have Mike Gibbons.

Now Gibbons is a name you probably don’t know yet but you should. He’s the head writer on the best late night show on television, the amazing James Corden show (if you haven’t watched it yet, do so tonight. I guarantee it’ll bring a smile to your face).

All of this is a long-winded way of saying if TODAY’S script doesn’t win me over, then no multi-camera sit com is going to do so. Because I love what all these guys bring to the table. So grab your tea-coffee chais and your bacon-maple donuts you hipsters, and join me for a plot breakdown that I pray I’ll like.

35 year-old Joel (yes, the character Joel plays is also named “Joel”) has been forced into a position he promised himself he’d never be in – taking a desk job. It’s not Joel’s fault. He was out climbing the world’s tallest mountain when a bad fall messed up his leg, ending his mountain-climbing career instantly.

To make matters worse, Joel works at an outdoors magazine run by 20-something hipster douches whose idea of mountain climbing is clicking through Yelp reviews of restaurants that are on a hill. In a world where Joel wants to write serious articles about running out of oxygen at 25,000 feet, his hipster cohorts would rather write about the five best mountain-climbing tools to have should the zombie apocalypse arrive.

All the garden-variety sit-com tropes are in place, like the female lead whose only job it is to inject sexual tension into each episode. Oh, and let’s not forget the token black friend who lets our hero stay at his place while he gets back on his feet (except for the days when he’s Air BnB’ing his house!).

Despite the fact that when you take the ‘i’ out of ‘pilot’ you’re left with ‘plot,’ I couldn’t find anything resembling such a thing in this episode. There may have been a magazine-wide pitch due at the end of the show but you’d be hard pressed to point out where they set this up.

In the end, despite Joel hating his new job, he decides to give it a shot because if he doesn’t there wouldn’t be a show. Which, to be honest, probably would’ve been better for his career. I know that CBS is the only network that still understands the classic sit-com format. But I’d be surprised if even they could make this one work.

One of the terrible things about sit-coms is that when they’re bad, theyre realllllly bad. As in they go south faster than a Irish woman on St. Patty’s day. Something about the fact that you’re hearing laughter when things are so clearly unfunny makes how not-funny they are even more noticeable.

Did you ever watch that awful Sean Hayes sitcom from a year ago? And how bout that Mark Paul Gossler sitcom about married life that came and went faster than a Sascha Baron Cohen opening weekend? The Great Indoors feels like a combination of those two shows.

And it’s driving me crazy trying to figure out why my workout buddy agreed to do this. This is a man who participated in one of the most edgy comedies of the last half-decade. And now he’s doing traditional sit-coms?? That’s like racking a three-plate bench press then going to the warm-up area to do push-ups.

There was only one joke in the entire script that I hadn’t seen before, and that’s when Joel had to go to HR for making a millennial cry. Laughter had become such a foreign concept during this read, that I immediately felt guilty for doing so, sort of like I’d just giggled at a crippled man who’d fallen out of his wheelchair.

A big reason for the lack of laughter came from how lame these characters were. One of the things I always push upon writers is that you want to create three-dimensional characters. These characters were the antithesis of this. They were one-dimensional to the core. As in you pick one trait per character and hit on it over and over and over again until you want to stick your forehead in a 1920s printing press.

And look, one of my favorite shows ever was Seinfeld. Those characters were pretty one-dimensional themselves. But at least that show was trying to do something different! It didn’t follow the traditional sit-com format. It centered on the minutia of everyday life. This meant that at least one aspect of the show was taking us into unfamiliar territory.

The Great Indoors is a premise lost in its 1950s treatment of the format. Which is ironic because it’s supposed to be about this new generation of hipsters who are changing the work game.

I mean, shit, The Intern covered millennials 100 times better than this, giving each of its characters multiple traits (Adam Devine’s character wasn’t just the clueless millennial who spent all day on Facebook, but also a good friend to Robert DeNiro who helped him feel at home at the company). When you’re getting beat out by Nancy Meyers for character depth, you may want to reevaluate your teleplay.

I don’t get it guys. Why isn’t this format extinct? Everything about it is played out. And outside of the premise itself, there isn’t a single thing that’s new here. Wake me up when this format disappears.

[ ] what the hell did I just read?

[x] wasn’t for me 

[ ] worth the read 

[ ] impressive 

[ ] genius

What I learned: I’ll qualify this by saying I’m not an expert on sitcoms, but I’ve always found that no matter WHAT you’re writing, it works best when you come up with a story first, then squeeze your setup in around that. Scripts are much less successful when you focus on setting up your world first, then try to squeeze in a story around that. The Great Indoors does the latter, leaving everything feeling forced, exposition-heavy, and worst of all, not very entertaining.

Please get me out of this movie!

I don’t like trashing movies. I really don’t. By and large, Hollywood is a place where people love movies and are doing their best to make good ones. “Nobody sets out to make a piece of shit,” some producer once said. And so you don’t want to trash someone who tried like hell and just couldn’t get it poppin. However, there are instances where people who don’t value the opportunity they’ve been given get to make films, or times where ego dictates a film getting made, or where the almighty dollar becomes more important to the studio than making a good movie. And in those cases, I think it’s okay to call the movie out. Almost every movie on my Worst Of List falls into one of these three categories. So yeah, I’m going to vent a little bit here. But in order to give the post some value, I’ll throw in a few screenwriting lessons along the way. Let’s get started, shall we?

10) Jupiter Ascending – Calling the Wachowskis misguided at this point doesn’t do their status justice. Sure, the two are the original imagine dragons and they possess spoon-bending directing skills. But they’re stuck in “M. Night Shalaman Land,” unable to realize how badly their writing is screwing up their movies. Jupiter Ascending is a classic case of writers trying to cram way too much story into their script. George Lucas had to come to terms with this with the original Star Wars, which was supposed to have most of the stuff that ended up in Empire and Jedi. He finally relented, realizing it was too much story to tell, and focused on a more contained version of the story (by the way, there isn’t a sci-fi adventure script I’ve read that didn’t have too much story in its first few drafts). What that script gained in the process was urgency – becoming one of the greatest chase films of all time. Jupiter Ascending, with its bulky and bloated plotting, was the antithesis of this, a lumbering leviathan, and a lesson to all aspiring screenwriters to KEEP YOUR STORIES LEAN!

9) Knock Knock – Maybe it’s serendipitous that our number nine slot involves the actor who helped bring the Wachowskis into the public spotlight. This one really hurts though. For like two seconds, Keanu Reeves was cool again. John Wick brought the “Whoa” back. Which meant we could look forward to a Keanu who would receive better scripts, get better offers, and reclaim his spot on the A-list. Except Knock Knock. Who’s there? Eli Roth. If there is a working director with a bigger name who is less talented than Eli Roth, I’d like to know who he is. Knock Knock takes a somewhat interesting premise – a married man who lets two stranded trouble-making teens into his home while his family is out of town – then writes half a screenplay out of it. That’s right. Knock Knock runs out of story 60 minutes through. The whole idea with a premise like this is you make it a one-night ordeal – a series of escalating problems that climax before daylight. Yet Roth and his writing crew inexplicably send the girls home the next morning, only to have them show up a day later to, I guess, inflict more pain on Keanu. Except by that point, ALL THE TENSION IS GONE, leaving us confused as to what the point of the story was anymore. The screenwriting tip on this one is pretty obvious. Once all the air is let out of the balloon, you can’t blow it back up again.

8) Man From U.N.C.L.E. – This was the most bizarre movie experience I had all year. I have never seen a movie with more beautiful cinematography and more talented directing come across so dead on the screen. It didn’t help that everybody in the film looked like they’d just smoked a pound of herb! Oh, and that Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer have the collective personality quotient of a monk at a hospice center. Luckily, not many people had to suffer from these performances since THIS MOVIE HAD THE WORST TITLE OF THE DECADE and therefore NO ONE SHOWED UP!!!! Okay, just work with me for a second on this. You’re John Smith living in Minnesota and you want to see a movie this weekend. I tell you the movie, “Man from U.N.C.L.E.” is playing. What do you think the chances are of him having any idea what the movie is about from that title? I’ll give you a hint. NEGATIVE 9 BILLION PERCENT! But for shits and giggles, let’s let him watch the trailer. That should make things clearer right? Um… sorta? It seems to be a buddy cop movie set in the 1960s? And one of the guys is Russian (when has a movie that featured a Russian accent in one of the main roles EVER done well in America????)? And they’re trying to stop something? And what do you tell your friend John when he asks why “uncle” has a bunch of periods inserted into it? I have no idea why anybody thought this movie had a Jawa’s chance in the Sarlac Pitt of doing well. Screenwriting lesson: Make sure your title helps sell your movie!

7) Entourage – This one seems like easy pickens. But it’s on the list because it’s bad in a way that none of the other movies are bad. It’s bad because it’s empty. More than all of the other entries, Entourage has the least story to tell. Indeed, when the end credits roll, it seems like we’ve been watching for 30 minutes. Vince (the lead character) directing a movie is supposed to be the “big hook” that makes this Entourage story worthy of feature-status. But Entourage the Movie is an example of why some stories are best kept on the small screen. Entourage has always been about the dialogue and the interaction between its lively group of characters. What it never purported to have was STAKES. You never felt like if the characters failed that anything bad would happen to them. And since movies are one event (as opposed to 100), the stakes need to be giant in them. Since Entourage had never operated in that arena before, it didn’t know what to do when given that mandate. And, oh yeah, since we were talking about Mary Sues the other day, isn’t Vince the biggest Mary Sue in the history of television? No movie felt like it had robbed me of my money more than this one.

6) Mississippi Grind – No film implored me to want to scrape my eyeballs out with rusty sporks in 2015 more than Mississippi Freaking Grind. I consider the hack that got Mississippi Grind made one of the industries biggest issues, and a loophole that bad writer/directors will continue to exploit if financiers don’t stop funding these. Basically, what you do is you write a non-story that centers around two miserable characters. Actors love playing miserable characters! So even though the story sucks balls, they sign on. And once you have known actors, you can get funding. And hence Mississippi Grind gets made. But the ridiculousness doesn’t stop there. Critics typically give these movies high marks because they’re different from Hollywood flicks and there’s at least one good performance. These factors help mask the fact that movies like Mississippi Grind are absolutely awful. Nothing happens in this fucking movie!!!! Two people gamble and talk and wallow in misery. FOR FUCKING TWO HOURS!!!!! There is never a point to any of it. These self-indulgent pretentious exercises in filmmaker masturbation do nothing other than convince a few poor souls to mistakenly lay down $5.99 for an Itunes rental. A mistake, I’m ashamed to admit, I made. I should’ve known better.

5) Fantastic Four – I know. Another gimme. We all heard about what happened. The director stayed in his trailer half the shoot, preferring to snort lines instead of help his actors read them. He’d get kicked off directing duties for a future Star Wars movie as a result (thank God!). They needed to bring in other directors to try and save the film. It was a mess. But movies have been saved from doom before. Maybe Fantastic Four could do the same? I’m afraid not, my friends. My best guess, from watching the film, is that the only stuff director Josh Trank shot before he went crazy was the first act. Because that’s all this movie is! One giant first act. I can’t tell you how many scenes there were of people in labs or on computers “researching things.” In a typical Hollywood blockbuster, those shots would’ve been relegated to a 60 second montage. Here they’re the main souce of plot for an entire hour! At a certain point it became a game of “How many computer generated DNA strands can characters look at in a single film?” Then, when we FINALLY get to the point where they go to the “other dimension” that they’ve spent 90 minutes researching, it’s a terribly composited incredibly ugly half-CGI empty moon-like surface. THIS IS WHAT WE’VE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS WHOLE TIME???? TO COME HERE??? This movie probably would’ve finished higher on this list if I didn’t feel so bad for all the people who had to work on it.

4) Terminator: Genisys – Here’s some advice for Hollywood studios. Do not, under any circumstances, deliberately spell a word wrong in your sci-fi title. It is a guarantee that your movie will suck. I’m serious. Star Wars was not spelled, “Star Warz.” Or “Starr Worrz.” Is there any person on this planet who didn’t know this movie was going to be terrible as soon as they saw this misspelled title? And yet still, after lowering the bar that much, Terminator: Genisys still somehow managed to disappoint us. As I’ve always said on this site, if you’re going to do time travel, KEEP IT SIMPLE. Time travel is inherently confusing. Trying to mash multiple time-jumping storylines together is a recipe for movie suckage. To me though, it comes down to this director. Here’s a guy who took one of the most iconic scenes in science-fiction history, the naked Terminator walking up to a gang of punks and demanding their clothes, and changed the haircuts of the punks (from blue spiked hair to black normal hair and from a short cut to a green mohawk) because he “felt like it.” Any director who doesn’t understand why you don’t change the hair of the characters in that scene SHOULDN’T BE ALLOWED TO FUCKING DIRECT THE MOVIE. What’s interesting about this film is that it was casting at the exact same time as The Force Awakens, and each production was fighting over the same actors. I can only imagine if JJ Abrams would’ve brought Emilia Clarke into the Star Wars universe. His pitch would’ve been so simple: “Come with me if you want your career to live.”

3) American Ultra – American Ultra puts every rant Max Landis has made on Youtube and Twitter into question. If he thinks this movie is good writing? I don’t think you can trust anything the guy says, whether it be about Mary Sues or lookie loos or piles of doo-doos. I can’t remember the last time a movie has made me hate its main characters so quickly. Our “hero” is a loser who smokes pot all day (why do I get the feeling this “trait” was based off of someone the writer knew?), refuses to do anything, doesn’t try to make his life better, whines all the time, and is generally a miserable worthless human being who has no interest in bettering his life. His girlfriend isn’t much better. She ALSO smokes pot all day, stays in like her boyfriend, gets pissed when her boyfriend doesn’t want to do anything, and is generally a humorless annoying excuse for a human being. THESE ARE OUR HEROES!!!!! What Max Landis doesn’t realize is that nothing he writes after he’s introduced us to these two people matters. It doesn’t matter if our protagonist all of a sudden gains Jason Bourne like powers. BECAUSE WE HATE HIM! A script can recover from a morally questionable character introduction. But it CANNOT RECOVER from a character the audience detests to the very core. But even if Landis managed to get that right, this is still a confused premise that’s only celebrated at 3 in the morning after everyone’s too trashed and too high to know a good idea from a bad one. “Like, he’s a stoner, who’s also, like, Jason Bourne. Wouldn’t that be awesome?” “Yeah dude. Max, you should totally write that.” “I can probably belt out a first draft by breakfast.” “Can I play the dealer?”

2) Aloha – This is the most significant of the movies I’ve put on this list because when I first reviewed this script, which was beyond awful, I got a call from one of the producers of the film chastising me for reviewing an early draft of the script (strangely enough, I kid you not, the final draft of the script added a major villain character named, “Carson”). Yet I knew, just knew, that there was no way this could ever become a good script. And it wasn’t because of the writer. This is Cameron fucking Crowe we’re talking about here, writer of Jerry Maguire and Say Anything! But the premise was so confused, so unsure of itself, that rewriting it was be akin to reorganizing the sheet music on a Nickleback song. Let this be a warning to all of you that if your concept is flawed from the beginning, there’s no way to save it. You can’t rewrite something that never had legs to stand on in the first place. And I know you’re all wondering, “How do you know if your concept is flawed?” There’s no universal answer to that other than GET FEEDBACK. If people look confused when you pitch them your idea? Or if you get a lot of polite observations that the concept is kind of hard to wrap their head around? That’s usually an indicator that your concept doesn’t work. In this case, it was that the concept was unfocused. There was no clear unifying idea, like in, say, Jerry Maguire: “A top sports agent must start back at the bottom after being excised from the biggest sports agency in the world.” What’s the unifying concept in Aloha? “A pilot comes to Hawaii to make sure a satellite launch goes well to stave off a rival Chinese company while rekindling two separate love interests and keeping the local Hawaiian government at bay?” I think some writers assume they can write their way out of a sloppy concept. It never happens.

1) Big Game – We’ll finish this list on a lighter note. I did not hate this movie. But it is unquestionably the worst movie of the year. The plot plays out like a bad 1980s Sylvester Stallone movie. The dialogue is so on-the-nose, you leave each line with a fresh blackhead. The characters are so over-the-top, you wonder how they keep climbing back onto your side. Just the premise alone – a stumbling-over-his-lines Samuel Jackson as president gets teamed with an Inuit boy who uses his hunting skills to help the president evade a Middle Eastern terrorist who doesn’t just want to kill the president, but hunt him down like a wild animal – is so bizarrely conceived you’re wondering if this is one of those MTV Movie Award comedy promos where someone’s decided to use the leftover footage and try and turn it into a feature. I was so fascinated by this awful collection of ideas, I went looking for more info on the film, and only then did the picture become clearer. The director is a Finnish guy from Helsinki who had, up until this point, only directed short films. I began to imagine a backstory for this man, one similar to the family in The Wolfpack, where he’d been chained to his bed-post growing up solely on a diet of cheesy 1980s action movies. What I’m about to say next is going to sound preposterous. But I swear to you I believe it’s true. I think this script was originally written in Finnish and the director simply put it through Google translate to get the script we see now. Like that’s how wonky this movie is. I cannot believe that this movie exists. I just can’t!

Tuesday is Best Movies of 2015!
Wednesday is Best Amateur Scripts of 2015!