Dave-430

This is one of the worst movies of all time. The four-hundred-and-something witless souls who awarded this a 10 should be permanently banned from voting.

Forget that it was made on a shoe-string budget, and that at one point Arnold fights the worst bear costume in movie history; forget that he takes his shirt off in every other scene, often with zero motivation; forget that the Mount Olympus scenes are obviously shot in New York; forget even that the acting is of such monumental ineptitude that James Karen (one of the worst actors in "Return of the Living Dead") is far and away the finest thespian in sight. The fact that anybody invested as much as a nickel in a script that one monkey working for one hour could easily have done better is what really blows my mind. The premise is painfully stupid, and the execution of it is as heavy-handed and amateurish as anything you're likely to see. Most porn movies are produced with more consideration for plot.

I recommend "Hercules in New York" to anyone who likes to go to the dentist or enjoys a hard punch in the nose. This is an hour and a half of pure agony.

As a Dane I'm proud of the handful of good Danish movies that have been produced in recent years. It's a terrible shame, however, that this surge in quality has led the majority of Danish movie critics to lose their sense of criticism. In fact, it has become so bad that I no longer trust any reviews of Danish movies, and as a result I have stopped watching them in theaters.

I know it's wrong to hold this unfortunate development against any one movie, so let me stress that "Villa Paranoia" would be a terrible film under any circumstances. The fact that it was hyped by the critics just added fuel to my bonfire of disillusionment with Danish film. Furthermore, waiting until it came out on DVD was very little help against the unshakable feeling of having wasted time and money.

Erik Clausen is an accomplished director with a knack for social realism in Copenhagen settings. I particularly enjoyed "De Frigjorte" (1993). As an actor he is usually funny, though he generally plays the same role in all of his movies, namely that of a working-class slob who's down on his luck, partly because he's a slob but mostly because of society, and who redeems himself by doing something good for his community.

This is problem number one in "Villa Paranoia"; Clausen casts himself as a chicken farmer, which is such a break from the norm that he never succeeds in making it credible.

It is much worse, however, that the film has to make twists and turns and break all rules of how to tell a story to make the audience understand what is going on. For instance, the movie opens with a very sad attempt at visualizing the near-death experience of the main character with the use of low-budget effects and bad camera work. After that, the character tells her best friend that she suddenly felt the urge to throw herself off a bridge. This is symptomatic of the whole movie; there is little or no motivation for the actions of the characters, and Clausen resorts to the lowest form of communicating whatever motivation there is: Telling instead of showing. Thus, at one point, you have a character talking out loud to a purportedly catatonic person about the way he feels, because the script wouldn't allow him to act out his feelings; and later on, voice-over is abruptly introduced, quite possibly as an afterthought, to convey feelings that would otherwise remain unknown to the audience due to the director's ineptitude. Fortunately, at this point you're roughly an hour past caring about any of the characters, let alone the so-called story.

The acting, which has frequently been a problem in Clausen's movies, can be summed up in one sad statement: Søren Westerberg Bentsen, whose only other claim to stardom was as a contestant on Big Brother, is no worse than several of the heralded actors in the cast.

I give this a 2-out-of-10 rating.

This is quite possibly the worst movie of 2003. The acting is bad, and the story is exorbitantly dumb. It is sad to see Oscar nominee Michael J. Pollard's career come to this nadir. The visual effects are pretty good, but it does not make this turkey bearable. I give it 2 out of 10.