I had to get these four out before they completely faded from my memory. We do have more misleading Amazon Prime posters, which I know is what you really come for with these posts so I will try not to disappoint. Sadly, I do have the first film on this list to bring you. I think it will end up being the worst movie I see this year. It will really take something awful to beat it. Here we go!

Oliviero Rising (2007, dir. Riki Roseo) – I know you can’t hear it, but I am chuckling as I am writing this. First off, that’s a scene from the very end of the film. Second off:

Thirdly, they didn’t even get the right title in their fake poster. Here’s the realistic poster for the movie. Sort of.

Fourth, the plot summary on IMDb has nothing to do with the movie: “A young and charming employee (Gallo) finds himself victim of an ‘office intrigue’ engineered by his attractive female boss.” Finally, I’m pretty sure that the “Rising” in Oliviero Rising refers to Vincent Gallo’s penis. I’m not kidding. The story is about Gallo getting over his mentally induced erectial disfunction. Shall we talk about this a bit? It does have a scene I can’t avoid telling you about. Shivers just ran down my spine.

Usually when I write about these movies I just watch them on the big screen so I don’t have screenshots to share. Sometimes there’s that rare film that causes me to stop and switch to my iPad. This was one of them. As a result, I do have a few of them to share.

The movie begins and we meet Oliviero who appears to drive a tuck for a living. We see him stop the truck and lift up air without showing the actual person in the scene. I’m pretty sure that Gallo wasn’t present for this scene or any of the truck driving parts. We see later that air is a baby porcupine. After a really weird and inappropriate scene with a psychiatrist, Gallo and his family are off to Italy. They are there for a family funeral. Nothing really happens there except bad directing. Here’s the “highlights”, if I dare to call them that.

Ernest Borgnine riding while singing in a pink cadillac with a suit of armor in the back seat.

A small jump cut as Ernest Borgnine rolls in the armor because either he wasn’t actually there or he knocked it over so they reshot it from the point where it fell over. There is a lot of lazy and awkward editing in this movie. Some of it very obviously done because not all the actors were there or sets couldn’t be used at the time they were needed.

Enest Borgnine not putting his penis into her vagina meaning he is screwin’ the cushion. I know Borgnine shows up in many different films in much the same way Whoopi Goldberg does, but this? Why? Why? Why?

This is the “Superior Seduction” the poster was referring to.

She tries to seduce him, which he has no interest in.

I must apologize, but I don’t have the scene with Vincent Schiavelli who you may recall as the angry subway ghost from Ghost (1990). He is trying to help Oliviero get over his ED. He actually stops, looks into the camera, and lectures women in the audience about their alleged worship of the penis. First off, I’m sure lesbians are rather indifferent towards the penis. They probably just feel men’s pain for all the weird things it does out their control. If a straight girl leaves you because you can’t get it up or keep your penis hard, then she is a horrible person. She is the guy who leaves a straight girl because her sex drive has taken a dip. Penises are weird. People with that equipment are not lying or exaggerating when they say it has a mind of its own. It takes a fair amount of work to try and get any modicum of control of it during sex. However, none of this translates to worship of the penis.

There is also the scene where Gallo’s wife has sex with his girlfriend because he can’t get it up for her. Seriously. Wife gets frustrated, goes right over to the girlfriend’s room, and they have sex while Gallo is in the hallway.

I think Ernest Borgnine summed up my feelings about this movie when he walks past the bones in the castle and tells them, “fuck you”.

A Scandalous Journey (2002, dir. Michele Placido) – If by scandalous you mean the story of a woman who writes poetry, meets a guy, then seems to stop writing, and instead supports her now mentally disturbed husband who also writes before he winds up in a mental institution. It’s not scandalous in the slightest. It has a beginning and an end. So I guess it technical it is a journey since they don’t stay in one spot the whole time. That’s really it. The rest is just how much you like good performances in a really boring story that grates on your nerves. I wish I could provide you with more details, but this was so incredibly forgettable that I can’t. I remember the next one more and it was forgettable, but at least it had an irredeemable asshole that the film is blind to seeing as such. That made it stick in my mind more. Even the more realistic poster is misleading.

You basically get a film made by an Italian director who probably wishes this was still the era of films like The Night of the Shooting Stars (1982) or 1900 (1976). It isn’t. Moving on.

Little Lili (2003, dir. Claude Miller) – Wow! They’re “Young & Hungry For Fame.” I could understand if they were just young, but also hungry for fame? This is clearly going be story about Ludivine Sagnier who is so hungry for fame that she’ll sleep with Robinson Stevenin to get to the top. I mean what else are you going to read from that poster? Well, I read that this is a movie based on a play by Chekov about a young pretentious self-loving asshole who makes a shitty short film that his family defends as if he is some guardian of pure unadulterated cinema as characters wander around to make sure we spend way too much time with this twit before the movie decides it has no idea how to redeem the character so it suddenly leaps over many years where he is now going to reshoot the events of the film on an artificial looking set that belongs in a Douglas Sirk movie before the film finally ends. That’s what I see. I also see that dickwad we are told to cheer for not listed on the poster. That character is played by Bernard Giraudeau who of course went on to do next to nothing after this film rather then the two actors whose names are on the poster. Oh, and after it leaps over all that time, he’s still a jerk who looks down with contempt at people who dare to not make shitty foreign films like the one you will be seeing if you watch this movie. Also, it continues to remind you of better directors, films, and actors throughout. I think I even spotted a reference to Rohmer’s film Claire’s Knee (1970). Amazing! Stay as far as you can from this garbage. I want the film that poster promised me. It sounds stupid, but I doubt it’s as bad as this thing was.

Blindspot (2008, dir. Ad Bol) – The poster is certainly accurate about “You cannot see.” I could barely make out the opening scenes because they were so dark. That was followed by the remainder of the film that I couldn’t understand. The movie begins with a woman doing a weird dance before she wakes up. It was a nightmare. Then we see a guy take a woman hostage in a room. I thought things were going to progress there, but then it seemed to come apart when they were talking, but it was in a voiceover while they were in clearly different places. After that, it goes off to tell the story of some guy who gets involved with a woman who died and her sister who needs to confront her father about him abusing both of them as children. There are some affairs in here. How any of this ties together, especially with the opening scenes, I have no idea. It’s a confusing mess. I wanted to scream at the director that if he didn’t know how to this kind of non-linear plot, then to stop trying. It didn’t help that it would suddenly cut at odd times. There is also an audio lead-in that I think was the only one in the movie and it only adds to the viewer’s frustration. Hell, this could have been linear, but it was so disorienting that I couldn’t tell. Skip!

Sadly, I can’t recommend a single one of these this time. Maybe I’ll have better luck next time.