How bad a year for movies was 1995? Let’s put it this way: Judge Dredd was one of the crappiest action movies in years, a foul, lumbering, metal-bound carcass of a film—and it couldn’t even penetrate a list of the worst movies of 1995.

But the following movies could, and did. 1995 saw a handful of crushing failures by noteworthy directors, a few noble misses and honest tries—and a towering junk heap of dimwitted star vehicles, inert action thrillers, and lunkhead sex melodramas that couldn’t raise the pulse of an endorphin-starved hyena.

Fortunately, you didn’t see all these movies. Unfortunately, we did. As Criswell the psychic so eloquently observed, “Let us punish the guilty; let us reward the innocent.... God help us in the future!”

We therefore present to you, with trembling fingers and a bargeload of Pepto-Bismol, the worst movies of 1995.

The Bottom 10

Noel (in diabolical order):

1. Mad Love. If you can buy this premise—that a hip young alternachick would be bummed out because her parents moved to Seattle (“What’s there to do around here?” she gripes)—you’re the perfect audience for this excruciating Gen X romance.

2. The Scarlet Letter. Demi Moore, explaining away the movie’s ridiculous changes to the Hawthorne classic, said, “I don’t think it’s a big deal. Not very many people have read the book.” Least of all the makers of this atrocity.

3. Destiny Turns on the Radio. Hipster thieves, kicking around a seedy Vegas motel, contemplate the evil forces that meddle in their lives. Soon to appear on UPN as Pulp Fiction: The Series.

4. Showgirls. The human body is a commodity, sex is ugly, people are inherently selfish—not even two hours of copious nudity could sweeten this raw deal of a movie.

5. Casper. Not a terrible film, but symptomatic of a larger evil—children’s movies that are built, not created.

6. Search and Destroy. Formerly hot New York collage artist David Salle arrogantly decides that—despite having no training, no scholarship and no knack—he can make a movie. The result is like every pretentious 1980s art film violently, incompetently squished together.

7. Congo. Was this a spoof of bad old jungle adventures, or was it a bad new jungle adventure? Either way, it was no damn fun.

8. Strange Days. When civilization starts falling apart in cities like L.A. or New York, why doesn’t anyone ever move to Wichita?

9. Waterworld. The most eagerly awaited disaster of the year got a break from some critics (and many audiences) because it wasn’t the worst movie ever made. But land sakes, it certainly wasn’t good.

10. Steal Big, Steal Little. Steal bad, steal lousy. An inexplicable romp about ideologically opposed identical twins pulling practical jokes on each other in a battle over their late mother’s ranch-slash-dance-school. Andy Garcia in a dual role! Like you’ve never seen him before! And will never want to again!

Dishonorable Mention The Prophecy, Judge Dredd, Species, The Walking Dead, Roommates, Tank Girl, Mallrats, Just Cause, The Basketball Diaries, Bye Bye Love, Forget Paris, Hideaway, Murder in the First, Johnny Mnemonic, Outbreak, Panther.

Jim (in hysterical order):

1. Showgirls. Take All About Eve and remove the sparkling dialogue, the charismatic actors, the solid direction, the handsome cinematography, the trenchant observations about show business, and any semblance of emotion, intelligence or originality. Substitute nipples.

2. Strange Days. Fifty-seven channels with nothing on. A waste of first-rate actors (chiefly Ralph Fiennes and Angela Bassett), talented filmmakers, and the year’s most intriguing premise—virtual-reality memories as the drug of the future—on an appalling, senseless mess of a script that mixes state-of-the-art sadism with the dreariest kind of retro conservatism. If the repulsive sexual violence didn’t drive you out of the theater, the volume did.

3. The Prophecy. Here’s a prophecy: After this imbecilic horror movie about warring angels, I see Christopher Walken starting a new career. I see some rubber gloves and a case of Palmolive.

4. Species. An evil space creature assumes curvaceous earthly form and walks around naked trying to mate with Earthlings. And it still sucked.

5. Waterworld. When the best scene in your movie has the star swigging a cup of his own urine, you’re in trouble. When that scene’s at the beginning, chances are you’ve got Christopher Walken’s agent.

6. Outbreak. In 1975, this overgrown disaster movie would’ve starred Robert Culp, Charo and O.J. Simpson. In 1995, it stars Dustin Hoffman, Rene Russo and Morgan Freeman. And there’s not even an exclamation point after the title.

7. Operation Dumbo Drop. The feel-good Vietnam War kids’ movie of the year.

8. Tank Girl. Futuristic punkette Lori Petty and mutant kangaroo Ice-T wage war on evil utility-company head Malcolm MacDowell. An entire generation swears off acid.

9. The Bridges of Madison County. A butt-numbing adaptation turns Robert James Waller’s lightning-paced kitsch into insufferably high-minded treacle—with Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep as romantic leads. What’s the matter—couldn’t anyone get Al and Tipper Gore?

10. Death and the Maiden. A trashy, reprehensible melodrama that exploits the real-life suffering of political prisoners for cheap frissons and unearned significance.

Dishonorable Mention Judge Dredd, The Basketball Diaries, Virtuosity, Dead Presidents, Lord of Illusions, Panther, Jade, Congo, Search and Destroy, Hideaway

Breaking it down

Disappointment of the Year/Disturbing Trend Noel: The indie malaise. In days gone by, the heavily hyped Sundance Film Festival winner The Brothers McMullen, a pleasant enough movie about the romantic travails of three witty Irish Catholic brothers, would’ve been a promising student film; its writer-director, Ed Burns, would’ve been given the chance to hone his obvious talent on his next film before getting worldwide distribution. But now—after the success of Robert Rodriguez, Richard Linklater, Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino—it seems that anyone with an underrealized idea and a lot of business hustle can get a hearing from a befuddled Hollywood exec. The results, this year, have been Before Sunrise, Desperado, The Incredibly True Adventure of 2 Girls in Love, Kids, Mallrats, Miami Rhapsody, Destiny Turns on the Radio, The Basketball Diaries, Search and Destroy, and more than a few others—all of which could’ve used a couple more rewrites before the cameras rolled.

Jim: The disappointment of the year was the number of artistically underwhelming movies by great directors—ambitious, intermittently brilliant, nobly flawed movies from Spike Lee, Martin Scorsese and Walter Hill, genial misfires from Robert Altman, Sam Raimi and John Carpenter, disastrous films by Roman Polanski, Paul Verhoeven and Kathryn Bigelow. The most disturbing trend was the pervasive sexual hostility toward women in movies. Mainstream releases as diverse as Rob Roy, Showgirls, Seven, Braveheart, Strange Days, Higher Learning, The Usual Suspects, Waterworld, Death and the Maiden and Hideaway contained either implied or attempted sexual violence against women, and several featured graphic rape sequences. (Even Hester Prynne got attacked this year, for God’s sake.) Just goes to show how Hollywood really feels about the emerging female power base. Runner-up: Serial-killer chic.

Worst Actor of the Year Noel: Alfred Molina is a good actor. Really, he is. So why does he keep popping up in movies like Hideaway, Species and Scorpion Spring, where his phoned-in performances make him a running joke?

Jim: Memo to Christopher Walken: Some idiot is trying to destroy your career by assuming your identity and giving the same twitchy, parrot-on-Prozac performance in one lousy thriller after another. First came The Prophecy, in which your evil twin played the archangel Gabriel as an oily hipster with a shoe-polish ’do. Well, OK, we thought, maybe you thought you were supposed to be Gabriel Kaplan. An honest mistake. But then came Search and Destroy and Nick of Time, in which you played—a real stretch here—an oily hipster with a shoe-polish ’do. We just hope you’ve been replaced by a nefarious double—maybe that guy who imitates you doing Skittles commercials on Saturday Night Live.

Worst Actress of the Year Noel: For some reason, critics have taken a shine to young Drew Barrymore, despite the fact that she inhabits a role like a squatter, speaks lines like she’s reciting from unreliable memory, and can’t get her voice out beyond her tonsils. This year she was a triple threat in a triple feature—grating on the nerves in Boys on the Side, Batman Forever and the appalling Mad Love.

Jim: Elizabeth Berkley in Showgirls. A WonderBra in search of an actress. Runner-up: Juliette Lewis, giving her by now patented Tourette’s Syndrome fit of a performance a double workout in Strange Days and The Basketball Diaries. Juliette, honey—try decaf. Second runner-up: Demi Moore’s im-Puritan in The Scarlet Letter.

“Yeah, Right” Moment of the Year Noel: In Outbreak, while an entire town dies horribly of a virus “10 times worse than Ebola”—puking black blood, covered in welts, streaming pus from their eyes—an infected Rene Russo displays what amounts to a slight case of the sniffles.

Jim: In Species, an alien being with no knowledge of earthly customs can’t maneuver a car in one scene, but soon afterward she’s speeding miraculously through the hills of Southern California, where she also intuits the location of a power station and that gasoline is flammable. Yeah, right. Runner-up, from Under Siege 2: Steven Seagal running down the aisle of an Amtrak train—while it collides head-on at full speed with another train.

Most Offensive Character Noel: Peter Hanly in Mel Gibson’s Braveheart portrays the Prince of Wales as a grotesque gay stereotype—fussy about his clothes, eyeballing other men, his wrists too limp even to hold up a sword.

Jim: Amy the gorilla in Congo, a lovable anthropomorphic cutup who gets to guzzle martinis, belch on cue, and otherwise demonstrate her enormous intelligence. What I want to know is, if she’s so smart, what’s she doing in Congo?

Worst Sex Scene Noel: Shannen Doherty and Jason Lee, playing ex-lovers, meet up in a mall elevator and hump joylessly against the glass wall—another excuse for Lee to shout tonelessly in Mallrats.

Jim: Elizabeth Berkley thigh-mastering Kyle MacLachlan and thrashing orgasmically in his ultra-swanky pool in the high-camp climax (!) of Showgirls. First runner-up: the alien babe in Species in the throes of wild, sweaty, scaly, butt-nekkid sex with virile earthling...Alfred Molina. In his dreams. Second runner-up: Hester Prynne and Dimmesdale doing the ol’ donut toss in a bin of grain—actually, it could be a roomful of Rice-A-Roni—in The Scarlet Letter.

Overdirection of the Year Noel: Marc Rocco, in the oppressively heavy Murder in the First, directs every scene with some kind of camera trickery, framing through keyholes, bars, ceiling fans, glasses...if there was an aperture nearby, he used it.

Jim: Kathryn Bigelow, whose overuse of grainy video footage in Strange Days made the movie look like a live transmission from a Kwik-Sak security camera.

Head-Scratching Moments

Noel: ♦ Our tax dollars at work in Species—when they’re not sitting around in bars drinking Long Island Ice Teas, a crack team of government agents specializes in showing up 10 minutes too late to the scene of a crime....

♦ Sean Connery professing disbelief in Just Cause: “If that’s a confession, my ass is a banjo....”

♦ As Sylvester Stallone blows up an entire floor of an apartment building, Antonio Banderas shields himself with a coffee table and leaps to safety out a third-story window: more gritty realism from Assassins....

♦ The noble Powder tells a local girl that if everyone could be honest and open like him, the world would be a better place; 15 seconds later, she asks him about his past and he pulls away, refusing to answer....

♦ Die Hard With a Vengeance offers car chases, explosions, and a pulse-pounding moment in Central Park—Bruce Willis and Samuel Jackson pouring water back and forth between two containers to solve a riddle. No one will be seated during the gripping “funnel” scene!

Jim: ♦ A bit of criticism that somehow sneaked past Waterworld filmmaker Kevin Reynolds: madman Dennis Hopper and cohorts aboard the Exxon Valdez, seemingly improvising a weird little conversation about their lack of direction....

♦ Patrick Dempsey’s featured appearance in Outbreak, which lasts just long enough for a monkey to shower him with contaminated mucus....

♦ The new, improved ending of The Scarlet Letter, in which that irrepressible scamp Dimmesdale saunters up to Hester Prynne after the big Indian attack, gives her a devilish grin, and—we’re not making this up—rides off with her into the sunset....

♦ The tender moment in Showgirls when strip-club boss Robert Davi wistfully acknowledges how much his former employee, Elizabeth Berkley, must miss having customers ejaculate on her. Classy.