Rick’s Reel Recommendations | 3 Absolutely Terrible Films

COLUMN | ISSUE NINE | WHAKAKATA / HUMOUR Written by Ricky Lai (he/him) | @rickthelai on IG & Letterboxd | Columnist

1. Da Hip Hop Witch (Dale Resteghini, 2000)

Directed by the music videographer who’d go on to lend tone-deaf visuals to Busta Rhymes’ ‘Arab Money, Da Hip Hop Witch was a Blair Witch parody riding on four plots interwoven with no discernible rhythm. (A) Female staff at the office for a tabloid magazine fight off their creep of a boss. (B) A gang of youngins from Salem search for the ‘Black Witch of the Projects’. (C) An underground rapper takes a sketchy deal with a producer named Lazarus. (D) A never-ending series of who’s-who cameos from stars such as Vanilla Ice, Spliff Star, Rah Digga, and Vitamin C, all recount their spine-chilling encounters with ‘da hip hop witch’ for a fictional cable network (‘Hip Hop Witch TV’). All victims of the hip hop witch beg you to heed their warnings, but none with the hallowed repute of the one and only Eminem. (Pre-8 Mile, too.) The centrepiece and selling point (assuming this ever sold) is Slim’s aggressively sexualised testimonial, which is so dreadfully long that the editor had to split it into chunks and seed it throughout the movie, and also which his legal team attempted to have gutted from the final release. Well, jokes on them! Debate Magazine is here on the scene to untrench buried truths.

1. Campus Code (Ken Waddell & Kathy Scorsese, 2015)

‘We’ve been watching movies for 100 years, time for something different’, reads the tagline for JumpView’s now-defunct website. Founded in 2013 by business partners Michael Simon and Ken Waddell, the ambitious JumpView offered a platform for choose-your-adventure-style re-edits of films and television shows (e.g. Rashomon, Lost, Twin Peaks…) for which viewers could ‘switch’ between character plotlines at will. Standing tall and proud on their catalogue is Campus Code, their only original feature, co-directed by Waddell and his former NYU classmate, Katherine Scorsese: the daughter of you-know-who. In fact, Papa Marty actually shows his face as a school nurse here, as does Ray Liotta as a sleazy bartender at the student dive, which by default makes this their second-best shared feature behind Goodfellas. The resulting Campus Code is a part-Matrix, part-Truman Show thriller, toggling between a web of misfit college students gradually becoming aware that the fabric of their reality on their university grounds is rife with glitches, disappearances and NPC-like behaviour. An inciting incident involves Jesse McCartney (voice of Theodore from Alvin and the Chipmunks), who discovers a colleague plagiarised his graphic tee designs and gives chase on a rooftop before falling thirteen stories to his death. Or does he? Taking no damage as he lands, McCartney is revealed as one of many bulletproof co-eds of this mysterious academy. JumpView, on the other hand, was nowhere as invincible. Its co-founders and Scorsese would go on to sue each other over poor financial negotiations and erratic on-set behaviour, which explains in part why Campus Code feels as if it was directed by nobody in particular. Almost as if… it were all programmed. As if it were a game…

1. Pinecone (Ashley Hays Wright, 2026)

Readers! It’s time to hunt the beast! Pinecone is one of many completely AI-generated animated features from Wright Family Films, and I imagine it won’t be the last – after all, this movie’s production probably costs even less than a shoestring budget (so long as you have a water cooling system). Folks, it is quite late in the game, but a contender has risen here for the worst movie in the history of the medium. The other ‘worst movies’ I’ve seen now benefit from the qualifier of ‘made with human touch’; how depressing that the bar has lowered so. At this stage, AI output has its limits, so every shot in Pinecone lasts about 3-4 seconds, and a character’s voice will actually vary between lines in a scene. Pinecone is also crucially a musical, with every number a shameful banger, sounding much like room-shaking faith anthems at a megachurch service. Ostensibly it is set in a fictionalised Irish county – some of the accents are Scottish instead, and the text-to-speech generation blatantly mispronounces the name “Pádraic”. Doesn’t matter, though, because it’s about the message – how couldn’t it be from a production LLC whose mission is ‘maintaining wholesome standards, no nudity, no hidden references or words, no foul language, modest attire and no extreme violence’? That is the beast they are hunting, and if you didn’t gel with the core gospel this time, they can sure run it as a prompt through a chatbot again to build their next script.