friday flicks – so bad it's good

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JACK REACHER (2012) The first Jack Reacher movie is a DMT hallucination that a balding middle-American dad experiences in the microseconds before death. The hero? Tom Cruise as a no-nonsense vagrant super-detective who lives off the grid, travelling everywhere by Greyhound and only buying his child-sized distressed leather jackets at op shops. The bad guy? An Unsettling European Man who loves talking about eating his own fingers (he brings it up constantly) and whose evil schemes revolve around, you guessed it, running humble family-operated companies out of business by staging elaborate terrorist attacks. And if you were thinking, “They should cast legendary German director Werner Herzog in that role for some reason,” then I have TERRIFIC news for you.

THE GORGE (2025) If ever there was a movie made to be watched on a random TikTok account over 40 separate parts while an AI voice narrates it ineptly, this is the one. Anya Taylor-Joy (sassy Eastern European assassin who loves to cry) and Miles Teller (former special forces guy who loves to write poetry – ever heard of it?) are separately tasked with guarding two green screens on opposite ends of an enormous mysterious gorge (the mystery is it’s filthy with zombies). They’re forbidden from meeting, but that can’t stop them from falling in love via binoculars over the course of several excruciating montages. Maybe the best ChatGPT movie yet. 

WAR OF THE WORLDS (2025) It’s hard to overstate just how bewildering the 2025 War of the Worlds adaptation is – the closest comparison is one of those theme videos you watch while waiting in line for a rollercoaster. The whole thing takes place on a computer screen owned by Ice Cube, a government surveillance hero whose job involves hacking everyone’s phones while using Microsoft Teams extensively (and before you ask: yes, these are all things heroes do). When aliens invade, intent on EATING the world’s data, Ice Cube must do what he does best: take screenshots of various TV news about the invasion, pull them into a folder and then DM that folder to the president over Microsoft Teams. Watch it and you too will be saying: “That’s just not how a computer works.”

LEMONADE MOUTH (2011) If Disney has one redeeming quality it’s that 90 per cent of its streaming catalogue is insane 2000s made-for-Disney-Channel musicals that all feel like what High School Musical might have been if Zac Efron had died on 9/11. One such movie, Lemonade Mouth, is about a group of misfit kids who form a rock band to unite their classmates against the tyranny of their principal, a sort of Caucasian Satan, who’s trying to get rid of the school’s lemonade machine. Personally I would run him over with my car if he tried to do this, but their strategy of singing several songs about believing in yourself seems to work pretty well for them. Incidentally, the movie’s lead actress is now the CEO of a satellite company. So that's fun! 

THE SECRET: DARE TO DREAM (2020) It shouldn’t be surprising that The Secret is still a thing. If anything, society is more primed for a magical manifestation cult now than when the book came out back in the 2000s. What is surprising is that in 2020 The Secret people shot and released a full-on movie – with a romcom-adjacent story and everything – in which Katie Holmes plays a single mother whose life sucks (house falling down! Ugly children!) until a handsome stranger (millionaire!) teaches her the power of not complaining so much about it. Which works pretty well, by the way, due to The Secret. The actors are all visibly bored and the vibe is best described as a Nicholas Sparks book set in a world where sex doesn’t exist.

VANDERPUMP RULES (2013–present) Forgive me, because this reality show is actually very good if you’re the kind of freak who loves watching the most evil people in America imploding their lives over brunch while casually rewriting humanity’s understanding of botox science. The cast are all minimum-wage waitstaff working at Hollywood’s sexy unique restaurant SUR (an acronym for “Sexy Unique Restaurant", correct), which is very funny after like 10 seasons when everyone is a millionaire from being on TV and their problems are less “I can’t believe he missed his shift again!” and more “I can’t believe he’s losing the superyacht in the ultra-divorce – and he missed his shift again!”

SEVENTH HEAVEN (1996–2007) To address the elephant in the room: yes, the dad in this show turned out to be a predator. Yes, he’s now married to a Seventh Heaven “super-fan” 40 years his junior. Yes, the actors (not him) now have a Seventh Heaven rewatch podcast. Once you get past the very unsettling energy this all creates you’ll be able to enjoy the very unsettling energy that already emanated from the show – a sickeningly tame family-friendly drama about a giant Christian family undergoing constant crises of a late-20th-century vintage: teen pregnancy, low-stakes gang crime, smoking cigarettes, caffeine pill addiction. At one point the mum has a full-on nervous breakdown because she sees her son flip someone off. It’s a weirdly telling vision of how America saw itself at the turn of the millennium, kind of like an inverse Sopranos where you’re actually hoping the dad gets whacked.

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These silly movie recommendations come straight from the pages of issue 129. To get your mitts on a copy, swing past the frankie shop, subscribe or visit one of our lovely stockists.