Unfortunately, the film is also painfully juvenile with a target audience of adolescent boys who define their world as being surrounded by bullies and beautiful, unobtainable girls "in real life", and bad guys, dragons and demons to kill with various cool and hyper-aggressive weapons in their virtual, video-game-fueled lives. It's no surprise that the women in the film are all costumed in fetishistic outfits with plunging necklines, bare midriffs, über-short skirts and long stockings. They're all very sexy but, unsurprisingly, there's no actual sex in the film.

Sucker Punch starts out with a dark, moody sequence where late teen blonde waif Baby Doll (Emily Browning) is trapped in a gothic monstrosity of a house with her scary, leering stepfather (Gerard Plunkett). When she rejects his advances after her mom has passed away, he turns his attentions to her little sister, to which Baby reacts by finding a gun and shooting him. She misfires and her sister ends up killed and his revenge is to have her locked up in the home for the mentally insane.

And that's where it switches from a delightfully creepy horror film into an incoherent genre mashup. Baby Doll meets the other babes in distress that become her posse: Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), Rocket (Jena Malone), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens) and Amber (Jamie Chung). They're all required to act out erotic plays in the speakeasy then entertain individual customers, through which we realize that all the women in Sucker Punch are victims of sadistic men, and that there are no bad women -- or good men -- in the entire narrative.

Sucker Punch is a mess. The storyline barely makes sense and the constant transitions from fantasy to "reality", era to era, genre to genre, left me asking "WTF?" more than once during the movie. By the end it was just exhausting and while the effects were splendid, the storyline was too weak to sustain it. I can only recommend this for adolescent men who want to see their soft porn mixed with a strong dose of video game visuals and effects.

The worst of the bunch, though, must have been Land of the Lost. When it was rewritten as a so-called star vehicle for Will Ferrell, the writing team managed to take a sweet if shlocky TV series about a Dad, older son and younger girl mysteriously thrust back to a parallel world that included both dinosaurs and the mysterious Sleestaks and turn it into a modern drug and sex innuendo laced mess that not only failed with critics but also turned out to be a failure at the box office too. 

Okay, okay, you can read more of my worst films here: The Worst Films of 2009.

So what about the flip side of the coin?  What films did I think exemplified the best of cinema, either as pure entertainment, as thought-provoking narrative, or simply as something that captured my imagination or piqued my curiosity?

Let's see...

When the film came out, directed by Zack Snyder, I knew I had to see it, but I wasn't sure I'd like it. After all, graphic novels are generally characterized by graphic violence and aggressive imagery: did I want to see blood splatters and dismemberment in living color?  Turns out that while there were a few minutes where the violence was unquestionably extreme, I really did like the movie quite a bit, including Snyder bringing out much more of the ambiguity of the costumed crimefighters and whether they masochistically enjoyed hurting criminals.

At over two hours, the theatrical release of Watchmen was long, but full of visually astonishing sequences in a film that provoked much thought and led to a complex and satisfying conclusion. It was, however, startlingly violent in scenes, something that constrained it to a fairly narrow audience.

When the movie was released for the home audience, Snyder recut it, splicing into the film an additional 25 minutes of footage. That's a lot of additional scenes, giving the film a really long 3:05 running time. Is the director's cut worth watching?  Read on...