Three Directors Who Should Never Be Allowed To Make Another Film...

...but probably will.

Joel Schumacher: an obvious choice, and most people would centre on Batman And Robin. And with good cause – it is an appalling movie. Not even so bad it is good. But actually so bad it is atrocious. The script is piss-poor – beneath even the old Adam West series – the puns are awful. The action was pointless and pedestrian, and the film buried the film franchise for a good decade. Yet was the preceding Batman Forever actually any good? The answer has to be a resounding no. Two-Face is a second-rate Joker, dressed by a colour-blind moron. Jim Carrey as the Riddler is the epitome of stunt casting, whilst Val Kilmer as Bruce Wayne and Batman manages to be simultaneously wooden and irritating. All Batman Forever manages to be is better that Batman and Robin - which is much the same as saying normal 'flu is better than swine ‘flu. But even going outside of Schumacher’s offerings to the Batman franchise, he’s pretty shit. He made Brat Pack movies – films that instantly dated and became cliches as they hit the silver screen. And 8mm? A film that teaches you that S&M is bad at the same time as showing that monsters look like us – if you are a fat balding man with a fetish for gimp masks or a flamboyant porn film director. And worst of all, it has the relentless attempts of Nicholas Cage trying and failing to act. Schumacher is capable of wrapping films up efficiently; he doesn’t seem capable of making them any good.

Mick Garris: You might not know who Mick Garris is. He seems to be a friend of Stephen King; he certainly seems to get to adapt a lot of King’s work. Yet, if I was Stephen King, I’d be pretty hacked off with Mick Garris. Because he takes Stephen King’s work and makes it deeply pedestrian. Remaking The Shining was always going to be a bad idea, but Garris managed to take a great novel and translate it to a bland mockery on the screen. Slack, flat, overlong and awful – it still manages to be the best of Garris’s adaptations. Desperation is the worst. Pathetic in every regard, it looks and feels as if everyone concerned just shouldn’t have bothered. Watching this adaptation makes me never want to read the source novel again. And then there is The Stand - one of King’s best novels turned into a cosy catastrophe story. Gone is the apocalypse followed by the epic struggle between good and evil – instead we have a group of nominal good guys who are just Hollywood B-list actors who can’t find any other work and the leader of the bad guy – the Devil himself – looks like he should be fronting a Country & Western band. And, lest we forget, Garris also made Psycho IV: The Beginning that ends the classic film series with a story that focuses on a radio phone in. Terrifying. As in terrifyingly bad.

Michael Bay: The cream of the crappy crop. Currently having another hit this year with the no doubt awful Revenge of the Fallen, Bay is Hollywood Gold. In that he can make money. But his films are mindless popcorn dross. They are devoid of any artistic merit whatsoever. Transformers was one of the worst films I have ever, ever seen. It managed to make a slightly bland cartoon series from the 1980’s into a generic hotch-potch of what should make a blockbuster movie, at the same time as making a film that is close to unwatchable as I have ever had the misfortune to endure. And Pearl Harbor – scathingly eulogised in a song from Team America: World Police - is an insultingly stupid movie, and the less said about the turgid Armageddon the better. The sole selling point of Michael Bay is that his films are popular – but as history shows again and again, something being popular doesn’t make it any good. Remember Nu Labour, people. Remember Nu Labour.

Anyway, those are the directors I’d never allow back on a film set. If anyone has any other options, then stick 'em in the comments.