The Best Cinematic Surprise aka the I thought It Was Going To Be Shit Because The Trailer Looked Woeful But Actually It Wasn’t That Bad Award

In 2009 Will Ferrell’s goofy sci-fi adventure/comedy Land of the Lost, a remake of the schlocky ’70s TV show of the same name, quickly became synonymous with the words “gobble gobble”. Widely heralded as the bona fide turkey of the year, the film’s ridiculously disjointed SFX-smattered trailer didn’t exactly engender audience confidence. While it certainly wasn’t great, it wasn’t that bad either, with fans of Ferrell’s lackadaisical grasp of comedy at least likely to leave the cinema mildly fulfilled if they approached it with a grain, chunk, brick, wheelbarrow of salt.

But the year’s best cinematic surprise came in the form of a fat mall security guard with a low tolerance for alcohol, a physical addiction to sugar, an affinity with his Segway and a burning desire to make it into the police force.

The trailer for Paul Blart: Mall Cop suggested it was going to be one helluva comedic miscarriage, the kind of imagination-starved claptrap Hollywood is known and (rightfully) savaged for. So you can imagine my surprise when it turned out to be a funny, intelligent and tongue-in-cheek homage to John McTiernan’s 1988 classic Die Hard. Its hokey plot made the movie easy target practice for critics but, well, I just didn’t have the heart. Carried by an endearing central performance from Kevin James, Paul Blart: Mall Cop is good, clean all-ages fun.

Best Non-Sexual use of Food

Not since the days of Honey I Shrunk the Kids! has the ratio of humans to snacks been so insanely disproportionate as it is in the sassy 3-D animated flick Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. All right, if you want to get technical that’s not entirely true: there was The Indian in the Cupboard, The Burrowers, Honey We Shrunk Ourselves and probably some other movies about tiny people that have slipped the mind, but that’s beside the point.

While Meryl Streep and Amy Adams cooked up some scrumptious looking dishes in Julia & Julia — beef bourguignon, raspberry Bavarian cream, artichokes with hollandaise sauce, mmm-hmmm — their standard-sized cuisine resolutely failed to impress in terms of girth and bang-for-buck to the food served by inventor Flint Lockwood (voice of Bill Hader), the protagonist of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.

Lockwood has a long history making screwy contraptions — spray-on shoes, TVs that run away, a device that translates monkey thoughts — but he stumbles upon gold (and impending disaster, but what the hey) when he discovers how to out-miracle Jesus Christ. JC may have turned water into wine but Lockwood can make any dish he wants rain from the clouds with a special food-conjuring weather machine. Pizza, ice cream, lamb chops — you name it.

But all hell and hamburgers breaks loose when the machine goes haywire and starts dumping meatballs the size of craters onto the young inventor’s home town. That’s when this aporkalyptic disaster pic really kicks into gear. It’s a guiltily enjoyable food-fangled adventure with an odd after-effect: if you see the movie then go out to dinner, even a 72oz Texan steak will look like chicken feed.

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Coming up tomorrow in the final instalment of Crikey’s inaugural Golden Choc-Tops: The Best Use of Bodily Fluids Award, The Malcolm Tucker Award for the Most Deplorable On-Screen Personality and the Golden Choc-Tops Readers’ Choice Awards!