So bad, it needs a new word: repugnathon

It started 20 years ago. We were married and had had three Valentine's Days together. Given busy jobs, we decided to be low-key for the demanded romantic holiday and just rent a movie, order a pizza, and stay at home. Little did we know we had birthed an annual tradition.

Our Valentine's Day Movie rules are strict but simple: the movie has to have been released the prior year and it has to have received awful reviews. We want a movie that is so bad, so cringe worthy, it makes us laugh and shake our heads and wonder how in the world it ever got made. We pair the ridiculousness with wine, pizza, and cookie dough and spend most of the evening laughing. It's one of my most favorite traditions.

We've struck gold with gems like Baby Geniuses (1999), Glitter (2001), and Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star (2011). Our 2007 selection of Balls of Fury about Olympic ping pong and the international intrigue and Chinese warlords that naturally follow was so epic, we bought our own copy for repeated enjoyment.

We keep a list of movies during the year, consult The Razzies, and solicit recommendations from friends. This year had a whole mess of suggestions, with one movie that seemed both perfect and potentially unwatchable. Naturally, it was our first choice.

Movie 43 might truly be the worst, most disgusting movie ever made. I don't know for certain because I eventually did deem it unwatchable and we went to Plan B: Johnny Depp's The Lone Ranger.

Rob and several friends had warned me that Movie 43 was not for the faint of heart, mind, and soul. I had hope, though, because compared to the average bear, I have a pretty high tolerance for inappropriate humor. Indeed, my most hysterical, laugh-'til-you-cry-and-almost-pee-your-pants evenings in recent memory have been while playing a deliciously wrong game called Cards Against Humanity (tag line: "A party game for horrible people"). So I was pretty confident I could handle Movie 43. I was wrong.

The basic premise of this star-studded repugnathon is a washed-up film maker (Dennis Quaid) pitching movie ideas to a Hollywood producer (Greg Kinnear). I guess there are about a dozen vignettes of sorts, perhaps 5 minutes long each. I lasted through one and a half.

The first one, called "The Catch," starred Kate Winslet and Hugh Jackman. They are on a blind date. After some flirtatious and promising banter while walking in the cold winter night, Hugh takes off his scarf at dinner to reveal a very....ummm...unique physical deformity. The supposed humor of the vignette is that nobody but Kate seems to notice, care, or react to the fact that Hugh has a bonus scrotum hanging on his neck. Yes, you read that right. There are moments involving a fellow patron's baby playing with them, stray private hairs falling in soup, and the reduction effects of the restaurant's over-active air conditioning. Rob noted that my gasps of dismay were far more amusing than what I was gasping at.

It thankfully ended and we were back in the pitch room. I felt like I had survived Round 1. Reaching for another slice of pizza, and trying desperately not to think about stray hairs, I girded myself for Round 2.

Titled "Homeschooled," its premise was a set of parents who were home schooling their son. Now a teenager, the parents were very focused on giving him the full and complete high school experience. You know, the one that involves ridicule, ostracism, and, well, sex.

I tried to laugh when the parents hosted a teen party and refused to let their son into the house since he wasn't cool enough. My stomach turned when they duct taped him to a flag pole, wrote disgusting words on him with dog poop, and forced him to admit to untrue sex acts while being filmed. When the mom...played by Naomi Watts...then decided she needed to give her son the experience of his first kiss and more, I was done.

Reaching for more wine and handing Rob the remote, I commanded in a pleading sort of way, "Make it go away."

Warned that this might happen, I had playfully started a stop watch when the movie started. I fully expected to make it through at least half of the movie, if not the entire thing. I stopped the watch at 14:11.6 minutes...including the opening titles...out of 94 unfathomable minutes.  Movie 43 you win. There is not enough wine in the Western Hemisphere to make you palatable.

Regrouping with some cookie dough, we switched to Plan B. While not quite as funny as I was hoping in its awfulness, The Lone Ranger was indeed pretty bad. In fact, about 20 minutes into it, it was so boring I paused it and asked Rob if we should return to Movie 43. Fortunately for all involved, we stuck with Johnny Depp's masterpiece.

I used to watch the Clayton Moore television show on reruns when I was a kid. So I enjoyed learning the film's concocted back stories of The Masked Man, Silver, and Tonto.

The production value of The Lone Ranger was impressive. Huge scenes involving steam trains, Indian attacks, exploding bridges, and saloon fights. The characters kept insisting they were in Texas but anyone with a tiny bit of US travel under their gun belt would be able to recognize many scenes filmed in Monument Valley...in Arizona. And then there was all that plot development near Promontory Point...in Utah. It was a Disney film. Apparently they can make up their own reality.

I cringed at the gore of the movie and was somewhat relieved to learn it was rated PG-13. Waaaay not suitable for the Frozen target demo, what with the cutting out of a cowboy's heart and all. Produced by the same guy that does "CSI" on television, the blood and guts was just a tad overdone. Eww.

I laughed at the unintended humor of the film making. I swear the movie channeled scenes from Blazing Saddles, The Muppet Movie, and the Jesse James episode of "The Brady Bunch." It also had some delightfully cliché shots, like shoes falling in slow motion over a ravine, and our main characters reflecting pensively while overlooking an expansive valley at dusk.

The best part of The Lone Ranger, though, was Johnny Depp. Basically reprising his Captain Jack Sparrow role in Pirates of the Caribbean but with buckskin, he mostly smirked throughout the entire movie. A producer of the film, he didn't seem to be taking it or himself very seriously. He rolled his eyes, he looked directly into the camera with disbelief, and he had a certain modern-day-ness in his acting and attitude that clashed with the film's 1800's time period. It was like his Tonto was fully aware that he was making a movie. It was weirdly engaging and quite funny.

So The Lone Ranger will go down as a good Valentine's Day movie choice but not a real standout. I don't know if I will ever try to watch the rest of Movie 43. With other vignettes titled "iBabe" "Truth or Dare" and "Tampax," it's really really unlikely.  I will admit to a twisted sense of humor but, as I learned last night, even I have my limits.