Talking trash: as much as we loved the gay-savvy Pirates of the Caribbean, that's how much we hated these gay-shabby "comedies" of 2003.

Gigli Audiences could smell the scent of a turkey, but no amount of bad buzz could prepare them for how bad Gigli really is. In this megaflop from writer-director Martin Brest (Scent of a Woman)--the most talked-about, least-attended movie of 2003--a kidnapped retarded boy (Justin Bartha) and a lesbian gangster (Jennifer Lopez) make small-time hood Larry. Gigli (Ben Affleck) a better person. How nice for him. The appealing kid has a Baywatch fixation, the fence-straddling glamour dyke has a psycho ex-girlfriend, and the helmet-haired hoodlum has doubts about his own sexuality--not to mention Lainie Kazan as his bi-curious mother.

Does it get worse? Yes.

Al Pacino shows up sounding like Mel Brooks, and J. Lo and Ben finally have sex. What these two real-life (we hope) lovebirds don't have is on screen chemistry. Remember how hot the sex was in Bound, that other lesbian-thug movie? This is un-Bound. Brest should have made a movie about Romeo Gigli instead--at least the clothes would have been chic.

Marci X How can a movie with such a high-profile gay pedigree be as stinko as Marci X? The screamingly funny gay writer Paul Rudnick (In & Out) and the quality-obsessed gay producer Scott Rudin (The Hours) teamed up for a hip-hop satire that, under the direction of Richard Benjamin (My Favorite Year), isn't hip and doesn't hop. A retail-obsessed Jewish-American princess (Lisa Kudrow) attempts to save her father's record label by reforming rapper Dr. S (Damon Wayans) and staving off a boycott led by ultraconservative senator Mary Ellen Spinkle (Christine Baranski). There are a few Rudnick-style big gay laughs: At Marci's urging, Dr. S records a public service announcement starring a boy band named Boys R Us, remaking them into a latter-day Village People and transforming their ode to abstinence, "Let's Wait," into a gay anthem, "Let's Date." And when Marci ends up in jail, a banner headline in a Jewish newspaper reads "Shonda!" But this movie is the real shonda. On the bright side, it makes Rudnick's last dog, Isn't She Great, seem like a real masterpiece.

Boat Trip The title should have been Some Like It Her or Butt Pirates of the Caribbean. Two straight men--Oscar-winning actor Cuba Gooding Jr. and Saturday Night Live's Horatio Sanz--decide to improve their love lives by taking a cruise but mistakenly end up on an all-gay holiday. I hate when that happens, although not as much as I hated watching this movie. Cuba faints when he finds out he's on a ship full of sissies, but he soon falls in love with a straight female choreographer (Roselyn Sanchez) mad ends up in her show lip-synching to "I'm Coming Out" dressed as a showgirl in a thong, headdress, and platform boots. That always happens on a cruise.

Sanz, meanwhile, has the hots for the star of an all-woman Swedish training team but has to outrun Roger Moore, a rich man who decides the rotund comedian is the perfect twinkle. Where were men like that when I needed one? "He could have been one of the great ones," a spurned Moore says of Sanz. Right, and Carson Kressley is going to star in a remake of The Guns of Navarone.