By DANNY GALLAGHER

It's been an important week in the world of movies. The Golden Globes, or as they're better known "Oscar's illegitimate children," were given out on Sunday. The nominees for the Razzies, the Academy Awards for the worst films of the year, were announced on Monday and, no surprise, "Gigli" got the most nominations with nine proverbial golden middle fingers.

But most importantly, the month of January, the worst month for movies for the entire year, is coming to a quick and relatively painless end. Every year, movie lovers like myself dread, absolutely dread, the month of January because the quality of movies are lower than Whitney Houston's expectations for a good husband.

It's the month that's right after the rush to get the higher caliber films eligible for Oscar nominations, and right before the slow and steady build up towards the hallowed summer movie season. That's not to say the worst films of the year are restricted to January. It's just the slowest movie going month of the year and notoriously bad movies are more attracted to it than a high school boys' basketball team to a drunk Carmen Electra on Spanish Fly.

Sure, bad movies are released throughout the year but every January carries the promises of at least three really big stinkers guaranteed to fill theaters with the smell of rancid cheese and vinegar. From my memory, there were eight films from last January that made me run from my seat like a flaming man in search of a grade school water fountain including such stinkburgers as "The Guru," "National Security," "A Guy Thing," "Darkness Falls" and "Biker Boyz" (POSTER TAGLINE: If you hated "The Fast and the Furious," then you'll want to have the makers of this movie assassinated by a foreign nation.").

But the worst of the worst was one of the most ridiculed movies of the year, "Kangaroo Jack." Truthfully, I never saw it and I will never see it, even if the theater is filled with Froot Loops and a busload of Hawaiian Tropic bikini models were trapped helplessly underneath it.

"Kangaroo Jack" was a no-brainer when it came to figuring out if it would become a "Movies that Suck" because it fits a patented formula that has a 100-percent success rate in determining movies that suck. First of all, it was released in January, so already, it's not looking so good. STRIKE ONE!

Then I learned notoriously bad movie mogul Jerry Bruckheimer, a man responsible for a Hiroshima sized holocaust of human brain cells, fronted the dough to get this multi-million dollar yuckfest in the theaters. STRIKE TWO!

The final nail in the coffin? It features a rapping kangaroo! This movie doesn't deserve the dignity of being hit between the eyes with the pitch and given a free base. STRIKE THREE!

So let's review...

JANUARY RELEASE + PRODUCED BY BRUCKHEIMER + RAPPING KANGAROO = MOVIE THAT SUCKS

You would assume based on this simple algebraic formula that people would avoid this movie as if simply watching it would give them cancer, but NO!

"Kangaroo Jack" made more money than any movie in January of 2003. Sure, it only scored about $66 million, which is laundry money when compared it to the big money makers of the year, and there wasn't a wide variety of quality films to choose from, but it's a movie about a rapping kangaroo! You would think if someone came up to you on the street looking frightening and fearing for their own life screaming, "There's a rapping kangaroo and he's coming right for us!", you would turn your head as quickly as your spine would allow and flee the immediate area in horror because a rapping kangaroo could be easily confused with some kind of serial killer.

Instead, people flocks to the theaters in crowds larger than the Million Man March to pay a stranger seven bucks a person to sit in a darkened room and watch a rapping kangaroo! They could've saved that money for cab fare to come to my house and I would've volunteered to beat them over the head with a broomstick and I wouldn't have charged them anything.

Thankfully, 2004 was more forgiving than "The Year of the Kangaroo." Sure, all the usuals were there like the bad hip-hop comedy ("My Baby's Daddy"), the bad high performance vehicle, low performance actor action/adventure ("Torque"), the bad romantic comedy starring a slowly fading sitcom star ("Along Came Polly") and the bad Ashton Kutcher movie that would cause audiences to harbor weapons of mass destruction ("The Butterfly Effect").

But at least there wasn't a rapping kangaroo!

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©2003 by Danny Gallagher