At first, I thought it might be fun to compose 200-ish words each on my 10 least-favorite 2008 movies, to go along with my 10 favorites for the year. And then I realized that would just be mean-spirited and silly. And I still opted against it.

So instead, I'll content myself with random comments on the top 10 (well ... 20 ... ) Hollywood entertainments that made the job of being a movie critic just a little tougher than it should ever have to be.

There are low-budget films and there are low-low-budget films. And then there are low-low-low-budget films.

And then there's Octopoid Productions' Pickman's Song.

"We clocked the budget in at around a hundred dollars," says Octopoid co-founder Joshua Bentley of his East Moline company's 31-minute homage to a 1926 H.P. Lovecraft story. "A hundred dollars with plenty of guerrilla-film locations. You know, basically storming an old abandoned school in the middle of the night ... .

"The outside of the school," he quickly amends. "Not the inside. Nobody was inside any place they weren't supposed to be."

"We go to drive-ins all the time," says 23-year-old Arron Lorenz of his family, which includes father Randy, stepmother Terri, and half-siblings Nicholas, 13, and Courtney, 9. "It's one thing we can do together where we don't have to be quiet."

Kathryn Allen serves as the chief organizer for the Quad Cities' third-annual Environmental Film Festival, and when we sat down for a recent interview, she described the turnout for 2006's inaugural program as "pretty good - we had probably about 100 people, and we were ecstatic. We thought that was just great.