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A quick quiz Okay, it is very late on Thursday evening and I thought I would pose this question to our commenters for a bit of a Friday quiz before I go to bed:
What is the worst film you have ever seen?
(This thought was inspired by seeing a short trailer for a movie starring Jennifer Lopez).
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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Waterworld.
“The Crazies.” (I believe it was George Romero’s first film.)
Travolta’s Battlefield Earth.
It’s not even good to watch as camp.
Of movies I actually paid money to see: Starwars Episode 3,hands down.
“Showgirls” was good bad,
“The Corporation” was annoying bad,
latter day Tom Cruise tends towards bad bad.
fahrenheit 911
Gosh, I have seen so very many; Charlie’s Angels 1 and 2, and Blade 2 spring to mind.
But the only film which, after watching I have said, “I want those 2 hours of my life back” and really, really meant it, is 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Now that remains the most tedious, badly-paced films with appalling character development (I am good HAL and now, with absolutely no warning or motive I shall become bad HAL) that I have ever seen.
DK
Rat Race.
Made me want to put my foot through the telly. In fact, I’ve felt that way whilst watching every other film starring John Cleese since ‘A Fish Called Wanda’.
Depends what you mean by ‘worst’… There are many terrible movies in the so-bad-they-are-good category (such as ‘Showgirls’). And then there are movies that I loathed so much that I want to rewind time so that I can un-see them.
Pearl Harbour. Hated it so much it was the only movie I have ever walked out of before the end (in-spite of being a huge Kate Beckinsale fan)… Braveheart and Indochine are also close contenders for the bottom of my poop pile. In all these cases I found the ‘heroes’ of these flicks utterly nauseating.
The movies I like are here.
Worst movie that I paid to see..
Bean
Mind you, I like Rowan Atkinson in stand up, however his character in Bean well…. I’ve had much better experiences on trips to see a dentist. Worst yet… Bean 2 is in post-production.
Of films I saw on the big screen, I’d have to say that Wim Wenders The End of Violence was the worst that I’ve endured.
A collection of cliches poorly executed that is the usual European auteur bashing Los Angeles shallowness type film that often goes so wrong (especially disappointing coming from the maker of a few great films).
Crash (the most recent Academy Award winner, not the kinky ‘auto’erotic film by Cronenberg) is a very close second.
Multi-story films set in Los Angeles that try and tackle race and violence issues are almost always horrid.
Are you tryin’ to start something?
Of the film experiences I can remember, probably The Blair Witch Project. Now, that was probably one of the most utterly tedious ninety minutes of my life and I wish the time I spent watching it could be returned to me.
Ishtar, nothing else I have seen comes close, although Being There and AI tried hard. Actually, Spielberg has almost always made extremely bad movies, starting right out of the box with Close Encounters of the Third Kind. That movie marked the first appearance of the classic Spielbergian Brat, about all of whom I feel they should have been drowned. So Spielberg gets the lifetime award for consistently low quality.
Blair Witch. Just gave me motion sickness. I never get motion sickness.
USE A PROPER CAMERA! IT WAS NOT “ATMOSPHERIC”!
I have walked out of precisely one film. The year was 1983, I was in my 3rd year at university, and for some strange reason I decided to go to matinee sessions of every movie that came to Hamilton during the year.
I forget the title, but this particular movie concerned kung-fu lesbian vampires, a concept that seemed to show potential of the so-bad-it’s-good variety. I was mistaken.
There have been many movies since that I probably *would* have walked out of, had I gone to see them, but I’m a little more choosy now. And DVD rental stores (and $2 Tuesdays) mean that you don’t actually have to get up the willpower to get up and walk out of a cinema, but merely become distracted by something else at home…
Oh, and one more I have to get off my chest: Lawrence of Arabia. Never before has an intelligent and interesting man been rendered as so unnervingly stupid and dull. But here we enter into the realm of bad movies that were made so on purpose. The English Patient would be another example.
I really felt like Krull was a waste of my time and money, but some people say it’s better than it looks. The only movie I can think of which I wish I could “un-watch” is Blood Simple. Awful. Negative, tedious, gory, pointless…
“Backdraft” Every cliche, done badly, that you would expect from a movie about a rookie firefighter at his first assignment. (“Ladder 49” covered the same ground but did it about 100 times better.)
“Last Samarai” Tom Cruise proving, once again, that he will act in any swill as long as the check clears.
“Little Miss Sunshine” This year’s entry. My God this was a tedious waste of time. Exactly one scene got a laugh out of me. Not a good sign for movie that advertisd itself as a satire/comedy.
I always wanted to see the last scene in ET.
You know the one they cut out after that final tearful Elliot moment and the Spaceship drawbridge closes up.
The scene where a considerably larger version of Junior cuddly monster, phone home ,heaves into view and gives him a right clip across the ear!
“I told you to stay close to the spacecraft you gormless little shit!
Have you any Idea what you put me and your podfathers through!
There are all sorts of strange people out there in the Universe! and they’re not all as nice as us!
You are grounded for a Trillion parsecs young man!”
“But the only film which, after watching I have said, “I want those 2 hours of my life back” and really, really meant it, is 2001: A Space Odyssey.”
Well said! Tedious, mind-numbing drivel.
All of the movies by Uwe Boll is the worst movie ever.
I’ve made a hobby of seeing bad horror films, but these usually have a campiness or other qualities that make them bad candidates for “worst movie ever”. They were never intended to be good.
To really understand bad movies, you have to explore movies that have huge budgets and so-called professionals working on/in them. You just can’t compare a movie that cost nothing, such as, say, Invasion of the Blood Farmers, with a $73 million movie like Battlefield Earth. Battlefield Earth is orders of magnitude worse than Blood Farmers because the people making it had money, experience, and the intention of making a great movie.
The spectacular failures (and I don’t mean box office, I mean quality) are much more interesting as subjects for the study of bad movies.
So I vote for Glitter. I agree with a number of movies listed above, such as (obviously) Battlefield Earth, The English Patient, and Pearl Harbor, but I thought I’d add one that hadn’t been mentioned.
Additionally: to truly determine how awful a movie is, one has to listen to the director’s commentary (if they have it). The more pretentious the director is, and the more they try to justify or explain the swill they have splattered on the screen, the more entertaining it is and the more they deserve being classified as one of the worst movies of all time.
Woah, Perry, read your profile and we have eerily similar taste in movies! And I thought I was the only person in the Western World to have seen obscure and totally cool movies like Avalon and Cypher!
I agree Pearl Harbor sucked though I guess I hated it less than you.
Oh, and the total pits for me was “Cheaper by the dozen”. There was once a time, long, long ago, when Steve Martin was actually funny. Those days are long gone.
The worst film I ever saw was the one on my teeth after I’d been to sick to brush them for a few days.
Now as for movies…
Bolero
The worst film (avoiding Americanisms) I was ever dragged to go see by an (ex-) girlfriend was The wind that shakes the barley by the odious Ken Loach.
Jimmy –
There was?
mrp –
Bo-anything!
Until I went to see Bullworth, I’d never seen anyone read during the showing of a film. What irritated me most was that it was MY reading material, and I wanted it back.
Jimmy:
“Cheaper By the Dozen” was a remake of a 1950s Clifton Webb/Myrna Loy movie. Webb’s name reminds me of one of the movies I’d select as worst ever: Going My Way. A truly retch-inducing movie in which Barry Fitzgerald beat out Webb (in the wonderful mystery “Laura”) for Best Supporting Oscar; a quirk in the nominating rules meant that Fitzgerald was also nominated for Best Actor, and Fred MacMurray from “Double Indemnity” was overlooked; and it beat out Alfred Hitchcock’s “Lifeboat” and Billy Wilder’s “Double Indemnity” amongst others for Best Director. Horrible, and massively over-rated.
Another movied I’d select would be The Damned. It’s an Italian movie allegedly about the Krupp family, but it’s just pointless and overlong. There are good movies that aren’t in English, but this is the sort of dreck that unfortunately gets held up by the arty types as the sort of movie that’s somehow wonderful just becuase it’s a foreign film.
This one is a little obscure, and I’m not a big film buff so don’t think I’m showing off. Disclaimers all done? Good.
T.R. Baskin. I wouldn’t have minded, but I was madly, truly, irretrievably in love with Candice Bergen. Anyone who had to compete against a hand puppet for a parent’s attention, had a gift for comedy, and was just so damned good looking… and then went and acted in this piece of sirreverence … well, it was a deal-breaker where I thought there was no possible way of breaking the deal.
So I married a woman who looks just like her (that was a compliment, dear).
“Love Actually” is probably the worst movie I ever paid money for. Hugh Grant as Prime Minister? Billy Bob Thorton as a US President? And that cameo by Claire Short? effin’ awful.
My wife loathed the English Patient. I didn’t dislike it quite that much but I can see why so many people hated it. Especially when it won Oscars. When you are told you are supposed to like a movie so much and it is so very underwhelming, it really gets some strikes against it.
I walked out of, I think, Police Academy 3 (could’ve been #2, who knows). Whichever one was the first not to be rated R. It wasn’t a leaving in disgust type thing. It was more of we could be drinking beer talking about sports as a better use of our time logic.
A honorable mention: The Royal Tannenbaums. Another one of those I’m supposed to like it and get the comic genius of it. I like dark quirky humor as much as the next guy, but that movie was a true waste of film. Paltrow and Luke Wilson play their roles as good as possible. Too bad it was in a lousy unfunny movie. Ben Stiller, as the Ben Stiller character, really starts to show how stale he is. The Wilson brothers wrote it. They are funny guys. But, they need to leave the script writing to others.
Soooo many choices over the years. If pressed, I’d probably have to go with Eraserhead.
I agree on Eraserhead. Someone said 2001 was tedious? 2001 was a knockdown dragout party compared with Eraserhead, the worst movie of all time.
Waterworld was not as bad as some people say.
Little Miss Firecracker. horrible acting and the slowness of it all just killed me. Well, not really, it did come close.
Tough one. I have actually seen Heaven’s Gate and it deserves its reputation. Murky, incomprehensible, preachy. overlong, BORING — and who ever heard of a Marxist Western, for crying out loud?!
But I’m gonna have to go with Battlefield Earth. No other film ever made has crammed so many logical impossibilities into its running time. Fighter planes still usable after 1,000 years with no maintenance? Cave men learing to fly them in one week? Air that explodes when exposed to radiation? There’s no end to it. Give the creators of Plan Nine a $100 million budget and cut their IQs by 50%, and this is what they’d have come up with.
Little Miss Firecracker. horrible acting and the slowness of it all just killed me. Well, not really, it did come close.
So bad that they are good: Evil Dead 3: Army of Darkness (this is the absolute best of this category), with Sean of the Dead a close second.
Worst rendition of a classic Heinlein novel: Puppet Masters
Worst movie ever dragged to by sister: Bring It On
Worst zombie movie: Night of the Living Dead (all of them).
I never saw Showgirls, but that Demi Moore As Seal movie sucked worse than her fake tits.
Worst SF Movie: Silent Running
You Sir have no taste.
Army Of Darkness, Sean Of The Dead and Bring It On were all great movies. Nothing “so bad they were good” about it, they were just plain good.
As for worst Award-winning movies: There was an Australian film a while back called “Lantana” that scooped every AFI award. I tried watching it and fell asleep half way through.
Worst film?
Liquid sky. Bar none
Gigli.
There are so many ways for a movie to be bad, I’ll list a few with representatives (of the ones I’ve seen, I’m sure there’s far worse out there but I avoid a lot of movies with obvious warning signs of suckitude)
big budget original incompetence: Love, actually – Slim pickin’s here cause I usually avoid these kinds of movies, I made the horrible mistake of not avoiding this. Preachy, dull, unfunny and unengaging do not a good movie about love make.
big budget sequel: The Mummy Returns – I didn’t mind the first for what it was (not a mummy movie) but this sucked pharoah’s ass.
micro-budget non-exploitation: Religion, Inc. – supposed ‘comedy’ about a guy who starts a religion for money, would be totally forgotten but an unknown by the name of Sandra Bullock had a small part in it…
low budget exploitation: Bloodsucking freaks – too stupid to be scary and too vile to be enjoyable as camp, really, really awful. One of the few movies that made me feel dirty by just watching it
self-conscious ‘art’ – Prospero’s books, yikes, what a pretentious, awful, boring mess (Peter Brooks is high on my list of directors to avoid)
well-crafted but phisolophically nauseous: Forrest Gump – I enjoyed it while watching it in the movie theater and almost immeately afterwards began hating it immensely for its “It’s good to be Stoopid” message (more than one person I know has told me they had the same reaction).
“Multi-story films set in Los Angeles that try and tackle race and violence issues are almost always horrid.”
I haven’t seen Crash but I liked Grand Canyon (I saw it after the LA riots which may have made it seem better/more prescient than it really was).
And I really like Magnolia too, though race wasn’t a primary issue. I even liked the raining frogs at the end as only a biblical scale cataclysm could come close to waking the characters out of their self-involved stupor.
It’s also kind of scary to look at Tom Cruise’s ‘performance’ which was regarded as a stretch at the time. Now it seems to be the closest to the ‘real’ Cruise, a loose cannon dangerously fixated on an inane philosophy.
I’d go along with all of those on this list that I’ve seen (not many), and add:
Shadows and Fog
Van Helsing
Ishtar
Love Actually (Dave Cameron is dying to have a ‘Hugh Grant moment’) – is poor but Richard Curtis really excelled himself in the Girl from the Cafe – a mindnumbingly dire tree-hugging, we-are-the-world, hold-hands-and-sing-and-the-world-will-be-a-better-place nostalgic shit.
I actually threw up at the end of the movie.
Walked out of theatre/returned DVD/turned telly off before end:
A Beautiful Mind, K-Pax, Equilibrium, Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. For example.
More loves ‘n loathes here(Link).
Great suggestions folks! Here are mine:
Love Actually.
Shallow Hal. It pains me to say this about Paltrow and Black, as the latter was great in School of Rock, but this was awful. Gwyenneth, oh why?
Most Spielberg films apart from Minority Report and Schindler’s List.
Gigli
Most recent Steve Martin films, especially the new Clouseau film. I saw it on a long-haul flight from Mauritius. Terrible.
The Swarm, with Michael Caine. Oh dear.
Any Ken Loach film.
The English Patient.
Glad to see I’m not the only one too.
Oh yeah, and Shakespeare In Love. A happy-ending Romeo and Juliet, with annoying Fast Show cameos, a set that looked like the Blue Peter studio, and characters whom I genuinely hated.
Seen some absolutely terrible kids’ films recently, notably Ice Age 2 and Stormbringer, but at least they didn’t beat The Truman Show to any awards.
I not sure if this one qualifies. Emmanuelle. It was so boring, I fell asleep after about 20 minutes and missed most of it, I can’t therefore claim to have seen it.
Having worked on Shakespeare In Love I resent that 🙂
2nd worst film ever: The ‘Burbs
Reason: They discarded the script halfway through filming and improvised … and it shows. Tom Hanks “acting” without a script is funny in a not-at-all-funny kind of way.
Worst ever movie: Alex Cox’s Walker. Starts off late 19th Century mildly anti-USA and pro communist then throws any final pretence away and launches into a full-blown anti Western rant, complete with Soviet gunships in the 19th Century.
Is it possible to hate a film you’ve never seen? If so then “The Patriot” would get my vote.
Otherwise the award would have to go to “Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” Considering the source material, how did they get it so wrong?
“Shallow Hal. It pains me to say this about Paltrow and Black, as the latter was great in School of Rock, but this was awful. Gwyenneth, oh why?”
I have to step up and defend this one. It’s Black’s best performance (because he is, you know, really shallow*) and I think Gwyneth Paltrow’s too (and I’m not usually a fan). Physically appropriate (she doesn’t have her usual skinny girl body language but actually adopted fat body language to her frame) and balances prickly defensiveness and vulnerability in a thoroughly credible way. My only quibble is that while she’d worn miniskirts through most of the movie they keep her in pantsuits when she’s in the fat suit.
*why he was so miscast in King Kong, Denham is a kind of amoral monster in the movie and Black just wasn’t up for that level of barely self aware evil.
Legally Blonde 2. Awful, don’t ever watch it. It goes through humour and out the other side in the darkest realms of anti-humour. It isn’t just not funny, it seems to actually try very hard not to be funny. Yes she’s blonde, wears pink and is a ‘girly-girl’ watching her be a lawyer isn’t particularly entertaining. If I wanted to do that I could go into any number of law firms and ask if I could shadow the girliest girl lawyer on their staff, it’d probably be more enjoyable. I don’t want those 2 hours back, I want them erased from my memory forever.
“Big Fish”- I dozed off in the cinema rather than keep watching.
The original version of “The Ring” was boring as hell also: I guess horror isn’t my thing.
The Disappearance of Garcia Lorca.
A honorable mention: The Royal Tannenbaums.
A film with Owen Wilson on the credits (in any role) is guaranteed to be annoying.
“Manos: The Hands of Fate” has to be the worst film ever. I stopped the dvd after 20 mins. & I was watching the MST3K version!
Mike L., I have to disagree, the worst rendition of a classic Heinlein novel has to be “Starship Troopers”. “Puppet Masters” was bad but it at least bore some resemblance to the book. ST was an almost not bad sci-fi adventure, but why use a well-know book & then change EVERYTHING but the name? Worst, a boyfriend, who didn’t like sci-fi, took me to see it as a treat because he knew I like Heinlein.
Elaine: Manos, The Hands of Fate is indescribably bad, but it isn’t even a movie, in my opinion. Just because someone sticks some motion photography together and calls it a movie doesn’t make it one.
Of films that people might have heard of, The Nutty Professor and Collateral Damage I found unwatchably bad. Most films that are obviously going to be completely awful (Glitter, Gigli etc) I just don’t watch.
People above that listed the following films as among their least favourite are either idiots, or need to watch more films:
Charlie’s Angels
Blade 2
2001: A Space Odyssey
A.I.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (WHAT???)
I mean, are you guys for real? Some of those films are downright great. It’s nearly as bad as Ebert listing The Usual Suspects among the worst films of all time. Why people continue to listen to him as a film critic after that is beyond me. He should have been disqualified from the human race.
Thin Red Line.
Great battle scenes but it just goes on and on and the plot is rambling and incoherent. And the voice-over…
That Thing You Do.
Hanks’ directorial debut. Nicely evokes the late 50s/early 60s to no particular end. The plot is utter drivel.
Jack.
A late Coppola train-wreck with Robin Williams. Nuff said.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Coppola again. Complete and utter misunderstanding of the book. Brannagh is dreadful but De Niro ought to have been shot for the worst performance by an actor I have ever seen. Total guff. I hope the ghost of Mrs Shelley is round Francis’ place right now scaring the pants off him.
The Parole Officer
I like Steve Coogan but this was utter shite.
Batman and Robin
Joel Schumacher should just have flushed his umpty million dollar budget down the toilet than make this embarrassment. Then shot himself.
Days of Thunder
Remember the wheelchair race?
JFK
A wet dream for conspiracy theorists. Crashingly dull for everyone else.
Top Gun
Farcical shite. How many of you watched that wishing Goose had survived the ejection rather than Maverick? And just don’t get me started on the flight scenes.
And there is more. Late career Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy “vehicles”. Why? You guys used to be funny. Oh and the Star Trek movies especially the one with the whale and the one where Kirk et al meet God. Unmitigated bollocks. I’ll agree with an earlier comment as to “The Girl in the Cafe”. Right, nuff said. I think I’ve put more than my 2p in already.
An easy shot would be “Saturn 3” or “The Black Hole”, but I think the really bad are those that think they are really good and are in a cinematic version of self-denial.
Heat was utter tripe. All that pyro, cliche setups and just the excuse to get two names on the same bill. Two for the pace of none. The Bad Lieutenant, on the other hand…
But I have to reserve my spleen for the Matrix2+3, in fact Matrix 1 (second half) onwards…2.5 bad films. They stole drivel from the jaws of insight.
Batman is one of a group of “overproduced” US films that disappoint. Production values almost to the point of anal-retention, yet the story fails and you can feel the energy drain away as the film progresses – one suspects the production designers push the director forward and once all is “done” from an art angle they collapse in a heap off-stage and the director is left high and dry.
As for 2001, well, HAL became paranoid about not knowing all about what was going on. He suspected conspiracy and had a nervous breakdown.
The Flying Scotsman from 1929. Starts off silent, then becomes a talkie halfway through. Since it was originally meant to be silent, there was no script, so the cast made up their own dialogue as they went along.
In 1979 (I think) I sat through what seemd like an eternity watching One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s nest.Everyone was laughing and I couldn’t see why. It obviously flew over my head.
Also The Postman Always Knocks Twice with Jesicca Lange.Time stood still in that one
Saturn 3. Wasn’t that the load of pony with Kirk Douglas and scripted by Martin Amis… Oh, that was bad.
Nightfall was one of the few movies I ever walked out of. Ostensibly based on the classic Asimov short story, it failed as an adaptation and it failed as basic entertainment. David Birney’s career went in the toilet after this movie. Coincidence? I think not.
The Star Wars prequels. Especially the first two are complete nast and the third only marginally better.
Hannibal, GI Jane and White Squall do not represent R Scott’s finest moments either. Hannibal is a complete pantomime. Hopkins and Oldman seem to be competing as to who can overact the other. A bad book made into a worse movie.
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves deserves an honourable mention. Costner is bloody awful (that’s a general point), Morgan Freeman telegraphed in his trademark “nobillity”, Alan Rickman was manic. I moved to Nottingham shortly after… It was all bollocks.
Braveheart. Melanie Gibson with a mullet completely twisting history. I was cheering for the executioner by the end.
Traffic. Annoyingly over directed. Two hours of guff to make the point that drug dealers aren’t nice people. D’oh!
Titanic. I’m anti-censorship in general but when I heard that it had been cut to 45mins for release in Iran I thought for once the mullahs had made a decision I agreed with. You would need a heart of stone not to laugh at Leo’s demise.
Troy. I was transfixed by Brad Pitt’s wig. I have yet to see a worse cinematic hairpiece. It is amazing that you can take a previously good director, a top cast and a lot of cash and end up with a film as thoroughly awful as this.
The most dissapointing movie I ever saw was Mystic River. Beautifully acted and directed, well scripted but the ending just doesn’t work. Really pissed me off because Eastwood is my hero.
I’m amazed nobody has mentioned “The Postman”, surely Costner’s absolute nadir.
In the basement of the British library is the “special collection” which is stuff deemed so wicked that it can only be accessed in the presence of a library trustee and the Archbishop of Canterbury. There should be something like that in Hollywood for bad movies.
“The Hours”
(Disclaimer – llamas once shared a house in Croydon with Stephen Dillane, who plays Virginia Woolf’s husband in this wretchedly awful movie. Much as I like everything that I’ve seen that Stephen has done since then, and think him a fine actor, this movie stinks.)
I watched this in the US in the company of another expat, who had also lived in Croydon. There’s a scene in the movie which looks for all the world to have been filmed on East Croydon station, and my buddy leans over and says “I’d rather be waiting on East Croydon station – in the rain – for a train that’s already 40 minutes late – than be watching this ghastly movie!”
Turgid, filled with meaningless nonsense and non-sequiturs. Los Angeles trying dreadfully hard to persuade everyone – and I suspect, trying harder to persuade itself – that it’s got kulcher. A two-bag movie.
llater,
llamas
Monster A-Go-Go makes Manos, the Hands of Fate look like an internationally-acclaimed masterpiece.
Infidel asked:
Don’t you remember Kevin Costner in Il Postino? 😉
Obviously, *none* of you lot has seen The Astounding She-Monster.
Yes – The Hours – definitely. A friend lent the DVD to me with a glowing recommendation. I didn’t get further than the first 10 minutes. And I have rarely spoken to that ‘friend’ since.
ooh… oooh… I have another nomination! “Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo.” And the only reason I was even dragged to see it was ‘cuz I didn’t pay. I want *those* two hours of my life back.
Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle
Hands down the most pretensious movie I’ve ever seen, and Jennifer Jason Leigh was excruciating. The only movie that I paid money to see that I could not finish. Turned it off after 30 min.
Ski Patrol. Ruined the cinema outing for my 11th birthday.
Several folk have dissed 2001, a Space Odyssey. WTF? It may be over-long and dull at the end, but I liked the middle bit and HAL is a sort of funny creation. There are plenty worse.
Twin Town.
An utterly obnoxious film. Just remembered it now and it gave me a shudder.
Why has nobody mentioned the Police Academy franchise?
I thought it was brilliant. It’s definitely not an “easy watch,” though, so I can see why a lot of people find it dull. But even for those people, there’s simply no way it’s the “worst film you have ever seen.”
The Fantastic Four is the first thing that came to mind.
It was like one long inconsistent childish cinematic cliche.
I will have to respectfully disagree. I point you to a key quote of the movie, “Stupid is as stupid does.” Judging by his actions he is not stupid. He is determined, honest, and, most important of all, does not get caught up in the passing fads of history. This is the key difference between “stupid” Forrest, and “smart” Jenny. Forrest defines himself as an individual and does the best he can. Jenny allows herself to be taken up in some illusion of a force of history, as shown by her involvement in the many “social movements” in the movie. The message is not that being stupid is good, rather, that intelligence per se has little to do with making correct decisions. Be an honest, hard-working individual, and you have a better chance of prospering, not a self-absorbed collectivist proselytizer. A good message, I say.
Then again you could take it in a more cynical view, but in either case, the message is clearly different than what you took it to be.
Battlefield Earth is definitely up there for me, though I do wish that “blow the dome” had entered the common lexicon.
As for recent movies, “The Ant Bully” is pretty vile. I point you to this clip. Astounding.
I started watching A Knight’s Tale a couple of weekends ago. But even my schoolgirl crush on Rufus Sewell couldn’t sustain me. What an idiotic mess.
I also have deep, deep hatred of Titanic. Such great source material, so many backstories they could’ve told. Instead we get moronic anachronisms and buffoonish stock characters.
My third choice would be Caligula. In college, I knew nothing of its notoriety and was just intrigued by the theatre posters. I thought it would be similar to I, Claudius. So I went to see it. On a date. With someone I didn’t know every well. I still shudder to think of it.
Definitely “She’s Back.” I used to LIKE Carrie Fisher, despite her loopiness, but this was such drivel I couldn’t come close to watching it all. It even failed in the train wreck sort of way. Yeccch
The only movie I ever walked out on, and that I promptly forgot the name of, was some drivel involving (I kid not) a scene with a blowup sex doll, a chase scene on skateboards and a rocket launcher.
it ended badly for the blowup doll.
Other than that, the two Matrix sequels.
Too many to list. However, we can but try:
Myra Breckinridge – Easily the worst movie ever made.
201 Minutes of Space Idiocy – terminal boredom, squared. Turned me off sci-fi, for life.
Apocalypse Now – An unreadable book turned into an unwatchable movie — and then came Brando to apply the coup de grace.
Citizen Kane – Hollywood’s favorite movie of all time; ’nuff said.
The Patriot – Mel Gibson recreates Oradour-Sur-Glane for the Revolutionary War; and that’s not even the worst part of the movie.
Caddyshack 2 – beyond description.
Hurry Sundown – Michael Caine (?!?!) playing a Southerner, with Hanoi Jane as his slutwife.
Reds – Jack Reed’s final blow against capitalism, and Warren Beatty’s blow against succinct movie-making.
Jesus Christ Superstar – “Even managed to offend atheists.” (I don’t know who wrote that, but it’s perfect.)
The Name of The Rose – All that suspense, for nothing. The biggest anti-climax ever filmed.
The Night Porter – S/M soft porn, played like it was an art movie.
The Omen – Offended even more atheists than Jesus Christ Superstar.
Pretty Woman – Cinderella on Hollywood & Vine. Like that’ll ever happen.
The Prince of Egypt – Just about everything bad ever done, all in one movie.
Titanic – Totalitarian movie-making.
It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World – And it’s a bad, bad, bad, bad movie.
and finally:
Any movie ever starring Gene Wilder, Mel Brooks, Jerry Lewis, Alan Alda or Steven Seagal.
The worst film I have ever seen was “Solar Crises”. Evil corporation tries to sabotage space mission which is trying to prevent the world being burned up – the corporation does because……. well they are evil.
The film starts with well groomed corporate lady standing (with one of her high heals) on starving begger in the gutter – and carries on like this.
The corporations of Hollywood make a lot of “corporations are evil” movies, even though a lot of these films loose money, – I suspect that the Hollywood executives have “self hated issues”.
Bad Santa, without a doubt.
“you could take it (forrest gump) in a more cynical view, but in either case, the message is clearly different than what you took it to be”
You mean the intended message was different than what I took it to be, which might be true, still the message I got was what I perceived.
If the intended message is as you say, I’d have to say the film was a failure because rather than any kind of conscious choice what his priorities were, forrest was just not capable of absorbing very much going on around him, which was what saved him and allowed him to occasionally help others.
And (winding up) the movie didn’t seem to distinguish between being interested in the world and mindlessly following every fad you come across. Jenny made wrong choices because she was screwed up, not because she was ‘smart’.
But every viewer has the right to their own interpretation, if you didn’t hate it, then you didn’t.
Here’s another category; worst thing ever done to a movie. When my son was 12, he came home in tears shortly after a neighbor first got cable. The reason? “They colorized D.O.A.”
So Kim you don’t even like Blazing Saddles? I can only think of one film with Mel Brooks I don’t like and that was Life Sucks
My impression of 2001 A Space Idiocy as: “It’s 45 minutes too long, and at that, the projectionist has left out one reel…”
My impression of 2001 A Space Idiocy as: “It’s 45 minutes too long, and at that, the projectionist has left out one reel…”
Totally agree that the Matrix sequals deserve a mention though I can’t put them in the WORST category. Bad, yes. Perhaps they deserve scorn because they ruined such a fantastic movie in the original Matrix (disagree that the 2nd half is bad. Thought the whole thing rocked). Still, personally I can’t rate THAT low since the battle for Zion was rather cool and being a typical male geek who is easily satisfied with big sci-fi explosions, I’ll have a soft spot for at least that part of the 3rd movie.
One movie I’m shocked hasn’t been mentioned (and I’m ashamed I didn’t mention it originally): The Island of Dr. Moreau. Was this the movie that killed Val Kilmer’s career?
Lastly, any movie with Rob Schneider as the lead has to be ranked. His movies look so bad that I wouldn’t see them to even rate them. I believe he is striving to achieve the worst filmography in the history of cinema.
I’ve got to agree with David Crawford. The Last Samurai takes the cake for bad cinema.
Someone mentioned “Liquid Sky”. I have to disagree! That is one that is definitely so bad it’s good!
I actually paid money to see these – Argh!
Two Lane Black Top
and
Damage
Kim
Pretty Woman?
How can anyone not love this movie. It’s a fucking classic, man.
As are Apocalypse Now and Citizen Kane.
Someone mentioned Bad Lieutenant favourably I think.
I rented it once.
Utter shite.
And to really spoil everyone’s morning picture this: Harvey Keitel dances naked in this film.
And he’d clearly never heard of the Ewan McGregor rule – don’t get it out unless you’ve got something to get out.
A fat middle-aged man gyrating naked and hung like a Chinese mouse. Who is going to enjoy that?
I didn’t enjoy it. My girlfriend didn’t enjoy it. It was cringe-worthy. It was so bad I wanted to eat my own teeth.
What was to enjoy? Fuck all. A truly dreadful experience.
Battlefield: Earth and Freddy Got Fingered.
wasn’t so much of a winner either.
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow – nice design but is just rubbish.
The only “good” performance is from Angelina Jolie.
I know lots of people raved about it, but my all-time turkey was Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge.
Ewan McGregor sings well, but the plot was clichéd boy-meets-girl predictable rubbish, with unconvincing over-the-top characters you don’t give a toss about. Even the usually excellent and thoughtful Jim Broadbent, as a rouged buffoon, was obviously being directed to overact as if his life depended on it.
OK, I’ve seen a few equally dire films on the tele, but Moulin Rouge was definitely the worst I’ve ever paid good money to see. Two hours of purgatory. If we hadn’t driven some friends to the cinema with us we’d have walked out long before the end.
My theory is that the characters count for the most in any film. Doesn’t matter whether it’s Hamlet or Tom and Jerry – if you care about what happens to them you’ll enjoy the film: if you don’t you’ll be bored out of your brain.
Apocalypse Now is Heaven’s Gate, set in Vietnam: a monument to directorial self-indulgence.
Citizen Kane is the most overrated movie of all time. Yeah, it used ground-breaking techniques and blah blah blah… but the story was lousy, and the movie full of inside jokes which make the movie “meaningful” to film buffs, but just stupid to anyone else.
And Pretty Woman is just po-mo Cinderella. Cindy is a whore, not a hard-done-by orphan; and the Prince is an unprincipled, amoral tycoon. Ugh.
And all Mel Brooks’s movies are so terrible, they defy satire. Borscht Belt humor, endlessly replayed in movie after movie… strap the rat cage to my face.
The League of Extraordinary Gentlement. Very, very bad. But I think I may have to go with Pearl Harbor, dollar for dollar the worst film I have seen, especially given the material they had to work with.
After one watches ‘Swept Away’, with Madonna, it feels like the worst film ever made. If one immediately follows it by watching ‘Ballistic, X versus Sever’, with Antonio Banderas, one learns the original assessment was dangerously off.
RK Jones