Almost forgot Meeks’ Cutoff. It wasn’t so much bad as it was crushingly boring. Honest to christ, how long can you show a wagon on a dusty trail? The characters would confer on direction of travel along the way and every conversation went like this: Which way should we go? I dunno, which way do you think? I dunno, which way do YOU think? Let’s go this way. Okay.
Almost nothing happened in this film, which may have been accurate as far as traveling the Oregon Trail, but it ain’t good movie-making.
Are we limited to “BOR-ING” or can we include stupid and cliched? Because if the latter, then I saw a VERY stupid and very cliched movie* just a few weeks ago - I walked out well before the end. (Maybe if I had been with my teenaged daughter I would have just taken a nap.)
for those not wanting to click the link, here’s a hint: It’s called The Hunger Games
Van Helsing has to be up there. We were expecting cheerfully bad schlock, but we got the kind of bad that I can’t even come up with a funny post about, because it was just all-over bad badness with a big ladleful of bad on the side. Nothing funny, nothing interesting, nothing original, nothing joyfully Ed-Wood-bad, just unrelenting badness. We watched the first half-hour or so, because surely it *had *to get better, but it didn’t and we gave up.
Was my generation’s Lost In Translation, for me. I hated the main character, a selfish old woman who didn’t care how much shit she created for others.
My girlfriend at the time liked the movie. It may have been our last date…
I hated Blair Witch too. Aside from the nauseating camera work (and this from someone who’s normally nearly immune to motion sickness), the “characters” were so incredibly obnoxious I was rooting for the witch to come shut them up.
I also really hated 2001: A Space Travesty, which I watched mostly for Leslie Nielsen. As I said on IMDB, “This was a total disappointment to me. IMO, it was basically “all the cliches of every Leslie Nielsen movie”, minus the customary intelligence and humor. I can’t recommend this one, even to other diehard Leslie Nielsen fans.”
The 1981 “Tarzan” movie, with Bo Derek, was pretty awful too. Shouldn’t the title character actually be the primary character? My IMDB review: “I have NO idea HOW John Derek got away with calling this “movie” “Tarzan”, when the title character was not even close to being the major character. If he’d called it “Jane”, that would have at least been somewhat more honest about the focus of the “movie”. Not that that would have helped much. Nothing could have helped this waste of film. I saw this ONCE, eighteen years ago, and still shudder at the memory.” (This was written in 1999.)
The all-time worst I’ve subjected myself to, so far as I retain any memory of it, would be “Kannibal”. Again, my IMDB comments: “Absolute garbage. The “plot” is incoherent, sound quality is so bad that dialogue is unintelligible, background music choices are bizarre at best [such as in the opening sequence, with several police cars rushing to their destination on a rainy night with lights and sirens, with bright, sprightly, cheerful music playing], the music tends to be so loud that it drowns out dialogue [which is probably a good thing. Judging by the garbled “plot”, the “writing” was so bad that a better result could have been achieved by throwing alphabet soup at blank paper] and the “actors” seem to be sleepwalking or to hate the movie about as much as the audience does.”
So the At Long Last Love or the new Wicker Man type infamously bad movies don’t seem to be included in the question.
On some films people have listed here:
Meek’s Cutoff: A bit overrated but hardly a bad film. My main complaints are the changes to the original tale. E.g., the original train had 200 wagons and a thousand people vs. the handful of wagons in the film. And when they realized they were going to have water issues, they stayed in one spot and sent out scouts to find the next water source. They didn’t spend weeks wandering around without water.
Lost in Translation: If you don’t think this is a wonderful film, please go see a priest/minister/shaman and find out where you soul has gone. A great example of how to convey deep emotions with subtlety. Something very few films have even tried to do, let alone succeed.
The original, the sequels, or the recent Syfy original movie? The original is a fairly fun slasher film, not great cinema but pretty decent for its genre. The sequels are terrible but not really deserving of the title of “worst ever” IMHO. Never saw the remake, looked awful though.
I can’t believe nobody has mentioned “The Godfather Part III.” What a complete and utter abomination. The first two were among the best handful of films ever made; this crap should not have been allowed to use the name!
Margaret is an odd choice for worst movie ever. It was flawed, for sure, and there were pointless scenes, but there are much worse films out there.
I’ve walked out of 3 movies:
Showgirls ('nuff said)
Romance, another movie (French, this time) that made sex seem tedious and dull
And Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, so badly written and badly acted we left after about 30 minutes and snuck into Prometheus, which was just barely not quite as shitty in the end.
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski is a horror novel about a family in a haunted house that is being filmed. It’s fantastic and all the while reading it I was wondering why no one had ever done a movie with that plot. I think Paranomal Activity was dull too, but there has to be a way to do it well. I can’t wait for that movie.
I understand Malick’s “The Thin Red Line” and “The Tree of Life” appearing in this thread. I’ve had this discussion with friends before who had the same reaction to these films, and I still claim this is more about a failure of expectations, more than anything else. Malick is always successful at getting good financing for his projects, and big name actors want to work with the guy. The problem is, when money and stars become involved, it is inevitable the film will be marketed as commercial entertainment. And Malick’s films are not commercial entertainment.
I walk into a Malick film knowing a little something about his creative process, and with genuine curiosity for what will appear on screen. He’s not avant garde, more of a collage artist. He shoots thousands of hours of film with only the loosest idea of story. He then composes his “linear” story in editing, letting the images pull him in directions. Obviously the result of this process ends up as some very non-traditional (and non-commercial) storytelling.
I actually talked my wife out of seeing “The Tree of Life”, when she said she wanted to see the new “Brad Pitt flick”. That’s the problem.
That said, the only time I walked out of a film was Woody Allen’s “Small Time Crooks”. Not because it was such a bad film (I’m sure it was fine). I just decided about ten minutes in that I wasn’t in the mood for his crap.
The Last Temptation of Christ. I don’t know about the novel it was supposedly based on, but it seemed like the script was written by some college sophomore majoring in philosophy at a state university trying so very, very hard to sound deep. The pacing was glacial, to describe the photography as mediocre would be charitable, and its portrayal of Christ as an existential wimp was agonizingly pretentious and stupid. Especially exasperating was the tacked-on dream sequence of Jesus having sex, which, despite the director’s claims to the contrary, was all too obviously an adolescent ploy to get attention. A chimp with a Super 8 could have made a more intelligent, visually appealing film.
At least *The Passion of the Christ *was pretty good torture porn.
The Big Hit. I actually walked out of the theater before it was over. I could not believe how stupid I was being treated as a viewer of this absolute bullshit. That was one of the only times I have ever left angry about watching a movie. Disappointed or saddened, yes, but this was a first for me being angry at what I had just been subjected to.
Maybe I was in a mood that day, but it always sticks out as one of the worst movie going experiences I’ve ever had.
Now this will seem unfair but I can make a case that, for me personally, the worst film I have sat all the way through is American Pie.
I only saw it as the last in a large batch of rentals long after it’s theatrical run. I had heard that it was pretty funny. I watched it while being intermittently distracted by some other activity. At some point, about 10 minutes from the end, I realised that although I was watching the movie, and didn’t hate it or find it objectionable, I had also not laughed once. I could remember many of the gags but as each had happened it had been like I had read the script - they all seemed weak and predictable. Naturally having come to this realisation it wasn’t very likely I would laugh afterwards.
So I watched all of American Pie without a single chuckle. I’m sure I’ve seen other comedies that I haven’t laughed at but I have given up in disgust at the standard of the movie generally. But there was nothing outstandingly bad about this one it was just a drama with the dramatic bits cut out, a thrill-less thriller, a lack of adventure story and an unfunny comedy, with good production values.
Brown Bunny. Yes, there is that blow job scene, but you have to wade through three miles of hip-deep horseshit to get to it, and by then you don’t care, because you’ve still got another three miles to go.