In response to X~Slayer(ALE), the Dustin Hoffman, Warren Beatty movie was “Ishtar” which I previously mentioned.
And if Julius Henry thinks Santa Claus vs the Martians is a strange title how about “The Harlem Globetrotters On Gilligan’s Island” ? Since this was a TV movie from 1979, I don’t know if it should count as a bad film. Still, that title is unbelievable huh?
CONGO
All This and World War Two with Beatles songs as the soundtrack for clips of war movies and newsreels.
Also, the crapfest of Sargeant Pepper’s Lonely hearts Club Band starring Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees.
And that horrid Kristy McNichol / Christopher Atkins adaptation of The Pirates of Penzance.
I hate musicals.
I’ve always claimed that Event Horizon was the worst movie ever - it’s certainly the worst I’ve seen.
Having said that - I’m not counting Battlefield Earth because I only managed to sit through ten minutes of it.
The alleged musical starring Kristy McNichol and Christopher Atkins was called THE PIRATE MOVIE. - Good nomination from DrFidelius.
And how abut a movie similar to Congo and just as bad - ANACONDA
Starship Troopers & Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.
I’d watch Manos on an endless loop before I’d ever sit through either of those two again.
Fascinating! You’ve actually found time to point this out more than once?
Why?
Cannonball Run
Cannonball Run II
Smokey and the Bandit
Smokey and the Bandit II
Smokey and the Bandit III
Gone in 60 Seconds
The Fast and the Furious
2 Fast 2 Furious
…but maybe I just have a thing against dumb car movies.
[sub]Note: I said DUMB car movies. Mad Max is still the man.[/sub]
I must admit to being fascinated by Battlefield Earth and Jeepers Creepers. My wife and I counted up the number of distinct points at which BE insulted the audience’s intelligence with things that blatantly didn’t add up, and it came out to be roughly once every minute or two. I must say, it was a unique experience.
I never thought I’d see another movie like that, but then they made Jeepers Creepers. Christ! That’s a prime example of a movie that simply wouldn’t happen were it not for the total idiocy of the protagonists. To wit:
You see a demon eating someone. What do you do?
a.) Drive away at full speed?
b.) Stop the car?
c.) Stop the car and watch?
d.) Stop the car, turn off the ingition, and watch?
e.) Stop the car, turn off the ignition, get out of the car, and watch?
I’m sorry, that was a trick question. The correct answer is, “stop the car, turn off the ignition when you know the car has difficulty starting, get out, move from the driver’s side to the passenger side of the car, watch in horror as the monster eats someone, and- most important of all- do not leave until the monster has finished eating his victim, had a cup of coffee, a smoke, and an after-dinner mint, has turned his attention to you, and is now flying at you. At this point, you may now return to the driver’s side, enter the car, attempt three times to start the car, and drive away.”
Or my personal favorite: the protagonists (let’s call them “Boy” and “Girl,” because that’s all anyone remembers about them) are driving around when the song “Jeepers Creepers” comes on the radio.
Boy: Hey, it’s that song! (Turns up the radio.)
Girl (loud voice, in order to be heard over radio): What song?
Boy (shouting over girl, turns up radio): The song that woman talked about! It’s a clue!
Girl (screaming even louder in order to be heard over radio): What song? What woman? What the hell are you talking about?
Boy (turns up radio louder, screams louder in order to be heard over both radio and girl): Would you shut up? This song is important!
Girl (shrieking at the top of her lungs): WHAT SONG? WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? TURN OFF THE DAMN RADIO!
Boy (turns up radio all the way, shrieks like an enraged banshee): SHUT UP! DAMN YOU! THIS SONG IS IMPORTANT!
This is, of course, the scriptwriter’s clever way of explaining why the boy and girl don’t hear the demon approaching their car. But why, exactly? Why should we care if they hear it, when if they did their only response would be their inevitable slack-jawed quiver-lipped paralysis?
But I still maintain that the worst movie ever made is the enigmatic “sharecropper movie.” It was something of a phantasmagoria for me. I couldn’t stay awake, and would periodically wake up to see a few seconds of a sharecropper running in darkness before I submerged into slumber again. My wife was awake for the whole thing, and reports that the whole movie was like that: sharecroppers fleeing in darkness from some horrible monster, the nature of which was never revealed.
Then there’s all those movies at Hollywood Video which resulted from someone being given a camcorder for their birthday. Ah, indie cinema. It’s so much more intellectual than big-name Hollywood movies, isn’t it? The history of these movies is a bit like this:
1.) Hollywood Video announces their “First Rites” (or whatever they call it) line of videos, by which they intend to promote the exciting world of indie cinema. Now, anyone can find the works of brilliant, edgy first-time filmmakers in a special section, in boxes bordered with bright yellow.
2.) The special section is gone, and the First Rites videos are scattered in with the other movies.
3.) The bright yellow border is gone, and First Rites movies can be distinguished only by the “First Rites” logo on the front of the box.
4.) “First Rites” logo moved to the back of the box.
5.) What the hell- this movie didn’t have a First Rites logo on it! Honest, honey, I looked over the box with a magnifying glass! Check for yourself! Do you think I should go ask for our money back?
The prime example of #5 is “The House that Screamed.” This is a movie which, quite literally, was made by some guy who got a camcorder for Christmas and decided that he, his family, and his friends would make a horror movie. Not a brilliant horror movie too original for the studios, mind you. No, basically just a bunch of popular horror movies put into a blender, with a special effects budget that was blown on ketchup(!) and bubble-wrap(?).
Another contender in the same category is “Satan’s Storybook,” memorable only for Lord Orcus and his prancing jester. Beyond that, it was like something they would show on public access, at 3AM.
Ugh… I saw that, but I honestly can’t remember it. It’s partly that I confuse it with that Winona Ryder horror movie, so I can no longer remember which fragments belong to which movie. And it’s partly that the movie was so utterly bland.
Speaking of pretentious crap, has anyone here seen “Marianne and Julianne”? When I was in college it was picked by the artsy types as being that movie that they absolutely had to show in place of, say, “Heavy Metal.” IIRC it was about two sisters, one a feminist, and the other a terrorist. It was slow, it had spam-fisted symbolism (a character is sitting in a cafe thinking about marriage, and a woman in a bridal costume walks past the camera. Why?!? They’re in a cafe, for Christ’s sake!) Plus, it had a kid burned alive in gasoline.
Then there’s “Dr. Caligari.” (Not the 1920’s silent classic, but an 80’s movie.) A movie that exists solely to say, “I can make a weird and self-indulgent movie, with lots of sex. Ergo, I am more hip than you.” The one good thing I will say about it is that visually, it worked well. If anything, the utter lack of a budget worked in their favor. “Outdoors” was depicted using nothing more than a black backdrop and a fog machine, which gave it a weird, “these people are living in a self-enclosed universe” feel. If Tim Burton remade it, you’d probably see outdoor shots with vast expanses of gnarled trees and the like, but it wouldn’t be the same.
But the most vile of all self-indulgent art movies is “The Item.” God, that movie was excruciating. I looked into the story behind it, and it looks like some scriptwriter decided that Hollywood movies are all crap, so he would create the ultimate movie. With, of course, himself in the starring role as the hip gangster. And, of course, shot with the camcorder he got for Christmas. Every frame reeks with the director’s sneering arrogance arising from his unshakable belief in his own brilliance.
Remember “The Day Trippers”, with Liev Schreiber’s character constantly talking about the novel he was writing? “There’s this guy, see, and he’s a prophet. But nobody listens to him, because he has a dog’s head. And you know what the best part is? Guess what kind of dog it is. That’s right- he’s a pointer. Because he points to what’s wrong with our society, right?” “The Item” is full of that kind of symbolism, utterly lacking in power, because it’s just an elaborate decoder-ring game that the writer is forcing the audience to play. The plot? These gangsters are paid to baby-sit a penis-worm-monkey for a few hours until the buyer arrives to take the PWM off their hands. But the PWM’s life-support system malfunctions, so they take it out and try to nurse it, and it starts messing with their heads so that they all commit suicide. Oh, and the PWM’s eyes are sewn shut. As if that weren’t bad enough, there’s some bloody scenes in which various people (including a gang of transvestites) get bloodily beaten up and killed. Every movement is accompanied by a “whoosh” noise, and there’s lots of “Matrix on a budget” handheld camera effects, intended to make it look like people are zooming around during fights.
As one might expect, this has a lot in common with #5 movies, although it was clearly a semi-professional production. (By which I mean only that shooting was never interrupted with comments like, “Dude, I have to get home. I’ve got the early shift at Wal-Mart tomorrow!”) Most striking was the fact that the back of the box completely misrepresented the movie, because that’s the only way they can get anyone to watch it. It was presented as being a straight monster movie, rather than being a Tarantino-esque meditation on Nietzsche and the Id, via the symbolism of a peniswormmonkey.
No offense to anyone, but it’s clear that many of the posters in this thread have never seen a truly BAD movie, only movies that they didn’t like…movies that have many fans. In my opinion, a film can only be called truly bad when it’s of such incompetence and so utterly un-entertaining that it has nearly no fans whatsoever. So, here’s my choices.
Heaven’s Gate: since it’s ranked by many critics and historians as one of the worst movies ever made, I’d rather not pick such an obvious choice; but alas, since I subjected myself to a 3 dollar and change Hollywood Video rental of the DVD, I have to put it in. One of the most painfully pretentious, overlong, and boring movies ever made…there are, however, certain sequences that are beautifully filmed, so if you’re a fanatic for pictorial epic cinema, you might want to swallow your pride and endure 3 hours and 40 minutes of this bullshit in order to appeciate the 20 minutes or so of good stuff.
Children Of The Living Dead: a object lesson in how NOT to make a movie. The producer’s daughter took control of the film after it was done, and changed all the dialogue by dubbing it over with new dialogue…since the lips can’t possibly match, you might wonder how this works. Well, it works by never showing a person’s face when they’re talking, so there’s nothing but reaction shots to dialogue through the entire film. The editing is unbelievably bad and the story is non-existent.
Adding to the dumb car movie artistic cinematic genre:
Stroker Ace
Speed Zone
The musical version of Lost Horizon.
Lost Souls.
I can watch almost anything. I might not actively enjoy it, but I will be distracted and entertained. Almost everything, that is.
The day I rented this movie, I also rented Left Behind. I was able to sit through that, and even allow myself to be entertained by its sheer horribleness. Not so with Lost Souls. There was nothing obstentatiously bad about it, nothing so bad that it stood out. It was just boring, poorly-but-not-hilariously-wretchedly written, and bland. Worse than anything I’d ever seen, and that’s a genre I usually like.
A line blatantly stolen from Winston Churchill:
“Winston, you’re drunk.”
“Bessie, you’re ugly. And tomorrow, I shall be sober.”
I just had the privilege of watching Gay Niggers From Outer Space, which wins my all-time award for tack. It’s got abysmal production values, a ridiculous storyline and some of the wosrt dubbing I’ve ever seen (from Danish, no less). However, it’s not eligible for this thread because it’s also extremely funny and a ruthless spoof of Star Trek.
Since this thread really seems to be about revealing cinema’s most highly polished dogturds, a vote for Simpatico. A cast including Nick Nolte, Jeff Bridges, Albert Finney and Caroline Keener can’t save this from being plotless tedious drivel. The only movie I’ve ever been to where more than half the audience fell asleep before the movie ended or walked out.
Nothing But Trouble a truly horrific movie.
Hm. I noticed on the first page a couple of nominations for Four Weddings and a Funeral. I don’t know if it would be appropriate to call this the "all time worst movie."
On the other hand, it did feature Andie MacDowell, who I would nominate as the “all time worst actress.” What Hugh Grant’s character is supposed to see in her, I’ve no idea.
Her acting in the last scene (“Is it still raining…?”) is particularly bad.
I found the scenes without her to be quite nice and frequently amusing. YMMV.*
By the way, this the first time I’ve ever used “YMMV” in a post. When I first started lurking here, it took me ages to figure out what that phrase meant, and it took me even longer to figure out how I could use it appropriately in a post. Success!
The Beast of Yucca Flats. Nearly no plot, mysterious narration that just repeats “A man dead. A woman’s purse” and “Flag on the moon…how did it get there?”. Some weired thing where you never see the actors’ lips while they’re talking. Tor Johnson.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Tatiana *
**I’ve always claimed that Event Horizon was the worst movie ever - it’s certainly the worst I’ve seen.
[QUOTE]
This reminds me of Supernova, and Sphere. The former is full of cliches, but seems to think of itself as clever and smart. But it isn’t. Which makes it even more insulting to sit through. The latter, that big budget thing, with Dustin Hoffman and Sharon Stone, it just goes on forever, steals good ideas from good sci-fi films before it, like 2001 and Solaris, and just tanks at the end. At least Event Horizon has some great set design and effects going for it – but it’s still pretty bad.
Also, I absolutely hate New Rose Hotel by Abel Ferrar (of Bad Lieutenant fame). Christopher Walken looks like he’s wearing a toupee on top of a wig. The whole movie is shot in jerky-cam. It seems like much of the dialogue is improvised, and like the actors are just talking to mirrors. It’s supposed to be based on a William Gibson story, but virtually nothing in the film has any sort of “cyber”-whatever. And the last 45 minutes of the movie:
are a complete flashback through the first 45 minutes!