Many people have nominated movies for this thread. These EXACT SAME PEOPLE have never tried to sit through a showing of Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees. Read the plot synopsis on Wikipedia, which I’ll spoiler for those who don’t want to be spoiled:
[spoiler]JUST KIDDING, YOU FOOLS! There is no plot! But here’s what Wikipedia says about it:
[/spoiler]
Re-formatted as hypertext and posted on the Internet. You don’t even have to watch it now, just that description is enough to tell you what an atrocity this movie is.
I’ve watched it 1 and a half times. The first half was at a theater, where I walked out. Then an idiot professor in college forced me to sit through a showing.
Other terrible movies have explosions, or gunfire, or nudity, or even yelling and running to liven things up. At the very least, they have dialog.
The Green Beret - John Wayne puts down his six shooter and picks up a M16
Its a move made by a self confessed arbiter of US patriotism to justify the Vietnam war and rattle the sabre.
Its bad indeed
Here is the last line of the film -
Kirby is talking to a Vietnamese orphan boy (Ham Chuck) who was partly adapted by the unit - somewhat stereotype name of one of those funny foreigners
Kirby, in a touching moment, walks over to the boy and tells him the sad news(about Petersons death). Ham Chuck asks plaintively, “What will happen to me now?” Kirby places Petersen’s green beret on him and says, “You let me worry about that, Green Beret. You’re what this thing’s all about.” The two walk holding hands along the beach into the sunset.
I took a young relative to see Twilight as a thank you for dog-sitting for me. Dreadful. Wooden acting, a plot that made no sense, lots of angsty sighing and moaning, and really really bad special effects.
Even the tweener I took with me thought it was pretty awful.
The Wylds (repackaged for the UK market as ‘The Adventures of Chris Fable’ with this cover art - clearly aiming to ride the Harry Potter wave)
Truly and utterly poor film. I think it must just have started out as an amateur drama effort that someone filmed and published. It’s nearly all walking and the bits that aren’t walking are terrible dialogue, limp acting and ‘special effects’ that look like they were done on an 8 bit computer, badly.
I saw My Dinner With Andre over dinner, and watching my gravy congeal was more interesting than the film. It was just a long, rambling, pretentious discussion – the kind that stoned college kids would find profound. No scenery, no actual acting. Just a couple of blowhards regurgitating some pointless crap they read somewhere while sitting in a chair.
To be fair, I watched it almost 15 years ago, and I’ve read enough praise for it now that I figure I must have missed something. But my initial experience watching it was so utterly tedious and insufferable that I haven’t been able to bring myself to rewatch it since.
I was going to say Battlefield Earth as well. I think it’s quite telling that that’s the first nomination in this thread.
It’s a stinker - it fails as SF. It fails as (any other category of movie). Awful acting, writing, it doesn’t have any visual interest at all. They used one transition between every freakin’ scene (whatever you call a wipe from the middle out, we started doing the “Moses parting the Red Sea” gesture after a few cuts).
My buddies brought it over so we could have a fun “Bad Movie Night” (we were going to film ourselves improvising an MST3K commentary)…within a couple of minutes we were dumbfounded at how stupidly bad it was. It was beyond making jokes. As you said, it is so bad you can’t even enjoy poking fun at how bad it is.
I’ll nominate the third “Matrix” movie as a runner-up. Oh my lord that sucked. I was convinced to go see it in Imax and it was the cinematic equivalent of reading the world’s lousiest book in LARGE TYPE. Bad scifi. Hideous acting. Huge budget. Cast that evidently feels they are appearing in the World’s Bestest Movie Evar.
Hell, I watched Showgirls. It was better than both of those and it’s at least cheesy.
My most-disliked film is Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video, an incompetent, incoherent mess assembled by Michael O’Donoghue (of National Lampoon and SNL). It is stupefyingly tedious and utterly unfunny, and has none of the charm or unintentional comedy of traditional “worst films” like Plan 9 from Outer Space and The Room.
Never before or since have I seen so many people walking out of a film. I managed to stick it out, and when the lights came up at the end I was the only person left in the theater. In retrospect, I should have bailed.
To add insult to injury, Mondo Video’s marketing was grossly deceptive. The cast list includes people like Carrie Fisher, Bill Murray, and Teri Garr. Well, most of the actors named on the poster are only on screen for a few seconds.
It astounds me that people are naming films like The Phantom Menace and Matrix Revolutions as all-time worst films when repulsive dreck like Mondo Video is out there. Folks, if you truly think that Phantom Menace is the worst film ever, then you’ve led a sheltered movie-going life. Go watch Mondo Video, if you can find it. Or hell, just watch a Pauly Shore movie.
Well, the movie I dislike the most, Alien, is hardly the worst film ever made. Overall, it’s well directed and much of the first quarter is nicely done.
It only falls apart once the alien shows up, as the crew members continued to do the stupidest possible thing in every situation and, as more as revealed, it makes less and less sense. It’s a bunch of morons running around with bulleyes on their shirts on a target range, and they constantly stop and stand still so the alien can get a better shot at them. There are many ways that they could have survived and nothing prevents them from trying any of them. The film ignores characterization and logic in order to make the audience jump. I find that extremely annoying (the horror scare is the cheapest and easiest thing you can do as a filmmaker) and by the end I was rooting for the alien to kill them all – since they were all too stupid to live anyway.
But I’ve seen far worse films. I hate that film because I don’t give a shit about watching stupid people constantly doing suicidal acts in the name of making the audience jump a few times. It’s ultimately a tiresome slasher film set in a spaceship and everyone involved is wasted (and has done much better).
I’d say Battlefield Earth but I have to recuse myself from that because I never watched it all the way through.
My nominee is Tor, Hunter From The Future, in which science-fiction meets fantasy and then just sits there like a dull, dun-colored turd in a toilet bowl. Watching paint dry has more emotion, range and action. I should have left early.
It’s like when Top Gear did the “Worst Car in the History of the World”. They quickly found appalling cars, but there were excuses for all of them. They were designed to be cheap. They were built by companies (or in countries) with no experience in motoring. So they established a criterion that it had to be “not cheap, and by companies that should have known better.” So I have no great expectations for a movie that was designed as filler for SNL. But I’m going to drag out the sharp knives for something that could and should have been excellent and instead involved action sequences where the worst child actor in the world says “I wonder what happens when I press this button?” and blows up a heavily shielded space station by accident.
I’d like to say, Edge of Tomorrow, because the ending made me so angry and destroyed any good will from the first 2/3 of the movie. I could also say Avatar, but that was only bad because of the simplistic plot, paper thin characters, and beating me over the head with its point.
However, I can only answer Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.
Non-sensical plot. Oh, they can look like people! Why not just do that? Robot afterlife? Oh, sure! The Smithsonian has been moved to Arizona? Of course.
Terrible acting from all involved.
Two of the most racist characters ever committed to celluloid.
Why the hell are there 4 endings? This is not RotK.
Such a boring movie, and all they needed to do was slam huge metal robots together for 2 hours.
Goddamn Decepticon Balls. I almost left the theater at that point, but I had lost all motor control, and was trying to keep from sliding out of my chair.
I think the Decepticon Balls alone assure total victory in this little competition.
Think of the most annoyingly pretentious person you know. Then imagine that person is three people. Now put those three people in a castle and have them wander around aimlessly for two hours trying to out-pseudo-intellectual each other.
I hated Mother, Jugs & Speed decades before its star, Bill Cosby, was revealed to be the Rapemaster General. While he was generally quite good on television, he never didn’t suck in the big screen. It’s a very dark comedy about the rivalry between two commercial ambulance services. Also starred Raquel Welch (doing this piece of shit instead of another “cave girl in skimpy fur bikini” role) and a pre-Taxi Driver Harvey Keitel. The writer (Tom Mankiewicz) and director (Peter Yates) went on to better things, so I guess we can write this off as “for educational purposes,” all involved honing their craft for triumphs to come later.
I sought this one out because I heard it was bad, and I like bad movies; Plan 9 From Outer Space is a repeated guilty pleasure. And I figured “If it was really unwatchable, it would be forgotten, instead of released on VHS, no?”
I was so wrong. The entire movie is dubbed; it’s basically a silent film with narration and mismatched dubbing occasionally. No shot is longer than thirty seconds, because that was all the camera they had could do. And the acting is nonexistent, the plot is… vague, to say the least… and pretty much everyone associated with it demonstrates no real ability to do what they’re doing, be it acting, writing, directing, or much of anything. It requires the attention span of a Terminator to get through the thing.
Even the MST3K version is… well, they’ve riffed better movies. This thing is unwatchable, and FAMOUS for being unwatchable. Ecch. This was the movie that permanently altered my viewpoint from “Well, you paid for it, you might as well watch it,” to “My time is worth something, and I will sacrifice no more of it.”
Manos: The Hands Of Fate was made by what were essentially amateurs. Someone referenced the Top Gear Worst Car in the History of the World special up above and it made an important distinction. A bad car or a bad movie made by the inexperienced is one thing but one made by people who are otherwise capable of quality work is quite another. So I’d disqualify it on that basis.
