To quote Mike Nelson “If there was ever a movie I wanted to feed into a stump grinder, this is the one.”
A movie that was intended to be good, took itself seriously, but still ended up being a parody of serious films… The Committee
We start out with a driver picking up a hitchhiker, tricking that hitchhiker into looking at the engine of the car, slamming the hood of the car down on the hitchhiker’s neck, feeling bad about the whole thing, sewing his head back on, then talking about his actions and life generally for the next hour or so.
It’s meant to be very lofty or high-brow, but ends up being needlessly cruel and then tedious.
This is one of those films that was “lost” for 30 or so years before coming out on DVD. It’s primarily remembered for the Pink Floyd soundtrack or the Arthur Brown appearance about half-way through. “Who is the God of Hell Fire?!?”
Should’ve stayed lost.
Bolero. First and only movie I’ve ever walked out of–and I’ve seen Liquid Sky! Bolero was an excuse for Bo Derek and several others to walk around naked for 90 minutes and that didn’t even redeem it–really bad dialog, bad story, bad everything.
I had a hard time choosing between*** Avatar*** and Elysium, but I will go with*** Elysium***.
This is the worst movie ever made because the message is absolutely nonsensical. Director Neil Blomkamp isn’t shy about the fact that this story is intended to allegorically represent the problem of illegal immigration, stratification of wealth, etc, etc, saying “This isn’t science fiction. This is real. This is now.” The problem is that the story is very clearly science fiction because it relies on a science fiction premise: Free, unlimited, magical health care.
To summarize: Earth is a massively overpopulated hellhole, but all the rich people live in a satellite sky palace where machines can diagnose and instantly cure any disease. So far, makes sense. In a universe where all disease can be cured, the world would obviously be overpopulated, right? So if someone on the surface is suffering from a disease, they might risk making the flight to Elysium just to have a shot at breaking into somebody’s house and jumping in their magical healing machine.
Apparently there are dozens of unoccupied houses on Elysium just sitting around empty. The movie doesn’t concern itself with the problem of crashing a space-ship into someone’s house, breaking in, and taking their medicine. No wonder Jodie Foster hates them so much!
The story never gives an explanation for why the people of Elysium don’t share their machines. In fact, the end of the movie shows they have giant space ships full of medical machines just gathering dust, and we are left to assume that they are only witholding it out of spite.
The metaphor itself is hideously, completely broken. It is not “real” in any sense. In real life, we can’t export medicine to the entire world because medicine (and doctors, and specialized equipment) is a limited resource and it costs money. It is neither unlimited nor magical, and to claim that the First World witholds its wealth out of nothing but malice is tremendously unfair.
Anyone with even a shred of critical thinking will also realize that the resolution of the movie is disastrous. The movie depicts giant medical space ships landing on Earth, and the poor huddled masses pick up their injured children because their deliverance has arrived. How many of these space ships are there? Are there enough to serve all of the billions of people on Earth? Because now one of two things will happen:
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The most probable outcome is that an armed group (of which there are obviously many) will inevitably sieze control of the ships and start charging admission. They don’t even need to control all of them: Just controlling one ship in a region could be enough to make a man a king.
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Assuming that everyone shares and takes turns, and the ships are able to treat most of the human population, the overpopulation problem will only be exacerbated. Humanity’s already depleted resources will be spread even thinner than they already are, and the world falls further into chaos.
So it turns out that Jodie Foster was actually the savior of humanity, because she was the only one willing to save the world from itself.
No - no. There are many people who hate that movie.
The thing is that you don’t want to be one of those people.
I don’t get this. It wasn’t Cronenberg’s best work and maybe it is one of the worst movies of all time but I don’t remember it really having anything to do with racism. I’ll agree about the lack of depth and no real insight though.
I’m going to vote for Battlefield Earth as well. I read and enjoyed the book and I am extremely forgiving of bad movies so I thought this would be a movie I’d enjoy at least some but the movie was truly horrible and a memorable bad experience for me. I’m not awaiting the sequel.
Doctor Dolittle, the 1998 film with Eddie Murphy. What a waste of cellulose.
The story was nothing at all like any real Doctor Dolittle story, and the Doctor Dolittle character was nothing at all like the character of the stories. Never mind that the setting was moved from Victorian England to modern San Francisco, and never mind having the title character being black. You could perfectly well do those things and still have a Doctor Dolittle story. This wasn’t that.
What this movie was, was substantially just a compendium of toilet humor and butt jokes. Fine comedy for a certain subset of teenagers, I suppose.
Somebody else must have agreed with me. Later that year, when TIME Magazine did their annual “Ten Best” issue (lists of Ten Best plus the One Worst in many different categories), their verdict for the Worst Movie was – you guessed it – Doctor Dolittle.
Note: NOT to be confused with the 1967 film of the same name, starring Rex Harrison as Doctor Dolittle, which actually was clearly a Dr. Dolittle story. I don’t know if it was actually a story that Hugh Lofting wrote (I doubt it), but it portrayed an accurate back-story that followed the book, and the rest of the story, even if not a real Lofting original, was quite well in-character. The Eddie Murphy movie, however, not so much. Not at all.
It is prophesied: Peter Jackson will be slain by no man.
I’ve heard that, ironically, one reason Murphy wanted to make the film is that he is a big fan of Hugh Lofting’s book. The book, by the way, is somewhat embarrassing today because of what is apparently the unconscious racism of the time it was written.
It’s funny, I just had the chance to watch this on the 18th (Direct TV is giving us a sneak peek at HBO to try and entice us to sign up–fat chance) and I watched it–and had damn near the exact same reaction as you did. Whoever wrote this used the wrong mushrooms for dinner, because the plot is an incoherent mess.
Say what you will about the Matthew Broderick “Godzilla” (and you can say quite a bit), it was coherently plotted, with characters doing reasonable (well, reasonable for them) things in linkage with the story…something the 2014 Godzilla avoided at all costs.
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Crash. Oh, how I hate that film.
Why? It had no depth at all and no real insight. They might as well have just put up a screen that said, " Racism is bad. White people in Hollywood feel guilty, but don’t want to actually think about the issue too much, either."
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I’m pretty sure you guys are talking about two differentfilms.
Any movie that’s in legitimate contention for “worst ever made” would be bad enough that I’d have been forewarned, and thus have avoided seeing it (and thus also avoided the opportunity to personally dislike it).
That said, the worst movie that I’ve ever seen (or at least, a portion thereof) is an obscure direct-to-DVD flick called “Time Changer”. It’s a clumsy attempt at fundamentalist Christian witnessing, with the hero using a time machine to thwart the efforts of the evil secular humanists, who are of course evil because, you know, secular humanists. Not only are the dialog and storytelling cringingly awful (“Well golly gee gosh, I never realized that stealing was wrong! Thank you for telling me, mister nice man!”), but the production values and cinematography are literally painfully bad. And yes, I mean literally: Just looking at the scene on the screen caused me physical discomfort.
The best I can say is that it’s the thought that counts: My dad (who gave it to me) knows that I like time travel stories, and he figured that since it was a Christian movie, it had to be pretty good. He was legitimately trying to give me a gift that he thought I’d appreciate. Unfortunately, as in so many other ways, Dad was completely wrong.
Peter Capaldi: There’s a film called Alien? That’s offensive! No wonder you keep getting invaded.
So the only reason I saw the first Transformers movie is that it was like 109 degrees outside and it was the movie about to start the soonest. I knew going in it would be bad, however, I just wanted air conditioning and to wait it out until after sunset.
While I liked Transformers toys and cartoons as a kid in the 80’s, this was just so much a headache inducing, confusing, awful, painful, angering, wretched movie that I’d have been more comfortable sitting out in the weather than in the theater.
I’m sure the sequels are even worse, but having learned my lesson, I refused to see them.
I’m tempted to post all this again in the Hey movie, you have not solved the problem! thread, since my problem was discomfort, and this movie only made it worse.
Even the cat???:eek: You heartless evil person!
I share your dislike of Alien, thinking that It! The Terror from Beyond Space, from which it shamefully lifted its plot, is a much better film in many ways, and under-appreciated.
If you want a REALLY bad Alien-type film (and Og knows, there were plenty of cheap remakes and ripoffs in its wake), I recommend, for your viewing displeasure, Star Crystal. Yet another Alien-Loose-Aboard-the -Spaceship films, but in this case they defeat the alien by…
[spoiler]…converting it to Christianity.
Really. I’m not kidding.
I actually rented and watched this entire film.
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If you have a masochistic streak, you can watch it here, for free:
Some films I rated 1* at IMDB after enduring them were:
Windtalkers. At a friend’s house, we actually paid to see it on pay per view.
Casino (deNiro)
The Out of Towners (Jack Lemmon). That movie made me want to strangle somebody. Maybe it was supposed to be infuriating, but paying money to see it was like paying money to catch a cold.
I don’t blame you all for getting this one wrong. If I could have avoided seeing it, I would have. The true worst movie ever made: Eragon
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based on a book that was a patchwork of every fantasy cliche ever, which was understandable since it was a first effort by a teenager.
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badly written script that took the cliche to the next level by having every word out of every character’s mouth be more cliche. Also took a plot that actually hung together a bit and machete-ed it into pieces then taped it back together so if it were a painting it would be an amateur cubist . . . with holes in it.
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John Malkovitch chews scenery
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Everybody chews the scenery
It was so bad that even though it was based on a best selling novel and was obviously set up for the sequel, the sequel never got made.
Yow. Someone else actually thought of Elysium, here? That was one of only two movies that I ever felt like walking out on. And I think for similar reasons.
Although, you can actually spin it rather disturbingly easily as a propaganda parable/mythos—it’s a tale about an advanced city from outer space populated by physicially perfect aryans, who are brought down by their weak resolve towards the machinations of the sickly, criminally inclined, stubbornly unassimilating foreign hordes and their out of control breeding, archaic religion, and attitude of nothing but covetous contempt towards their host culture…
(Jodie Foster’s character was, thus, clearly a Draka.)
I saw John Ford’s Cheyenne Autumn when it came out in 1964. I’ve been in therapy ever since, but am still unable to talk about it. The mere mention of this film causes me to instantly fall asleep. Italian Indians, Spanish Indians, and Karl Malden, slogging through the desert for hours, while the audience sleeps peacefully under a blanket of spilled popcorn. Cripes.