Yeah, that was the 13th Warrior as well. “The Fire Worm”.
Neighbors ‘81
Belushi and Aykroyd switched roles shortly before shooting commenced. Playing against type (Belushi = quiet and timid; Aykroyd = loud and obnoxious) made the movie funny for me.
Captain Ron, Kurt Russell and Martin Short. I thought it was a howl, others not so much.
I’m not sure a rotten tomatoes of 26/59 is bad enough to make this list, but I count Suicide Squad (the first one, with Will Smith) as another great character movie that a lot of people had a hard time getting. In this case though, half the reason people don’t like it was that there were just too many characters for them to keep track of. Amazingly each of the many characters got a different personality and character story (including “stays just an asshole” Boomerang) that was, in all cases, reasonably well told, but there were still a lot of people and stories to keep track of. Lose the threads - hate the movie.
Of course the other half of why people didn’t like it was that it had the worst version of Joker yet seen on the silver screen, and possibly any screen. Which certainly didn’t help, but it wasn’t enough to sink the movie for me.
Weirdly, I went to a showing of UHF where Yankovic was one of the people on stage talking about the movie. It was at the Lincoln Theatre in Washington, D.C. on October 30, 2016. Besides Yankovic, Tig Notaro, Seaton Smith, Dave Hill, and Emo Philips (who was actually also in the film, unlike Notaro, Smith, and Hill). They did a strange sort of commentary on the movie. They sat in chairs at the front of the stage. Behind them the movie showed on a screen, and all of it was shown. However, the sound for the movie was turned off most of the time. Those five people talked almost all through the film and that was all you heard most of the time. A couple of times they decided to turn the sound of the movie up and listened to it, as did the audience, and then they turned the sound back down again. So I’ve seen UHF, although I haven’t listened to most of it.
Coneheads was one of my favorites as a kid. I was too young to have any idea that it had ever been an SNL thing. I thought it was hilarious and watched it over and over again.
It may not qualify for this thread because I haven’t watched it in years because I’m afraid if I watch it with a more adult perspective, I’ll see all the flaws. I’d rather maintain that little bit of ignorance and continue loving it.
The Subway product placement was really obvious in that movie and kind of annoying.
Probably already covered, but here’s a short list:
Vertical Limit
Mission Impossible
Rocketman(1997)
Balls of Fury
Chef
LaLaLand
Men At Work
Excalibur
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
Point Break
Fun With Dick and Jane ((James carrey v.)
Big Trouble in Little China
Kung Pow! Enter the Fist
“Brain cloud”
I am not a DC fan. Most of their movies suck, in my not so exalted opinion. But both Suicide Squad and Wonder Woman had absolutely kick-ass female leads. Sure, Suicide Squad was supposed to be an ensemble lead by Will Smith, but Harley stole this movie and made it her own.
You mean the film that “won” the Best Picture Oscar? (It didn’t actually win, but when announced as the winner it wouldn’t have been a surprise to anybody except those who prepared the tickets.)
Is there more than one?
-but yeah, that one.
I’m going to presume you don’t mean La La Land, which was very well rated by every group. That leaves two things called LaLaLand. One is a 2014 television miniseries. The other was a 2013 one-season television show. Which are you talking about? Come on, people, when you mention some movie or television show, check on IMDb to see if it’s necessary to be more specific than just giving the title.
This reminds me of the movie “1941” (if only because Belushi and Aykroyd were in it).
I also liked that movie despite it getting bad reviews. It had some great moments.
If you mean the 1981 movie, it was very well rated by every group.
I remember Chain Reaction for an interview in a Chicago paper (it was being shot there) where the journalist asked Reeves if he could thought he could believably play a PhD candidate in nuclear physics. He was pretty clearly offended.
I agree with a lot of the ones mentioned, but it’s not clear to me that they’re widely panned, or at least aren’t considered bad today:
Van Helsing
Big Trouble in Little China
Last American Hero
The 13th Warrior
I agree about Tomorrowland , although I agree that it drags in places. This is a Brad Bird film, people – The guy who made The Iron Giant and The Incredibles. The scenes taking place when our two heroes, at different periods, “visit” Tomorrowland are priceless, as is the recreation of the 1964=5 World’s Fair “It’s a Small World” experience. I own a DVD of this, just so I can watch it.
I’ll add
King Kong (2005) – Peter Jackson’s film is a masterpiece, for which I am, for once, the ideal target audience.
I loved The 13th Warrior, which is based on probably my favorite Michael Crichton book, Eaters of the Dead. It’s a wonderfully bizarre take on Beowulf. Why Omar Sharif complained about this as the movie that drove him from film I cannot understand – he’s been in movies that were much, much worse. This one featured an Arab as the hero, for cryin’ out loud, and was respectful of the character and his culture. I agree that it’s a much underrated movie.
I don’t know why you clicked on my post to make this statement, since I don’t mention any of those movies in any post.
Another one for me: Bunraku. A 49% Audience Score on Rotten Tomatoes is pretty bad for a movie like this, and the 17% Tomatometer is really bad. But I really enjoyed it. I even have it on DVD - I think it’s the last movie I bought on DVD, because it was so hard to find on streaming, and I really wanted to re-watch it. It’s highly stylized, and I can see why it could come across as pretentious and nonsensical (especially the no-guns element of the premise), but I thought the style and presentation were really original and compelling, and the performances (except for Demi Moore) were exactly what they needed to be for a movie like this.
Son of a bitch must pay.
Edit ti add: Wait a sec. BTILC has a 74% rating at Rotten Tomatoes, 82% with audiences. I don’t remember it being “widely panned” (as OP specifies).