How to find out the WORST of anything?

Cafe Society
1

Ther is a thread floating around about bad movies, well strictly speaking Movies you absolutely DESPISE but you see what I mean.

I looked at the first 2 pages and wrote down the movies that I would probably watch if they were on TV and I was after some entertainment. They were:

Bruce Almighty.
Gladiator
Benny and Joon
Blue Velvet
Pretty Woman
Sleepless in Seattle
The Wizard of Oz.
Gone With the Wind.
Forrest Gump.
The Sixth Sense
Breaking the Waves.
Moulin Rouge
Serial Mom
A Clockwork Orange
Varsity Blues.
Love Actually
When Harry Met Sally
Boogie Nights
American Beauty
Requiem for a Dream.
My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
Field of Dreams
Jerry Maguire
Titanic
Dead Poet’s Society.
Adaptation.
Ghost World.
The Breakfast Club
Thelma and Louise.
Pulp Fiction
The Silence of the Lambs

From the look of things it continued much the same way. Now I am not saying that these are all great movies, although some are, but they are not DESPICABLE movies by any standard I know of. Which brings me to my question.

How can you evaluate the worst of anything since, if you ask people, even on the SDMB, some smartasses will say The Godfather is the worst film ever made just to be outrageous. Years ago I was told that hate isn’t the opposite of love - indifference is, and that is how it seems to me. The truly bad movies I have seen are just forgotten.

So how to judge badness? Any ideas?

Apologies if another forum would have been better

2

This might be a good place to start.

3

When dealing with elements of taste, “worst” is a borderline-meaningless concept.

You can certainly define a worst for you, and I can define a worst for me. But expecting there to be any sort of concensus worst is unrealistic.

There certaily isn’t any concensus best in matters of taste either. Consider the annual awards shows for various entertainments, whether it’s movies, music by genre, or sport. They gush on and on about the best of this and that. I generally diagree with all their pronouncements. To my eye, they laud the mediocre and ignore the exceptional. So who’s right?

The answer is that “right” is not a well-defined idea for this sort of thing.

4

continuity eror I am familiar with that end of IMDB’s ratings but even that presents an interesting example. They have You Got Served as the ninth worst movie of all time. I personally wouldn’t walk across the road to watch it, but…recently I was held up for some time in a music store while buying CDs and all the screens were showing this DVD. The routines that I saw were very good so that even if the rest of the movie was garbage it had some entertainment value. I have seen plenty of better rated movies that have no memorable bits after they are over.

5

Off to Cafe Society.

DrMatrix - GQ Moderator

6

Come on, don’t ask, like anyone can even know that.

7

To me, there’s a difference between not enjoying a movie and thinking it is bad or worthless. When people respond to a thread that asks for movies they despise, it’s likely that many of the movies that end up on the list are not movies that were poorly made or without artistic value, but movies that had a subtext or message that was not agreeable, movies whose actors rub someone the wrong way, and movies that remind us of something personal that we’d rather not be reminded of.

For instance, I can’t stand the movie “Petulia.” I don’t think it is bad art, I just find it distasteful. It brings up memories that I’d like to leave buried in the dust.

8

Well, you know what they say–one man’s dinner is another man’s poison, To each his own and all that.

I suppose it’s irrational but in some cases my reaction to something will be determined by expectations. I liked Goodfellas because I was told before hand that it was about thouroughly despicable people so I knew what to expect. I didn’t like Thelma and Louise because I’d heard it was some great feminist statement and to me it seemed the exact opposite.

Sometimes we judge the merits of a work by what the majority thinks–i.e. if 999 out of 1000 people think *You Light Up My Life * is a bad song, then it’s a bad song. (But try convincing the lone dissenter of that.)

9

Or perhaps they just find it dull and feel that the subject matter is too pedestrian nowadays. Everything is subjective. Anyone has the prerogative to hate Citizen Kane and adore Ducktales the movie.
Asking people what they absolutely despise or absolutely love isn’t a way of measuring quality, it’s just meant to be interesting. If you want to find the worst or best movies go to rottentomatoes or the imdb, or ask people to list generally good movies.

Some people love camp and cult flicks, but they don’t have much merit when measured against better financed movies. That doesn’t stop them from liking them. To each his/her own.

10

You want to find the worst movies ever? Go to the BX/PX at your local military base.

Sure, they also carry good stuff. But AAFES has a talent for finding the worst movies ever and selling them. Want the Anna Nicole show on DVD? The BX has it. Did you know The Amazing Colossal Man had a sequel? The BX has it.

A few others:
Boa Vs. Anaconda
Species III
The Maniac Cop trilogy (available in an AAFES-branded box set)

11

:smiley: :smiley: :smiley: :smiley: :smiley:
Napoleon rules!!

12

Many bad films have entertainment value because they are so bad they are funny. You can do your own MST3k on them and it’s even better with alcohol.

I saw Night of the Lepus on televison as a preteen, even before I had ever heard of MST3k and I thought it was hilarious. Giant killer bunnies! Whenever they showed the “giant bunnies” they were just sitting around being bunnies, about as non-threatening a thing as you can imagine. I guess I would be in big trouble if Giant Bunnies ever invaded my town because I’d just smile and say “Giant Bunnies!” and then I would get hopped to death.

So, what’s my point? Uh … I have no idea.
Giant bunnies!

13

Realistically, you’ll never see the worst of anything. If it’s that putrid, then it’s going to be sitting on a dusty shelf in some film vault. There’s probably stuff out there that makes Manos, The Hands of Fate look like Oscar material. Movies so bad that there’s not even an point in laughing at it. The not-very-good stuff that actually gets into distribution probably varies between mediocre and very bad. And it’s a matter of taste where it falls on that spectrum.

14

If it’s playing at 9:00 pm saturday night on the sci-fi channel, it’s probably the worst movie ever made.

Until next week.

15

Based on the rerun of Alien Siege(?) that I saw last night, you’re probably right. I managed about 20 minutes before I gave up.

16

There seems to be a backlash when people are asked for their worst movie. People don’t really tend to pick their least favorite, they tend to pick movies they didn’t car for but many people liked.

For instance, I couldn’t stand Moulon Rouge. But I must admit, it was artistically better than some things I enjoyed. (Godzilla movies would be on that list)

I can remember a bit of a horror movie I watched about 20 years ago. All I can remember is the monster’s hand moving over the body of a sleeping woman. I can’t remember the name, the plot, anything. This movie was worse than Moulon Rouge, but I would never be able to remember the title to put in a thread like this.

17

The hard way, usually.

If it’s supposed to be really serious, but you can’t take it anymore and it makes you crack up instead.

If it’s supposed to be funny, but instead makes you weep for the fate of all humanity.

If plot holes or other such nonsense are just too much and you sit there going “wait a minute…” or better yet “get the Hell outta here!!”

People have different thresholds, though, and even “bad” movies may be enjoyable for some unknowable reason, so it’s still all subjective.

18

To me, the worst movies anyway, are either the most forgettable, or the most tedious, or tediously dull, or overblown cliched. Two popular examples that I truly can’t stand are Battlefield Earth and Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever. The former, it had a huge budget, but bad acting, a barrel-full of cliches, high school play costume design and make-up, and most of all, it wasn’t even so-bad-it-was-good fun, it was just tiresome and annoying. The latter, it was so excrutiatingly poorly written, that within the first 15 minutes I was so confused and baffled, that I stopped caring about anything that was happening. All the actors were acting like they were interacting with imaginary actors, and as if they were all in separate rooms delivering their performances, and then put together in the same rooms through special effects.

I don’t qualify bad movies that are entertaining because they are so inept, as worst. For example, I find plenty of old exploitation movies a lot of fun, like Ed Wood movies for example. But other times, movies that I think are the worst, I just give up on completely out of boredom. Often, as Larry Borgia mentioned, if it’s playing at night on the SciFi Channel – half-a**ed, cheaply made, poorly acted, uninteresting, forgettable straight-to-video movies – it tends to not be good at all. When you have to struggle to find something redeeming in it, I think it represents the worst. An old z-grade movie called Monster-A-Go-Go is near the top of my list for worst movie, because more than half of it is stock-footage, and much of it is a man who was turned into a “monster” just wandering around aimlessly and scaring bad actors. I don’t even know what the story was supposed to be. I was so utterly bored, I just turned it off. I tried to watch it twice because I had a friend who believed it was so-bad-it-was-good, but I didn’t even find it to be close to that estimation. I’m sure the MST3K version is great, but I haven’t seen it. MST3K had a great knack at making bad movies quite fun. Would I want to watch the non-MST3K version of Manos? Probably not, but the altered version is hilarious.

Still, like bad music, if you can’t even remember it, if it makes no impression on you or a negative impression which is quickly forgotten – if it’s simply mediocre – that’s how I define worst. But, worst is pretty subjective. One person’s worst is another person’s great (let’s all debate the worth of Showgirls again!)

19

This is an excellent point. Sometimes, it seems like people get this little thrill from being able to name, as one they hated, a movie that is fairly generally admired, whether by critics, or by the general public. Which is one of the reasons why some people trash a movie like American Beauty. Granted, it’s to be expected to a certain degree, because that particular film is just quirky and non-inoffensive (if you get what I mean) enough that it doesn’t fit into the “movies as entertainment” niche that so many people use as their metric for deciding whether a movie is good or not. However, a lot of critics liked it, and it had a couple of major stars, and a few up-and-coming good actors in it, plus a good screenwriter and a good director. So it’s high-visibility, but off-beat. Good combination for this sort of thing.

20

Thanks to this poster, I have nothing to add to this thread.