Trouble with a curve was awful. I think Clint Eastwood was trying to counter the movie Moneyball and it came out horribly wrong.
Back in 1967 I was with the millions of other American Beatle fans who couldn’t believe that this wasn’t being shown here. How could anything with Beatle music in it be that bad?
It didn’t play on American television until 1987, which is when I saw it. It’s that bad. It really is.
Exactly. The soundtrack is marvelous, and has some of the best music of the late Beatles recordings. But the movie? Oh, god. The unremitting horribleness of it…
Like I said, it was just like Star Trek, where Chris Pine was a juvenile delinquent in one scene, and commanding the Enterprise half an hour later.
I assume that in both cases, someone edited out the scene showing that they did really, really well in basic training.
Basket Case. And if that weren’t bad enough, there was Basket Case 2 and Basket Case 3.
Panther (1995). About the original Black Panthers. Now, I can understand black paranoia about the Man, and I’m willing to believe almost anything bad about J. Edgar Hoover – but in this film, Hoover is personally responsible for the epidemic of drug abuse in AA neighborhoods! As in, he personally orders it – he has everything in place to flood the ghettos with drugs and he sets it rolling with one phone call – just to destroy the economic base of the Panthers’ movement! Because they scare him that much!
On that same note, I once saw a black crime drama of more recent setting, the '90s or later, can’t remember the title, but it exploits every conceivable stereotype about black gangsters. At the end, a guilty-as-sin dead-to-rights criminal is offered amnesty by the FBI if he will assassinate a particular black preacher before he gives a planned speech – “Do not try to grow a brain on this! He must die before he gives that speech!” – and the preacher, cornered, delivers the speech directly to the assassin – and its content is the most innocuous thing you could imagine! He says only that AAs should stop committing crimes and stop doing drugs and stop mistreating their women and they should stay in school and get jobs. You’d have to be a very rare (I hope!) sort of racial paranoid to think America’s white PTB would have any interest in muzzling that message!
Well, in this story, ETs attack Earth, setting up their first base camp on a mountain in Oahu, and they sink all the American and Japanese ships that happen to be conducting a joint exercise at the time, and the only ship left to use for a counterattack is the mothballed battleship Missouri in Pearl Harbor, which at least can be used to lob the big-gun shells (or shell, there’s only one left) at the base camp, cutting off communication with the rest of the ETs and forestalling the invasion. And yes, it’s every bit as dumb as it sounds. But a good popcorn-movie.
This. Ever seen the Eric-Idle-narrated Beatles spoof, “The Rutles–All You Need is Cash”? When they get around to razzing MMT, you almost can’t tell them apart. If anything, The Rutles is better because the songs are funny.
I agree. I always enjoyed John Candy movies, but this one was just unwatchable.
I’ll admit that I did like the 1973 musical Lost Horizon–until I saw the 1937 Ronald Colman version, and saw what could really be done with the story. The 1937 version is excellent; the 1973 version is now, to me, something to be avoided.
I agree that low-budget, so-bad-it’s-good B-movies shouldn’t really count for this survey. The biggest stinkers of all time are the films that had big money and talent behind them, yet somehow they churned out pure garbage. Case in point: Percy Jackson & the Lightning Thief, which was so terrible that I sent the DVD back to Netflix after watching only half of it. Then I had a chance to read the original novel, which was wonderful and highly original – which made me hate the film version even more!
Another stinker: Kicking & Screaming, which I only watched because I was switching theaters between Return of the King and whatever Harry Potter film had just been released – figuring, how bad could it be? Certainly, it should maintain my interest during that forty-minute interval. Nope, wrong. The movie was so putrid, so utterly stupid, that I went to the Harry Potter theater and watched the slideshow of ads on the screen for the last 25 minutes, which ended up being far more interesting.
Also Highlander 2, Star Trek 5, Die Hard 3-5, Howard the Duck, yada yada.
Wow! :eek: Wasn’t the Hayes Code still active, back then?
And yet it just might have been redeemable if they had given Howard’s voice to Rodney Dangerfield! With all that implies!
If he’s talking about the second one, I concur. I got roped into seeing this piece of crap because my work group was going to a movie and that was the one everybody else decided on. If it hadn’t been a work outing, I’d have walked out. It was that bad.
Also, Highlander: The Source(aka Highlander 5) was every bit as bad as Highlander 2.
That is disappointing, because I thought the source material was interesting (and I think I got the reference for those novels from this very board).
This is quite literally the only movie that, at the end, I said to my boyfriend “I want those minutes of my life back.” And I actually have read the book.
I love this movie, so I’m wondering why you felt it was so bad?
For me, the surprisingly terrible movie was Sin City. The entire thing bored the ever-loving crap outta me, so much so that I just shut the thing off before it was halfway over. I couldn’t possibly be less interested in any of the characters.
Anything by Lars Von Trier. I’ve seen ‘Breaking the Waves’ “Funny Games” and I TRIED to watch Dogville. Von Trier is a troll, for him, film is a chance to express hatred and contempt for his audience. Crap, no matter how expertly made, is still what it is.
Oh hell no! You take that back panache45! 
This is a classic “so bad it’s good” movie.
That movie had a lot of problems but Howard’s voice was the one it could’ve never gotten around even if all they got all the other elements (story, script, special effects, etc.) right. Rodney would’ve been a good choice but to me, someone who’d actually read the Howard the Duck, Howard sounded like Walter Matthau.
The Last Resort, an unfunny grimace-fest starring Charles Grodin’s constipated look. Every single person leaving the theater was wearing a similar scowl and saying to their moviegoing partner, “. . .but I thought YOU wanted to stay and finish it!”
“Funny Games” was written and directed by Michael Haneke.