I’m glad someone mentioned Nosferatu. I kept hearing about how scary it was, and I just didn’t see that at all. Then again, vampires don’t scare me in the first place, so I was probably a lost cause from the get-go.
The other two I always mention in threads like these: Alexander and The Black Dahlia. Good god, how is it possible to make a legendary conqueror and a horrendous gory murder case BORING??
nm
I deleted my above post because I feared that I had given away too much info and should have included part of it within spoler tags but I was running out of time to edit the post and didn’t want any of the spoiler info to remain in the post. So I just deleted the entire post and replaced it with the abbreviation for “never mind” - i.e. “nm”.
So, here is the original post with part of it hidden in spoiler tags.
I was very strongly tempted to start a new thread titled “Movies that you watched for some reason but found they were just terrible”.
Unfortunately, I just couldn’t justify starting a new thread when the idea behind this one seems so similar.
I was strongly tempted to start a new thread because the first few movies listed in this thread were:
All That Jazz
Inglorious Basterds
The Lovely Bones
Wild Wild West
The Hangover
Pirates of the Carribean (the second one)
The American
My guess is that people use this thread to list movies they didn’t necessarily expect to be all that bad, but then had a strong negative reaction. I wanted to start a thread where people could list moves that were just plain terrible regardless of any expectations. Perhaps someone will decide it makes sense to start such a thread. I just don’t know if it’s a good idea.
I’d like to tell you about two British movies that I thought were just straight up terrible.
The first was “Let Him Have It (1991)”. It was rated 7.3 on IMDB which shocked me because that generally means a movie that is very good. But this film was just terrible and the reason was:
The story is about a young man with epilepsy who gets roped into doing some kind of stupid burglary with a friend and when a policeman tells the friend to drop his gun, the young man tells his friend to “Just Let Him Have It”. He meant for his friend to hand the gun over to the policeman. But his friend shoots the cop (wounding him) and at the trial, the judge and most of the people in the court believed that when he said, “Let him have it”, he meant to shoot the cop.
The friend also shoots and kills another cop and the judge sentences the first young man to hang because of some British law that interpreted his statement to be responsible for the death of the cop. At the end of the movie, the protagonist is hung and his family is still struggling to clear his name. This incident happened aroun 1943 and his sister is still trying to clear his name. By the way, the movie makes it look like this was a true story. But I have no idea if that is the case.
Neither the defense lawyer nor the accused ever tries to explain that the cop misunderstood what was said and the young man meant for his friend to hand over the gun to the cop.
What a stupid premise upon which to base a movie! I couldn’t believe it. The rest of the film was equally stupid and terrible. I would have given it a 3.5 rating. 7.3 is just way too high for such a piece of crap.
The second movie is titled “Kill List” and after watching it, I read the summary that it was about a hit man who had a list of people to kill. But that never seemed to be made clear in the film. The film was terribly confusing.
I thought this was one of the worst movies I had ever seen and watching this film was a complete waste of time.
It got an IMDB rating of 6.3 which was closer to what it deserved. I would have given it perhaps 4.5 to 5.0.
But it was still just awful.
In any event, I’d like to ask, “Do people think that “real bad movies” should go into this thread or would it be appropriate to start a new thread for them”?
Let Him Have It is indeed based on a true story, one that caused a lot of controversy. It is by no means certain that “let him have it” meant “give him the gun.” If it seems like a stupid premise for a film, that’s because real life isn’t always logical.
You are quite correct.
Perhaps I should have reworded my statement to say that the movie certainly did make it seem that the young man was telling his friend to hand over the gun to the cop. I can’t imagine that many people watching the film would have ever imagined he was telling his friend to shoot the cop.
What did you think? Did you think he meant for his friend to shoot the cop? Or did you think he wanted his friend to hand over the gun?
Well, I knew about the case beforehand, so that colours my view. I think it was ambiguous.
Fair enough.
There were several different cuts of the movie, from pg to unrated…
LOL, I came in here to basically give you a mirror response. I really liked The Sting; but HOLY CRAP Butch Cassidy and the Sundace Kid really sucked. To me, they’re not even close.
Every February or so I get my recommended yearly allowance of culture by watching the Best Picture nominees. In previous years, I’ve been lucky with Django, Inglorious Baestards, Black Swan, etc. However, this year, I finally was able to get my hands on a copy of Hotel Rwanda. What I was expecting was to see was Don Cheadle putting on a maestro acting performance, but over half the movie he was just swept along by events. He seemed totally like the victim, not a master negotiator.
I saw Do the Right Thing and Summer of Sam, so I figured I’d track down other Spike Lee films since he’s also doing the Hollywood remake of Oldboy. I stopped with Inside Man. All his racism commentary just didn’t fit.
Kill Bill Vol. 2 was a huge disappointment. Vol 1 was one of the best western martial arts films ever made. Vol. 2 built up this huge showdown with Bill and it ended up, in wrestling terms, to be a huge squash match. Robot Chicken’s Kill Bunny was 100X better.
I expected Forrest Gump to suck, but I didn’t expect it to suck like that.
Mrs. FtG and I like to watch the occasional kids movie to remind us of when the FtGkids were small. Don’t expect much going in as they’re usually geared to easily amused folks.
Watched Frozen Saturday. Egad. This made money?
Gladiator
It was boring, derivative tripe, and it won the frickin’ Oscar. HOW? I’d rather watch paint dry.
How is it not already mentioned in this thread?
Casablanca was a major disappointment for me.
I finally saw “Blazing Saddles” a couple years ago. It was boring, offensive, and not funny at all.
MHO and YMMV, of course.
Perhaps because mentioning the elephant in the room (racism) is not as forbidden as it was when the movie came out.
Indeed, the movie was purposely offensive to point out racism. I miss those days when you could be creative.
When I saw this thread the film that sprung INSTANTLY to mind for me was Gladiator (I’ve mentioned my dislike of it in another thread). As I’ve mentioned to other people (both on this board and off of it) I regard it as little more than a porn movie substituting violence for porn. Absolutely awful and one in a list of movies that I couldn’t bear to watch all of (re: my wife - who wanted to see it more than I did - and I left well before that piece of trash was over). For that P.o.S. to have won Best Picture either that year (1999, was it?) was a REALLY BAD YEAR for movies or the academy members took SERIOUS leave of their senses when voting on Best Picture that time.
Let’s see:
[ol]
[li]Inception - If it was all supposed to be in his mind, it was just dull. It it was supposed to be “real” then it was idiotic. Either way, it was laughable to read that Nolan spent ten years writing the story. Did he do it by writing a single word every day? Two hours plus I’d like to get back.[/li][li]Inglorious Basterds - With the exception of Christoph Waltz (always good) this was a steaming pile of dung. There were pro-war WWII propaganda films made in the 1940s which were better than this yawner. It almost made me root for Hitler. Almost.[/li][li]Man of Steel - Wow. Did anyone involved in this film know anything about the Superman narrative? Or did they just “wing it?” The previews were better (and cheaper) than sitting in the theater and watching it. Even Diane Lane couldn’t save this POS.[/li][li]Avatar - Basically an imbecilic 2 1/2 hour cartoon which attempts to compare a fictional mining companies treatment of aliens to the exploitation of aboriginal peoples. If that wasn’t bad enough, the continuity and script people (along with James Cameron) did next to nothing to plug the film’s numerous plot holes. Giant knife carried by a man wearing an exo-skeleton,anyone?[/li][li]Spiderman 3 - Three villains. Three hours. No coherent plot. I thought that Sam Raimi knew a lot about pacing and narrative flow until I saw this film. If he hadn’t decided to leave the franchise, he should have been fired after this one. Just awful. I want my money back.[/li][/ol]
Harrison Ford in the latest Indie film was so awful I was embarrassed for him and everyone who had anything to do with it. Apparently there’s a new Blade Runner in the pipeline, looks like Deckard was human after all. (replicants don’t age) . With Scott back to direct it, it’s going to be as terrible as Prometheus. I can see the promos, now;
Wooden Spoon Stroller
“Do Producers Dream of a Sleeping Audience?”