The title speaks for itself, but keep in mind, these are not just bad movies. I hated Event Horizon and wish I hadn’t wasted my time or money on it, but it can exist. There are some movies I wish didn’t.
Batman. This wasn’t just a bad movie. This was a bad movie that I’m supposed to love because I like comic books, even though I can’t fathom and comic fan enjoying this piece of shit. Especially a Batman fan. And, as a comic fan, I become a little resentful when someone who doesn’t read comics tells me that they liked Batman because it was so much like a comic book. I don’t even say anything anymore when I hear this. I used to say, “Almost any comic book out there has a better plot and dialogue than that piece of crap.” I’m also supposed to worship Mr. Tim “Got One Trick, Here It Is Again” Burton for this mess.
The Phantom Menace. I love Star Wars and it pains me to admit it, but I wish this movie just wasn’t there. I would rather not have an Episode One at all, to be honest. I’ve tried to salvage this one in my mind and it’s just easier to throw the whole thing out and start over.
Alien3 and Alien:Ressurrection. How did Alien and Aliens get sidetracked into this mess? Wipe these two and start over, doing a third one that actually has some connection to the other two.
Well, I actually liked Event Horizon and tolerated Batman. However, I wholeheartedly agree with you on your other picks. George Lucas screwed the pooch big time on Phantom Menace and I already pretend that Alen and Aliens are the only movies in the series.
I add to your list Natural Born Killers. I wished that Oliver Stone had died after Platoon so that this piece of trash had never existed.
The immediate answer is Highlander 2. It came close to ruining the first one for me, young fanboy though I may have been.
Phantom Menace had its rough spots (okay maybe 40% of the movie is bigger than ‘spots’) but did alright setting up the rest of the series. Both Ewen McGregor and Liam Neeson, not to mention Natalie Portman, did good jobs. If Jar-Jar had been excised completely, it would have been above average. Had Anakin (and his ‘lucky as hell’ robot-controlling-ship disablement) been either a more realistic kid or a more realistic prodigy it could have been great.
Most movies that have song titles as inspiration probably shouldn’t have been made.
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who think people can be subdivided into as few as two categories, and those who know better.
Hamlet(2000), with Ethan Hawke. This took over the spot for “worst movie I’ve seen in the theater”. You could see the boom microphone in two scenes, and I wasn’t even trying to be nit-picky. Terrible, terrible, movie throughout.
The Lost World This is the movie Hamlet replaced. I wished it didn’t happen.
Lazlo nailed my first choice Natural Born Killers, the movie that I thought of when I saw this thread.
Other than that, it’s kind of murky. There are a number of movies that I consider just terrible, but very few that I would use my one wish to rid the world of.
I don’t know exactly when the Batman franchise went south. I liked Batman, aside from Nicholson’s Joker which made me want to cry. But the rest of the films are all second rate at best and brain melting at wors (B&R).
Warning - I have a different take on the OP - these are movies I wish had never been made, irrespective of whether I think they were good or bad as films:
The Right Stuff - because in the mind of Joe Average, Gus Grissom is now a coward. A horrible thing to do to one of the Mercury Astronauts and his surviving family, especially since there was no evidence and virtually no suspicion that he did what the movie and book accused him of. I cannot watch the film, as good as it is.
What’s the Worst That Can Happen? - not only because it was a waste of film, but because the book is a fabulous caper novel that would have made a great movie, but no one will ever touch it now. It’s my favorite Dortmunder, too.
I actually posted this in another thread, but I think it fits here too:
Eraserhead is easily the worst thing ever to pass through my cones and rods. It is the biggest steaming pile of doo doo ever created
and I would love to burn each and every copy of it, so that no other human beings would be subjected to the evil that is Eraserhead. My
hatred for this movie knows no bounds. I would climb the highest mountain, swim the largest ocean, and walk the earth on broken glass
to see this “movie” utterly and completely destroyed. Imagine a movie breaking into your house, sexually assaulting your family, and
making you watch. THATS how much I hate that movie. I hope I’ve made my undying hatred of this movie clear. And yet it has a cult
following. Write it up to pretentious people who have no taste.
I would hunt down David Lynch for that travesty, as well as the second worst film ever made, Blue Velvet. The only reason he has beens
spared my wrath is 1) I am not a violent person; and 2) Elephant Man.
Anything starring Jim Carrey, Keanu Reeves or River Phoenix.
Any movie featuring anybody with the last name Wayans unless it also features Robert Townsend.
Any movie based on a premise that began on Saturday Night Live, with a limited exception for the first Wayne’s World.
That little piece of hell that is Battlefield Earth, a movie which now plagues me by seemingly being aired on HBO at least three times weekly. Why, why, why?
Any live-action movies that air on the Disney Channel. I’m waiting for a movie about a blind, deaf, one-legged dog to save an entire school of elementary school children all trapped on the 50th floor of a burning skyscraper. I’m sure it’ll surface any time. My sister loves those sort of “touching” and “heartwarming” movies. The badly overdone dose of saccharine is almost too much for my overworked gag reflex.
Most bad movies, I completely block out of my memory. But heartwarming family movies just never, ever, ever go away. Argh.
jessica
Please remember, these are not just bad movies or movies you don’t like. I hate a lot of movies whose existence don’t bother me. I tried to give reasons for the ones whose existance does bother me.
Head Over Heels with freddie prinze jr. that is the worst movie i have ever seen in the theatre, ever! the only redeeming quality would have been watching freddie do shirtless pull ups, but since his character in the rest of the movie was so awful, i had a hard time even enjoying that. i wish this movie didn’t even exist because the applause of the junior high girls as the credits rolled still haunts me…they THOUGHT it was GOOD. ugh.
Jaws: The Revenge. Not just because of its unspeakable badness, but because of the way it “kills off” Chief Brody from the first movie. Mrs. Brody, IIRC, explains that her husband was terrified of shark attacks and eventually “died of fear.” This really betrays the character of Brody, who bravely overcomes his fear of the water, and his terror at confronting a 25-foot shark, in the original Jaws.
And I second The Phantom Menace, not just because of its weaknesses (and it has many), but because it fucks up the idea of the Force. In the original trilogy, the Force is a mysterious thing and it is never clear why some are strong in the Force and others aren’t (except for the fact that it seems to run in families). After TPM, it’s clear that you’re strong in the Force if you have lots of “midiclorians.” Whatever. Save that pseudo-techno-bullshit for the Star Trek movies.
Since we’re on the subject, I also nominate Star Wars: Special Edition. I know, blasphemy. But I’ll take bad special effects over Greedo shooting first any day of the week.
The movie which absolutely should not have been made is Tri-Star Troopers. Yes, I know that that’s not what they called it, but I refuse to degrade such an excellent piece of art as Starship Troopers by associating its name with that strip of celluloid. I probably wouldn’t have minded the movie, in its own right, unconnected to the book. I probably wouldn’t have gone to see it, but I still wouldn’t have minded it. The problem I have is that since Verhoeven was too uncreative to come up with a new title and a few names, nobody will ever now make a movie of Starship Troopers.
With Lost World, at least, Hollywood was slaughtering a bad book.
And Spoonbender, The Phantom Menace never mentioned midichlorians. Really. They never mentioned them. Maybe if we all say that enough times and wish really hard, it’ll be true. Sigh.
Artsy fartsy piece of crap on a stick. If anyone had ANY sense, they would have screenplayed the friggen Dark Hosre series. Hell, it was masterful.
Synopsis: The Alien is smuggled on to Earth by scientists wishing to use it as a weapon. However, through a variety of double crosses, it winds up in the hands of a religious zealot who welcomes it as a new god and builds followers who start becoming willing subjects. As the Alien spreads, the military begins to try to eradicate the cult and the threat but are too late. The film ends with some of the original survivors (Hicks and Newt both of them complete burnouts) watching a load of replicants getting killed as they try to arm nuclear devices while their ship blasts off, the earth now home to a new species.
Very gruelling and graphic but it made way for the return of Ripley in a later series which absolutely could have been Alien Ressurection
Instead we got bald Ripley. At least the space pirates in Ressurection were halfway cool.