The other night, The Tunnel of Love (1958) was on TCM, and we decided to watch it. Starring Doris Day and Richard Widmark, it’s the story of a married couple who can’t have kids, so they adopt a baby that winds up looking just like the husband (for reasons).
The plot was stupid, the characters were stupid, the acting was stupid, the dialog was stupid, even the music was stupid. Oh, and the husband is a professional cartoonist who can’t draw. And the wife’s name is Isolde, of all things.
If you encounter this movie and are even slightly tempted to watch it, don’t waste your time.
White House Down wins stupidest award for me because it’s one of those movies where the movie could have ended at multiple points early on if the heroes weren’t completely stupid. Also among other things an ICBM is used to shoot down Air Force One, somehow, and the finale on the movie literally depends on an elementary school girls flag twirling skills, which somehow tops the infamous Chekov’s Gun elementary school gymnastic skills of Lost World: Jurassic Park.
Alien The story only works because everything about it is stupid. The characters are stupid, and the world building is even dumber. Everything is contrived to set up random jump scares.
At one point there is a machine gun mounted on a trailer that drives around and the gun traverses to shoot people. I remember thinking, “But it doesn’t have any motors, how is this possible?” I guess I shouldn’t apply logic to films like this.
I failed to finish Mars Needs Women (available on YouTube), or The Vulture (available on Archive.org).
Every time I think I have seen the stupidest movie ever made, I run across something on AMC’s or TMC’s late-night lineup that plumbs new depths. There were a remarkable number of really bad sci-fi and not-particularly-scary horror films made in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
And then there were all the cheesy, low-budget sword-and-sorcery films and post-apocalyptic films of the 1980s.
Now that I think about it, I think Heavenly Bodies was even stupider than Plan 9. Two hours of aerobic dancing. Even the sex scenes were boring. (And I was a hormone-crazed teenager when I made that assessment.)
Ed Wood was at least entertainingly bad. I’ll gladly watch his ouevre in preference to movies that are simply awful without the redeeming quality of imagination.
My vote – Tales from the Past AKA Gallery of Horror AKA Dr. Terror’s Gallery of Horror. An awful “horror” anthology with “twist” endings you can see coming from a mile away, muddy color, bad sound, and the best scenes stolen froim Roger Corman movies. And it had John Carradine and Lon Chaney Jr.
In the movie Ashley Judd is convicted of murdering her husband. When in prison she finds out her husband faked his death and framed her to run off with his mistress. Another inmate tells her to get paroled for good behavior by falsely claiming remorse for “killing” her husband. The inmate further tells once she is free, she can kill her husband with impunity due to the Double Jeopardy Clause in the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Reminds me of the famous anecdote about carrying a ball and glove if you ever carry a baseball bat in your car for nefarious purposes, because if the cops search your car and claim that’s probable cause you can claim you carry it to play in the park every weekend.
Speaking of stupid movies there is the 2014 film Lucy which is based on the debunked adage “We only use 10% of our brain’s power.” They “unlock” the title character’s brain and she develops psychic abilities.
I agree with the Double Jeopardy, Lucy and White House Down examples listed above, and to make matters worse, all three of those were movies that took themselves quite seriously. Double Jeopardy was particularly egregious because its takeaway message could have actually gotten people killed in real life.
I can think of a lot stupider films than that one. (Really, don’t get me started.) Not too much of a problem with that one, myself. Aren’t horror films more or less contrived to set up random scares*?
Indeed, from the moment we see Stephen King’s unwanted mug at the offending ATM at Maximum Overdrive’s beginning, until its equally crappy ending that - event though I’ve forgotten it - I’m sure would have been equally crappy, the flick just heaps on every teenager-y trope imaginable, with embarrassing, predictable lines that can only be rivalled by, say, Cabin Fever, or Hellraiser (“Help me, will ya?” )
Read SK’s Maximum Overdrive short story when I was a kid but can’t remember it for comparison.
*Originally typo’ed that as “scars” and almost left it.
Though it was billed to me by people I thought I knew well as gut bustingly funny, I thought ‘Borat’ was brutal to endure. The “humor” was beyond inane to me.
The short story SK wrote was called “Trucks” and it’s very loosely adapted into Maximum Overdrive, since the main thrust of the short story was it was only trucks that rampaged, cars and other electronics seemed absolutely fine, and it had a major downer of an ending compared to Maximum Overdrives weird happy ending. The only real similarities are that Trucks takes place in a truck stop surrounded by semi’s but I think it only had 4 to 5 characters in the short story.
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