Wasn’t “Gigli” used for that? Manuel Noriega, I think.
“Rabbit Test” came out when I was in junior high; I’ve never seen it, but I definitely remember it because there was one teacher in particular who had a huge potbelly and we called him that behind his back. :rolleyes:
The worst movie I ever sat through in a theater was “National Lampoon’s Class Reunion”. I was in college, and went with a friend, and we wondered why so few people were there - until the movie was under way. Len Maltin put it this way: “If you went to high school with people like this, no jury on earth would convict you for turning homicidal either.”
Not a good one, but better than many in this thread. Bad movies we’ve sat through in a theater should be a different category. I know I take a lot less risk when it comes to seeing movies at the theater.
Worst movie I sat through at a theater was “Last Resort” in 1986. Horrible move. Don’t think I laughed once. I sat through it only because I was there with a friend. Afterwards, I found out HE only sat through it because he was there with me. We could’ve saved ourselves some pain if we’d communicated better.
My worst-movie-seen-in-a-theater would be Dynamite Chicken. As a twelve-year-old on a first “date” (chaperoned by my mother). Luckily all involved had enough sense of humor to transform the experience from an embarrassment to a memorable absurdity even as it was unfolding.
2 more I haven’t seen listed yet (because I’ve learned over the years not to post a laundry list, no matter how compelling I think it is):
The Ninth Configuration is one of the biggest messes of a film I’ve ever seen. It’s so pretentious that goth hipsters are embarrassed to be seen watching it. The acting is so bad that wooden sticks would have shown more emotion. The direction is both ham-fisted and lacking any coherence. In short: it’s a stinker.
Glitter stars Mariah Carey as a struggling young singer who’s about to get everything she ever wanted… or is she?
I must admit I’ve never even heard of Leonard Part 6 before. It looks like it could be a runner-up.
The worst of all time slot, of course, being reserved for The Star Wars Holiday Special. I don’t think anything can top that for sheer badness (made all the worse by high expectations at the time), and it was mentioned in the OP …
Oh, oh, Reefer Madness. I saw it in a theater revival because it was regarded as cult film, billed as so self-delusional, it was actually funny. It wasn’t. It wasn’t intentionally bad so much as intentionally bland.
It was originally meant as a PSA film to show at schools to deter students from marijuana, but it was done with the same level of emotional investment as any of the “how-to” instructional movies teachers put in the projector to kill time. All I really remember was that the movie had these no-good rebelling teens, wearing nice normal clothes and sporting perfectly bland hairdos playing stand-up pianos in their homes, like it was the equivalent of hanging around in biker bars.
At the end, they put a guy in a straitjacket because he darted his eyes around too much. The arresting officer then droned on about the deleterious effects marijuana has on the brain, showing the eye-darting guy as an example. No suicidal bums in alleyways, or bodily-diminished whores begging for a joint or anything. They guy in the straitjacket was as over-the-top as it got.
I would watch all of these movies, and probably enjoy them if I was with the right crowd. (We so need to do a bad movie Dopefest). But there is one movie that I will never watch again, not even if Rifftrax did it. There is no redemption for this lead brick of a film. I feel sick even remembering it.
This is the worst fucking movie ever made. It’s pretentious, it’s boring, it will drain you of your will to live in five minutes flat. No one should watch this movie. Not even the worst person who’s ever lived. No one deserves this horror.
*The Crawling Eye *sounds like it ought to be the worst of the worst. I remember the older kids in my family talking about it being on the old Million Dollar Movie back in the '60s. I actually watched it on YouTube last week, and was surprised to see that it was fairly decent for the “1950s black-and-white no budget creature feature” genre.
I am shocked, shocked that the truly awful low-budget sf film Liquid Sky hasn’t been mentioned yet. An alien draws life energy from NYC punkers when they come in a seedy Eighties nightclub. Bleagggggggggggggh.
IIRC, one critic’s review read, in its entirety, “And back it should go.”
Liquid Sky is the only movie that has gotten me slapped for recommending it.
I saw it and told a friend about this awesome weird movie I had just seen. A couple of days later she walked up to me in class and slapped my face, hard, and told me it was in return for recommending it.
Good thing I never told her about Santa Sangre, huh?
*Thunderpants? * I don’t even want to know what THAT is about! :eek:
When my younger brother was a toddler, our Mom subscribed to Parents Magazine. We older kids would read it too. I found some weird movies in the movie guide every issue, that the editors regularly panned. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians was one of these. (I never took the magazine’s advice myself; I was just about through with movies by this time.)
I truly enjoy the second half of Can’t Stop the Music, the not-at-all-true creation story of the Village People. The first half isn’t bad so much as just boring and slow.