My interest and viewing of movies the past 8-10 years has increased and I find I give most movie a passable rating, the equivalent of a 1 star or 1/2 star review. But…there are a few so bad they deserve the dreaded “zero star” review.
Note: I do not judge movies like The Room as harshly as movies with actual financial backing, ones made by people who know how to make movies.
I have two that immediately came to mind for me:
Puppet Master Legacy
This is the 8th Puppet Master movie and is a clip show. Yes, a movie that is a clip show made up entirely of clips of the previous movies. It has 15 minutes of new footage and the rest is clips. This was presented as a real sequel and they took money for it. Scam.
Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl
Wow, this was awful. And racist. Yes, racist. And just terrible in all aspects. The director had made a real movie prior to this and this follow-up is just atrocious. There is not one redeeming factor in it and I would love to wipe it from my memory. :shudders:
Believe it or not, this was the film at my first date, as a twelve-year-old (chaperoned by my mother). It made for a good laugh for years. No laughs during the film, though! (Only now I realize it was an early 80s cinematic revival of a 1971 film. Why they revived this, of all things, I’ll never know.)
There are various clubs in the school and one of them is made up of girls who pretend to be Black, and I mean in the worst stereotyping and racist way. I can’t find the main scene, but I’ll spoiler-post a link to a picture of two of the girls.
Rock n Roll High School Forever. I absolutely love the first one, the classic starring the Ramones, P.J. Soles and a bunch of Corman’s regular players. It’s a fun masterpiece that never gets old. A decade later, New World churned out an ostensible sequel straight to video, and I watched it out of morbid curiosity. It’s one of the most turgid pieces of shit ever made. Corey Feldman is the lead, Larry Linville shows up for a paycheck, and for some inepxlicable reason Mary Woronov returned. Mojo Nixon has a 90-second cameo as “The Spirit of Rock n Roll” and genuinely looks embarassed to be there and pretty much races out of frame as soon as he can (and he was in Great Balls of Fire, fer Chrissakes). When I worked at a video store, a customer once tried to rent it and I flatly refused to send it home with them.
Oddly, the theme song isn’t horrible, and was written and performed by the great Canadian band The Pursuit of Happiness, though I doubt they brag about it much.
There are so many crap movies that should never have been made, and most of the ones mentioned here I have never heard of. I was hoping for more about reasonable movies that people hate for other reasons, not because they were crap movies.
For example, I have walked out of almost no movies (back when I had to walk in to see a movie), but I walked out of Outbreak in 1995. To me it seemed horrible in every respect, especially the writing. But it’s been so long, I’m not sure I could elaborate more on that subject. I’ll keep thinking of other movies for a better example.
Worst I’ve seen in a movie theater: Master of Disguise. It only has two jokes, one a pun on the surname of the protagonist and the other a flatulence joke, and they both grow stale in the first 10 minutes. If I hadn’t been seeing it with my little sister, I would have seriously considered walking out.
I don’t see what the big deal is. I’m kidding. That’s just horrible.
These are some movies that are horrible and unentertaining. They’re not even so bad as to be good.
Highlander 3: I made my father take me to see this movie. A few years later he died, and I can’t help but think this might have been the proximate cause.
Cabin Fever: I like horror movies, but there was nothing to like about this movie.
13 Ghosts (remake): I don’t remember the original, but this remake with Tony Shalhoub was a complete waste of time. The makeup was okay.
If a movie was really crappy, I’d probably stop watching it, so I don’t think I have any real zero-star reviews. Looking at my IMDb rankings (which I probably stopped doing 15+ years ago), the two lowest were Bulworth and Aur Pair Girls. Maybe my views might change on the former if I watched it again, but I doubt my opinion would change on the latter.
Eyes Without A Face has the distinction of being the only movie that I’ve slept through in a theatre.
Highlander II
All but the first 15-20 minutes of The Hobbit trilogy.
Phantom Menace
Attack of the Clones.
The Thin Red Line (I can’t for the life of me see what people see in this pretentious snorefest)
I detest Love, Actually with all my being, except for the few scenes with Bill Nighy. People have gifted it to me, assuming I’d love it as much as they do. Actually, no.
I dunno, a lot of the movies listed are indeed Bad, but few of them deserve zero stars. One, sure, but it takes a certain special something to go all the way to zero.
Highlander 2 is one of them, in that it retroactively makes the first one worse. So not only is it horrible, but it damages something good (or at least interesting) worse.
Battlefield Earth probably qualifies, in that while the original novel is extremely unoriginal, it’s at least vaguely coherent. Almost everything in the movie goes off in various batshit directions and are non-stop WTF and “how the F***?” excesses that you just ascribe to all the cocaine.
The only vaguely recent movie that I actually watched and felt deserved zero stars fell under the bad, and so bad it damages other movies by existing. And that’s the 2019 Hellboy Reboot. Damn that was horrible. Admittedly, the prior two movies about the character were more campy than the source, but the acting, the makeup, and the fact that most of the actors seemed to be having fun doing it made the difference. And while not as successful, I loved the Golden Army, with a far more nuanced villain.
But the 2019 version tried to be more dark and gritty but with periodic moments of comedy that jarred. All the actors felt like they were phoning it in, the dialog was horrible when audible at all (often mumbled) and the special effects often looked like the whole movie was an effort at a SyFy “so bad it’s good, really, we promise” effort.
I went to see it with a friend, and we sat through the entire thing, listening to others in the theater laughing, and wondering why. We sat through the whole thing, waiting for the good parts. Hint: there were none.
Also, weirdly (and I think this was the film, not the projector), about halfway through, a bit of grunge / dirt / lint appeared on part of the screen; it persisted throughout the rest of the thing.
The only 2 movies I’ve walked out of were Hannah and Her Sisters (we were bored silly), and American Werewolf in London (jump scenes got to be too much).
I wouldn’t claim that these are intrinsically awful movies, just that they were terrible for my sensibilities. For various reasons, each of these three films enraged and disgusted me.
