My favorite is Blowjob. Much shorter.
I have a no walk-out policy myself, because I paid for the movie, and no matter how bad it is I usually want to know how it ends. I do wish that I had made exceptions for ‘Howard the Duck’ and ‘Star Trek VI’ to this day. Blegh. Yuck.
Although, come to think of it–in reference to A Clockwork Orange–which I think is a great movie–there are times when I prefer the original version, Warhol’s Vinyl. Hard to track down, but worthwhile if you can.
If you read the trivia at IMDB for Irreversible it says:
I have no cite to back this up but I remember hearing that Woody Allen films in the early 90’s had a lot of walkouts. But it was due to the handheld camera work. I think Husbands and Wives was considered the worst.
We walked out of The Story of O. We knew what it was about, and weren’t offended, but decided that it wasn’t at all interesting - and we figured the end was going to be worse.
I bet the same was true for The Phantom Menace, whatever movie that trailer appeared with.
lets see, I have a don’t walk out policy, but I don’t make a religion out of it, thus:
The Basketball Diaries in sheer boredom.
I think I saw more people walk out of Aristocrats than any other movie I been in, the theatre was pretty clear about what people were getting themselves into, so I don’t get that.
I’ve turned off/fallen asleep a lot of dvds.
Meet Joe Black
-Newsweek stated that this was the most walked out of movie of the year.
Okay . Now we are getting somewhere. Did Newsweek actually make this up, or are stats actually kept on ‘The most walked out movie of the year’. Why not say ‘most hated movie of the year’ or something like it ? Is it just anecdotal evidence of being ‘The most walked out of movie of the year’ ?
Can anyone find a cite from newsweek? Because I cannot.
A group of friends and I went to see Vampires (James Woods) back in University and by the time we left most of the theatre was gone.
That’s the only movie I’ve walked out of.
I do not know the answer to the OP, but I walked out of Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
I have walked out of exactly three movies.
One was Unfaithfully Yours which insulted my intelligence at 13. (I haven’t screened it since, but I think at the point I gave up on it, a man was running around the house Benny Hill-style wearing a pig mask with a woman on his back. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t missing anything.)
A couple years later I walked out on Jean-Luc Godard’s Je vous salue, Marie, because it was simply boring the tits off me, and I opted to walk across the street to see Robert Altman’s butchering of National Lampoon’s O.C. & Stiggs. Not even a lobster! The only thing that kept me from walking out was that I didn’t want to pay for two movies and not get through any. I went back to Je vous salue, Marie a few years after that, and enjoyed it immensely.
The last movie I walked out of was Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark. I hasten to add that it was certainly not my choice to walk out of it – my date couldn’t take it, and although there are many, many things for which I could choose to harbour a grudge against that woman, that one incident is really the only one that still puts a hair up my ass now that I’ve managed to get shut of her. Grrrr! (Lars von Trier is among my favourite directors and Dancer in the Dark has become my favourite film by him.)
One bonus: When I was very young, I was driven out (in a car, not with firebrands and clubs) of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It was a double feature, and my parents had sat through the Ramones’ Rock & Roll High School thinking that we were in for a proper Horror Show. To their way of thinking, a semi-naked Jamie Lee Curtis gauging Michael Meyers’ eyes out with a knitting needle was just fine for an eight-year-old, but a sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania was Simply Not On. Go figure.
If I had to make any conclusion based on my limited experience with walking out of movies, I guess it would be that it often has more to do with the ambulators than it does with the movie.
I also have a no walk-out mentality. I, however, wanted to walk out on Sideways at least 3 times. I fell asleep the first time I saw Predator. I also almost walked during Pink Flamingos (the original “chicken fucker” re: South Park), the last scene made me gag, but I stayed.
Disney hasn’t re-released their old films to theaters for at least ten years. They re-release them briefly on VHS (now DVD), then place them on moratorium for a ten-year period.
I’ve walked out of a fair number of movies, but the only two that come to mind right now are the bottomlessly awful Evolution and the excruciatingly “arty” Moon in the Gutter, which I wanted to hurt and hurt badly.
In a similar vein as the latter, I would most certainly have walked out of Godard’s Alphaville if I had seen it in a theater. I tried to find some value within, but the dialogue was quite pretentious and it grated tremendously that he didn’t even try to provide reasonably futuristic sets or props. For example, to go from one “galaxy” to another, the hero simply drives his ridiculous Citroën there!
One thing that has disturbed me somewhat upon reading this thread is the large number of people who proclaim – quite proudly it seems to me – that they have a “no walkout policy”. What the Holy Jumping Fuck??? If someone starts shooting at you, do you have a “no ducking policy”, too? What, are you masochists or something? Get up off your ass and get your money back! Such feedback may well help ensure that fewer bad films are made.
Do cinemas have a money back policy?
At the cinema I worked out there was such a policy. But almost nobody knew it. If a customer complained to the manager that they did not like the movie the manager gave that person 2 free tickets to any movie. Probably less than 1% of people knew this and probably only 1 in a thousand actually took advantage of it. Obviously it would have changed if everyone knew about this.
Speakling of Disney, the only film I can remember walking out of (early too!) is THE LION KING. (I tolerated CALIGULA just fine.)
I took my daughters to see it when they were maybe 7 and 3. During the stampede in the film’s first 10 or 15 minutes, my 7-year-old announced that she was leaving, “It’s too scary, Dad.” The 3-year-old concurred, and I was outvoted (Also out 21 dollars, less than a minute per buck.)
The part that kills me is the next time the subject of Disney films came up, two or three years later, both daughters claimed they didnt like Disney because it was too bland and boring, and now I understand my older girl (at age 19) is an advocate of edgy, raw films that I might consider tasteless or sexually provocative, which is going some because I’m considered hard to shock or offend.
I can’t speak for others, but my ‘no walkout’ policy is because, in a perverse way, I like sitting through a bad movie. When I’m with friends, we intentionally seek out the worst possible movies to rent. It’s like people who use Dave’s Insanity Sauce. They aren’t hoping that it will start tasting different in a few minutes, they want the bragging rights of having survived it.
Sorry, OP, no “stats”. Gonna have to go with anecdotes.
My folks tell me they walked out of A Clockwork Orange. It’s not just the rape of the suburban couple, but there’s also the rape scene of the naked girl on the stage.
When I saw Aristocrats, people walked out. I also saw Fargo 3 times in the theater, and people walked out of that every time I saw it.
Also, City of God had some walkouts. Some of that art house crowd just doesn’t DO violence in movies, I think.
Most recent walkout: Must Love Dogs.