Mr. CK and I were discussing movies and musicals after reading an interview of Mel Brooks. He didn’t make bad movies, but somehow we followed that segue.
We find it interesting that we both agree about probably the worst, and we didn’t know each other when we saw it: Joe Vs. the Volcano. I saw it at a dollar movie night and wanted my money back. Mr. CK said he rented it for a dollar and wanted his money back.
So, I wonder what the Dopers consider to be the worst movie they ever saw.
Was it a critical success, or was it panned? Did it do well at the box office, or was it a total flop?
I honestly don’t know this info about Joe Vs. the Volcano, but I am curious. I generally don’t care for critical favorites, so I don’t listen to them.
I judge bad movies by whether I care enough to stay awake and watch till the end. Star Wars 1 Phantom Menace and Avatar both put me to sleep, and in full theatres, no less. Ymmv.
I’ve seen a lot of bad movies, but I generally went into them with low expectations. In terms of the movie that had the worst ratio what I hoped for going in vs. how I felt coming out, it’s a tossup between Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace.
Leonard Part 6 was awful. I was a huge fan of Bill Cosby at the time, so I kept expecting something funny to happen. But it was just really, really weird.
The worst movie I ever paid to see was The Adventures of Lucky Pierre (1961), which I watched on a triple bill of films directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis. Starring nightclub “comic” Billy Falbo and several unattractive women, it’s a staggeringly obvious and unfunny “nudie” film, the only one I have ever seen (and one more than I would have liked to have seen). The audience was dead quiet throughout, though at one point, someone got up to leave and his companion told him “Wait, you’re going to miss the good part.” Everyone in the theater cracked up at that. I can’t believe we didn’t walk out as well, but after sitting through that and The Gore Gore Girls (1972, starring Henny Youngman!), the repeated reel they showed during The Wizard of Gore (1970) was too much to bear and we left early.
Then there is the worst film I was ever forced to sit through. In high school, a teacher screened Wavelength (1967), a well-known test of cinematic masochism. Running 45 tortuous minutes, the experimental film consists of (what appears to be) a single, very slow zoom-in from a wide shot of a room to an extreme close-up of a painting in the room, while the electrical hum soundtrack grows progressively louder. There is some incidental and vague human action and a snippet of a Beatles song is played, but the end result was one of only two movies I have ever seen to make me nauseous (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was the other). That teacher had more positive influence on my life than any other, but I will never forgive her for subjecting the class to that horror.
I remember wanting to walk out of the theater while watching The Thin Red Line back in the day. Going into it I had a feeling that I was going to be disappointed after having recently seen Saving Private Ryan. I was right, and it turned out to be exactly the sort of movie you don’t want to see when you’re hoping for an action packed WWII war movie.
The worst movie I ever saw in a theater, all the way to the finish, was “National Lampoon’s Class Reunion”. Leonard Maltin said, “If you went to high school with people like this, no jury on earth would convict you for turning homicidal either.”
I was a college freshman, and the girl I went with and I wondered why there were so few other people in the theater for a National Lampoon movie. Hoo boy, we found out.
“Mortal Thoughts”, starring Demi Moore and Bruce Willis.
I was with a Russian friend and afterward asked him what he thought. In his pigeon English he said, “Well… this man hit this woman, this woman kill this man, other woman fuck this man… This is not my problem.”
That about summed it up.
Now, to mount a defense for “Joe vs the Volcano”. I think this is a very misunderstood movie. I find it clever and endearing, despite some quirky tricks like Meg Ryan playing multiple roles. It’s a nice hero story, the music is great, and did you notice a young Nathan Lane in one of his first roles?
The luggage scene is hilarious. Ossie Davis has a fun role, and the terrible company and boss Joe works for in the beginning is over the top funny.
My dad was a rabid fundamentalist Christian, and he knew that I like time travel stories. So one year for my birthday or Christmas (I can’t remember which), he got me a copy of a fundamentalist Christian time travel movie called Time Changer.
I had known that there were boring movies out there, and stupid movies, and ugly movies. But I hadn’t realized that it was possible for a movie to be physically painful. I managed to get through about five minutes of it, and going any further would have required clawing my eyes out.
Worst I ever saw in a theater was The Secret of Santa Vittorio, which made me cringe to watch – bad dialog and Anthony Quinn overacting terribly.
I rarely walk out on movies. The only one I can think of was Night of the Living Dead, though mostly because it annoyed me. I can respect it overall, but I detest that sort of blatant audience manipulation.
That Mario Brothers movie back in the 90’s. My neighbor took a bunch of the neighborhood kids to the movie theater to see it, and the five of them were the only ones there, on a hot August Saturday afternoon.
Myself? a documentary or something on Robert Crumb, the grotesque 60’s comic idol… I watched 5 minutes and immediately remembered I had to go clean the litter box.
