Joe Versus the Volcano definitely stank… but we saw it in the theater knowing it was going to be bad, and therefor enjoyed it. We were really in the mood for something completely mindless.
Plan 9 from Outer Space was arguably the most jacked-together, incoherent, inconsistent piece of dreck to make it to the big screen - but I saw it in college, knew what to expect, and had fun.
Stranger Than Paradise, on the other hand… got fantastic reviews, and a friend and I went to see it. We sat through the whole thing because everyone else was laughing and we kept expecting that it would get funny at some point (spoiler: it didn’t).
Upstream Color (2013) – Despite an intriguing beginning and concepts, this was generally senseless, obscure and tedious, a bad combination. I recall seeing interview highlights with the writer/director/star in which he admitted he had no idea what it was really about and had to have some friends come in and do some editing in order to “save” it. They shouldn’t have bothered.
The New World (2005) – Long, boring, thrill-less retelling of Pocahontas legend beautifully shot in Virginia has Colin Farrell and rest of cast standing around waiting for direction most of the time.
The Yin and the Yang of Mr. Go (1970) – Little known, little-seen cinematic atrocity of villainous Mr. Go (played by that respected interpreter of Asian roles, James Mason) undergoing sea-change of attitude thanks to the random intervention of the Buddha. Written and directed by The Penguin (Burgess Meredith) and “introducing Jeffrey Bridges” (his feature film debut). Godawful.
I bought the Alien Quadrilogy DVD box set a while back. I was a huge fan of the first two movies, and had not seen the third or fourth ones. I figured the whole set, with bonus features, would be a nice treat.
I watched the third one (penal colony setting), and it was pretty bad. Lame story and sucky SFX.
I figured they must have learned their lesson and that the fourth one (Resurrection) would have to be better.
Not only was it not better, it was a travesty. The whole concept was just terrible. It’s like if the Terminator franchise turned John Connor into an evil bad guy (oh, wait…). Anyway, I was so disgustingly disappointed with Alien Resurrection that I took the DVD out of the box set and threw it in the trash. I did not want it to contaminate the other DVDs in the set, just by being there. Terrible, terrible, TERRIBLE movie.
I can’t decide whether I would expect someone with your username to list Santa Claus Conquers the Martiansin this thread or not - presumably you’ve seen it and lord knows it isn’t good, but also presumably you liked it enough to reference it.
*The first section is set in the bare Lower East Side apartment of Willie, who is forced to take in Eva, his 16-year-old cousin from Budapest, for ten days. The joke here is the basic joke of the whole movie. It’s in what Willie doesn’t do: he doesn’t offer her food or drink, or ask her any questions about life in Hungary or her trip; he doesn’t offer to show her the city, or even supply her with sheets for her bed. *
I saw* SCCTM* once, decades ago. Don’t remember it, have no fondness for it, and mildly regret my username as this is the second time I’ve had to explain this. Fortunately, I also have a well-developed sense of apathy about it which prevents me from caring too much.
I have not actually seen all of it, but La Nave de los Monstruos, a.k.a. Ship of Monsters (1959) certainly has a place in this thread. A choice clip should suffice:
Last week I stumbled across the move Explorers. (If I had ever heard of it before I had forgotten about it, and definitely never saw it.) I wouldn’t likely say that it was the worst movie I ever saw, but it is somewhere up there on the list.
Oho! There are plenty of MST3K movies that make* Plan 9* look like a cinematic masterpiece. Having a low budget doesn’t mean you can’t make a good movie (cf Budd Boetticher) but sometimes the reason you can’t get anyone to give you money to make your movie is because you have no talent. MST3K is a master at finding these polished turds.
The first Star Trek movie and the first Phantom whatever Star Wars movie (after the ewoks; why did I go?) were really bad. I went to sleep in both of them.
I had to get up and sit in the lobby while Clueless was on. I preferred just sitting there and thinking about carpet lint (Wife was inside).
Just thought of another: Yellowbeard. More great comic actors than any other move: Graham Chapman, Peter Boyle, Cheech Marin, Tommy Chong, Peter Cook, Marty Feldman, Eric Idle, Madeline Kahn, John Cleese, Kenneth Mars, Spike Milligan, plus James Mason, Susanna York, and even David Bowie. Script by Chapman and Cook.
Not a single laugh in the entire 96 minutes. Pretty impressive, really.
I sure I’ve seen plenty of terrible movies in my time, but the two standouts are “Raw Deal” and “Superman III”. As a kid of the 80’s I enjoyed most of Arnold’s B-action movies, but “Raw Deal” had no likable characters or a plot worth paying attention to. I like Superman and Richard Pryor, but who thought putting them in the same movie made any sense at all?
Movie executives. They’re not guided by any sense of artistic integrity or even logic or consistency. They’re guided by profit, and Richard Pryor was a hot property at the time, as was Superman. In their minds, it was the ideal situation.
That the movie was abysmal isn’t relevant. It cost an estimated $39M to make, and made back a third of that in the opening weekend, eventually grossing $60M domestic. So it was profitable, even without counting overseas, video sales, and broadcast rights. What more would they want? You’d think dilution of the brand would factor into it somewhere, reducing profits for Superman IV and spinoffs like Supergirl, but apparently not. (I note that the movies decreased geometrically or even exponentially in quality as you went from I to IV and Supergirl)
I fully agree: There’s different levels of bad and expectation matters.
I want to add something, though: Some kinds of film simply won’t be bad in some ways. Modern Hollywood films will have synchronized audio, for example. There’s a certain floor their technical quality won’t sink below, simply because there are too many technicians working on the project who, while they can’t fix bad dialogue, can fix the digital media files to ensure that dialogue comes through correctly.
So you have to go out into the wide world if you want to see films which are bad on multiple axes at once. Compare Plan 9 to Manos: Plan 9’s the product of a filmmaker. Manos was the product of a fertilizer salesman. Therefore, while Plan 9’s plot is idiotic, it at least jolts along at a reasonable pace, whereas Manos’s plot stops dead while people drive around looking at nothing for an extended sequence which exists for absolutely no comprehensible reason. Ed Wood knew how to tell a story, and how to keep telling it without nodding off partway through or something.
Some problems aren’t the film’s fault, which is also related to budget and how close to the mainstream the film was. Plan 9 was always preserved, so the good copy is what everyone’s seen. Manos was just about buried until a rather poor-quality copy was revived and spread around, giving people an unfair impression of the cinematography involved. Happily, Manos has since been restored, so now we can finally see Hal Warren’s oeuvre as it was intended to be seen: [del]In the back of a manure truck, attracting flies[/del] As a black-and-white film of reasonable image quality.
Not the worst, but Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil was incredibly boring. I had some petty high expectations, but couldn’t wait for that turd to wrap up. Total snooze-fest.
