As far as Mr. Lucas technically…he didnt direct after 77. empire and jedi were directed by others. is he the worse…dont know…
paul anderson who directed resident evil
and sooooo many others out there kinda make lucas pale in comparison…
David Lynch directed The Elephant Man and The Straight Story. Even if every single one of his other films were horrifying bad (which I don’t think they all are) he doesn’t deserve to be in a thread called “Worst Directors of All Time” when those two movies are beautiful, sensitive and brilliant.
He may have directed the Movie You Hated Most Of All, but TEM and TSS make up for a million Eraserheads (which I haven’t seen).
actually i forgot…
joel schumacher
recent michael bay movies
recent john singleton movies
No thread about the worst directors ever would be complete without a mention of Albert Pyun.
Bill Rebane
Regarding David Lynch, from Equipoise
As I said, watch “Eraserhead”
The film is so monstrously awful that even if every other film he ever made won the Palme D’Or (Good God, I butchered that spelling, but you know what I mean. That big prize at Cannes), Best Picture, and was on every Top Ten list, he should still be mentioned in a “Worst Director” list.
I could launch into a Pit-worthy rant on Lynch and his fans, but I really don’t care to, and will say no more about him, his fans, or his movies.
Russ Meyer was the breast director.
I’m gonna have to disagree. Corman is a GREAT director. He just happens to have made low-budget movies. Seriously – rent the original “Little Shop of Horrors”. It’s not a bad sci-fi movie, it’s a spoof of bad sci-fi movies that featured a damned good early performance by Jack Nicholson, was edited perfectly, and was completed in three days. I don’t have a cite, but I read a Corman interview years ago. He didn’t understand the whole ‘big budget’ movie attitude. He’d rather take that money and, say, clean up a neighborhood or put in a nice park somewhere.
Plus, he has his own ‘school’ of filmmaking, that features such alumi as Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, Johnathan Sayles, Ron Howard and Johnathan Demme.
John Woo couldn’t direct his way out of a paper bag. A handful of competent action sequences does not a movie make.
Joel Schumacher is always a good choice–
But for overall lack-of-any-cinematic-value whatsoeverability, Joel can’t even TOUCH Kevin Smith.
CLerks is classic though. I mean his writing is not great but he did gives us clerks
Andy Sidaris.
The guy actually manages to make naked Playboy Plamates running around Hawaii boring and unwatchable!
Clerks was clever and all but Chasing Amy and Mallrats seemed really amateurish.
Surprised no one mentioned John Carpenter.
Cause John made Roddy Piper look good, that’s why.
Andy Warhol didn’t really direct movies. He just exposed the film to light.
So many kinds of “worst”:
Worst Director Thought by A Lot of People to Be Quite Good, But Who Really Isn’t:
Paul Thomas Anderson
Worst No-Budget Director:
Coleman Francis
Worst Low-Budget Director:
Henry Jaglom
Worst Big-Budget Director:
Joel Schumacher
How did I know I was going to have to come in here and defend Paul Verhoeven? I haven’t seen Showgirls, so I won’t comment on that. But RoboCop and to a lesser extent Starship Troopers were really clever parodies. There are a lot of different metaphors and themes in RoboCop but sadly most people couldn’t see past the violence in the film. As for Starship Troopers, I think a lot of the bashing of that film is unfairly in response to Verhoeven’s open contempt for the source material.
Have you seen any of his Hong Kong films, like The Killer or Hard-Boiled? They are much, much better than the crap we get from his Hollywood efforts, like Face/Off or Windtalkers.
And I would hardly characterize his action sequences as merely “competent”. Geez, if John Woo isn’t “action” enough for you, what is?
As for my own picks, I’ll second Schumacher (even though I liked the Michael Douglas parts of Falling Down, and Phone Booth) and I’ll raise everyone Renny Harlin, who blasphemed Die Hard with a shameful sequel compared to the masterpiece original. Although on the plus side, maybe his effort shamed John McTiernan into coming back for #3.
I don’t know what shocks me more: That this’ll be my third post on this thread (I don’t even have that many on ones I’ve started) or that I’m going to speak ill of Kevin Smith, but here goes.
Kevin Smith cannot direct.
He can write, really, really well though, and as I read somewhere, he really ought to write for an HBO series where the obscenities wouldn’t be censored (really, just one more time, because thrice per sentence is insufficient).
Willard Huyck directed consecutively Best Defense and Howard the Duck but strangely nothing since.
But then he redeemed himself with Starship Troopers. 