I watched Freddy Got Fingered, and was in the age range of what it would have been geared toward… and I have to say, it is definitely one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. I liked Movie 43 much more.
Ah, Tommy Wiseau! There was a film made about him (The Disaster Artist, starring James Franco). Not sure if this should really count as it arguably may have been a deliberate attempt to make the worst – or at least the weirdest – movie ever made. Wiseau is a truly strange character who has never disclosed where he’s from or where his money came from.
Incidentally, The Room should not be confused with Room, an acclaimed 2015 film starring Brie Larson. There’s also a mediocre 2019 film called The Room.
The Room deserves some credit:
I don’t remember the filmmaker’s name, but he was profiled on a PBS program about Third World cinema. He had another short called “King Kong vs. Steven Senegal.”
Good old Dinesh D’Souza. He’s got a new film out called “2000 Mules.”
I have never been able to decide if that movie is “fun bad.” One of those movies that is so terrible they are fun to watch because they are terrible. I have a few movies on that list but I don’t think this is one. This movie (The Room) is just bad.
The Room is fun to watch if you go to the theater in LA where people bring spoons to throw at the screen when there are spoons and footballs to play catch with the person sitting next to them and do Rocky Horror style callbacks. I don’t know if they still do that.
The only reason I can understand Dogville not being mentioned is that mercifully people did not watch it.
I try to avoid the obvious stinkers to save money, and indeed some of the ones mentioned above have been awful. But I’d cite stuff that made me viscerally angry. I saw the original French version of Martyrs at TIFF in 2008 and I’ve never had such a disgusted reaction to onscreen violence. It was part of the “French Extreme” movement and takes torture porn about as far as it can go. That said, it was also incredibly skilled filmmaking, which made it worse.
Another TIFF premiere experience that left me actively angry was Horns, based on the book by Joe Hill and starring Daniel Radcliffe. I attended the premiere of this one, and from five minutes in, I loathed the film. It generally got decent reviews, so I may be in the tiny minority, but ugh. What a piece of crap.
I didn’t think it was great, but overall I enjoyed Horns.
I think when discussing bad movies, it’s important to decide if you are focusing on all movies or just movies that have sizable money behind them.
Neil Breen makes movies much worse than The Room, but both Tommy Wisseau and Neil Breen were/are working outside the studio backed money system. They have no idea what they are doing and would never be expected to succeed. And they didn’t.
But in terms of “real movie with real money” and studio backing and so forth, we find some interesting disasters.
Battlefield Earth is incredibly bad, but did come out in 2000, so just misses the cut.
Jack and Jill is probably a fine pick. A $70(!) million production and it looks like it cost $2 million and was filmed in someone’s garage. Just total trash and not one funny joke.
Saving Christmas - this is cheating because it is outside main studio productions. However, can you believe a Christian movie was made about Xmas that in the end, tells you to commercialize the whole thing and spend, spend, spend? That is what this movie says.
In the end, I’d probably say Jack and Jill deserves real consideration. A real studio movie from a real crew and cast. People think it’s going to be a funny Tootsie type movie where Adam Sandler is dressed as a girl. It barely even tries it. Lazy, cheap-looking($70 million!!!), and almost entirely product placement, racism, and a comedy without a single punchline or real constructed joke.
The absolute worst movie I’ve ever seen (at least in part) was a fundamentalist Christian thing called Time Changer. I think I made it about five minutes in. Everything about it was bad, with a net effect that was, somehow, literally physically painful.
Of movies that actually made it into theaters, I’ll go with The Fountain (and on looking it up, whoa, that was Hugh Jackman?).
Christian movies are almost all bad because of the same reasons Christian music is currently overall bad.
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Smaller amount of people are Christians, so less talent pool.
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Some people making Christian movies would never be good enough to land a proper studio movie, so Christian movies is an easier field to get into.
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Criticism from within the Christian community is less harsh since criticizing a Christian movie can often sound like you are criticizing their service/ministry to God.
Harsher criticism of movies and music in the Christian field would actually work to produce better products.
Well, I made it through half the trailer. God, does that look painful to sit through. I feel bad for you.
I used to work for a Christian organization. And this was number one on my list of “Why We Suck”… you’d get people who would never be supervising in the secular world, but they were the best the Christians could find.
So I immediately apply that to Christian media as well: “Okay, considering they had the producer’s minister write the script, his Sunday School kids helped build the sets… and a guy who’d been a grip on the “Left Behind” series was cinematographer…”
I liked that movie. It was weird and cerebral and ambitious, and while it didn’t really work, I respected the attempt. It’s Darren Aronofsky. His movies can be hard to watch, but they’re never bad.
I fucking loved that fucking movie; it went from being interesting to being intriguing to being so riveting that I stopped noticing the gimmick, and all while I kept wanting to see what’d happen next.
It also had its budget slashed after Brad Pitt pulled out. It was a miracle it got made at all.
It is not great, but hardly the worst movie of even its year.
Damn, I love how polarizing movies are. Maybe even more than books or music.
Anecdotes:
We were introducing ourselves in a class by telling everyone our favorite movie. The teacher went first, then as a bonus went off on a rant about how terrible my favorite was. I considered changing mine to something he didn’t hate, but I stuck to my guns.
Oh, and a good friend just texted: Now that it’s safer, let’s catch a movie. Just not… and he named four genres that comprise ALL of the movies I watch.
anything with the opening of “Syfy channel presents”
but I think they’ve almost left the tv movie genre since Comcast bought their parent company