When I first heard of it I actually thought "Cool! The only movie to really address these Illuminati-esque guys was Godfather 3 (and I don’t think they ever used the name).
When Tears of the Sun was advertised I thought it was interesting because in some mythologies gold is the tears of the sun (to the Incas it was the sweat of the sun while silver was the tears of the moon) and I thought it was a treasure hunt movie, but no such luck.
I won’t say worst, but among my least favorite names for movies are
Eat Drink Man Woman
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (which was actually a great movie, the title was just too 'novel-'ish)
A play that became a movie: The Persecution and Assassination of Jean Paul Marat As Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of The Marquis de Sade, bka Marat/Sade for obvious reasons
I Could Never Have Sex with Any Man Who Has So Little Regard for My Husband
I think they went with just Frankenstein in the end, but for a while the 1994 take was touted as Francis Ford Coppola & Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar – not only is the title way too long to fit on a marquee, it conjures up the image of people passing pithy post-its back and forth for 2 hours. It’s the kind of title that’s so pretentious, not even Leonard Maltin would watch it. I don’t even know what the movie’s about, and I never want to find out!
I saw bits and pieces of this one (Hieronymous etc.) on cable one night and stopped watching when star/writer/director Anthony Newley had a nude scene, something I never wanted to see. It takes a special kind of egomaniac to think the audience wants to see him naked when he’s co-starring with his wife, a young Joan Collins.
Single White Female. I saw the trailer for this film when it originally came out. The movie seemed like a passable stalker-thriller, but once the title flashed up on screen the entire theater audience burst out laughing.
When I first heard the title, my reaction was, “Wow, how fortunate he is that his name rhymes so well with his chosen business. Just imagine how boring the movie would be if his name was Mr. Snafeteria, or Mr. Kepartmentstore.”
Agree 100%, it is the height of stupidity when a movie gives a character a stupid name so it can use that stupid name as part of a stupid title- another example, a movie called **Have Plenty ** which stars a character whose last name is “Plenty” solely for the sake of the “clever” (read: stupid) pun.
There’s no real catch to it, I guess it was a “you had to be there” moment, but seeing the words slashed onto the screen in ultra-high 80s melodramatic fashion. Also, bear in mind that this is supposed to be a thriller/horror movie…Do the words “Single White Female” strike fear in your heart?
Just a nitpick, the title is really The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, which makes more sense. Charenton being an insane asylum in the suburbs of Paris.
To be really pedantic, the movie and poster give the title as “Manos” The Hands of Fate. So it looks like there’s a punctuation error (or at least a bewildering use of punctuation) in the title. That might merit a nomination in this thread even if the movie wasn’t so bad.