Yeah, I had a few chuckles when I watched Scary Movie. I don’t know if I’d call it “brilliant,” but I certainly wouldn’t put it in a list of the worst movies I’ve seen.
Not to totally hijack the thread, but Gone With the Wind is the most bigoted film ever made? I take it you’ve never gotten any of this Birth of a Nation action.
Other than that, I am willing to agree to disagree at this point and watch the thread develop, free and unfettered by petty squabbles.
Apologizing for the slight thread drift…
Point taken. I should have phrased it better. GWTW is the most CELEBRATED uber-racist film ever made. It goes without saying that other films were more explicitly racist (hell, you can easily find films made by skinheads, and for skinheads on video). However, GWTW is the most racist film to have received that much popular acclaim.
And I doubt this would turn into a squabble. I stated an opinion, you asked me to elaborate, and we don’t agree. That’s perfectly fine. No squabble here.
Well, this seems like a nice safe topic with which to delurk -
I have seen many bad movies in my life. Because I love going to the theater, I’ve paid full price for most of them. Nothing has ever made me as angry as “Drowning Mona.” I was angry at the screenwriter, for evidently slamming his/her head repeatedly into a concrete wall before going to work on the nonsensical dialogue. I was angry at the director. I was angry at my lovely wife, for suggesting that we see it in the first place. I was angry at the ticket takers, at the projectionist… even my popcorn didn’t taste good.
Excuse me, I have to go lie down now.
Zaphod Beeblebrox: To continue this hijack even further - Actually Birth of a Nation still wins the crown 
. It is, in fact, perhaps one of the most celebrated films of all time. As a milestone in cinema, it holds a far more important place than GWTW. And it is racist to an almost staggering degree. But I agree with you in one respect - I didn’t like GWTW either 
.
I still think that Barton Fink was good film . I also liked The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. But hey, each to their own . I’m also on the anti-Scary Movie side 
.
- Tamerlane
Where do I begin?
Laserblast - I paid money to see it when years later I could have seen it on MST3K.
Leviathan - ever wondered what Alien would be like if it was stupid and you didn’t care about any of the people in it? Here’s a movie for you!
Elvira, Mistress of the Dark - Okay, I can’t really fault anyone else for this. I can’t say I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. The trailer did make it look funnier than it was, though. But it was god awful.
The Witches of Eastwick - shudder.
The Seventh Sign - Demi Moore, not Ingmar Bergman. Fortunately I missed signs one through six.
Ghostbusters 2 I saw for FREE and still felt owed something.
now, to the modern era:
Species - I didn’t want to see this, but a friend said it was supposed to be good, so I went. After it was over and I was yelling at him for making me see this waste of time, he said, “Oh I knew it was going to suck, so I didn’t mind it.” Jerk.
The Fifth Element - disappointing because buried within it was an entertaining, fun movie. Unfortunately it was surrounded by a numbingly stupid and obnoxious one.
The Blair Witch Project - I’ve had scarier haircuts than this thing.
and finally, the creme de la creme: Event Horizon. Where do I begin to describe the sheer awfulness of this dreck? After seeing either it or the Blair Witch Project, I don’t remember which came first, I decided I was seeing too many movies, so I quit.
These days I hardly see any movies, and I don’t miss them. When something’s worth seeing, like Memento, I find out about it and go see it. I read reviews, trust my gut, and won’t see ANYTHING on its opening weekend. As a result I haven’t seen any bad movies in the past two years, except one:
Tomb Raider - I went to this thing knowing it was scoring 15% on Rotten Tomatoes and was being called stupid even for a stupid action movie. But the wife wanted to see it for some reason, so we went. The most it did was confirm that my decision not to see as many movies was a good one.
I think it depends on how one defines “most celebrated.” BOAN might have marked a milestone in cinema, and might indeed be a more important film, but GWTW is a more well known film, at least with the general population. I think just about everybody who’s seen a movie knows of GWTW. However, the same cannot be said for BOAN.
Toss up between Tank Girl, It Could Happen to You, and Hannibal.
Darkman is the king of my awful movies, with The Jetsons Movie coming in a close second. Ugh, what were we thinking?
On another note, I’m not trying to start a flamewar here, so I’ll retract my question if necessary, but I see a lot of movies that were awful coming out of the gate. Dungeons and Dragons, Battlefield Earth, and a few others got TERRIBLE, scathing reviews. I’m just curious, but does no one read reviews? I can understand not trusting one or two reviewers, but it seems to me that if nearly every reviewer is trying to fumigate himself after seeing something, you should maybe take a step back before buying that ticket.
For that reason, I love Rotten Tomatoes. Even if I don’t like any one particular reviewer, the sum total of them is pretty powerful, and I can also see how positive the positive reviews were (to me, “brainless fun” isn’t a positive review, nor is "sucks, but not as much as I thought it would.)
Of course, like I said above, I allowed myself to be dragged to Tomb Raider, which was getting awful reviews, but that was under duress.
One more thing: Dungeons and Dragons, while truly awful, can be fun if you see it with your gaming buddies. We did and howled with laughter.
For me, it would be a tossup between Mom and Dad Save the World and Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, with MKA just barely edging out M&DSTW. At least I knew M&DSTW was going to suck hard before I entered the theatre (my sister wanted to see it).
You beat me to it, Atreyu. The only reason I went was because my mom was supposed to take my sister to see it, but mom had too much work to do that weekend so I volunteered to take my sister instead.
Mom gave me the money to take her, but I still feel like I was ripped off.
I dunno. My opinion of John Goodman changed entirely with Barton Fink. I’ll always have fond memories of him running down a flaming hallway with shotgun blazing, screaming about the life of the mind. Not my favorite Coen Brothers work otherwise, but I did enjoy it.
Paid as in theater, the worst would be Phantoms, a direct-to-video affair that somehow managed a quantum-movie-tunneling jump to theatrical release. On the upside, it made one of the lines in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back between Matt Damon and Ben Afleck much more amusing, where Damon enthusiastically opined that his friend’s unfortunate movies aside, he was DA BOMB in Phantoms, and they high-five.
Paid as in rental, well I derive entertainment from most bad movies. Others, I just don’t, f’r’instance: Very Bad Things was one of the first movies I ever turned off halfway through; I gather it was supposed to be funny, I found it instead to be a tedious exercise of despicable characters shrieking unconvincingly at each other. Battlefield Earth was…what it was.
Zaphod beebelbrox: Point conceeded .
Legomancer: Egads - I’m with you on Laser Blast. I saw that in a theatre as well. I was overjoyed when MST3K used it in one of their mock-fests .
As to Dungeons and Dragons - Well, I was expecting crap, to be honest. But fun crap with cool special effects and Jeremy Irons being evil . Not festeringly bad, worm-ridden crap, that was so bad I couldn’t even laugh at it comfortably. And no, I don’t always trust reviewers .
Now mind you, I could laugh at NOW. It would be fun to deconstruct with some buddies. But at the time it was just dumbfoundingly bad.
Superdude: I liked Tankgirl . Strangely enough, actually, because Lori Petty usually annoys the bejesus out of me. But I thought it was an imaginative translation of a comic book into a comic-book-like movie.
- Tamerlane
Drastic: Oh yes, Very Bad Things was very bad indeed.
I also hated Feeling Minnesota. Yechh. What a wretched bunch of depressing characters.
- Tamerlane
I liked Lori Petty until this movie. But I wouldn’t hit a dog in the ass with this movie. I’d rather pound my nuts flat with a wooden hammer than watch it again.
Mission to Mars was excruciating. I hated the plot, I hated the acting, I even hated the score. I went because the reviews weren’t that bad, and because there isn’t much hard sci-fi in movies nowadays, but what a bad mistake.
The worst movie I ever paid to see (50-cent rental) was Deathstalker. And I am not kidding you when I say it was far worse than Pearl Harbor, Dungeons & Dragons, The Island of Dr. Moreau or even Wing Commander. The movie made me feel physically sick, and managed to make beautiful, naked women unattractive - no small feat there.
The worst movie I ever paid to see in a theater was Chain Reaction (narrowly nosing out Payback). Ordinary bad action films (and even some reasonably good ones) resemble a filled-out form: sexy hero, check, sultry leading lady, check, hissable villain, check, etc. But Chain Reaction resembles a form that has been left blank; you can see the empty spaces where the Evil Plot, the Stunning Revelation, and the like were supposed to have been inserted, but no one ever bothered to actually do it.
Oh, and by the way . . . no, I can’t say it. Oh, God, I’ve got to. I liked Mission to Mars. No, really, I did.
I’ve been dragged to a couple comedies by friends that were so painful I think they cry out for nominations. The first was “Dracula: Dead and Loving it” … the reason I now avoid any Mel Brooks film made in the last 2 decades. The ONLY good line in the whole thing was in the previews.
The other was “Ace Ventura 2,” which is the perfect demonstration of why actors should not be given total control over their movies. The worst part was, my friends were laughing… and they were the only ones in the theater doing so. Ever tried to disappear into a theater chair since people are staring at your insane friends?
I’ve seen bits of Waterworld and Battlefield Earth on cable… and I’m very, very glad I didn’t see them in the theater. They are so bad they’re not even worth watching to make fun of them…