I’m sorry dude, Sabrina Lloyd may be cute, but Kari Wuhrer is red hot!
I present to you, The Last Starfighter.
May God have mercy on your souls.
Sorry, Nava: Starship Troopers ties with The Stars Like Dust for the title of godawfulest SF I’ve ever read.
Daniel
Casper Van Dien. And Doogie Houser.
Paf! Flash Gordon is one of my favourite films. They’re not travelling from planet to planet - the big floating rocks like Arboria and Fridgida are still inside Mongos atmosphere. Man I shouldn’t know that, whether I like the film or not.
I quite like a lot of the stuff mentioned here actually. Make of that what you will.
I’ll have to second the robot dog on Battlestar Galactica and Twikky from Buck Rogers. I’m pretty sure it’s because I was still holding out hope against hope that these two series would have something going for them, but Twikky and that robot dog were so goddam awful that I just knew that the series they were in would be unrelenting crapfests once I’d seen thme in action. And I stopped watching both because of them.
In the literary division, I’d have to go with Ursula K. LeGuin. She doesn’t write like someone who really LIKES science fiction, just finds it a convenient platform for her political and social rants. I guess the worst would be “The Disposessed.” Yech. Ich. Feh. Imagine if there were a mirror-image John Norman and he wrote novels which were almost all rant. That would be Ursula.
Isaac Asmov once described attending a pre-release showing of “The Lathe of Heaven”. As he sat down, he remarked to the studio person it had been a while since he had seen a good science fiction picture. The studio person replied, somewhat huffily, that they prefered to call it SPECULATIVE fiction.
Asimov settled into his seat, somewhat depressed, because he knew at that point exactly what he would NOT see any of in the picture…
Speaking of 70’s cheesy live-action Saturday morning science fiction shows, does anyone else remember that show that could best be described as “An RV in a post-apocalyptic world”? It was a white vehicle with tinted black windows, the main male character had brown hair… and that’s all I remember.
Here’s another choice that’s going to get me shouted down as a heretic: Theodore Sturgeon’s More than Human. Not necessarily the worst, but definitely the most overrated.
You do have to give L. Ron credit for having an incredible post-mortem work ethic. He even beats out Tupac as the most prolific dead guy.
I sat threw the movie Hardware . I think that wins both worst sci-fi and worst movie ever.
You’ll be happy to hear that in the upcoming remake series of Battlestar Galactica, whatever else happens there won’t be any cute robot pets. One of the premises of the new show is that the humans use the lowest low-tech electronics they can get by with because of the fear of having their equipment taken over by Cylon A.I.s
Heh. THere’s probably not much overlap between Asimov fans and Le Guin fans. I recall reading a quote by Asimov where he looked forward to the day that the New Wave finally crashed itself against the steady shores of Science Fiction and was spent.
Sorry to disappoint, Isaac.
Daniel
I’ve said this before…
but I *liked * Aliens 4.
Y’know, having Muffet be taken over by a Cylon intelligence and work as a completely unsuspected assassin and spy behind Colonial lines would have been an awesome plot point on the original series…
I used to love this show also. It is available from amazon.com on VHS. Amazon.ca is sold out.
Battle Beyond the Stars? The Last Starfighter?
I guess this is a new definition of “bad” I haven’t been aware of. I blame the Internet: no one understands the difference between “good but flawed” and “terrible” any more. :rolleyes:
Still, there are some worthy choices, including Battlefield Earth, The Starlost, Lost in Space. Did anyone mention the recent remake of The Time Machine yet?
For books, the worst I’ve read was probably The Ultimatum to Mankind. Luckly, I got to vent about it. 
If you skip vanity press projects, then I’ll go with Memoirs of an Invisible Man. What an utter moron!
Why do I remember this stuff?
Was that the version of Lathe they showed on PBS, with aliens wearing white space-armor that made them look like the Sidney Opera House?
The post-apocalyptic RV in that show always reminds me of Damnation Alley. “This whole town is infested with killer cockroaches!”
Man, I’d forgotten that Time Machine remake fiasco. So far no one’s mentioned that wretched remake of Planet of the Apes which, while it didn’t quite suck as bad as *Battlefield Earth * or Lost in Space, nevertheless set new standards for suckitude. This thread seems to re-open an awful lot of old wounds.
There really have been an awful lot of bad sci-fi flicks over the last ten years or so. And I’m not talking about low-budget B films that no one expects a great deal from in the first place. These were major productions that, given the money and talent that went into them, should have been a hell of a lot better than they were. Considering that this is the only exposure many people get to science fiction, is it any wonder that so many of them think of science fiction as juvenile trash?
I am really not looking forward to the upcoming *War of the Worlds * remake starring Tom Cruise. I’ve got a feeling that one’s really gonna hurt.