So, what IS the worst film ever made?
Our piece last week on Eddie Murphy's cinematic train-wreck A Thousand Words - a possible nominee for the worst film ever - had El Reg commentards queuing up to recount their celluloid nightmare experiences. And chilling reading it made, to be sure. Inspired by your litany of cinematic shame, we've decided to run a poll this …
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Stalker
Rated 8.1 on IMDb, supposedly a classic, and a whole 2 hours 43 minutes I can't get back.
<quote>One of STALKER's many treats is that it invites you to get carried away into your own thoughts, flowing with the images as it provides new questions to ponder...</quote>
thoughts and questions like, why am I watching this god awful film, how could so many people be so wrong.
Another nomination...
As much as I hate in inflict it on you all...Cinderella 2000. Just when you think it can't possibly get any worse, they start singing. That's about as far as I made it.
http://www.youtube.com/movie?v=9ORXua3H05I&feature=mv_sr
Does straight to DVD count?
If so War of the Worlds 2: The Next Wave is definitely a contender.
Quite frankly how anyone can even get away with using the name and making something this terrible (check out the imdb user reviews) without being taken out and shot etc. is beyond me.
Even Battlefield Earth seems Oscar worthy next to this!
I Am Legend
I Am Legend was utter rubbish. Even to this day i don't know how i made it to the end of the film.
Re: I Am Legend
Drugs always help... you'll want to see the sequel then.
http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/1251444/i_am_legend_2_in_the_works_with_will_smith_sought_to_return.html
Re: I Am Legend
I recently read the book and was (and am still) in shock at how Hollywood can take what is a genius idea for a thriller-horror and make such a pitiful piece of shit out of it. Do cretins like Will Smith write their own dialogue too? I can't see any other explanation for this crap.
Any of the Pirates of the Caribbean films. Or the Bourne trilogy.
The worst I've paid to see is Starship Troopers, but I've had exposure to Battlefield earth and it is a stinker.
But I've twice had to sit through 'raise the Titanic' and it is in a league of awfulness that I hope is its own. Lower the Atlantic, it would be more believable.
I found Starship Troopers a very good film. If you don't try to expect a screen version of the book the film is actually a hard-hitting political satire.
"It would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic" was the joke the producer made at the time...
It's amazing how many people (particularly Americans, for some reason) seem to take ST seriously...
Starship Troopers
Is great.
I even got a free exchange from flipper to RSDL by moaning at them.
Worst Film
Pearl Harbour - Its not difficult to make a bad film, but to spend so much money on this stinker takes real genius.
Closely followed by Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy - Never in history has a film been anticipated by so many, yet satisfied so few.
Oh and Judge Dredd, if only for Sly Stallone totally missing the point(although we could add get Carter to that long list). Hopefully the forthcoming remake will fix that though
Re: Worst Film
Just use you DVD player's chapter selection to go straight to the 20 minutes or so of the action in the middle and it's great. Thank god RIAA never managed to make skipping chapters illegal.
Dungeons and Dragons
Dungeons and Dragons, without a doubt for me. Nothing like the kids TV show I remember, I should have trusted my instincts at the video shop looking at the cover. Pure shit, no wonder it went straight to video. Starship Troopers 2 was pure crap as my second, again a shit film cashing in on something else's name.
So many to choose from.
Rather disappointingly there are so many bad films out there I can't think of one which is trancendentally bad, head and shoulders above the rest. Possibly the nearest is that Nick Cage film "Knowing", with the ridiculously trite Adam and Eve ending.
Seconded on "Knowing"
I cite that film as the archetypal example of "Seen the trailer? You've now seen all the good bits so don't bother with the rest."
The trailer touts it as an end-of-the world thriller, but in reality it's an hour and a half of Cage and his son puzzling over some numbers on a piece of paper, followed by 3, count them, 3 minutes of actual world-busting special effects, and then - that fucking ending with them dancing off on that paradise planet? Oh please.
At least that other better-films-in-my-toilet-bowl stinker 2012 had enough sequences of cities falling to bits and tsunamis flooding over mountains, to gratify my innate desire to see the world destroyed, throughout the movie instead of the first/last five minutes as is usual with disaster movies.
Re: Seconded on "Knowing"
Thirded for Knowing.
It's bizarre though - the plane-crash sequence early on in the film is (from what I can recall) spectacular and, I believe, shot in one continuous take (or at least made to appear so). I spotted it on the TV a couple of weeks ago and tuned in just as that scene was about to start and was impressed again. Needless to say, I tuned out again as soon as the scene was over...
-1 for Knowing
I was impressed by its audacity. I didn't expect a big-budget Hollywood production to take the story to its logical conclusion.
And yes, I'm aware that Roger Ebert and I are the only two people on this planet who actually thought Knowing was good.
As bad as some of these are...
... I find myself somewhat surprised the first mention of Uwe Boll didn't come about until page 6. I'm gonna go ahead and agree with Alone in the Dark, and toss another vote to the sequel to Highlander that didn't happen.
The Sound of Music
I may toss my cookies just thinking about it. Leading cause of diabetes.
So many...
Primary nomination: Southland Tales or Waking Life.
As far as Battlefield Earth goes - having read the book, I must say the movie did not truly do the book justice. The movie is pretty awful, sure. But the book is so much worse! All 900+ pages of it.
You gotta wonder about Scientologists - do they know how truly horrible Hubbard was as a writer??? I've read lots of SF and, yeah, it's a genre with its fair share of duds. But Hubbard is in a category all by himself.
p.s. (wiki for B.E.): "current US presidential candidate and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney pointed to the book as his favorite novel."
Re: So many...
I'm sure I'm gonna burn for this, but I actually like the book and have read it several times over.
Oh the shame.
Re: So many...
I'm going to have to agree. The book isn't anywhere near as bad as some L Ron haters try to portray it. That said, Scientology can eat one.
Re: So many...
Sorry, but Waking Life is quite good. One of my top 5 of all time.
It's just not for everyone. It's slow, ponderous, and takes effort to watch. But the ending, which does tie all of it together, makes it worth the effort.
Southland Tales is crap, however.
Magnolia
3 hours of total shite.
I sat through the whole thing, waiting to see if the supposedly-interconnected storylines would somehow wind themselves into something awesome. And they didn't.
For the last 90 minutes or so, I was genuinely hoping for some major natural disaster that would take out the whole fucking lot of them.
Vic.
Damn! pipped by the 1st post
Battlefield Earth.
The best thing I can say about it is ,they got some of the names right.
Watchmen
Intolerably lengthy bunch of pseudo-moralistic nonsense spewed by weeping bolsheviks in dire need of being purged.
BFE is just about equals it but even that had some grotesque so bad it's good factor. Watchmen is so nauseating with its absolute belief that is a high work of art that nothing can redeem it.
Re: Watchmen
Watchmen was undoubtedly a crime against art, for taking fine source material and turning it into an imagination-free abortion. Other comic-book adaptations in the same vein include '300' and 'Catwoman'.
But - worst ever? Nah.
outfield
Invasion USA (1952) [saw that one at school]
Barb Wire (1996)
Titanic: The Legend Goes On (2K)
Justin Bieber: Never Say Never (2011)
Gnomeo & Juliet (2011)
Spice World (1997) [oh come on, it's awful]
The Wicker Man (2006) [US remake]
The Hottie & the Nottie (2008) [vile sexist shallow awful]
Nude on the Moon (1961) [similar]
Sex & the city
Norbit
Liquid Sky (1982)...
Youth of today don't know how bad a movie can be.
Re: outfield
I quite enjoyed Gnomeo and Juliet.
But then I was kind of high...
Sorry
"Worst" is the superlative of "bad". "Bad" is the opposite of "good". The word is neutral, colourless: not shocking, not disgusting, not instantly forgettable nor horribly unforgettable.
On that basis it has to be "Battlefield Earth", doesn't it?
Are they the worst ever??
Not sure, but I considering I (and this requires some personal bravery to admit) that I paid to see these, I have to suggest in no particular order:
1. Battlefield Earth: What was worse? The cavemen who went from grooming lice out of eachothers hair to flying 2000-year old Harriers vs. the Alien Air Force in the course of a few weeks? John (Revolting) Travolta opining about how the humans "love the rat!"? Barry Pepper wishing he had avoided this stinker by really been blown up by a German tank in "Saving Private Ryan"? So many painful moments......(shudder)
2. Predator II: Thankfully I saw this when I was still young enough that I could get away with heckling the movie for the last hour. That kept everyone around me far more entertained than Danny Glover and Kevin Bussey could.
3. Tim Burton's "Planet of the Apes" Mark Walberg--can be a decent actor. Tim Roth and Helena Bonham Carter--can be excellent actors. Taking the late 60s dystopian sci-fi classic and perverting it into a confusing mish-mash of nonsensical set pieces has to be one of the most horrible, mercenary ideas in movie history. Helena Bonham Carter wanting to bring a new meaning to the term "Jungle Fever" with Walberg, and then tacking on an ending that made no God Damn sense from the moment that Walberg decided to leave the planet (to go back in time to do what? Save the mothership from going to the planet in the first place, and therefore wiping out all Walberg's newfound friends? And how the Hell did Tim Roth's fascist gorilla become so revered ON EARTH that he took over Abraham Lincoln's spot on the National Mall? I think I ended the movie doing my best Charlton Heston impersonation, pounding my fists on the theater floor yelling "Damn you!!!! God damn you all to Hell!!!!!!"
(I don't suppose there is anywhere I can go to get 6 hours of my life and $20 back, is there??)
Re: Are they the worst ever??
Regarding your #3, my wife had to point out that Helena Bonham Carter was actually playing a monkey..I didn't think she was wearing a mask.
Honorable Mention....
So bad, it may be good!!
"Night of the Lepus"--about irradiated jack rabbits growing to the size of buffalo and then going on a carniverous rampage through a stereotypical small Southwestern desert U.S. town. The "crowd shots" were done by setting a group of fluffy bunnies loose across a model town landscape and filming them in slo-mo. Watch for the part about 3/4 of the way through the movie where the crowd of Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail lookalikes is roaming through the model landscape by night--only there is a stagehand visible in the shadows and of course looking at big as a mountain compared to the "giant" rabbits. Someone obviously tells the stagehand "You're in the shot!", because he turns and runs into the shadows (still in murderous rabbit army slo-mo)--only the movie is shot on such a D-list crap budget that the filmmakers keep the sequence in the picture! :)
Re: Honorable Mention....
You missed the classic line "Run for your lives. The Rabbits are coming!"
No mention yet for....
The three Mr Vampire movies.
We showed these at an SF Con at the NEC, in a professional Cinema but using our own (experienced) projectionist.
We spent a long time trying to figure out how to show them, as the reels didn't make any sense. In the end we settled on No1, No 3, then No 2, but even so we were never sureif we had all the reels in the right order in the right films (or even if we had all the reels, or if the reels were all from these films.
They were Chinese Kung-fu style vampire movies, with much leaping about as per Hidden Dagger etc., often for no apparent reason. Also they were subtitled, apparently by somebody who had done an evening class in Mandarin, but had only the sondtrack to work from.
Aweful, truly aweful. (and I mean that).
Quench
Truly, truly awful. And most certainly not in a funny way.
http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0874314/
Batman & Robin
Possibly not the worst ever, but deserving of an honourable mention all the same...
Re: Batman & Robin
Oh man, repressed memories come forth. George Clooney killed the franchise in a way that it took the awesomeness that is Batman Begins to undo, but we totally could have lived without his horrible take on the Dynamic Duo.
My List
I limited my list to movies that were so bad I had genuine trouble finishing the movie awake.
Birdemic: shock and terror
Radar Secret Service
Mac and Me
The Room
The Horror of Spider Island
Hercules v.s. Karate
A Boy and his Dog
I failed miserably on Mac and Me. I tried twice to watch that pile of steaming rectal discharge but in both cases I passed out and woke up hours later. Good as any tranquilizer.
Bonfire of the Vanities
Should have been burned before it ever saw a cinema.
mac and me
extra-terrestrial visitors (spanish but english dubbing involving a 7 year old child shouting expletives as the alien males all the clothes in the room dance) and quantum apocalypse simply because it sucked (though implying amiga is the only OS that can save the world is quite novel)
Transformers gets my pick, by a whisker over War of the Worlds (cruise version).
Star Wars prequels also rate highly.
Charlies Angels: Full Throttle
The "full throttle" subline should have referred to throttling the writers of this complete garbage movie.
the postman
apparently that Heaven's Gate mob in San diego watched this prior to offing themselves, and if it weren't for copious amounts of vodka to numb the pain, i'd be tempted to follow suit.
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