can't believe,...
.. 2012 didn't make it to the bottom 10. I guess so many people were forwarned of it's unbelievably plotless pointlessness that hardly anyone bothered seeing it !
It's official: Battlefield Earth is the worst film ever according to our beloved moviegoing readers. The final result of our poll of cinematic shame ended with Roger Christian's masterpiece on 1,454 votes, roundly beating The Phantom Menace into second spot with 1,022 votes. By chilling coincidence, Christian was second unit …
yes but 2012 was useful it proved to me that when the world is going to hell and volcanoes and earthquakes are rolling everywhere I can still board a jet to fly out to somewhere and get on a boat to survive.
I'm also surrpised the Day After Tomorrow escaped the list.
Disaster movies are... well a disaster to watch!
I agree. BFE wasn't that bad. It's entertaining, funny at times and follows the book surprisingly well.
That isn't to say that it's entirely faithful because the book is just too damn long (and frankly all the politicking and economics in the latter third would seriously suck) but I think it's a good adaptation. It captures the atmosphere of the novel quite effectively. You just have to not take it too seriously. It's not intended to be high-art. It's just supposed to pass the time in an entertaining way which I think it does.
I agree, most of these movies are fine, aside from "Manos: The Hands of Fate", it really does belong on that list. BFE wasn't great, but I have seen worse.
It seems like most of these voters might be 16-year old boys, or 34-year old hipsters.
I bet most of those voters have collections half filled with foreign language films. Not every film needs to be "Daughters of the Dust", sometimes you just need to watch Nazis invading Earth in flying saucers from the dark side of the Moon.
No, I quite enjoyed that too. This list certainly does contain some howlers, but it misses plenty.
Where are the 'dance' films, or the hordes of Jennifer Aniston chic flicks? I was unfortunate enough to have to endure some of 'Street Dance' not too long ago (it wan't my choice, I swear). The lead girl in that is simply awful, and the story takes cringeworthy cliches to a whole new level. I was on the verge of destroying my own TV. That I paid for.
Those dance films and such may not be too enjoyable; they do serve a worthy purpose. Namely keeping the $SO happy. My gf really enjoys movies with a little song and dance, though I usually quite dislike them.
Most movies in this list otoh result in a mutual dislike. That's an important detail IMO; because there is something such as "boy" and "girl" movies. And quite frankly; I think the majority of El Reg readers are boys :)
I was surprised that Cruise's character didn't hit her (or at least gag her). The main reason being the whole life and death aspect of not being found by the aliens, with getting on the parental nerves a close second (in general, I don't approve of hitting a kid, but alien invaders would qualify as an outlier to allow for it). I did think the unrealistic expectations of the kids was accurate.
I'd easily watch half the items on this list before I'd submit myself to ever watching "Rad", "Fargo" or "Biker chicks in zombie town" again.
The only qualifier I think that should have been applied to submitted movies, is that they were nationally released and not art house / direct to video films... cuz "Mario Bros." really sucked.
"""You mean the new War of the Worlds; the one with the annoying girl that practically screams through the entire film (it felt like it). For me the film was disappointing because she wasn't killed by the invaders once she started screaming."""
god sake that Girl completely ruined "War of the Worlds" Screaming all the dam time and other bad part was when the they started to attack the ships all we saw was tanks going in fire balls coming back how boring was that, i my self wish she was killed, i am happy i never payed to watch it as I would of walked out of the cinema (The Avengers better be good or it be the last time I ever bother going to the Cinema again)
in the original Film they dropped an Nuke on one and it came out of the mist that was like so cool its still coming (as I never seen the Film before so I never knew how it was going to end)
That Speilberg film adaption of WotW was such an heinous abortion of a film H.G. Wells classic masterpiece he must have been spinning in his grave.
I had such high hopes of a decent modern interpretation, a foolish thought given Speilberg's appalling track record. I think the world needs to collectively pretend this film never happened and for Peter Jackson to do a faithful melding of the book and Jeff Wayne's musical version, particularly the awesome artwork.
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The immediate give away this was going to be a complete howler was it was some non-actor (normally a singer) celeb's first film. See also: Sting, J-lo, Madonna, Phil Collins etc etc. At least Witney Houston actually sang in hers, which still didn't give her a passing grade.
Yes, "Riri", you can supposedly sing and "shake booty", but lets stick to that shall we?
I also like most of those...maybe not for its direction etc and sometimes the direction is so bad that it is a cult classic. I have Battlefield Earth on DVD and watch it every now and again.
Believe me, there are quite a few DVDs I do have that are "high brow" that will never ever see the insides of my DVD player ever again.
Which reminds me, I'm overdue watching "Where Eagles Dare" again: a film choc full of clichés, it's absolutely a masterpiece.
And I also concur, I watched Battleship last weekend and, compared to many in that list, it was complete and utter drivel. Even the storyline barely hangs together. The effects were OK but why the hell would a civilisation that could travel between stars in days/months only have the capability of half-hearted swimming and ballistic weapons? Practically everyone on that movie needs to be shot, from scriptwriter onwards.
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My taste varies but I'm not into arty farty films. What's peculiar is that some films I can watch several times others I just can't.
For Star Wars I'm okay up to the bit where R2D2 starts down into the valley then suddenly I realise how much more there is to watch and run away. For The Mummy I'm okay until that first night in the ruins around the campfire when the same feeling hits me and I run away again.
But Carry on Screaming I've seen a dozen times (I kid you not). Deep Rising I've seen over half a dozen times (shame they never did a sequel). Always love that joke in the elevator. It gets thrown around and half trashed. When it's going smoothly again and all you can hear is the musak someone asks "What the hell is that?" the comic foil replies "I think it's Blue Lagoon" :)
I think the trick is just to not take films seriously. They are all mostly a waste of 90 minutes of your life anyway so why worry about it. Just sit back and turn the higher centres of your brain off for a while :)
Bulletproof glass for the aliens helmet visors but not the spaceship windscreen..
Destroying the roads and cars but missing a massive battleship full of weapons
Stupidest aliens that *ever* existed..
Sucky'ist film moment in history when all the old sailors appear..
barf quotent +5 as america saves the world (again)
+ everything else in the movie
.. You could make a whole spoof movie just out of this one film!
.. saying that I still quite liked it
I can't believe that all of the worst films ever made (with one exception) were made after 1996.
Surely Ed Wood deserves some kind of Lifetime Award, for his persistence in producing lultra-ow-budget movies with some of the worst production values in history.
IIRC, when Channel 4 did a season of the worst 10 movies ever made, he had five entries in the list - including the dreck-classic "Plan 9 from Outer Space".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Wood
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Outer_Space
I was visiting a friend in Heidelberg (early 1990's) when a movie theatre announced it would be showing "The Worst Five Films Ever"; unfortunately it was quite some weeks away still and at least I wouldn't be there then.
Their Worst 5 list was taken from a well-known movie critic magazine, and contained *TWO* films by Ed Wood (Plan 9 and Glen or Glenda) and also included Manos. The other two I can't remember.
Going over the current list it seems that a lot of effort has been put, especially in the past 15 years or so, into pushing poor old Ed off his pedestal.
Troll 2 (in particular), The Room, and Manos have attained B-Movie cult status up there with Plan 9 (i.e. so bad it's good) by most standards. Troll 2 actually has occasional showings around where the audience shouts certain lines along with the movie.
I can't find the link, but I ran across an interview with - I think - the guy who put together that Heidelberg festival. In it he was talking about his invitation to one of the annual North Korean film festivals - after it the North Korean embassy got him access to prints so he could put on a Worst of North Korean Film Festival (or something along those lines). For REALLY bad... North Korea is actually a pretty good source of material... like Pulgasari (Kim Jung Il's knock-off of Godzilla).
As a HG Well fan you would of realised then that apart from the name, it had little else in common with the book,
as I don't recall it;
being set in America
being divorced
having two kids and dog
spending only a few hours in the cellar (not several days as in the book, which show why he finally snapped)
and about 50 other things that were missed out ( the whole cylinder suspense bit, poison gas?)
Oh and where was his brother and the enitre sub plot related to that?
If they had called it, I don't know, WoW2: Battle for USA, I could of accepted it a bit more.
Buried fighting machines?
1:
Why spend resources on constructing a tripod army only to bury it and wait (presumably tens to hundreds of thousands of) years before actually boarding them and conquering the planet later on?
2:
Of course, nobody managed to find said machines buried through mining, geological surveys, construction......
For me, the book was classic sci-fi: You introduce one novel element and keep everything else believable. In WOTW, Wells merely introduces a technologically superior race of aliens exist on Mars. The rest then follows with their dying planet, decision to invade Earth, <spoiler> falling victim to bacterial infection, because that problem was solved a long time ago on Mars and hence forgotton about </spoiler>. Spielberg moved it more to the fantasy domain for my personal taste. The special effects were great (the attack on the ferry was a great re-imagination of the Thunderchild scene). But just too much family relationship rubbish thrown in there.
Plus, on all modern re-interpretations, they have to introduce shields to the fighting machines because modern weaponry would likely smash Wells' imagined fighting machines to pieces. Better to tell the story in the period in which it was written.
Still more believable than teaching a caveman to fly a Harrier jump jet that's been kept in pristine storage for millenia...
>Still more believable than teaching a caveman to fly a Harrier jump jet that's been kept in pristine storage for millenia...
Yeah but that's not the film's fault. Maybe that's the difference. I've read the book so I don't blame the film for things like that. I look at it as a screen adaptation of a novel and all things considered it does a good job of that.
Compare that with HHGTTG or the newer WotW where entire plot elements are omitted or warped almost out of recognition.
"Compare that with HHGTTG or the newer WotW where entire plot elements are omitted or warped almost out of recognition."
Douglas Adams was always re-writing those stories. The books were different to the radio plays, the TV series was different to the books. I don't see why when he wanted to roll elements from the first four books of the Trilogy into one film, he shouldn't have started again.
Hitchhikers might have escaped as a passably watchable scifi adventure if it wasn't carrying 30 years of expectations with it. As it was it was too fast paced and action oriented and managed to horribly butcher many classic HHGTTG scenes. It held little for the fans and would have been largely meaningless to non fans. That was its problem.
Possibly you are. Other commentators are quite right - for the die hard fans of the series, the whole thing was too fast paced, too many changes to the text were done (that's where much of the humour is to be found) probably because some Hollywood rulebook decreed that a 2 second pause is too long in a movie whereas you need that pause to let the audience get the joke about "What's so wrong with being drunk?"
For a fan of DA, this movie is just bad bad bad. Imagine the cast of Glee performing a dramatisation of Terry Pratchett's "The Colour of Magic", directed by M. Night-Shamalamadingdong.
... you could at least do your research first: the screenplay was written by Douglas Adams.
Personally, I thought it worked pretty well for a movie. Even Douglas knew he couldn't squeeze a 3-hour radio play / novel / computer game into a 90 minute movie without some major surgery, so he didn't try to avoid that. It also didn't help that HHGTTG simply isn't that good a story. It's basically a series of comedy sketches nailed onto a very thin plot. (And that "guided tour" plot was already a cliché SF trope by then.)
As others have suggested, the problem was that the audience knew the original versions like Python fans know The Parrot Sketch and expected to see exactly the same thing, but on a bigger screen and with a decent budget. That does not make the film a bad one.
A movie isn't a sitcom; it has to tell a complete story, whereas a sitcom can coast along for a while before developing one or more characters a little to enable other stories to be told. (You can see that happening in "Red Dwarf".)
Watch it as a movie and it is still very funny. The set-pieces are still there, but they're played in a different key. It deserved a sequel.
"... you could at least do your research first: the screenplay was written by Douglas Adams."
Or so the people with a a vested interest in lying about what he did or did not write would tell you. Given that he was dead for 4 years before the film, it's far from convincing that a notorious prevaricator would have a filmable script ready and waiting years in advance.
And even if we give these people with an enormous financial incentive for lying the huge benefit of doubt the final result was still shit whether it was written by Adams or not.
Not the only one. I liked it too, but not just for ZD...
As Sean Timarco Baggaley said, the only reason it got such a panning is because fans went in with contradicting expectations, because a) they wanted it to suck because Douglas Adams didn't finish the screenplay, so whoever (Karey Kirkpatrick, for the record) finished it must have wrecked it, and b) they wanted to see a remake whatever previous iteration was their favorite.
But (and I don't have the source handy on this) I recall reading Douglas Adams saying that he took some perverse pleasure in the fact that every iteration of HHGTG was significantly different from the previous. When watched as its own entity, the movie stands up quite well, even when watched as a work of Douglas Adams.
I'd waited thirty years for it and felt quite let down. The plot and screenplay were OK, even the special effects -- I really liked the Vogons.
What really let it down was the really poor casting. Way too 'Merkin for a start. Ford Prefect was never right but Trillian was a complete disaster; they could have replaced the actress with a Barbie Doll for all the character she brought to the film. I'm not even sure that Arthur was that great, just not 'stiff' enough. Marvin wasn't quite right, not robotic enough, to be honest a little silly!
On a positive note, John Malcovich was excellent and Slartibartfast good.
Not the worst film given the intense competition from the typical plotless shite that Hollywood vomits out; Avatar, 2012, day after I wasted my money...
Do miss DNA though.
Battlefield Earth was a big budget vanity project for a religious cult. It had the potential to be a passable scifi flick but it is all the more satisfying that it is so atrocious in every way. Bad acting, bad script, abysmal direction and a lousy plot. Virtually every scene is shot at a odd angle through a colour filter with Star Wars like scene wipes.
It's all the more satisfying from thinking of the epic cognitive dissonance it must have aroused in cult members who had to reconcile this awful trash with their "church" telling them what a wonderful author L Ron Hubbard was. I hope it caused more than few of them to leave.
Once you get over the fact that Hollywood cannot reliably make good SF it ain't bad.
Avatar... Great fun
WotW... Once you get past over the smaltz it's not a bad adaption
And most shocking I like all the Matrix movies (sorry)
But Battlefield Earth (overly long like most opera) and The Postman (a bit sentimental, sorry Brin) are best done in your own head
What is really sad is the humungous skipload of great SF which would make storming movies.
I ain't going to list it here. You know who I mean or you wouldn't be reading this topic.
The Beeb adaption of HHGTTG stands unassailed BTW
What really ticked me off was to learn that the 'original' Avatar movie ("The last airbender") was even worse than this Caramon contraption.
Oh; the reason why I say 'original' is because the Anime series "Avatar" was out way before that silly Pocahontas movie existed. As such I think their movie should have had the right to be called Avatar as well.
But now after having seen it myself I'm actually glad that it doesn't share a resembling name. The series is /so/ much better than that movie, its almost an outrage :(
Most of the actual worst films ever made, most of us obviously and fortunately haven't seen. The poll might have made more sense if it was for e.g. the "worst movie costing more than x million dollars to make", for example. Without such a qualification however, what we ended up with was a bunch of movies that are mostly there because some significant group of people found them particularly disappointing in some way, e.g. Hitchhikers Guide purists who can recite the entire book from memory hating on the movie because it doesn't quite live up to their lofty expectations, when in reality it was a fairly fun adaptation which most objective viewers found pretty decent. The reality is that not even Highlander 2 is anywhere near the worst movie ever. Most of us probably have gems on the shelf that are way worse than anything on that list, for example I found my DVD of New Rose Hotel the other day, and while even that isn't the worst I've seen, it's definitely the worst I've paid for, and I'd easily put it up against anything in that poll.
All of these films while not good are surely a long way from being the worst. The worst I have seen is Adam Sandlers "Going Overboard" the first film he made I think, that was so bad I didnt even watch it all I had to turn it off.
Most of the films in the list are there because maybe it's "cool" to knock them, try watching Going Overboard !!
I really dislike Adam Sandler's work, but I have to say that his flicks look like Shakespeare when compared to Pauly Shore movies. Shore is so bad that I can't vote for them as the worst movies, because I have never made it through more than 5-10 minutes of a Pauly Shore film without flipping the channel.
It seems many of you have never lowered yourselves (and trust me, it's a low thing to do) to checking out the TV listings for the Syfy channel, with such classics as The Terminators, The Day The Earth Stopped, Almighty Thor (surely not a rip off of the dreadful Thor) and 2 Headed Shark Attack.
http://www.dreadcentral.com/reviews/ice-road-terror-2011
I actually watched that from start to finish. Some unbelievable plot holes in it like the generator for the hut dying so they don't have electricity to kill the beast but all the lights are still on in the house. So incredibly bad that I just had to watch it to the end.
But yeah - SyFy channel has had some real dogs on it recently.
Yeah, but there's waaaay too much low-hanging fruit around in the "straight to video/DVD/SciFi channel" bin. Just buy a fiver's worth out of the bargain bin at Poundland to see what I mean, I guarantee a complete set of stinkers.
I reckon that to be a real classic turkey, a film must have at least one person or organisation associated with it who reckons it's worth a cinematic release and makes it happen.
For the worst films ever may I direct people's attention to the fantastic TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000 which poked fun at hundreds of the worst films ever made. There are maybe one or two in the list that are truly hideous but watch MST3K and you will understand there is a whole other level when it comes to bad movies.
For starters I would recommend watching the Space Mutiny and Outlaw episodes.
Enjoy ....and you are welcome.
I suppose it depends on what you mean by sucky film, most of these ive watched and would probably watch again as they were ok for their own reasons. Avatar was polished and a generally OK film but was overhyped and too long on rubbish stuff and short on other stuff. More backstory would have been great.
Phantom menance was too self indulgent but had just enough jedi in it to warrant a watch. It remains one of the few star wars films I have only seen twice.
HHGttG was ok. Not great but ok, for the screentime it was always going to be rushed and a 2 parter wouldnt have cut it financially I guess.
Some films are just plain crap (day after tomorrow and 2012 are just plain stupid. As was the Core). Plus the star trek film where they all go off in search of god, jebus that was poor. Also the last pirates of the caribbean was dire.
I'd say all these films are stupid if my standard of reference credibility. Its like saying the Phantom of the Opera or Cats are crappy because of course they are set in a fantasy world. What normally irks me are plot holes, and using pseudo-science techno-babble when the real stuff would far more captivating. This Star Trek. But they're entertaining to me.
I must have an unerring instinct for avoiding these bad movies. I have not seen a single one of them (so I will have to take other peoples' words for the lack of quality), except a few dislocated fragments of Highlander II, whilst flicking around channels as it was on one of them, couldn't be arsed to stay on that channel for obvious reasons. Even in my state of boredom at the time that film did nothing to make me want to see it.
Not that I have not seen some cringeworthy films in my time. I saw "Once upon a time in the west" in a showing at my student union donkey's years back. It had some good bits, but so many silent, LOOOONG drawn out scenes, and pointless close-ups of people looking constipated as they are waiting (endlessly) for the other to draw first. I felt like shouting "Come on, shoot the guy, get on with it!" but I kept my peace for the sake of the other people watching. Afterwards, it turned out about 80% of the audience felt the same way.
For a movie to be voted "The worst movie ever", it must still be, recognisably, a movie.
Even the worst of SyFy's TV movies has made some attempt at including a plot, some characters and a premise that has at least a fleeting claim to plausibility. (As this is Hollywood, where the laws of physics bend freely around narrative requirements, there is a very low standard for that plausibility.) Something vaguely resembling "acting" is also considered a minimum requirement for such works.
"Waterworld" had none of these and is therefore not a movie in anything other than a purely technical sense. (Similarly, FOX News is only technically a news channel, despite all the evidence to the contrary.)
Oh dear.. I recommend a lot of strong drugs before Manos and Birdemic or at the very least watch the MST3K version of Manos and get a Rifftrax to help with Birdemic. If you choose to watch it without commentary might I suggest having a friend or relative check on you after a set period of time?
Philistine. Starship Troopers I is a classic. I knew it was gonna be cheesey (I think it's supposed to be) but I was actually very surprised at how well it was done.
As to 2 and 3 though, oh, yes, I totally concur. They were oh so bad that it would have been better to watch an Am-Dram Senior Citizen version of it in a theatre.
I'll admit it.... I watched the first 30 minutes of it. Then I turned to the missus, who had seen it before, asked if it got any better and ejected the disc when she said a resounding "no".
Fortunately is was one of many dvd's watched during a LoveFilm free trial, so cost me nothing... except my self respect and months of counselling.
A film can be stupid, illogical, hard to believe etc etc but still be entertaining.
The greatest crime in cinema is to be boring. I think Titanic wins for that.
I quite like a few of the films in that list especially Sunshine. But you need to listen to Brain Cox's commentary track to understand just WTF is going on at the end. They cut too much.
I actually liked Starship Troopers so long as you didn't compare it the Heinlein source material. Then it sucked reaaaaaal bad. I was happily surprised when the the producers of the kiddies CGI version nailed the spirit of the book beautifully. Excellent DVD purchase there.
Kiddie version 1 - Adults 0 go figure...
I find it slightly odd that the list contains Avatar and Titanic as bad films. Isn't it the case that those two films are the two highest grossing films ever made? That means a lot of people paid to go see them. Have all of those people been fooled? And then those people went and bought dvds. Have all of those people been fooled all of the time?
Occam's Razor... Isn't it probably the case that the majority of el reg readers are a strange crowd instead?
It has been shown repeatedly throughout history that the opinion of the masses is no substitute for genuine critical ability. Popularity and quality are simply not related.
As for el reg readers being a strange crowd, I think most would agree. But, again, that's not relevant.
" That means a lot of people paid to go see them. Have all of those people been fooled? "
A lot of people watch those glorified karaoke shows "devised" by Simon Cowell. So... yes. Yes, they have.
Ignorance is not only bliss, but also the default state of most of humanity. If that makes me part of a "strange crowd", then I'm fine with that.
By that metric, Ang Lee's Hulk is worse.
Judge Dredd was very bad. Though they gave themselves a bit of a mountain to climb by having Dredd helmet-less for so long.
Anyway, to be honest I'm not a huge fan, and have only read the Blockmania collection, but that was rather superb and I'd love to see a film of it.
Clearly nobody here has seen any of the later Leprechaun films.
Luckily for you, somebody else suffered to bring you a review of all the films in the series so you don't have to: http://www.onemetal.com/2012/04/14/leprechaun-a-franchise-retrospective/
Nor Mosquito... but I will grant that maybe b-movies are exempt from the 'competion'.
HHGTTG was a perfectly cromulent adaptation of the story, it is its own thing, as it should be. I haven't seen Battlefield Earth fortunately, but I have seen the disasters 2012, The Day after Tomorrow and The Core, and they are all crap, with typical American happy endings - we need to get a Terry Gillian cut of these movies. Good effects though.
Not even close. In fact not a one of the bottom ten that I've seen (about 3/4 of them) should even be in the running for a worst movie ever award. The problem with approaching it this way is that people are only going to vote for movies they've seen, and not many people have seen the worst of the worst.
To truely find the worst ever you need to get some masochists together and have a marathon of terrible, terrible movies, most of which no one has ever heard of, and the ask which one was the hardest to watch without them stabbing their eyes out.
For the youngsters - Reign of Fire - appallingly awful.
But for those who remember the great days of poor movies (no, not the 40s/50s/60s/70s, but the 80s!)
Creepozoids.
I doubt you will find any trace now.
Wait, oh my god, I am wrong, IMDB & wikipedia both have entries. Wikipedia is even nice about it. Go look, this makes anything on that list or subsequently mentioned, and I mean anything, look like high art indeed.
Mind you, if I remember correctly there is quite a good nude shower scene (with out ANY justification in the plot) so perhaps it isn't quite so bad.... No, even that can'r save it.
I did like the post-apocalyptic imagery, v. smilar to the "mad max" series, and particularly reminds me of "battle truck" movie where the alpha-male survivalist rules supreme. In antipodea, in the apocalypse, the farmers will become warlords cos they know to make do and conquer with limited resources.
The book is so *obviously* a two hander between a hero and a villain with the action roughly split 60/40 in favor of the hero.
Sure it's a B movie, but it could have been a *good* B movie.
I *may* have to consider re-assesing Sunshine as well on DVD.
But I saw it in a *cinema* where you don't get a Brian Cox narrative of the back story.
It's just not *exciting* enough. Seriously a space that looks the side of Wembley stadium being de-pressurised within 8 hours? Are you sh***ing me. I think quite a few people found 2001 a fairly profound experience despite either Kubrick or Clarke having any major religious hang ups to work out. It's probably more about what you bring to it than what the film makers put there.
Sorry Mr Boyle. You do people quite well but I guess you don't get good SF is about what happens when humans interact with *technology* (and the tech starts acting up) and I don't think you get the tech well enough to build a story.
For UK terror in space I think the bench mark is Event Horizon. Enough ambiguity for people to think what they like about what's causing things to happen and enough actually happening to keep the cast on their toes.
my favorite scene is 1:02:05 right near the end of the movie - The Door scene. The "Master's" terrifying entrance, the excruciating long 15 seconds pause on his dog just to wait for it to bark once, the chronologically inconsistent splicing of different shots, the husband shooting at the Master to literally no effect (he's not in the same scene!), then the best bit - the Master slowly raising his head to look down his nose at the husband as if to knowingly say "you silly, silly man" as if the audience at this point would understand the true power of "The Master" and then the fade out.
And finally the last credit, two words which, due to what it suggested, were possibly the only thing in the movie that terrified audiences: "The end?"
There are layers on layers of WTFs in this movie. Even that little end credit makes no sense because the villain didn't die! They decided to use a movie cliche for the sake of it without understanding it's point. Movies only use a "the end?" if the movie leads the audience to think there's no possible way there could be a sequel but the director wants to make that excuse (although arguably for different reasons manos: the hands of fate probably did give the audiences the impression there would be no sequel, apart from the scare words at the end)
Avatar was good, if only for the spectacular effects, and the ten foot tall space alien hottie.
The Blair Witch Project was good if only for a demonstration of a faux documentary and the power of the Internet.
Titanic (the James Cameron version) was good, if only for the spectacular effects.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, an interesting failure, the pictures were better in the radio play.
The rest, I agree with ... "War of the Worlds", as usual Spielberg over-directs ...
Does anyone else think this poll must have been limited in some way?
I can think of a ton of films that were more unbearable than Avatar and HHGTTG.
Apollo 18 (plot wise), House of Wax, Hostel, SAW #, Big Momma's House #, The Grudge (sorry)...
And I'm not even mentioning the shark films, other extreme humor and Adam Sandler movies!
The only thing about the failed movie was it was based off of the scientology relgion.
If anything the movie should have started when all the thetans were chained to a volcano and somehow their souls merged into one person who created dianetics.
Religion/Science cross over is not too bad of an idea. The movie Matrix did it .