@carl669 I just clicked on here to post the same thing.
I mean, yeah, I can think of a few films that are objectively worse, but not in comparison to their budget, or the hype.
@Limewater amen to that. i’ve watched a lot of movies and seen a lot of bad ones. but, something about avatar just lodges in the hate center of my brain.
@carl669@f00l That’s another thing that pissed me off about it.
“Unobtanium” was a thing long before Avatar. Now it’s been annexed and you can’t mention it without people thinking you’re referencing that awful movie.
I didn’t know “unobtanium” was around before Avatar. (Am way out of date on films since at least the mid 90’s).
I thought “unobtanium” was just a kind of “4th wall in-joke” about how totally formulaic the film was.
I didn’t hate the film. I credited it for amazing cgi and for being gorgeous.
But the plot and the characters … Ouch
You could just make a “screenwriter’s list of scenes in an action/adventure movie” and check them off. They were so obvious - and so obviously targetedly manipulative) that I couldn’t take them seriously.
I was never “captivated into the film” as someone emotionally plugged into the adventure … I just watched the unfolding pretty pix on full IMAX.
And pretty they were. And that’s why I was ok with the time spent.
@Limewater Yeah I saw that and actually it was definitely ok. Boll’s whole strategy was to take whatever money he could beg for and/or mug people on the street for and run to Germany who would match his investment towards a movie made in their country.
@sammydog01 I enjoy horror and zombie movies and cheesy/cult ones even more. I didn’t see the trailer at first it was on the shelf at the local Blockbuster back then. I saw “Dead” in the title and it was based on a video game and that was that.
@Cythwulf Yeah the editing in Eragon was terrible. I forgot what scene it was, but there was a hard cut as it switched scenes. Pretty jarring actually.
Cannibal Women of the Avocado Rain Forest. I’ve seen some real stinkers, my friends and I used to enjoy them. I just picked that one because it’s got the best title. The worst big budget modern movie I’ve seen was Will Smith’s After Earth.
@moondrake I think you mean Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death. I thought that one was pretty fun. The DVD release also came early enough to have dorky, low-rent easter eggs and special features on the menu.
It’s definitely better than Avatar.
The New Age and Fallen are the ones that stand out for me as awful. There are plenty of others that were just lame or boring or otherwise bad but these two are at the top of my list.
@RiotDemon@therealjrn OK. Maybe…
I really really didn’t want to ‘zoom in’ very close to the pic to investigate…
But… Would a girl removing articles of clothing wearing those supposed low-heel boots still be classified as a “Stripper”?
@daveinwarsh@therealjrn if she’s getting paid to remove her clothes, she’s a stripper. It might make them a stripper’s boots, but they are just thigh high boots.
@RiotDemon@therealjrn I have to agree they are not high-heel.
What probably happened is: Sean Connery sawed the high-heels off in order to look much more manly.
The results are obvious.
@therealjrn I LOVE ZARDOZ. It is absolutely terrible and insane, I don’t know what anybody was thinking when they made it, but damn it, it’s entertaining. The only thing I’d change about it is I’d rather Burt Reynolds had been able to star. The costumes and wigs are amazing, John Boorman’s wife was clearly really into crochet.
Anyway. I ENVY YOU YOUR THEATER EXPERIENCE OF ZARDOZ.
@mossygreen@therealjrn - The '70s was awash in post-apocalyptic films (surprise?) and Zardoz was probably the most interesting, if you don’t count Sleeper. But I can’t imagine recommending it for watching today, some movies are just ‘of their time’.
I expect ‘B’ movies to be bad, especially sci-fi & monster flicks.
Bad action movies at least have action.
But… Having to sit through a long, long, long ‘epic’ just drives me nuts.
Maybe “Titanic” is right up there. Just sink already! We know the ending from history, stop dragging it out for hour after hour.
Oh yeah… “English Patient” was unwatchable. Shit. Stop dragging it out.
That’s the first two I could think of…
@daveinwarsh
Never been much of a movie buff, so when I was raiding the library shelves for binge watching while house sitting, I added the English Patient. I assumed all the awards advertised on the box meant it was good, or at least intriguing. One of the few movies I have ever just turned off out of boredom and disinterest.
@sammydog01 I have never seen a Darren Aronofsky film, and I think I might hate him? I’m not sure. Wait, I think I watched up to half of Pi and thought it was super-stupid.
Thanks, @sammydog01… I came here to say the same thing. Horrible, revolting, disgusting waste of time. With the big name cast I had hope of it being watchable. Michelle Pfeiffer; what have you done?
I’m going to get yelled at for this but: Napoleon Dynamite. I sat through the whole thing just because I thought that it had to get better the way everyone was talking about it. It never did.
@tnhillbillygal fuck. I hated that movie. People tell me I need to watch it more to get it or find it funny. No I don’t. If I didn’t like it the first time, it could fuck right off.
@tnhillbillygal I was literally watching ND 10 minutes ago. Just left the room to hop on my computer and found this. You have to appreciate it for it’s unique qualities.
@tnhillbillygal You really do have to watch it twice…the first time I was amazed at how stupid and awkward it was…now I like how stupid and awkward it was and we quote it.
Bokeh. Listen to the description: On a romantic getaway to Iceland, a young American couple wake up one morning to discover every person on earth has disappeared. Their struggle to survive and to reconcile the mysterious event lead them to reconsider everything they know about themselves and the world.
I ought to spoil it for you. I guess I am by saying if you watch the movie, you will know NO MORE INFORMATION THAN THIS at the end, except you will also be pissed off and depressed as well.
@defective Well, if you consider that “The Happening” DID take the time to make an explanation, you realize it could have been worse. Anyway, my vote is for “Lawnmower Man.”
@curtw4 So you got an explanation. Something to make fun of, afterwards. Something to discuss. With Bokeh, you get nothing. Nothing but anger at yourself for wasting that time.
I might argue that Bokeh is optimum awful, since you can’t stop watching it. Sunken cost fallacy and all, you know. Silently repeating to yourself after 45 minutes or so that they will reveal something, anything, that will further the story that stopped progressing over 30 minutes prior. If it were more overtly awful, you could just drop it. Ugh.
I echo the fact that SyFy movies and low-budget ones are supposed to be bad, but this was a wide-release feature that was expected to make some money.
It’s the only movie I’ve ever wanted to walk out of, but I was there with friends, and we had plans to go out to dinner afterward, so I just would have been sitting in the lobby or my car. May have been an improvement.
I’ll qualify a bit, worst movie seen in a theater: 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag. Joe Pesci probably bought all the prints (or collected, they must have been giving them away) and put them in a duffel bag. So the warning is moot, but I’m still bitter about paying money to see it.
@medz I just remember it being gross. Mostly crude humor. Jack Black eats shit. Discomforting priest guy with not exactly positive homosexual undertones.
@Moose@ThomasF I also saw it in theaters. It was not very funny. I have definitely seen worse in theaters, though. Like Avatar.
Also, Alice’s Misadventures in Wonderland, which I am 98% certain nobody else on this board will have seen. I’m not sure you could see it if you wanted to, now. It looks like there’s a trailer on YouTube.
I thought the first eight minutes or so and the last eight minutes or so of Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny were brilliant, but it’s definitely a filler sandwich.
@Limewater@Moose@ThomasF I guess I’m the only one here that loved Avatar! I thought it was so beautiful that maybe it masked some things. Also, I’ve gotten used to plots being extremely formulated. All I know was it was gorgeous, had good guys and villains, a man got to walk again and the good guys won. It’s no where near my favorite film but I found it enjoyable. On the other hand, I couldn’t tell you if Moulin Roux or Dumb and Dumber were any good because I couldn’t get through the first few minutes.
@RiotDemon I still haven’t seen it, but I was super-mad about the “true story” ad campaign they had for it. Because it OBVIOUSLY wasn’t true, or based on a true story (I read all those Weird-America-type books in the '80’s, and I would have remembered something), and seemed to be inspired at least in part by the Karl Edward Wagner short story “Sticks.”
@mossygreen yeah. It was only true in the sense that they threw the people out there with a vague idea of what to do, and then would randomly tell them things during the course of filming to cause rifts between the people.
@RiotDemon I actually liked The Blair Witch Project. Granted I saw it long after the initial hoax was revealed. I never saw Book of Shadows but the more the recent Blair Witch was a good, creepy movie.
I was in high school when the movie came out and my health class had to make a series of first aid videos. My team chose to do the “The Care Witch Project” about a scary witch who would run around the forest tending to hikers that had minor cuts and sprains lol
I also didn’t care for that new alien movie ‘LIFE’ that came out recently, the one with the alien life-form they nicknamed Calvin. Without spoiling it, the ending sucked.
Don’t understand all the hate on Avatar (not the Airbender one). I thought it was good. Also have never heard anyone reference that film when I use the term ‘unobtanium’, and I use that word an awful lot!
@PooltoyWolf Life was a precursor to the movie Venom. Too bad they didn’t bother to explain that or it would have made a lot more sense – at least to the people who are familiar with the comic book series. They intentionally left stuff out that would ID it as a comic book movie because they still weren’t sure they were going to do the entire series or let it be a stand-alone film.
I actually liked the movie and thought the ending was a nice plot twist.
Lawrence of Arabia: three and a half hours of an Englishman running around in the desert, with nothing ever happening. How this got to be such an acclaimed movie is a mystery to me.
Just so ya’ll don’t have to click, Pulp Fiction is the worst movie I’ve seen. Go ahead and say what you will, I’ve heard it all from the people at work…
Every damn movie my gf picks out. She seriously has the absolute worst taste in movies I’ve ever seen. It’s gotten to the point where I refuse to watch anything she chooses with laurel branches on it. Just because it was nominated at some obscure film festival doesn’t mean it’s good.
@cinoclav lol… that’s like when my bro recommends a movie. We already know… no way. Fortunately, my husband and I always liked the same sort of stuff except for the fact that he liked more war movies than I did.
@lisaviolet When I was a kid, like seven or eight, my mom dragged my brother and me along to visit some distant relative. While they were doing their catching up, I guess they realized that kids wouldn’t be all that interested, so turned on a TV showing Them! It DID NOT help the time to pass faster. To this day, I still believe this movie is 17 hours long.
@wootcat I loved Howard the Duck. Saw it in the theater when it came out. I understand that makes me one of a vanishingly small, cosmically unimportant cohort. But we’re a cohort that got a nod in the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie, damn it!
I’ve given it a lot of thought and I’m going with Ken Russell’s Lisztomania. Every Ken Russell movie I’ve seen tends to be horrible and grating in one way or another, but when you tell people about it, it sounds so good. He always has interesting ideas and gonzo visuals, and it adds up to nothing. Lisztomania has, specifically, Richard Wagner re-imagined as a Nazi Frankenstein monster with a machine gun electric guitar, gunning down crowds, sounds great, and somehow, it… isn’t. It’s terrible and annoying.
How did Russell manage this? Why was Gothic so boring? Why was The Lair of the White Worm so boring? Why was Tommy so boring? They should all be amazing. Why do I spend so much time thinking about movies I saw in the late '80’s/early '90’s and did not enjoy? What’s wrong with me? Why have I not seen the two movies of his I would probably actually like, The Boyfriend and The Devils? Is it because I’m afraid they’ll be bad too, and then my favorite Ken Russell movie will be Altered States by default?
Only movie I’ve ever walked out on and got a refund for: The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989)
And I was watching a lot of art, syfy, low-budget, and MST3K films at the time. It was just not worth sitting through the rest after the first 20 minutes.
Even Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo kept my butt in the seat. So did My Dinner With Andre and even the Russian post-apocalyptic near-silent b&w art house film Stalker. But not that pile of drivel, CTW&L. Utter dreck.
@mike808 It’s been a long time since I’ve seen it but I remember enjoying CTW&L. This entire page is quite interesting to see how varied tastes can be.
@mike808 Hmm, I liked The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover and was utterly bored by Fitzcarraldo. But pretty much all I remember from the former is Helen Mirren’s dress changing color from room to room, because that was cool.
@mike808@mossygreen I wasn’t really a fan of CTW&L, but I love Helen Mirren and needed to see what happened to her character.
/image 1970s Helen Mirren
A Dutch film - The Fourth Man. Watched it late at night on Belgian TV about 25 or so years ago and I still can’t unsee it… Sort of a Black Widow type murder mystery. (At the time, I think its advertised name might have been The Black Widow?) Not the comic book Black Widow. All of the characters are pretty vile. Early on you’re treated to repeated graphic dream sequences of castration and it goes downhill from there. A lot of bizarre psycho-sexual stuff and scenes of a woman dressed in black, walking into a mausoleum with a bouquet of red flowers (oh, yeah - lots of forced symbolism). Eventually you realize the carcasses on meat hooks in the mausoleum are skinned human torsos. It finally got so bad that I dived across the room to hit the power switch on the TV.
I was a bit wary of late-night TV in Belgium after that.
Star Wars Episode 3. But only because I still haven’t seen any of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit travesties or Star Wars Episodes 7 and 8.
Also, possibly because I very rarely watch movies.
It’s kinda early in the morning for me here to work my brain that hard to think of all the sucky movies we’ve seen but one that jumps to the surface was A Walk In The Clouds with Keanu Reeves. UGH. My daughter kept telling us we should watch it so, one night it was on one of the pay channels so we put it on and about 30 minutes of blackboard scraping minutes later we just looked at one another and said… no more. >>>shudder<<<
I started digging through my Netflix history because there are is a lot of shit movies on there.
I found one called The Rift: Dark side of the Moon. I remember when watching it with my brother that we were bored out of our skulls. I think we turned it off.
@RiotDemon Everything about them using espionage tactics on the girl they’re dating was super skeevy, especially that they both wiretapped her phone and it’s played completely like “haha, boy are they desperate.” Guy’s treatment of that dog bothered me. Guy’s apartment bothered me. The overall shallowness bothered me. Lot of played out tropes.
@RiotDemon They played movies for the dogs at a kennel I used to frequent. It was one of them, and it was distractingly bad to me at the time. But maybe it bothers me more than it should.
If I had to pick just one, I’d say The Return of Captain Invincible, if only for how disappointing it was. A musical comedy about an alcoholic superhero! Starring Alan Arkin and Christopher Lee! With songs by Richard O’Brien! It sounded like it could be either surprisingly good or hilariously bad. Instead it was just meh. The “Choose Your Poison” scene was great, but everything else just plain sucked.
Honorable mentions go to The Room (which is so bad it’s good and makes for one of the best Rifftrax you’ll ever hear), Forbidden Zone (which is completely bonkers and intentionally offensive, and seems to have been made on a budget of forty bucks and some food stamps), and Zorro: The Gay Blade (which hasn’t aged well at all, but damn is the cast having a great time). Those are all movies I should probably hate, but actually love.
In general, I tend to be more forgiving of movies that were earnestly made. For all their faults - and their faults are legion - guys like Ed Wood and Tommy Wiseau had a story to tell, and believed in what they were doing. Maybe they shouldn’t have, but they did, and there’s an honesty to their work that charms me even as I mock it. I’ll take Plan 9 From Outer Space over a cynical Michael Bay cash grab any day.
Same goes for the cast. If they’re obviously having fun, I’ll overlook a lot. It’s about the only thing that made Yellowbeard watchable for me, for example.
@dannybeans You seem to find all the really, really bad musicals. I thought the follow-up to Rocky Horror, “Shock Treatment” was bad but it’s actually held up better than your two picks.
@nasman6 I wanted to like that movie. I really did. Between the amazing cast and all the shout-outs it’s gotten (especially from Star Trek: The Next Generation), I thought it’d be right up my alley. But it was so random and meandering and lost in its own mythology that I just couldn’t get into it.
I have seen SO many bad films. It’s hard to choose one because I’ve seen lots of cheesy sci-fri things with cliched plots, poor scripts, bad acting, incompetent directing, cheesy sets, and clumsy editing, but sometimes they can be so bad they’re funny to watch, like Plan 9 From Outer Space.
I used to find it unforgivable when a big budget picture had any of those sins, but after subscribing to Netflix I discovered there are more of those than I ever imagined. There have been SO many films that had my hopes up, then dropped them and stomped them into the dirt (ALL the Star Wars prequels leap to mind…)
Then there are all the films that are self-righteous, mean-spirited, exercises in supremacism of one sort or another, like Birth of a Nation, In Bruges, or American Beauty. And there are celebrated films with neanderthal values, like Starship Troopers or most early James Bond films.
To sum it all up, I’m going to give the palme d’ordure to The X-Files: I Want to Believe. It was a lazy, smug, condescending film that worked JUST hard enough to exploit the fans without providing anything of real value, imho.
@aetris You criticized the film’s neanderthal values. Unless you’re talking about the co-ed showers, which I’m sure Paul Verhoeven would endorse, the other values shown in the film are intended to be shown as ridiculous. A lot of the recruitment/propaganda clips that pop up through the movie are direct references to Nazi propaganda, for example.
@Limewater I would say Starship Troopers has multiple levels of neanderthal values. It is more than anything else a supremacist movie that supposedly criticizes supremacism, while really exploiting the values it’s presenting in order to make money. We’re supposed to congratulate ourselves for feeling superior to its ‘propaganda’ memes, while still finding it exciting entertainment. I’d say it does a great job of celebrating the values it pretends to… well, you can’t say it criticizes them in any way, so - presents.
@Limewater - I’m sure you’re right - unfortunately, thinking “superior people will get this” is unconscious naziism, and getting people to cheer for nazis doesn’t necessarily make anyone think “naziism must be bad.”
@ChadP I thought Bright was a lot of fun. There was some great world building. I’d watch more movies in that universe.
I mean, sure it had problems. It was heavy-handed as hell. Still less-so than Avatar.
And remember, Crash won the Academy Award for best picture in 2006. It’s even MORE heavy-handed than Avatar.
@pitamuffin I though the movie was just so so but Zooey Deschanel in that movie really really ruined it for me. She was like a lump of coal trying to act. My husband and I couldn’t stop focusing on how bad a job she was doing.
The writer-director plays along in public with the idea that these films are so-bad-the’re-great.
But that’s just his public stance, to go along with the films’ critical and audience receptions.
He secretly believes he is a visionary genius; that these are truly great films, and that these films are the Great “Save-The-Environment” Films Of Our Time.
FWIW the plot is beyond non-sensensical, and the cast had to also be the crew on these films (ie no $)
But the “best parts!!!” are the amazing special effects.
@capguncowboyFind Me Guilty was pretty good. It helps that it wasn’t your standard Vin Diesel bang-bang-shoot-'em-up stuff, and that it had Sydney Lumet behind the camera.
@Targaryen so, umm, asking for a friend… this list that is being created - is this the list meh is going to use when deciding what to buy or to not to buy when last blockbuster brick and mortar closes?
I’m packing for a trip and threw Netflix on the TV. Not so much to watch, but for background distraction. I grabbed the first movie listed in “recommended” and hit “play”.
A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan is, in fact, the worst movie I’ve ever not really watched. This is quite possibly the very worst movie ever made (and I’ve seen some pretty crappy home movie vacation videos).
Written and directed by Roman Coppola. Just goes to show you sometimes the apple does fall far from the tree.
I watched this one alone, fortunately. I got it as part of a film-of-the-month club I joined for three months, but it was expensive and all of the movies I got were super depressing.
@RiotDemon It was a first date and then, “hey, let’s go back to my place and make out! And not think about Gwyneth Paltrow’s head in that box.” Uhm, no, that didn’t happen.
Jack and Jill
Avatar
@carl669 I just clicked on here to post the same thing.
I mean, yeah, I can think of a few films that are objectively worse, but not in comparison to their budget, or the hype.
@Limewater amen to that. i’ve watched a lot of movies and seen a lot of bad ones. but, something about avatar just lodges in the hate center of my brain.
@carl669 @Limewater
Y’all just need a dose of some unobtanium.
@carl669 You mean “Pocahontas 3D” ?
@carl669 @f00l That’s another thing that pissed me off about it.
“Unobtanium” was a thing long before Avatar. Now it’s been annexed and you can’t mention it without people thinking you’re referencing that awful movie.
@carl669 @macromeh No, I think he means “Ferngully without Robin Williams.”
@carl669 @Limewater
I didn’t know “unobtanium” was around before Avatar. (Am way out of date on films since at least the mid 90’s).
I thought “unobtanium” was just a kind of “4th wall in-joke” about how totally formulaic the film was.
I didn’t hate the film. I credited it for amazing cgi and for being gorgeous.
But the plot and the characters … Ouch
You could just make a “screenwriter’s list of scenes in an action/adventure movie” and check them off. They were so obvious - and so obviously targetedly manipulative) that I couldn’t take them seriously.
I was never “captivated into the film” as someone emotionally plugged into the adventure … I just watched the unfolding pretty pix on full IMAX.
And pretty they were. And that’s why I was ok with the time spent.
@f00l @Limewater
the thing is, the plot was SO horribly bad, that i couldn’t pay attention to any of the fx.
@carl669 @f00l Yep. “Unobtainium” has been in use since the 1950s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unobtainium
After fifty years of regular use as a word that meant something, it became “that thing from Avatar.”
@carl669 @f00l @Limewater Car collectors have used it for decades to describe parts that are horribly hard to find (they’re made of unobtainium).
Umm…Manos, The Hands of Fate comes to mind…
But that’s an easy pick. I’ll get back to you.
@therealjrn
not saying it’s a bad film, it just reminded me of this thing I saw…
For me it was “House of the Dead”.
@Targaryen If you want to see a weird outlier, watch Rampage (the 2009 film). It’s also known as “The Uwe Boll movie that’s actually pretty good.”
@Limewater Yeah I saw that and actually it was definitely ok. Boll’s whole strategy was to take whatever money he could beg for and/or mug people on the street for and run to Germany who would match his investment towards a movie made in their country.
@Targaryen you thought that would be good?
@sammydog01 I enjoy horror and zombie movies and cheesy/cult ones even more. I didn’t see the trailer at first it was on the shelf at the local Blockbuster back then. I saw “Dead” in the title and it was based on a video game and that was that.
The Last Airbender, followed closely by the adaptation of the book Eragon.
@Cythwulf Yeah the editing in Eragon was terrible. I forgot what scene it was, but there was a hard cut as it switched scenes. Pretty jarring actually.
@Cythwulf Actually with all the generally good dragon CGI going around I’ve been hoping a Dragonriders of Pern movie or tv series would happen.
Willard. Absolute waste of time.
@renae78 I liked Willard.
@renae78 @sammydog01 I liked Ben too.
/youtube Michael Jackson ben
@renae78 The rats bouncing off of Ernest Borgnine one or the Crispin Glover one?
@mossygreen The Crispin Glover one. He’s great, but this movie was just so dumb.
@mossygreen @renae78 I was thinking of the original Willard. Never mind.
@mossygreen @renae78 @sammydog01 There’s more than one? Isn’t it the sequel to Ben?
@therealjrn Apparently there was a remake.
@sammydog01 Pfffft. Originals only I liked.
Cannibal Women of the Avocado Rain Forest. I’ve seen some real stinkers, my friends and I used to enjoy them. I just picked that one because it’s got the best title. The worst big budget modern movie I’ve seen was Will Smith’s After Earth.
@moondrake I think you mean Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death. I thought that one was pretty fun. The DVD release also came early enough to have dorky, low-rent easter eggs and special features on the menu.
It’s definitely better than Avatar.
@Limewater @moondrake
With a title like that how bad can it be?
The New Age and Fallen are the ones that stand out for me as awful. There are plenty of others that were just lame or boring or otherwise bad but these two are at the top of my list.
I saw this one at the theater: Zardoz, starring Sean Connery
@therealjrn Well… the picture above makes me question wanting to see that movie someday…
Thanks for the warning.
@daveinwarsh Whelp…it IS Sean Connery as you have never seen him before…be sure to beer up beforehand.
/I gotta get me some stripper boots too. If they’re good enough for Mr. Connery, they’re good enough for me.
@therealjrn There’s not enough beer on Earth to ‘Beer up’ for that sight.
Yes, the stripper boots are a delightful touch…
@therealjrn stripper boots would have high heels.
@RiotDemon @therealjrn Maybe it’s soft sand & the heels have sunk into the sand.
@daveinwarsh @therealjrn
/giphy zooms in
Nope. I can see the standard flat heels.
@daveinwarsh @RiotDemon Face it Dave, we lost. The woman knows her stripper boots.
@RiotDemon @therealjrn OK. Maybe…
I really really didn’t want to ‘zoom in’ very close to the pic to investigate…
But… Would a girl removing articles of clothing wearing those supposed low-heel boots still be classified as a “Stripper”?
@daveinwarsh @therealjrn if she’s getting paid to remove her clothes, she’s a stripper. It might make them a stripper’s boots, but they are just thigh high boots.
@RiotDemon @therealjrn I have to agree they are not high-heel.
What probably happened is: Sean Connery sawed the high-heels off in order to look much more manly.
The results are obvious.
@therealjrn I LOVE ZARDOZ. It is absolutely terrible and insane, I don’t know what anybody was thinking when they made it, but damn it, it’s entertaining. The only thing I’d change about it is I’d rather Burt Reynolds had been able to star. The costumes and wigs are amazing, John Boorman’s wife was clearly really into crochet.
Anyway. I ENVY YOU YOUR THEATER EXPERIENCE OF ZARDOZ.
@mossygreen @therealjrn - The '70s was awash in post-apocalyptic films (surprise?) and Zardoz was probably the most interesting, if you don’t count Sleeper. But I can’t imagine recommending it for watching today, some movies are just ‘of their time’.
@therealjrn
And you yet live. Wow.
Brave man.
I expect ‘B’ movies to be bad, especially sci-fi & monster flicks.
Bad action movies at least have action.
But… Having to sit through a long, long, long ‘epic’ just drives me nuts.
Maybe “Titanic” is right up there. Just sink already! We know the ending from history, stop dragging it out for hour after hour.
Oh yeah… “English Patient” was unwatchable. Shit. Stop dragging it out.
That’s the first two I could think of…
@daveinwarsh I hated “Titanic” as well.
@compunaut @daveinwarsh I refused to watch Titanic for years due to it being over hyped. After seeing it, I still don’t see what the fuss was about.
@daveinwarsh
Never been much of a movie buff, so when I was raiding the library shelves for binge watching while house sitting, I added the English Patient. I assumed all the awards advertised on the box meant it was good, or at least intriguing. One of the few movies I have ever just turned off out of boredom and disinterest.
@daveinwarsh
Dragonball Evolution. I had such high hopes for this when I heard James Marsters was playing Piccolo but it was just trash.
@stardate820926 Those hopes remained high after hearing Justin Chatwin was playing Goku?
@Limewater No so much…
I still had to give it a chance because it’s my husband’s favorite series but my god, it was awful.
I meant to see Mother! with my Moviepass and missed it. It’s on Hulu now. I’m glad I didn’t commit to sitting through the whole thing. It’s terrible.
@sammydog01 I have never seen a Darren Aronofsky film, and I think I might hate him? I’m not sure. Wait, I think I watched up to half of Pi and thought it was super-stupid.
Thanks, @sammydog01… I came here to say the same thing. Horrible, revolting, disgusting waste of time. With the big name cast I had hope of it being watchable. Michelle Pfeiffer; what have you done?
@simssj The baby. OMG the baby.
Neighbors. Both the 1981 Belushi film and the 2014 Seth Rogan film. But the Belushi movie was particularly horrible.
I’m going to get yelled at for this but: Napoleon Dynamite. I sat through the whole thing just because I thought that it had to get better the way everyone was talking about it. It never did.
@tnhillbillygal fuck. I hated that movie. People tell me I need to watch it more to get it or find it funny. No I don’t. If I didn’t like it the first time, it could fuck right off.
@RiotDemon I’d star that twice if I could.
That movie was so stupid.
@tnhillbillygal You’re just mad nobody every built you a cake.
@medz Or caught her a delicious bass.
@RiotDemon @tnhillbillygal
I have heard you need to watch it multiple times as well, but I out myself though that once and not again.
@tnhillbillygal I was literally watching ND 10 minutes ago. Just left the room to hop on my computer and found this. You have to appreciate it for it’s unique qualities.
@cinoclav @tnhillbillygal No.
@tnhillbillygal You really do have to watch it twice…the first time I was amazed at how stupid and awkward it was…now I like how stupid and awkward it was and we quote it.
@tnhillbillygal I only made it thru about 20 minutes. ick.
Bokeh. Listen to the description: On a romantic getaway to Iceland, a young American couple wake up one morning to discover every person on earth has disappeared. Their struggle to survive and to reconcile the mysterious event lead them to reconsider everything they know about themselves and the world.
I ought to spoil it for you. I guess I am by saying if you watch the movie, you will know NO MORE INFORMATION THAN THIS at the end, except you will also be pissed off and depressed as well.
@defective Well, if you consider that “The Happening” DID take the time to make an explanation, you realize it could have been worse. Anyway, my vote is for “Lawnmower Man.”
@curtw4 So you got an explanation. Something to make fun of, afterwards. Something to discuss. With Bokeh, you get nothing. Nothing but anger at yourself for wasting that time.
I might argue that Bokeh is optimum awful, since you can’t stop watching it. Sunken cost fallacy and all, you know. Silently repeating to yourself after 45 minutes or so that they will reveal something, anything, that will further the story that stopped progressing over 30 minutes prior. If it were more overtly awful, you could just drop it. Ugh.
@defective I read the plot summary. I guess I’d be frustrated at the end too.
Dumb and Dumberer.
I echo the fact that SyFy movies and low-budget ones are supposed to be bad, but this was a wide-release feature that was expected to make some money.
It’s the only movie I’ve ever wanted to walk out of, but I was there with friends, and we had plans to go out to dinner afterward, so I just would have been sitting in the lobby or my car. May have been an improvement.
I’ll qualify a bit, worst movie seen in a theater: 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag. Joe Pesci probably bought all the prints (or collected, they must have been giving them away) and put them in a duffel bag. So the warning is moot, but I’m still bitter about paying money to see it.
Year One with Jack Black and Michael Cera
@ThomasF That’s a good movie right there. Sorta like Life of Brian and The Invention of Lying mixed with Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny.
@ThomasF not the worst movie I’ve ever seen, but probably the worst movie I’ve ever seen in theaters.
@medz I just remember it being gross. Mostly crude humor. Jack Black eats shit. Discomforting priest guy with not exactly positive homosexual undertones.
@Moose I had the theater experience as well.
@Moose @ThomasF I also saw it in theaters. It was not very funny. I have definitely seen worse in theaters, though. Like Avatar.
Also, Alice’s Misadventures in Wonderland, which I am 98% certain nobody else on this board will have seen. I’m not sure you could see it if you wanted to, now. It looks like there’s a trailer on YouTube.
I thought the first eight minutes or so and the last eight minutes or so of Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny were brilliant, but it’s definitely a filler sandwich.
@Limewater @Moose @ThomasF I guess I’m the only one here that loved Avatar! I thought it was so beautiful that maybe it masked some things. Also, I’ve gotten used to plots being extremely formulated. All I know was it was gorgeous, had good guys and villains, a man got to walk again and the good guys won. It’s no where near my favorite film but I found it enjoyable. On the other hand, I couldn’t tell you if Moulin Roux or Dumb and Dumber were any good because I couldn’t get through the first few minutes.
I did not like Blair Witch Project. Watched it in the theatre. The shaky cam made me pretty sick.
Once I found out that the director told the guy to throw the map away, which just created a big mess, it made me even angrier.
I didn’t like the ending.
@RiotDemon I wasn’t going to movies often when that came out and bought popcorn. Almost puked.
@RiotDemon I still haven’t seen it, but I was super-mad about the “true story” ad campaign they had for it. Because it OBVIOUSLY wasn’t true, or based on a true story (I read all those Weird-America-type books in the '80’s, and I would have remembered something), and seemed to be inspired at least in part by the Karl Edward Wagner short story “Sticks.”
@mossygreen yeah. It was only true in the sense that they threw the people out there with a vague idea of what to do, and then would randomly tell them things during the course of filming to cause rifts between the people.
@RiotDemon I actually liked The Blair Witch Project. Granted I saw it long after the initial hoax was revealed. I never saw Book of Shadows but the more the recent Blair Witch was a good, creepy movie.
I was in high school when the movie came out and my health class had to make a series of first aid videos. My team chose to do the “The Care Witch Project” about a scary witch who would run around the forest tending to hikers that had minor cuts and sprains lol
@RiotDemon @stardate820926 What an awesome school project.
@RiotDemon @stardate820926 I love Jeffery Donovan but Book of Shadows was trash, way worse than the first one.
@RiotDemon @stardate820926 That sounds fantastic.
‘The Room’. Enough said.
I also didn’t care for that new alien movie ‘LIFE’ that came out recently, the one with the alien life-form they nicknamed Calvin. Without spoiling it, the ending sucked.
Don’t understand all the hate on Avatar (not the Airbender one). I thought it was good. Also have never heard anyone reference that film when I use the term ‘unobtanium’, and I use that word an awful lot!
@PooltoyWolf I had to go reread the plot to Life because I just remember it being ok.
What did you hate about the ending?
@PooltoyWolf Life was a precursor to the movie Venom. Too bad they didn’t bother to explain that or it would have made a lot more sense – at least to the people who are familiar with the comic book series. They intentionally left stuff out that would ID it as a comic book movie because they still weren’t sure they were going to do the entire series or let it be a stand-alone film.
I actually liked the movie and thought the ending was a nice plot twist.
@capguncowboy I…never thought of that. Makes total sense. o3o
Lawrence of Arabia: three and a half hours of an Englishman running around in the desert, with nothing ever happening. How this got to be such an acclaimed movie is a mystery to me.
@Klaatu1721 I love that movie. Get off my lawn.
How convenient that I already made my list.
Just so ya’ll don’t have to click, Pulp Fiction is the worst movie I’ve seen. Go ahead and say what you will, I’ve heard it all from the people at work…
@jst1ofknd Based solely off of this statement, and knowing nothing else about you, I am guessing you are under 30. Am I right?
@Limewater
You are incorrect. I haven’t been bellow 30 for 12 years.
Every damn movie my gf picks out. She seriously has the absolute worst taste in movies I’ve ever seen. It’s gotten to the point where I refuse to watch anything she chooses with laurel branches on it. Just because it was nominated at some obscure film festival doesn’t mean it’s good.
@cinoclav lol… that’s like when my bro recommends a movie. We already know… no way. Fortunately, my husband and I always liked the same sort of stuff except for the fact that he liked more war movies than I did.
Them!
Watched it on the telebision when I was six or seven and to this day, I hate ants. Worst movie ever.
As an adult, I’m not fond of gore for the sake of gore.
@lisaviolet - That’s one of my favorite giant insect movies! James Whitmore and his tommy gun versus giant ants!
@lisaviolet When I was a kid, like seven or eight, my mom dragged my brother and me along to visit some distant relative. While they were doing their catching up, I guess they realized that kids wouldn’t be all that interested, so turned on a TV showing Them! It DID NOT help the time to pass faster. To this day, I still believe this movie is 17 hours long.
Sssssss.
Awful movie. I like snakes, but not in this movie. The only redeeming feature was Dirk Benedict.
@heartny Oh yeah! I think I saw that on Comet TV last year!
Love Story.
It was just plain bad, Gawd Dammit.
@shahnm But, just about every female in the theater was in tears.
La La Land. I want my 3 hours back!
Howard the Duck
@wootcat I loved Howard the Duck. Saw it in the theater when it came out. I understand that makes me one of a vanishingly small, cosmically unimportant cohort. But we’re a cohort that got a nod in the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie, damn it!
@mossygreen Also in GotG 2.
The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl
I’ve given it a lot of thought and I’m going with Ken Russell’s Lisztomania. Every Ken Russell movie I’ve seen tends to be horrible and grating in one way or another, but when you tell people about it, it sounds so good. He always has interesting ideas and gonzo visuals, and it adds up to nothing. Lisztomania has, specifically, Richard Wagner re-imagined as a Nazi Frankenstein monster with a machine gun electric guitar, gunning down crowds, sounds great, and somehow, it… isn’t. It’s terrible and annoying.
How did Russell manage this? Why was Gothic so boring? Why was The Lair of the White Worm so boring? Why was Tommy so boring? They should all be amazing. Why do I spend so much time thinking about movies I saw in the late '80’s/early '90’s and did not enjoy? What’s wrong with me? Why have I not seen the two movies of his I would probably actually like, The Boyfriend and The Devils? Is it because I’m afraid they’ll be bad too, and then my favorite Ken Russell movie will be Altered States by default?
@mossygreen
Cars That Eat People. Made in the early 80s, in the UK, I think.
Only movie I’ve ever walked out on and got a refund for:
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989)
And I was watching a lot of art, syfy, low-budget, and MST3K films at the time. It was just not worth sitting through the rest after the first 20 minutes.
Even Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo kept my butt in the seat. So did My Dinner With Andre and even the Russian post-apocalyptic near-silent b&w art house film Stalker. But not that pile of drivel, CTW&L. Utter dreck.
@mike808 It’s been a long time since I’ve seen it but I remember enjoying CTW&L. This entire page is quite interesting to see how varied tastes can be.
@mike808 Hmm, I liked The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover and was utterly bored by Fitzcarraldo. But pretty much all I remember from the former is Helen Mirren’s dress changing color from room to room, because that was cool.
@mike808 @mossygreen I wasn’t really a fan of CTW&L, but I love Helen Mirren and needed to see what happened to her character.
/image 1970s Helen Mirren
@compunaut @mike808 Oof, that’s a classic.
A Dutch film - The Fourth Man. Watched it late at night on Belgian TV about 25 or so years ago and I still can’t unsee it… Sort of a Black Widow type murder mystery. (At the time, I think its advertised name might have been The Black Widow?) Not the comic book Black Widow. All of the characters are pretty vile. Early on you’re treated to repeated graphic dream sequences of castration and it goes downhill from there. A lot of bizarre psycho-sexual stuff and scenes of a woman dressed in black, walking into a mausoleum with a bouquet of red flowers (oh, yeah - lots of forced symbolism). Eventually you realize the carcasses on meat hooks in the mausoleum are skinned human torsos. It finally got so bad that I dived across the room to hit the power switch on the TV.
I was a bit wary of late-night TV in Belgium after that.
Star Wars Episode 3. But only because I still haven’t seen any of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit travesties or Star Wars Episodes 7 and 8.
Also, possibly because I very rarely watch movies.
@Dweezle Meesa So Sorry.
/giphy jar jar binks
It’s kinda early in the morning for me here to work my brain that hard to think of all the sucky movies we’ve seen but one that jumps to the surface was A Walk In The Clouds with Keanu Reeves. UGH. My daughter kept telling us we should watch it so, one night it was on one of the pay channels so we put it on and about 30 minutes of blackboard scraping minutes later we just looked at one another and said… no more. >>>shudder<<<
I started digging through my Netflix history because there are is a lot of shit movies on there.
I found one called The Rift: Dark side of the Moon. I remember when watching it with my brother that we were bored out of our skulls. I think we turned it off.
Wait, I just remembered a movie that actually made me really angry.
This Means War from 2012
@ThomasF why? I thought it was funny. Maybe I liked it more because the guys are both eye candy.
@RiotDemon Everything about them using espionage tactics on the girl they’re dating was super skeevy, especially that they both wiretapped her phone and it’s played completely like “haha, boy are they desperate.” Guy’s treatment of that dog bothered me. Guy’s apartment bothered me. The overall shallowness bothered me. Lot of played out tropes.
@ThomasF I think I’ll have a new opinion when I watch it again.
@RiotDemon They played movies for the dogs at a kennel I used to frequent. It was one of them, and it was distractingly bad to me at the time. But maybe it bothers me more than it should.
If I had to pick just one, I’d say The Return of Captain Invincible, if only for how disappointing it was. A musical comedy about an alcoholic superhero! Starring Alan Arkin and Christopher Lee! With songs by Richard O’Brien! It sounded like it could be either surprisingly good or hilariously bad. Instead it was just meh. The “Choose Your Poison” scene was great, but everything else just plain sucked.
Honorable mentions go to The Room (which is so bad it’s good and makes for one of the best Rifftrax you’ll ever hear), Forbidden Zone (which is completely bonkers and intentionally offensive, and seems to have been made on a budget of forty bucks and some food stamps), and Zorro: The Gay Blade (which hasn’t aged well at all, but damn is the cast having a great time). Those are all movies I should probably hate, but actually love.
In general, I tend to be more forgiving of movies that were earnestly made. For all their faults - and their faults are legion - guys like Ed Wood and Tommy Wiseau had a story to tell, and believed in what they were doing. Maybe they shouldn’t have, but they did, and there’s an honesty to their work that charms me even as I mock it. I’ll take Plan 9 From Outer Space over a cynical Michael Bay cash grab any day.
Same goes for the cast. If they’re obviously having fun, I’ll overlook a lot. It’s about the only thing that made Yellowbeard watchable for me, for example.
@dannybeans You seem to find all the really, really bad musicals. I thought the follow-up to Rocky Horror, “Shock Treatment” was bad but it’s actually held up better than your two picks.
The adventures of buckaroo banzai across the eighth dimension. Just what?
@nasman6 Buckaroo Bonzai is a classic!
“No matter where you go, there you are.”
@Limewater @nasman6 “Which one was yes, go ahead and destroy Russia… or number 2?”
@nasman6 I wanted to like that movie. I really did. Between the amazing cast and all the shout-outs it’s gotten (especially from Star Trek: The Next Generation), I thought it’d be right up my alley. But it was so random and meandering and lost in its own mythology that I just couldn’t get into it.
@nasman6 How dare you!
I have seen SO many bad films. It’s hard to choose one because I’ve seen lots of cheesy sci-fri things with cliched plots, poor scripts, bad acting, incompetent directing, cheesy sets, and clumsy editing, but sometimes they can be so bad they’re funny to watch, like Plan 9 From Outer Space.
I used to find it unforgivable when a big budget picture had any of those sins, but after subscribing to Netflix I discovered there are more of those than I ever imagined. There have been SO many films that had my hopes up, then dropped them and stomped them into the dirt (ALL the Star Wars prequels leap to mind…)
Then there are all the films that are self-righteous, mean-spirited, exercises in supremacism of one sort or another, like Birth of a Nation, In Bruges, or American Beauty. And there are celebrated films with neanderthal values, like Starship Troopers or most early James Bond films.
To sum it all up, I’m going to give the palme d’ordure to The X-Files: I Want to Believe. It was a lazy, smug, condescending film that worked JUST hard enough to exploit the fans without providing anything of real value, imho.
@aetris Starship Troopers was intended to be a satire.
@Limewater - Supposedly, so was Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu, and Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze. Your point?
@aetris You criticized the film’s neanderthal values. Unless you’re talking about the co-ed showers, which I’m sure Paul Verhoeven would endorse, the other values shown in the film are intended to be shown as ridiculous. A lot of the recruitment/propaganda clips that pop up through the movie are direct references to Nazi propaganda, for example.
@aetris @Limewater Whatever you have to tell yourself to get by, Limewater. No judgements here…you’re in a safe place. :hugs:
@Limewater I would say Starship Troopers has multiple levels of neanderthal values. It is more than anything else a supremacist movie that supposedly criticizes supremacism, while really exploiting the values it’s presenting in order to make money. We’re supposed to congratulate ourselves for feeling superior to its ‘propaganda’ memes, while still finding it exciting entertainment. I’d say it does a great job of celebrating the values it pretends to… well, you can’t say it criticizes them in any way, so - presents.
@aetris
@therealjrn - OK, but I still say there’s a big difference between having a loop on the top versus a patch on the side!
@aetris I’d wager he thought, “Hey, you’re cheering for Nazis” was enough to show what he meant.
@Limewater - I’m sure you’re right - unfortunately, thinking “superior people will get this” is unconscious naziism, and getting people to cheer for nazis doesn’t necessarily make anyone think “naziism must be bad.”
@ChadP You’re supposed to post a movie you didn’t like, Chad
@ChadP I thought Bright was a lot of fun. There was some great world building. I’d watch more movies in that universe.
I mean, sure it had problems. It was heavy-handed as hell. Still less-so than Avatar.
And remember, Crash won the Academy Award for best picture in 2006. It’s even MORE heavy-handed than Avatar.
@ChadP (The joke is he loathes Bright with a burning passion, to the point that it has become a company joke.)
@ChadP Bright 2 confirmed. Get hype.
The one that instantly came to mind as a movie I hated:
The Happening
Sorry Mark Wahlberg. I actually get mad when someone mentions this movie, just because I detested it so much.
@pitamuffin I though the movie was just so so but Zooey Deschanel in that movie really really ruined it for me. She was like a lump of coal trying to act. My husband and I couldn’t stop focusing on how bad a job she was doing.
@pitamuffin
The writer-director plays along in public with the idea that these films are so-bad-the’re-great.
But that’s just his public stance, to go along with the films’ critical and audience receptions.
He secretly believes he is a visionary genius; that these are truly great films, and that these films are the Great “Save-The-Environment” Films Of Our Time.
FWIW the plot is beyond non-sensensical, and the cast had to also be the crew on these films (ie no $)
But the “best parts!!!” are the amazing special effects.
/youtube birdemic trailer
/youtube birdemic 2 trailer
@ChadP
Sideways…by far
@jksquared I love wine. I like movies about wine. I HATED Sideways.
@jksquared That was pretty bad.
Jupiter Ascending was pretty awful. Even with the Mila Kunis eye candy, it was unwatchable.
Catwoman with Haley Berry was terrible.
XXX was unwatchable. As a general rule, I don’t watch Vin Diesel films because I know they’re going to be bad, but I did enjoy Knock Around Guys.
Worst one though? Any of the Transformers movies after the first one in 2007. That one wasn’t great, but the following movies were awful.
@capguncowboy Find Me Guilty was pretty good. It helps that it wasn’t your standard Vin Diesel bang-bang-shoot-'em-up stuff, and that it had Sydney Lumet behind the camera.
@capguncowboy Catwoman was bad. Haley was hot… It evens out maybe.
@Targaryen so, umm, asking for a friend… this list that is being created - is this the list meh is going to use when deciding what to buy or to not to buy when last blockbuster brick and mortar closes?
@Kidsandliz There’s only one US store left in Bend, Oregon.
/wootstalker https://shirt.woot.com/offers/gone-but-not-forgotten
Gone, But Not Forgotten
Price: $19.00
Condition: Probably New
I have a new “Worst movie…”
I’m packing for a trip and threw Netflix on the TV. Not so much to watch, but for background distraction. I grabbed the first movie listed in “recommended” and hit “play”.
A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan is, in fact, the worst movie I’ve ever not really watched. This is quite possibly the very worst movie ever made (and I’ve seen some pretty crappy home movie vacation videos).
Written and directed by Roman Coppola. Just goes to show you sometimes the apple does fall far from the tree.
I wanted to leave in the middle of “Hook” and the worst date movie was “Se7en.”
@TheMonkeyKing sheesh. I would of loved to seen Se7en as a date movie.
@TheMonkeyKing You want to see a bad date movie, check out Alexandra’s Project.
Alexandra’s Project
I watched this one alone, fortunately. I got it as part of a film-of-the-month club I joined for three months, but it was expensive and all of the movies I got were super depressing.
@RiotDemon It was a first date and then, “hey, let’s go back to my place and make out! And not think about Gwyneth Paltrow’s head in that box.” Uhm, no, that didn’t happen.
@TheMonkeyKing haha. I wouldn’t have a problem with that. When I’m making out with my partner, I don’t think about the movie we just watched.