101 Movies to avoid watching before you die.

I was really surprised at what a bad movie House of Sand and Fog turned out to be—I loved the book and it seemed like it had potential to work really well as a movie. I liked Kingsley’s acting a lot though.

(Somewhat relatedly: I read Blindness this winter and was blown away by it, as how could anybody not be, and was excited when I heard the movie was being produced—as I was reading the book, I was imagining it as a movie, as a really good movie. But the review I read of them movie screened at Cannes makes it sound just awful.)

Crash, both of them Paul Haggis’ and David Cronenberg’s, are to be avoided, especially back to back.

About a bunch of Irish people who die. My family called it “The horse movie” because it opens with a dead horse floating in the ocean and each time someone dies they pan up past the horse to the dead people floating in the ocean. It is the standard against which all bad movies are compared in my household.

As in “Is it as bad as the horse movie?”

Sorry, Hidari, but I disagree: Signs is actually damn good. Yes, an alien invasion is way too large a plot device to effectively use as a simple McGuffin for the film’s actual story, with the probably to-be-expected result that the aliens and their invasion plans were ultimately cartoonish and lazily conceived. And Shyamalan’s insertion of himself into the movie was too much, clearly. Still, the family drama works on multiple levels, with the result that the movie’s tension is genuinely earned. Feel free the trash Shyamalan’s subsequent films, but I maintain that Signs stands as one of those Last-Decent-Film-Before-The-Director-Lost-His-Talent movies. (See Rob Reiner’s

Now, if we’re talking about truly atrocious movies that one must avoid seeing at all costs, the answer is pretty simple: Superman III. The only movie that I have ever, after actually having paid the price of admission, walked out on.

Don’t see any recent serious movie set in Western Europe before the sixteenth century. They will get the Middle Ages totally wrong, they will get classical Greek or Rome wrong, and not in a so-bad-it’s funny-way, but in a ‘why are they such idiots way?’ I talked once to someone whose house had been used on the set for ‘Robin Hood Prince of Thieves’. The film-makers had brought mistletoe in from France, but they couldn’t work out the difference between a Saracen and an African-American. They are that stupid, they all are (except for the Pythons).

Ok, I screwed up the html there pretty badly. Let’s try again:

“(See Rob Reiner’s A Few Good Men for another example.)”

And, of course, Superman III is still the nadir of modern crap moviemaking.

Nobody’s mentioned the most recent spate of Star Wars movies? Or maybe any Star Wars movie that is not Star Wars?

My Dinner with Andre. If you liked it, let’s be sure we never are seated next to each other on a trans-oceanic flight. We’ll both be happier that way.

I did like it. But partly that’s because I had a friend who actually attended the strange actor’s camp-in-the-woods in Poland with Jerzy Grotowski that Andre Gregory talks about in the film.

The new Indiana Jones, which is actually worse than the MacGyver film that it rips off, because Brian Blessed doesn’t appear in it.

Junebug billed as a “wise, bittersweet … comedy,” in reality none of the above. Just awful, leaving out the grotesque misrepresentations on the dvd jacket.

I had a friend who actually attended the strange actor’s camp-in-the-woods in Poland with Jerzy Grotowski that Andre Gregory talks about in the film.

I haven’t watched that movie in so long…was that the scene when Andre is talking about some monster emerging from the woods? Weird, great movie. (The thing that makes it for me is the waiter, whom I seem to recall reading somewhere was played by a prestigious Eastern European actor whose name I don’t remember. They way the camera would keep cutting to him, staring at Andre and Wallace Shawn as they talked…it was unnerving. Like having Banquo’s Ghost watching your meal.)

Hard to beat Superman III. But as for recent films:
—The Golden Compass, for being the worst insult against the book on which it’s based. I managed as far as when the Gyptians show up to rescue Lyra from the Gobblers before I started screaming. Never begrudge an author the right to make money from writing, but for God’s sake I hope Philip Pullman donated his cut to Amnesty International or something.
—Any Lars von Trier film, on principle. I couldn’t get a half-hour into either Breaking the Waves or Dancer in the Dark; I just couldn’t watch him keep shoving Emily Watson and Björk into his cinematic meat grinder.
—Gigli. ‘My eyes! The goggles do nothing!’

‘Signs’ is terrible too. Mind you it has Mel Gibson in it, so you probably didn’t need me to tell you that.

I enjoyed it, but that’s because I have a soft spots for movies with an accidentally mal-theistic cosmology.

Thanks, but I think I’ll still be able to enjoy movies that are set in the past, as long as I don’t A) become an expert on the particular time period of the movie, and B) devote most of my attention to looking for signs of accuracy or inaccuracy.

Likewise, almost any movie involving hacking, except maybe Sneakers is ruined if you’re a computer programmer.

My priest showed House of Sand and Fog as part of a film series to discuss the place of God in our lives. This movie was meant to show how all of the characters had opportunities to listen to each other, and to let God work through them, but never did. I disagree with the criticism of Jennifer Connelly’s acting. While she may have looked too nice (it is Hollywood, after all), her behaviors did seem plausibly depressive to me. And the cop was very disfunctional himself, desperate to help Connelly’s character but not listening to what kind of help she wanted. It isn’t a perfect movie, but it isn’t awful either.

I agree with Superman III, though. And I’d offer Julie Taynor’s Titus, a horribly brutal version of Titus Andronicus. The only movie I’ve rented that I refused to watch the second half.

Likewise, almost any movie involving hacking, except maybe Sneakers, is ruined if you’re a computer programmer.

I can remember, long ago, once asking some hacker friend of mine exactly what was impossible or unrealistic about War Games. He went on a rant which lasted for about 30 minutes. I felt, shall we say, rather foolish.

I thought I would just be the first person to mention ‘Titanic’.

Could have been worse. The good part is that almost everyone dies.

The Sixth Sense was pretty good though, and I would even be prepared to ‘stand up’ for ‘Unbreakable’ if only on the grounds that it’s not as bad as ‘Signs’.

I actually think that The Sixth Sense falls into the same “pretty damn good” category as Signs, where I think Unbreakable is one of the great films of the last 10 years or so. To each their own.

As for Woody Allen, the world lost an enormous talent when passed away sometime in the late 90s. Who that person making movies in London with his name is I have no idea.

Sorry, # 8, 13 and 17, but you can’t put a sequel on the list. Sequels aren’t movies. Sequels are brand extensions.

I once was a movie reviewer for a daily newspaper, for about three years in the early 70s. A golden age, in retrospect, though most of it looked liked crap at the time. The only movie I walked out on during that period was Ryan’s Daughter. They literally couldn’t pay me to sit through it to the end.

Everyone should be sure to die before having to see Dogma. If I could, I’d be tempted to go back in time and kill myself before I had to see it. Its preachiness is surpassed only by its stupidity, every line is an insult to the viewer’s intelligence and sense of humor, and its oh-so-controversial attempts to shock are the tamest, most cowardly bullshit imaginable. The only movie of which I’ve ever read the evangelical review on capalert.com and thought, “yeah, that’s a good point.”

Also, #14 above is crazy: not only should you watch Demolition Man as many times as possible before dying, you should all that after you die, you may be transported to an eternal movie theater where it is playing non-stop. One of the most delightfully silly movies ever.

Damn it. Replace “all” with “pray” in the second-to-last sentence of 39.

Here’s something: Life is Beautiful was a huge disappointment based on how great Benigni was in Johnny Stecchino.

You’ve Got Mail is a perfectly brilliant romantic comedy that is actually about the AOL Time Warner merger, and the American corporate media landscape in general. This is, we recall, about a romance between a Barnes & Noble executive and the manager of an independent bookstore. In order to enjoy it, you need to interpret it in that way.

Oliver Stone’s Alexander. Watched it thinking it would be mindless fun (and yes, I realize from the other comments that mindless fun is BAD…) – and it was incredibly booooooring.

Also, I’d say Battlefield Earth is a shoe-in.

Dan—I felt exactly the same way about another Jim Jarmusch movie which I can’t be bothered to look up the name of. BUT, brilliantly, just as I started getting ready to walk out, the film started burning up, and the projection room caught on fire.

aulus—Yes, I quit Dogma pretty early in the game. Awful.

miriam—I bet you anything you like that Good Morning Vietnam is even more awful. I haven’t seen either, on the principle that Robin Williams is unwatchable post-Mork and Mindy. But I just imagine that Good Morning Vietnam must be worse than any of the others.

I totally agree on:

The Hand the Rocks the Cradle. Awful, awful movie that manages to play in probably the greatest variety of offensive, negative racial and gender stereotypes in a single Hollywood film since Birth of a Nation. This was actually the first movie I thought of when I read this post.

Signs Unintentionally maltheistic is right! God kills Mel Gibson’s wife and then nearly slaughters all of humanity in order to reinforce his faith in Him. Wouldn’t a burning bush have been easier?

Titanic Three hours of my life I’ll never have back.

On the other hand…

House of Sand and Fog is a bad movie that I’d warn people away from, but I just wouldn’t quite put it in this category.

And I actually liked My Dinner with André and eXistenZ.

Other films that would make my list:

Out of Africa With apologies to the late Sidney Pollack, this stinker is up there with Titanic in the list of utterly undeserving Oscar® winners. And while we’re on that category….

Dances with Wolves

Maxie A horrible, unfunny, and implausible comedy ghost story in which the generally awful Glen Close is possessed by the ghost of a flapper.

Autumn in New York Attempted tear jerker May-October romance that’s awful even by disease-of-the-week movie standards.

Godfather, Part III If only Sofia could act as well as she can direct!

The Natural This was always infuriating, especially because of its tacked on happy ending. Became more so when I had to watch its climax repeatedly intercut with Gibby beating my A’s in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series.

The Touch Ingmar Bergman’s first English language movie starring the often awful Eliot Gould. Potential saving grace: approaches unintentional self-parody.

The middle portion of the anthology film New York Stories. The first part, “Life Lessons,” directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Nick Nolte is quite good. The third part, “Oedipus Wrecks,” directed by Woody Allen is merely so-so. But the middle section, Francis Ford Coppola’s “Life Without Zoe” is one of the most insufferable, self-involved half hours of in all of world cinema.

Cabin Boy
Boat Trip
Unbreakable (Unbearable)

Since then, I’ve resolutely refused to watch another Jim Jarmusch film ever, on the “fool me once” principle.

Smart man. They’ve just gotten worse. If a bunch of right-wing movie critics were to gin up a pastiche of everything they imagine avant-garde, “politically correct” filmmakers are guilty of, they couldn’t do much better than Ghost Dog.

I successfully avoided seeing Highlander II when it came out. Good for me.

I’ve always hated “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” I thought Ferris was an insufferable little prick.

Bicentennial Man. Watch it twice? I’d rather be reincarnated as cat litter.

Still, it did provoke the best nul point movie review ever.

51: I thought the “Life Lessons” segment of New York Stories was better than “quite good.” I wish the format had caught on, in view of the number of mediocre-to-bad two-hour movies that have great half-hour movies embedded in them But the Coppola contribution, as you say, was beyond awful.

Now that I think about it, I’ve seen, in theaters, Dances with Wolves, Batman and Robin, First Knight (with Richard Gere!), the 1998 Godzilla, XXX and The Fast and the Furious (both with Vin Diesel – now there’s some potential squandered!), and Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes remake. There’s a hall of shame for you, altho in my defense(?) the last two were on dates. Anyway, thankfully there’s not much danger of any CT readers being exposed to any of them.

I meant to say above that I also kinda liked Demolition Man. The Taco Bell and no-toilet-paper jokes alone should spare it from this list.

And to be added to the list:

Howard the Duck Simply awful without being in the least bit unintentionally funny. A comedy in which the funniest joke is a sign that says “Cajun Sushi” (and, no, it’s not funnier in context). Saw this in a huge, largely empty theater in Boston on the weekend of its release. Apparently word traveled fast. One guy in the sparse audience actually liked the film and laughed loudly throughout, which made this an oddly socially awkward experience for the rest of us.

Something Wild Practically everyone I know liked this movie. I hated it. Go figure.

Angel Heart Ponderous puzzle pic that the writers clearly thought was really, really clever. Almost rescued by a great Robert DeNiro cameo as the devil and/or Martin Scorsese.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula Hate to keep adding Coppola to the list. When he’s good (e.g. first two Godfather films; The Conversation) he’s very, very good. But when he’s bad…you get this film. Watch Keanu Reeves lose a two-hour long battle with an English accent.

FWIW, I loved Taymor’s Titus. I thought the film was a really interesting (and visually stunning) reflection on male violence. It’s a mediocre play (at least for a Shakespeare play), but Taymor did everything one could possibly do with it.

These decommendations are all over the place, so I might as well add mine. I humbly suggest that one consider dying before watching West Side Story.

I’ve always hated “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” I thought Ferris was an insufferable little prick.

You’re not watching the movie for Ferris; you’re watching it for Cameron. He’s the only interesting person in the whole film (though why Starfleet later made the mistake of putting him in charge of a starship is anybody’s guess).

Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Ah, no, it’s got its moments. “I have rossed oceans of time to find you”: that shit is funny, man.

You’ve Got Mail on this list? Why does it sound like a plausible candidate? Henry didn’t say anything to back up that nomination. I completely disagree. It’s a very good romantic comedy with lots of interesting commentary and witty script (plus a cute story).

And Star Wars? Puhlease.

Howard the Duck Simply awful without being in the least bit unintentionally funny.

Oh, sweet heavens—I’d hoped that I’d never remember that date again. When Howard crashes through the wall of the bathroom and they show you a nice full-frontal shot of the female duck showering…gaaaahhh. Possibly the worst moment of my entire 18th year.

Angel Heart…Almost rescued by a great Robert DeNiro cameo as the devil and/or Martin Scorsese.

Ok, Ben, thank you: now you’re making me laugh. (The “and/or” really does it.)

Never seen Demolition Man. But I have seen The Running Man which is super-duper awesome. And as for West Side Story, you can take the plot, the dialogue, the casting, even the music, but you can’t ignore the dancing. Best choreographed film musical ever, period.

No Way Out (the 1987 Kevin Costner thriller) A film that proves that a surprise twist isn’t so welcome when it relies on the film’s actively lying to you for two hours. Bonus points for including a gratuitously evil gay character and for featuring Sean Young, who’s awful when she’s not playing a cyborg, as a seductress.

forgot one:

Kingdom of Heaven

I forgot to second Vanilla Sky, which made me want to throw large objects at the screen.

I have a soft spot for Dario Argento, however, so I can’t agree with Suspiria.

I’ll see your Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula and raise you Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Unless you like seeing Helena Bonham Carter’s heart ripped out of her chest. And I’m just not that big a fan of Emma Thompson. Badda-bing!

No one has mentioned Contact yet? It let’s us in on that profound secret that faith and science can conflict, especially when faith is the dreamy Matthew McConoughy. Add the 4 or 5 false endings….man, that movie is bad.

Notwithstanding my call for standards, I have to say that “Battlefield Earth” is indeed very impressive. I only sneaked a 37-second peak on the way out from watching another film, but those are 37 seconds I’d desperately like to have back.

“Straw Dogs.” The bits that aren’t like “Home Alone” are cringeworthy. Before I saw it, I wouldn’t have believed Dustin Hoffman was capable of such bad acting.

Michael Winner’s remake of The Big Sleep starring Robert Mitchum.

Resevoir Dogs:

Ever since I saw it in a theater full of frat boy types who were vocally thrilled to see the police officer tortured, I have had trepidations about watching films in public.

And, having seen and read about Tarantino’s more recent “work,” I wonder if I misunderstood the intent behind Resevoir Dogs—perhaps Tarantino really was simply trying to gratify his audience’s baser urges.

I probably shouldn’t say this, but man, are you people young. There are some awful movies cited, but two, in my memory, stand out.

When I saw it, I thought “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” (1962) had to be the worst movie ever made that was intended to be good. Starring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford (the rest of the cast is pretty forgettable, and, perhaps, best forgotten), directed by Robert Aldrich (who had a long, if not distinguished career: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000736/). Someone thought this would be a major movie. As it turned out, it became, quite quickly, the butt of a billion jokes.

But then, two years later—and directed by Robert Aldrich (he sure had a bad couple of years)—”Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte,” which was essentially the same movie, but not as well done. 7 Academy Award nominations! Bette Davis (also having a bad couple of years, Olivia deHaviland, Joseph Cotten, Agnes Morehead. If this isn’t the worst-intended-to-be-good movie of all time, I hope I never see the champion.

Perhaps notably, both screenplays were by Henry Farrell…also having a bad couple of years.

Its more than 20 year since I’ve seen it, but The Bride Wore Black is one I’d have really liked to walk out on, except it was a date with a guy I liked…

I thought ‘House of Sand and Fog’ was a vile book for just the reason you mention, the gratuitously unpleasant plotting. It was well written, didn’t hurt to read the prose, but I found nothing edifying in it.

Starship Troopers gets my vote for appalling brain-sucking movie horror. It’s closely followed by Last Tango in Paris: though here again it may be revulsion from nastiness, rather than a considered response to the art of the thing: though the movie was immensely tedious as well as nasty.

I have a soft spot for Dario Argento, however, so I can’t agree with Suspiria.

I only checked out Argento recently and thought Tenebrae was entertaining if clumsy, which I didn’t really mind. But Suspiria – sorry, no.

E.T. the Extraterrestrial

nothing personal, but you have no heart ;) – also,
Drew Barrymore as Gertie is the best child actor ever!

I thought “Grave of the Fireflies” was beautifully made, from an aesthetic standpoint, but ultimately a manipulative, heavy-handed downer.

I agree, it is beautifully made, but the latter part of your description made me turn it off, I just couldn’t stand it. I kinda liked Spirited Away though.

do you mean the original version of Insomnia

No the Nolan/Pacino version, nothing really worked in that movie at all. Is the original worth getting? I like Skarsgård.

When I saw it, I thought “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” (1962) had to be the worst movie ever made that was intended to be good.

Same here, totally over the top, seems to be some sort of gay cult film though.

I loved My Dinner with Andre, and have enjoyed most of the Jim Jarmusch I’ve seen. (I’m not too keen on trans-Atlantic conversations anyway, thanks very much.) I highly recommend Dead Man as one of Jarmusch’s best.

I’ve seen so many really bad movies, the titles have mercifully melted away. I do think that Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil was unredeemable though. In all fairness, it may have been because of studio editing but my impression was that Charlton Heston acting in the manner of Victor Mature had its effect.

Troy

And the worst thing about it was watching the emaciated and nearly lifeless corpse of Peter O’Toole, looking not all there, and making a damn, sad fool of himself in such a clunker.

I second the badness votes for A Few Good Men.

I happen to like Eyes Wide Shut very much. And I don’t think Coppola’s Dracula was bad at all.

Pretty much anything by Catherine Breillat. Titanic. Visitor Q. Irreversible. The Skin by Liliana Cavani. Pretty much anything by Lina Wertmuller. Any remake of a Lina Wertmuller film. Cousin, Cousine.

Re: Howard the Duck and general topic:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucxqC8sH83Q

The HtD part starts at about 5:37 and gets really funny/creepy at 6:57
(not really sfw (I mean, this is HtD) but nothing really bad either)

It shouldn’t. I just remember when it first came out everyone raved about it and I thought it was absolute crap.

Ben Alpers at 84: You thirded Vanilla Sky. I firsted it at 37.

Somewhere near the end (but not near enough), Tom Cruise ran out into the lobby of an office building. Someone behind me said at the top of his voice, “Please somebody shoot him, so this movie will be over!” Everybody cheered.

Speaking of Kevin Costner, what was the the name of the one where he was an escaped convict? And got shot, and took about ten very long minutes to die? That was a bad movie. Eastwood was in it, and Laura Dern.

And Hook, oh God yes. As Pauline Kael said, positively drenched in flop sweat.

I haven’t seen the Robert Mitchum remake of The Big Sleep (strange movie to remake, although I guess Lauren Bacall sort of did), but his version of Farewell, My Lovely is almost good. The really bad Philip Marlowe in the movies is Elliott Gould. I saw part of his version on an airplane and was ready to be let off in midair.

Cabin Boy was the only movie I’ve ever paid for only to walk out on. And it was the last five minutes. I decided that if anything, at least I could salvage those.
I thought Titus was visually beautiful, which counted for a lot. Vanilla Sky, as well, I found visually appealing.
Thanks for mentioning Forrest Gump, too ;)

O Lucky Man.

Not for the viewer.

Of course Star Trek V must be included. I have never watched First Contact all the way to the end, but my husband tells me it was watchable.

The people who made Field of Dreams made it too sentimental and a father/son story when it was only in part. Eddie/Kid Scissons should have stayed in the movie even if J.D. Salinger could not under his own name.

re 118: This may be why Dave Marsh preferred the Crystals/neighborhood kids to the mannered choreography of “West Side Story”.

Speaking of Kevin Costner, what was the the name of the one where he was an escaped convict?

A Perfect World. Costner has been in rather a lot of these, hasn’t he?

Dear #54,

There is no one who would (willingly) watch Cabin Boy and not love it. Lighten up.

Baby Mama.
Boondock Saints.
El Topo.

130:

No; and no.

Christ Almighty. By now I thought at least someone would have proposed Natural Borne Killers. I hope this is because no one has seen it. It was the only/worst movie I was ashamed of myself for not walking out of. I kept promising myself I would leave when the protagonists were killed. Dumbass! Nothing could have kept that crapfest going but the survival of the miserable protagonists. I hope that film failed financially or we are all in big trouble.

I too loathed “Being John Malkovich”. Truly nasty and depressing.

“I Heart Huckabees” was soul-vacuuming.

Finally, “Arsenic and Old Lace” is highly unpleasant – no mean feat with Cary Grant on the set.

Second to Troy. I just watched it on tv last week. It’s basically poorly made soft core porn for women, but not even a naked Brad Pitt can make up for the overall crappiness of the movie.

As for the person who mentioned Arthur, I assume you mean Jerry Bruckheimer’s Arthur movie? Because that’d be a top contender. Clive Owens doesn’t utter a single line that isn’t a cliche (we kept track), the movie is completely self serious, yet the plot is laughably implausible, e.g. Kiera Knightly, a Wiccan priestess fights of multiple 300 lb Saxons in hand to hand combat.

My parents should get an honorary award for picking out obscure European dud after dud. In 20 years, my mother’s never yet not rented a clunker. One was a French movie that involved nuns, and pigs farting (or maybe it was the nuns?), anyways, it’s our equivalent of the “horse movie.”

Finally, I wouldn’t say not watch it, but think twice before you rent a 3 hour movie described as a “Japanese Icelandic vision quest.”

…which is how some of us felt after viewing The Usual Suspects.

Don’t watch “The Usual Suspects” before reading the Foundation Trilogy.

And I’d offer Julie Taynor’s Titus, a horribly brutal version of Titus Andronicus.

I’d argue that, given that she’d decided to film Titus Andronicus in the first place, it wasn’t a bad effort.

The worst movies are the disappointments, so I think these would belong on any list: Magnolia, There Will Be Blood, Gangs of New York, The Darjeeling Limited

3- Sweeny Todd (the recent one with Johnny Depp)

A bit more on Black Book… the review in the NYT (I think) said something along the lines of “it was not really a serious movie”, yet a lot of it was about the holocaust, the main character is a Jewish woman in hiding from the Nazis, and the story was framed at the beginning and end by idyllic scenes of Israel, complete with blooming desert. Then, at the very end, there is gunfire from unseen attackers as the holocaust survivors take refuge (the year is given as 1956). The NYT reviewer loved the movie, but they wished that the current “struggle for Jewish survival” in Israel got more attention. So, The Holocaust = not something a movie has to treat seriously. Israel = the real struggle for Jewish survival. Go figure.

I guess you could say there were a lot of good things about how the ambiguities of war were portrayed (few clear goodguys and badguys), but I didn’t see anything all that special there, to me it seemed more like just a big mess where everybody was crooked or at least very misguided and most of them ended up shooting at each other anyway. Perhaps the most endearing character in of all was the S S officer (or was it gestapo?) who has a romance with the main character lasting most of the movie (provided you put his job title out of your mind).

Oh! I want to play!

Two stinkers from 1991: Queens Logic, Meeting Venus. Films so hopelessly corrupt they could have had Robin Williams in them and it wouldn’t have made them any worse.

I thought I had a hat trick for that year, but I just checked IMDB and it turns out Mr. Holland’s Opus was 1995.

And Zora—I’ll see your Aap Mujhe Acche Lagne Lage and raise you one Ham Dil De Chuke Sanam. Although my fellow victim and I amused ourselves by hypothesizing that the censors cut the scene towards the end when Ajay gives Salman a big ol’ BJ in a Budapest public urninal, which would have given the story some semblance of coherence. And class.

Pushing Tin.
Walked out, and got my money back.

Waking Life. Pretty to look at, but people offer bullshit through the entire film. Like My Dinner With 100 Stoned Andres.

Or am I the guy who ruined the thread with italics?

Gone With The Wind.

The following films should be nowhere remotely near this conversation, IMO (that is, I regularly actually recommend them to people):

Touch of Evil
Being John Malkovich
I Walked With a Zombie
After Hours
Magnolia
The Usual Suspects (a character lying to you is different from the movie lying to you, fwiw)
Requiem for a Dream (though I’d only recommend this to certain people)
Bringing Up Baby

Ned Kelly

2001: A Space Odyssey, whilst perhaps not as absolutely awful as some others mentioned, is my all-time most overrated movie. Admittedly, there is one good jump cut from the bone to the spacecraft, but the rest is pretentious drivel.

Some apes, a couple of black monoliths, a screwy computer, and this is deep?

Hers more the usual suspects…

Japanese Story/The Well/The Winter Dark etc, etc -half an hour of story packed into 90 minutes of meaningful looks and tortured landscape.

Captain Coreilli’s Mandolin – like eating warm ice-cream.

Planet of The Apes (Burton version) – killer premise, good actors, unlimited budget and one of Hollywood’s most original directors. Yet ended up as bonobo poopoo. Michael Caine was right. “Why don’t they remake bad movies instead?”.

Signs – artful and suspenseful allegory of lost faith and redemption or aliens spraying poison gas from within cheap bodysuits, taken down by an all-American, faith-based baseball bat? I’ve decided. And if these malevolent and covalent ETs are allergic to water, what are they doing invading a planet where the ecosystem and top species all depend on water?

The Village – even dumber and dumberer.

The Magnificent Ambersons – let’s face it, we’d all rather watch Touch of Evil again.

Eyes Wide Shut – I’m a real Kubrick aficionado but that really stretched my patience. Mind you, I’m inclined to blame Cruise and Kidman. They were excruciatingly smug and boring together. OK, Stan cast them, so he should share the blame.

A.I. – and it’s a sad thing Stan’s dead, otherwise we could have been treated to some of the old ultra violence visited upon Spielberg after Artificial Idiot. Like Burton’s Ape Planet, all the ingredients were there but utterly cocked up. And like all bad Spielberg films, it ended with a cute kid staring winsomely into a bright light. I can see the Spielberg memorial now.

Reality Bites – a film that commodified youth culture to make the point commodifying youth culture is bad. Bad faith indeed.

The Matrix series. Whether launched, refried or revolting, it’s still well worn old SF ideas, beautifully art directed though, lifted without credit to drive a mythos that just disappeared up its own Trojan Horse’s arse.

Other awful aspects of Dances with Wolves:

Though the film presents the Sioux as “noble,” the Pawnee appear as classic, cardboard-cutout evil Hollywood Injuns.

The film concludes with an end title that invokes the tragic-vanishing-Indians meme and more or less suggests that there aren’t any Sioux anymore.

And the film’s Civil War prelude is particularly phony and grandiose.

American Beauty got a brief mention above which deserves to be expanded upon.

It deserves the moniker of truly nasty – it is a thoroughly depressing account of US sexual morality which is entirely without redeeeming features, for craps sake why doesn’t Kevin spacey screw the girl, not to mention the nastily homophobic sub plot (the homophobe next door turns out to be gay really! Quelle surprise!) The dilemmas posed by the film are entirely false (wholesome vs. sex for example) that the only response is to run sreaming: get out of this frame.

And that plastic bag (nicely parodied since though).

Ooooh, yeah,

The fact that Ben Alpers liked this movie is making me reevaluate my whole commitment rationalizing the US primary system.

Planet of The Apes (Burton version) – killer premise, good actors, unlimited budget and one of Hollywood’s most original directors.

Good lord that guy sucks as a director. Technically he’s got all the verve and imagination of a soap-opera hack; his strength is that he has the art and design sense of a morbid 14-year old girl, which I suppose deserves on-screen representation somewhere or other.

Pee Wee’s Big Adventure was good despite him, same for Ed Wood.

THE GRADUATE

and

DEAD POETS SOCIETY

Don’t watch “The Usual Suspects” before reading the Foundation Trilogy.

Don’t read the Foundation trilogy before sinking yourself in a concrete foundation.

As someone said upthread, gosh you people are young.

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Trip with Teacher. The Devil’s Rain. Love Story.

Wolf Creek. Destroy all prints. Hunt down those who like it. Destroy the machines that recorded it. Sow the locations with salt. Collect all memories of the event and fire them into the sun.

Then and only then will humanity have a future.

The world as far as I am concerned is divided between people who abhor Richard Curtis’ Love Actually, and those who incomprehensibly think it is meaningful and warm. It is possibly one of the worst films I have ever seen.
Next to Austin Powers II, which I have never got.

“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

That’s more like it! That’s a truly impressive achievement in awfulness. And a pick that shows some imaginatio,n at least. So many of this picks are too bland to be bad.

Maurice @24: you should see The Five Obstructions, even though von Trier is in it. It’s hilarious.

Paul Agapow’s Postviews

[film] “Starship Troopers”
I couldn’t wait for that smarmy little brunette to die.

It’s the near future, shortly after the Californian invasion of Buenos Aires which looks like a live action version of “The Jetsons” done by the cast of “90210”. (Albeit with considerably less animation.) Here our pearly-teethed teens are beset with those eternal problems of the spirit: Who will win the big football game? Who shall I go to the prom with? Shall I join the military, dress up as a Nazi and lay waste to the known universe? Since Michael “Bad SF is my middle name” Ironside is playing their mono-handed Civics teacher, we can safely arrive at two conclusions: (1) We are in Bad Movie heaven, (2) Universe, bend over.

…

It’s very curious that those who love Starship Troopers as a gleefully over-the-top satire on the intersection of consumerism and militarism love it for the same reasons as those who hate it despise it.

192: which makes it great. And Verhoeven a genius.

(cue blog-destroying flamewar)

Vastly overrated, die before seeing: Pulp Fiction, In the Realm of the Senses, The Princess and the Warrior (Der Krieger und die Kaiserin: unlike many things, not actually better in the original German).

a gleefully over-the-top satire on the intersection of consumerism and militarism

This is a description of Robocop—a far superior film—not Starship Troopers.

Add to the trying-too-hard list: Pulp Fiction, The Princess and the Warrior. “Overrated” is not the same thing as “must be avoided.”

Hey dexter sounds crabby. Quick everybody else list the 101 CT Threads to Avoid Reading Before You Die.
I vote Juno on the movie front. Thanks to that film I am more reflective about cheating on my wife with hipster teens. But I am still getting the band back together.

Could you describe the fashionable backlash, sir?

Vivian,

Good call on Liquid Sky and Betty Blue. Arguably two of the worst lines in the history of film. In the former: “I’m killing people with my c*&^!” In the latter: “Her diaphragm [not the body part] was flapping like a screen door in a breeze.”

Starship Troopers was not a satire of consumerism and militarism, as such (where’s the humour?). But it was a film critical of a militaristic society that was entirely constituted by a (fictional) romantic militaristic propaganda film made within that society.

That structure reminded me of Lolita, a novel about a pathetic, despicable pedophile entirely constituted by that pedophile’s pompous and increasingly delusional romantic narrative about himself.

“American Beauty … truly nasty – it is a thoroughly depressing account of US sexual morality which is entirely without redeeeming features”

Completely agree. A masterclass in misogyny.

Why shouldn’t films be depressing, why does there always have to be something ‘redeeming’? That said, all three of the young protagonists in the movie actually find something like redemption at the end of the movie.

Also, I really don’t see how the film is misogynistic. OK, so the Bening character is a bit of a caricature, but gee, it’s not as if nobody ever met somebody like this in real life. And I could name literally dozens of movies where men are chasing the wrong dream and in the process make fools of themselves or go off their rocker, so why shouldn’t a female be allowed to be portrayed like this. Additionally, the Thora Birch character is entirely likeable and while Mena Suvari’s character is disingenuous and shallow throughout most of the film, her true and better self is revealed and wins out at the end.

Grave of the Fireflies was too much of a “downer”? Good Lord. That’s the sort of thing you should be embarrassed to say (or type) in public.

I think you missed the part about the film being manipulative, which IMHO it is and in a bad way.

Good call on Liquid Sky and Betty Blue.

I know it’s a bit rubbish, but I truly love Betty Blue ;).

that second para should be italicized, sorry

Liquid Sky is one of those movies that are so bad as to redeemably amusing—alien endorphin junkies with their frisbie-sized space ship—kinky sex, drugs and bad club music—vintage Soviet special effects—how could you not like that?

Starship Troopers was pegged by one reviewer as “Triumph of Will 90210.” I thought this was dead-on, but I really enjoyed the movie. If I recall correctly, the reviewer liked it, too.

Starship Troopers is remarkable because the director had the gumption of delivering an in-your-face parody of the book he was supposed to be adapting to film. That alone is more than enough to keep it off any worst-films-evah list.

Plus, it’s quite hilarious, really. For example, the bit where the Queen Bug sucks out the brains of the companion of the main character’s love interest is a brilliant send-up of the way Hollywood likes to handle your standard love triangle. Now if Lucas had tried something similar in Return of the Jedi to solve the Luke-Leia-Han situation…

Oh, and aren’t the phony all-American Argentinians half the point of the movie?

Bridget Jones Diary

anything with Steven Seagal.

the movie is supposedly set in Buenos Aires, but the characters aren’t very authentically Argentinian.

Exactly. Its Hegemony people!

A couple of bad ones come to mind:

“Being Human” – Robin Williams directed by Bill Forsyth. Williams is a sort of everyman through history. A misconceived and stupid movie.

“Secret Window” – Johnny Depp in a thriller based on a Stephen King story. Ends up not being suspenseful, just unpleasant.

My European film-buff friends used to point to the deliberate casting of actors with lots and lots of plastic surgery as one of the funnier bits of Starship Troopers.

I nominate, The Patriot, Braveheart and 300 as movies without any redeeming features.

Sophia

#185 in particular in on to something: this thread needs a thorough meta-analysis. Let me contribute to that project. I notice a couple of trends/themes in the posts:

-Many seem rooted in distaste for a particular genre per se. If you generally don’t like a particular film genre (romantic epic, period piece, musicial…), but get dragged/tricked/hyped into seeing an especially representative example of that genre, that experience will stick with you, and you’ll take it out on the film.

-Films punished for dashing your expectations of them. Once I decide I want to see a film, I make a point of avoiding reading, seeing, or listening to anything about it. This somewhat helps avoid disappointment. Beyond a certain point no film can ever live up to its hype.

Films dissed because of dislike of a particular actor, not merely b/c of their (lack of) acting skills but a visceral dislike. I’m guilty of this; e.g. I can’t stand John Malkovich-how he looks, the sound of his voice. He ruins for me any movie he’s in, for that reason.

WRT Angel Heart—All I remember about this movie is that there was nudity and I was young. Well that and the ceiling fans.

Basically, I’m saying that 300 is so bad it’s good. And it has Chippendale Spartans. No amount of second-order awareness of the first-order phenomenal experience of Chippendale Spartans can allow you to get over the “first-orderness” of Chippendale Spartans, if you know what I mean.

Re #145

Agree about The English Patient, but in one respect it’s an improvement on the book. In the book Almasy’s going back to the cave to have some necrophilia with his dead lover’s corpse. (And she’s something like 2 years dead – ugh!)

pandering to a depraved and narrow view of what some ethnic or social group (e.g blacks, gays, women) might want to see..

Or Republicans.

Every Robert Rodriguez movie since El Mariachi.

Since s/b including.

Sure, he made it for $30,000 or whatever. If they sold the tickets for a nickel I’d be appreciative.

The Spanish Prisoner is another good suggestion, altho it did have a couple of decent scenes. But if you’re going to make a movie around an elaborate scam that is gradually revealed layer by layer, the thing has got to make some minimal amount of sense when the last veil comes off. Otherwise—well, you’ve got Doug’s “utter contempt for the audience.”

I must agree that Requiem for a Dream was a useless waste of celluloid. A pseudo-sophisticated, “deep” for college students, two hour long piece of anti-drug propaganda. For that matter, Pi was colossally overrated.

But those are mere trifles compared to a movie like Across the Universe, which was so bad that it became good and then went back to being bad again. I can just imagine all the washed up sixty-year olds who were never even part of the counter-culture to begin with tearing up in nostalgia while watching this endlessly crass, hamfisted repackaging of their adolescence. I think that mini-series “The Sixties” was better than this film.

Really, though, what evil genius thought to film Beatles songs as though the lyrics were literal blueprints for a scene? “She came in through the bathroom window” and then someone actually comes in through the bathroom window?!

I want to see a movie that covers the Kinks oeuvre, about a boy who loves his village green in England and ends up meeting a magnificent flying cat who introduces him to a transgender person in America. Then they travel through time to fight in the war.

“aesthetic sense more suited to Man O’War album covers”

NTTIWWT

There should be a category for:

A film that proves that a surprise twist isn’t so welcome when it relies on the film’s actively lying to you for two hours…

Five fingers (it doens’t lasts two hours, but it feels that long)
One featuring Michael Keaton and Brendan Fraser (I forgot the name)

The really bad Philip Marlowe in the movies is Elliott Gould.

I disagree.

Nobody has mentioned 8MM (a Nicolas Cage flick). A truly horrific movie. It’s hard to describe just how awful this film is. Awful not only in the artistic sense but in the moral sense. Watching the movie itself degrades the viewer. Ick.

Some very good nominations here. I agree with most, but I have yet so see, unless I missed it, a nomination for the movie that is without a doubt the worst ever:

Battlefield Earth.

I have to nominate the (pseudo-)documentary movie:

What the Bleep Do We Know!?

Surely the most nonsensical, steaming pile of stream-of-consciousness free association ever to make the transition from “F” grade freshman philosophy essay to the big screen, it combines the factual informativeness of Blue Velvet with the honesty of Fox News Channel’s hosts and the artistic sensibility of Fox News Channel’s computer graphics team. Yet bizarrely, many people seem to actually like it and find it “educational”.
Talk about poisoning the springs of humanity!

I totally agree with beebklarg @ 138. The fact that the two main characters continue to survive through the movie is a slap in the face of the viewer. A totally undeserved ending as well. It’s as if some totally self-absorbed sociopath got rewarded for his complete lack of empathy by being elected President of the United States.

227: “It should be a list of films that are so deeply, morally, factually or historically inaccurate, so mistaken about so many basic life issues that when you’re trying to tell someone why the film is bad you don’t know where to start. So given over to the madness of a fixed idea, or mired in some idiot’s concept of Pure Art, or so pandering to a depraved and narrow view of [life] that every scene presents multiple levels of pure awfulness.”

That about sums up what I remember Pulp Fiction being like. Thanks, hiyo.

“Pulp Fiction” is excellent as a reference standard for jerky American culture, however, and maybe as a litmus test to decide who you’d want to be freinds with.

a litmus test to decide who you’d want to be freinds with.

This is certainly a redeeming feature to justify the film’s existence, but does not move it off the “avoid” list. Rather the opposite.

I’m surprised and saddened that no one has mentioned Zardoz. Cod-Nietzsche meets cod-Fraser meets cod-sci-fi. Nor have we mentioned Pink Floyd The Wall and indeed everything Alan Parker has ever done.

Goin’ back and keepin’ score (and in no particular order)…

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band is truly an indefensible film. May eventually go down as the undisputed champion of this thread.

Rosemary’s Baby A very good film. Not Knife in the Water or Chinatown, mind you, but masterfully filmed by Polanski. Cassavetes is wonderfully creepy in it. Mia Farrow is not entirely unwatchable (a high achievement for her, in my book). And “Hail Satan” is, of course, supposed to be funny. Despite the fact that this is a serious film, it has a lot of irony and humor in it.

O Lucky Man A mixed bag, but still worth seeing, if only for the music. Not as good a film as If…; a much better film than Brittania Hospital

Spider I was very frustrated by this one until the very end. One of the rare films with an O’Henry ending in which the twist not only works, but actually pulls the whole film together in a logical and convincing fashion. The anti-No Way Out

Pulp Fiction A very good film, imo. Lots of fun, fairly interesting, well made and well put together. If Tarantino had cast just about anyone other than himself as Jimmie Dimmick, it would have been even better.

Totally agree about the Juno backlash phenomenon. I just saw the film a few days ago (I was out of the country when it came out). It was perfectly pleasant. For an earlier version of this backlash dynamic, see Lost in Translation, another overpraised film that I didn’t get around to seeing until everyone decided it was terrible. I thought it was just fine. (If you want to see a not only overpraised, but also actually bad, film with Ellen Page, check out Hard Candy, though she’s quite good in it).

I’m glad someone mentioned “Sweet November,” I had the misfortune of seeing this on a plane and immediately deemed it the worst movie I’d ever seen. That was until a friend of my ex rented “First Daughter” one night, which was even worse, mostly because a movie about the president’s daughter made by Forest Whitaker should have been at least interesting. It was the most banal thing I’ve ever seen.

To Live and Die in L.A. exemplifies everything that was/is bad about 80’s films.

Re:

Dario Argento

If you refuse to recognize the unbridled visual genius of a film like Suspiria, you are truly not deserving of your eyesight. Or ears for that matter—horror movie music doesn’t get much better than Goblin.

Re:

The “fashionable backlash”

Films like Juno, Little Miss Sunshine, Napoleon Dynamite, and Sideways are all calculated, mediocre pieces of insincere crap that deserve every ounce of derision they receive. Even if their popularity is causing them to be hated when they normally would only have been dismissed, they still stink!

Pretending that they are actually acceptable works of art and that they are only experiencing a backlash because of their popularity is just an attempt to justify an extremely high tolerance on your part for utter junk.

Or, perhaps you think you need to act as a counterweight to all those people who think they need to act as a counterweight to all those people who originally liked the film. Either way, most of that stuff is simply terrible, there’s no way around it, and you’re wasting my time by suggesting otherwise.

In closing, “Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money…”

Girl on a swing

Who’s that Girl

I’m not hating on women, I am one, but those two were terrible.

Golden Compass

Across the Universe

Superbad is, well, super bad.

On my list of bad movies is The Last Emperor. Any so-called-epic Oscar-winning pile of rubbish that has the audacity to BORE MY PARENTS TO DEATH deserves to be ranked with the worst of the worst. At least Plan 9 tries to entertain you…

Sorry—my post above should read, “Without question the stupidest ending to any move ever made.” And then there should be a closing quotation mark at some point.

The Spanish Prisoner, Moulin Rouge, Junebug, You’ve Got Mail and Life is Beautiful? I can understand if some people don’t like these movies, but it seems a bit snobbish to assume no one at all could, so we’d better warn them not to see it.

If someone mentions You’ve Got Mail, but no other Meg Ryan film, then I think they have it all exactly backwards. So you think French Kiss was better?

“I think Happiness is great.”

How is this possible?—it’s not “happy” at all!

Happiness is no Welcome to the Dollhouse, but it’s not bad, and surely not listworthy.

Sad trend #3: many posters seem incapable of distinguishing moral (or emotional) and artistic evaluation. This is particularly odd in cases like Happiness, where the “loathsomeness” is intentional. It’s like hating Schindler’s List because Nazis are bad, rather than because Spielberg’s a hack. (In the case of emotional evaluation, bad emotion = bad movie. Which would rule out, e.g., tragedy).

That anyone would put Bringing Up Baby or Arsenic and Old Lace on such a list completely destroys my faith in the smallest trace of goodness in the nature of human beings. Which is OK. I only had a very small trace of such faith.

I can understand not liking Pulp Fiction, but to put it on this list seems like an overreacting—and not liking it is a pretty good litmus test of humourlesssonofabitchedness.

Argento’s a flawed genius, and Suspiria is a masterpiece. His aestheticism is his both his greatest artistic strength and weakness, but anyone who can’t recognize the brilliance of his work deserves to have their eyes gouged out—preferably as executed, choreographed, and filmed by Argento.

My list would be the insane romance dramadies of the late 1990s.

Autumn in New York

Sweet November

The plot of both movies: He’s an on the go tough business man, who sleeps with many women, but as no time for love. She’s a quirky, short of hippish girl who tries to show said man what life and love is all about. But she gets a brain tumor and dies leaving the man with the memories of their time together, and his renewed faith in love. WTF?

The Brother’s Grimm
Dumb and Dumber
Message in a Bottle
Titanic- the dialog in that movie is atrocious.
Juno- Yes thats right, there was no Juno backlash, it was the feel good movie for the pro-lifers with a plot that was pretty far-fetched.
All of those movies that try to parody other movies: Scary Movie etc.
Matrix Revolutions

Believe it or not, the worst film ever made just came out last week: The Strangers. Every second of this film; every word spoken; every shot filmed is terrible.

The problem is a lot of the movies listed I saw different things out of them that redeemed the movie.

For example…

The Lake House was actually one of the best representations of a long-distance relationship that I’ve seen. That it does it in a sort of sci-fi/fantasy twist that in the end works pretty well helps.

Signs would have been better if it was what it was REALLY supposed to be. A family sitting down watching the events of 9/11 together. But something like that would be ghoulish, so we get aliens. But for what it is, it still works.

Starship Troopers took the message of the original book and threw it on its ear. It’s a movie about propaganda and the worthlessness of the soldier and the individual in an authoritarian culture.

The Matrix trilogy (at least the second and third movies), are more decipherable when you realize that the major influence, both storywise and stylistically, is Hironobu Sakaguchi, the long time head cheese behind the video game Final Fantasy series.

Speaking of Final Fantasy, The Spirits Within is a great sci-fi movie. The problem is that among its target audience, most didn’t get the Final Fantasy link.

It’s our “Final Fantasy”, and it uses some of our myths and legends to create a great sci-fi/fantasy world. The story? The story plays second fiddle to the setting. Same with The Matrix movies. I’m fine with that. Most of my favorite books are like that as well actually.

There are very few BAD movies, or ugly movies out there. Eyes Wide Shut, for one. The piano in that alone made me turn it off.

Evil Movies- seven, 8mm, NBK, kids, the parent trap. (they separated the twins????)

Bad movies- What about Bob, Judge Dread, Highlander II, Fled, etc

Starship troopers, the usual suspects, and Love actually were all IMHO, great.

Though I could see some black turtlenecker finding the latter annoying.

“Druids” starring the incomparably wooden Cristopher Lambert. Imagine a movie where the first line is delivered by some poorly made-up Celt screaming in a thunderstorm, “I’m being crushed by the Wheel of Destiny!” as lightening strikes nearby. And it gets worse from there; I couldn’t make it past 45 minutes.

Alien v. Predator: Requiem

There are “good” bad movies and “bad” bad movies. I actually like the former… and the first Alien v. Predator was in this category. The problem is that when you’re already in the realm of bad movies, no matter how hard you seek out the good ones you’ll still run into many objectively awful ones. Hence, the two hours of my life I wasted on the sequel.

Spider is one of the most profoundly unsettling movies I’ve seen, ever. I have spots of memory loss as a side effect of my auto-immune problems (hint: neurotransmitters are not good to be allergic to), and damn. Cronenberg, Fiennes, et al put that experience up on screen and then amped it up. I love it, though I’m not sure I could bear to watch it again.

Sgt’ Pepper’s…this was on the freebie Video on Demand for Comcast Seattle recently. I couldn’t bear to look away. It was fascinating. Short of having the best boys come in to throw up on camera at random intervals, it’s hard to imagine how much worse it could get, and how better it could waste anyo f the talent involved.

I do agree with comments up above including that some people are reifying their dislike of a genre or other feature into a standard of quality.

Oh! Jade! Anyone else had the misfortune to see it? I don’t remember where I first encountered the description “like a dog turd encased in Lucite”, but whoo boy. It fits. I mean, if you’re going to make a piece of misogynistic incomprehensible sleazy trash, you can at least make the sex scenes fun to watch. But no.

“You all sound like a bunch of film buffs.”

Perhaps it’s our lack of quotes from Castilian hauteurs. But I’ve yet to experience the apotheosis of the jello, so…

While we’re on the topic, Saw. Not even worth it, & contains the single dumbest scene in movie history – when Danny Glover and his partner find the killer’s well-appointed loft and spend 90% of the scene doing that thing where actors point their guns jerkily in every direction. Ben Linus gets beat to death with a toilet.

I didn’t read through the whole list but, I think the worst movie I’ve seen lately, and yes, should be avoided, was The Brave One. I can count the number of movies I have turned off on one hand (I even sat through The Last Samurai in two installments) but, I couldn’t hack The Brave One. And ditto to all those who mentioned Crash. Both version are trash. Oscar my ass!

A: What do you think of Piero della Francesca?
B: Did you ever see the Flagellation of Christ? That’s not how they dressed! And that architecture, where was anything like that ever in the Middle East!??

I got more but that’s enough.

Bringing Up Baby, seriously? And Katharine Hepburn doesn’t play piano in it, fake or otherwise.

A few more:

Double Team – starring Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dennis Rodman. Intentionally terrible? maybe.

The Official Story – a mediocre movie about the Argentine dictatorship. You probably saw it in a Spanish class. Worst, most cloying movie music ever.

Speed – the movie that created Sandra Bullock. If that wasn’t bad enough, watch the actual movie.

Old School. Good god.

Lawnmower Man. Oh my god.

Actually, any movie that calls itself “Stephen King’s X” is pretty much guaranteed to be a stinker. There’s been some great movies based on his short stories, but the ones promoted with his name – I can’t think of a single good one.

I found Starship Troopers to be unwatchably bad.

Any of the modern series of torture porn splatter flicks, including Wolf Creek, the Saw movies, the Hostel movies – the entire genre and the people behind them need to be fired into the sun.

I didn’t see “A Time to Die” on this list. It was horrid. It’s OK to be a vigilante was essentially the theme of this phony high minded manipulative garbage. It wasn’t helped by the excruciatingly bad performance by the usually boring Matthew McConnaughy.

I also hated “Driving Miss Daisy” which I thought was horribly patronizing toward blacks and utterly inaccurate in its portrayal of Jews in the South.

I actually liked “Troy” although mosty for the beefcake. “Alexander” and “300” were simply bad.

The Men’s Club with Roy Scheider. The only movie I ever walked out of.

Show Girls – which is both a waste of time and morally debasing.

What was the movie with Bruce Willis as the leader of a team of oil drillers who go into space to stop and asteroid from hitting the earth. It was so very very bad, so comically bitterly bad “Drilling’s an art, it’s a science.” Bruce and a cast of disagreeable jackasses and liv tyler and some kind of bad rock score and I think Ben Affleck or someone like him dies, but not soon enough. Someone please tell me the name of this thing, so I can warn the next generation

Piling on. Starship Troopers had such obvious satirical roots—the incredibly bad strategies and tactics (A war buff friend of mine said, of the soldiers in this movie, “The Romans could have taken them, technology disadvantage and all”), the use of over-the-top hilariously bad warfare simulation (helmets that resemble nothing so much as partial bicycle helmets are supposed to protect from bullets? Soldiers are armed with thermonuclear hand grenades?)

that said, the satire was not quite over the top enough for the movie to shine for what it was, because virtually every reviewer missed it.

Mr. Brooks was a terrible movie I would recommend avoiding. Just when you think your at the merciful conclusion, they tack on two additional endings. awful.

“The Game” with Michael Douglas and Sean Penn. What a pointless piece of excrement and a waste of film stock that could have been used to make millions of badly posed picture frame inserts.

Jaws IV, the Revenge; Waterworld, Elektra, Daredevil, The Hulk, Star Trek V, Rocky IV, Last of the Mohicans (remake); The Patriot; The Belly of the Architect; A Zed And Two Naughts; The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover; Much Ado About Nothing; Willow; Marie Antoinette; The Joy Luck Club; The Bad Lieutenant; Husbands and Wives; The People Under The Stairs; Willy Wonka (remake).

pret a porter

“Saving Private Ryan though, that film could convince benevolent aliens not to contact us, even if they were bored.”

Bravo Shay! Signs of intelligent life! Sliver of faith in humanity restored!

“full of basic, technical errors.”

Because that’s what I watch out for in a work of art, as well as in my car mechanic. There’s more soul and beauty and real humanity, with all its horror and wonder and hatred and joy, in Argento’s little severed gloved pinky, or in a 30 second clip of Suspiria, than in the last 10 years of Oscars.

“I kinda liked Spirited Away though.

This prompts me to ask, are you on crack? ‘Kinda’ nothing, Spirited Away is one of the greatest kids’ movies ever.”

Seconded. But one of the greatest movies of recent years, not limited to “kids’ movies”.

“Breakdown” with Kurt Russell. I saw it on a Greyhound bus, so I couldn’t walk out. The movie that convinced me that cinematic violence caused violence in real life. By the end of that sucker I wanted to hit everyone involved in the film with a crowbar.

Second place goes to natural born killers, which I did walk out of.

First off, I’m glad to see 8MM get a mention in the evil films category, in which it belongs with Strange Days. Also agree with NBK, 300 (a future text for “proto-fascism in American cinema” courses), The Passion of the Christ. Apocalypto should be on the reprehensible films list, too, for its egregious caricature of the Maya (and for being a really stupid chase film dressed up in period costume). And there’s Showgirls, which is on occasion hilariously bad, but it really is something worse than just bad.

Junebug isn’t so bad as to be must-avoid, it’s just a truly inessential film whose entire premise is built around interpersonal relationships that it completely flubs.

And now to the bitchiness:

Re Grave of the Fireflies: I think you missed the part about the film being manipulative, which IMHO it is and in a bad way.

No, I caught that part, it just doesn’t make much sense. “Manipulative” how? Because it portrays orphans dying from malnutrition in war as tragic, or because it portrays them at all? Or perhaps because you don’t think such a narrative should have that kind of emotional affect? I’m not very avidly pro-sentimentalist myself, but there comes a point when the quest to root sentiment out of the modern aesthetic becomes ridiculous. If I’m a sucker because I’m willing to cut some slack to a guy writing about his sister’s death from malnutrition in WWII, so be it.

From the Fashionable Backlash files: Films like Juno, Little Miss Sunshine, Napoleon Dynamite, and Sideways are all calculated, mediocre pieces of insincere crap that deserve every ounce of derision they receive.

How terribly fashionable of you. And what I especially love about this sort of fashionability is the superpowers it confers on its representatives. Here, c m r displays astonishing telepathy—they Know What Lurks in the Hearts of Filmmakers and can just tell these movies were “calculated” and “insincere”—alongside the Neo-esque power to redefine the Matrix by sheer willpower, hence “mediocre” is what they it is, because they say so, dammit. As Keanu Reeves would say: whoa.

Also, this: it was the feel good movie for the pro-lifers with a plot that was pretty far-fetched.

This is a more comprehensible objection than “how dare they have a precocious heroine,” but pro-choicers getting worked up about Juno is unpleasantly reminiscent of fundies getting worked up about Harry Potter.

Re: Pulp Fiction This is obviously some strange usage of the word “fun” that I wasn’t previously aware of.

No, it’s actually not that uncommon for people to find over-the-top stories about sex, drugs, violence and the seamy side of life “fun.” How’s about we don’t pretend to find this surprising?

More from the trying-a-little-too-hard files: blaming the Iraq War on Saving Private Ryan. This would be more plausible if most of American culture and self-image hadn’t been built around its heroic WWII deeds for decades prior. Has there been a year since 1945 when the ideal for the average American soldier was something other than going into a fight against a “real” enemy like the Nazis?

I can’t believe, 300+ entries in, that Clint Eastwood’s The Gauntlet hasn’t been mentioned.

The Bruce Willis abomination about the drilling was “Armageddon.” It’s the only movie I’ve ever walked out of.

But I wished I could walk out of “Atonement,” which was unconscionably boring, implausible, overhyped, and annoying.

And “Forrest Gump” continues to make me angry for being shamelessly manipulative and stupid at the same time.

I wish I’d die before the pretension in this thread killed me.

Armageddon—it was called armageddon. The worst movie I ever saw. Maybe because I saw it on a large screen, and that magnified its badness.

Wasn’t ben affleck in it? and he died and there was onscreen weeping and offscreen rejoycing?

Sorry if I touched a nerve!

The passive-aggressiveness is strong in this one.

Before Sunrise and Before Sunset in no way belong on this list. Some that do:
Van Helsing
Message in a Bottle
Newer Star Wars films
8MM
Alex and Emma
Analyze That
Because I Said So
Bewitched
Bridget Jones 2 (liked first one)
The Bucket List
Catwoman
Death to Smoochy
Dirty Dancing
Dr. T & the Women
Dukes of Hazard
Duplex
First Daughter
Ghost Rider
Judge Dredd
League of Extraordinary Gentlmen
Lucky You (can’t believe Curtis Hanson made this)
Nanny Diaries
People I Know (Pacino should have retired years ago)
Showtime (Deniro too)
A Sound of Thunder
Stepford Wives
Stepmom
Surviving Christmas
Vertical Limit
Wild Wild West
Windtalkers

Noone has mentioned the Astronaut’s Wife. Characters without motivation, actors without enthusiasm, no direction, plot holes as big as all of outer space, misogyny, marital rape and Charlize Theron (before she somehow got an Oscar for not wearing make-up on set), I had to press my hands to my head to keep my eyes from leaping out of their sockets. My date liked it.
Someone earlier mentioned the Island. I left that movie (had paid $1 on base!) ten minutes or so in when anonymous savages began torturing their captives by keeping their eyelids open with broken toothpicks. As my friend remarked on visiting the Alien museum in Roswell, “It’s free, and you still feel like you’ve been ripped off.”

Truly, it restores my faith in humanity to see so many people dumping on Jim Jarmusch. The late 80s, when it was that guy and the lame Lynch of Blue Velvet duking it out for most “avant-garde” director on Earth—that was a terrible time to be alive.

Ok, I’m not cool, obviously, since Dances with Wolves is one of my all-time favorite movies. I also thought Bringing Up Baby was hilarious. Now that I’ve convinced you all of my terrible taste, here’s my list, in no particular order:

The Natural and Field of Dreams—I love baseball, but these 2 movies manage to make it boring! (Bull Durham remains my favorite baseball movie)

Waterworld—Oh my God. The same guy who made DWW came up with this dreck? Ditto the small part of the Postman I caught once on TV (and quickly turned off)

American Beauty—Turned off the DVD after about 20 minutes, with the enthusiastic approval of my husband

Hannah and Her Sisters—See American Beauty. As far as I’m concerned, Woody’s career ended with Manhattan

Dune—Yeaaaaagh! Manages to be both disgusting and boring, except for the 10 minutes of Sting at the very end

A lot of you are a bunch of pretentious nitwits. The question was “which are some of the worst movies ever that you must avoid?” not, “which movies did not satisfy your personal tastes?”

Also, the best part about You’ve Got Mail was Parker Posey.

1992’s Far and Away, early Cruise-and-Kidman, should have been a warning. It is recursive, insofar as Far and Away is far and away the worst movie made with intent-to-be-good I can remember.

Here’s an awful movie – The Maize.

All this stuff about Waterworld, Heaven’s Gate, Starship Troopers – really, just doesn’t compare to the the REALLY bad movies.

Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (with Jar Jar Binks): the other Star Wars movies are at least bearable.

I’m still burned about a 1977 film called Handle with Care, which I went to see on the strength of a glowing review in the Times. The boredom was excruciating, and I believe to this day that the Times owes me the $5.00 admission (or whatever it cost to get into a movie in 1977).

When House of Sand and Fog came out, I was thinking of seeing it until I read David Edelstein’s review, which ends “It’s the feel-bad movie of the year!” I never saw the movie, but I often think of that line.

Shakes the Clown. The only movie I’ve ever walked out of, walked up to the manager, and demanded my money back. Stunningly, stunningly bad.

the hills have eyes it took me two days to watch only did it for my brother. You guys are whinnying over movies that you thought were good and they ended up ok. You need to have watched movies that you knew where going to be bad from the startling and you still gave them a chance.like the pacifier and hills have eyes.

Wait a minute, are we talking really bad or overpraised? Because a lot of these moves qualify for the one but not the other. Magnificent Ambersons for example is overpraised, but not among the worst. Not even close.

‘But what is THE WURST‘

Where are the economists? Shouldn’t there be some ballpark stat one could cobble up?

There could be weight for
Cost of film
Box office gross
Proportion of pay to director
Proportion of pay to actor
Running time
Length of script
Total dialogue word count
Total exclamation points per script

And so forth. Get with it, thesis writers!

The Phantom of The Opera (the recent musical version) is the last movie that I just flat out loathed. My mother picked that one.

I found The Devil’s Rejects pretty infuriating but it kind of made me think.

I don’t see how anyone could not love Starship Troopers.

The movie I have especial hate for is… Gorillas in the Mist

A paint-by-the-numbers Oscar machine. Bad movies are one thing, but vehicles like this—pompous, boring, cliched—are the worst. A Few Good Men falls in the same category. Hollywood makes a statement!

Oh, and Sgt. Pepper’s. I have forgot about that!

ANOTHER FRIDAY, ok Friday hit a nitch in are population does not mean we need another one

I’m with #338, there is a big difference between poorly made films and real trash. Where is Joe Bob Briggs when we really need him?

Up late last night and nursing a torn calf muscle I watched Hugh Grant in something called “Night Train to Venice.” Truly, bewilderingly bad. I kept waiting for cream pies to fly out of wings and let me know it was all a joke. Not even strong narcotic drugs could help this film. A bit like a modern Plan 9 but with Eurotrash pretension.

But for bad without any redemption, Commando with Stallone. It was the only available entertainment in a small Oregon desert town and we all still walked out to the greater fun of watching local high school kids drive up and down the town’s one street. That’s bad film.

Verhoeven: “The Fourth Man” was completely pointless and disgusting.

Remember “Face Off”? Eww. But as Stravinsky said about the use of his music in “Fantasia”, I wouldn’t wish to criticize an unresisting imbecility.

I liked “The English Patient,” actually. Why was he in Italy? I dunno. But why should he have been in England? He wasn’t English.

“Bringing up Baby”. It was hard watching Hepburn play a dumbass airhead.

I saw something by Hitchcock recently that sucked, to my surprise. Can’t remember what it was.

I thought Face/Off was awesome! It was way cool watching Nick Cage overact!

Leaving Las Vegas was unrelentingly depressing.

Mission To Mars was a supreme waste of Don Cheadle and Gary Sinise. Ending totally ripped off from 2001.

Since I’ve seen an lot of awful movies in my life, I’ll cite the two last horrible movies I’ve seen:

Southland Tales – A pretentious David Lynch Wannabe film with a tremendous mess of a history and laughable actings by the Rock, Sarah Michelle … err, Buffy, that highlander guy and stifler from american pie. Really, the story is such a mess full of elements that it would be needed a TV series to show it all, and it would remain a bad written, uninteresting and stupid plot. Specially when you see that there was some good ideas (only a few) that were completely misused in the movie. I think it got to the director’s head when he was called a genius for Donnie Darko (another overrating)

One Missed Call – Probably the worst horror movie I’ve seen to date. Terrible and hard to convince acting, and, worst of all 100% not scary. As far as Japanese horror movies adaptations go, this one has hit the pits bottom.

Dave is right, it was Cobra with Stallone not Commando. How could I have confused the two?

I missed the above nomination of Shakes the Clown. Now in absolute terms it is one of the worst films ever made. But it is the best alcoholic clown comedy of modern times. The image of mime bars haunts me still.

Just about anything with Keanu Reeves, but I’d have to say Break Point is about the worst and extremely unwatchable.

Next to Keanu, Ben Affleck is almost Oscar worthy.

I’d like to add Woody Allen’s Match Point as my second worst to see film after Saving Private Ryan.

For me I think the essential quality that marks a film to be avoided at all costs is not just that it fails in itself but that it spoils other pleasures.

The spectacle of Woody Allen raiding his own grave and defiling the corpse of Crimes and Misdemeanors for Match Point ruined my enjoyment retrospectively of the earlier film. After SPR I had to reevaluate every other Spielberg film that dealt with the Nazis.

Its like if you had a charming but enjoyably disreputable friend who out of the blue sexually assaults a drunken unconscious teenager one night making you feel soiled by your own friendship.

Hypatia cade, No. 6: The floating horse movie you refer to is “The Field,” based on John Keane’s play about a dispossessed Irish farmer who is determined to buy the land he rents from the village widow. Instead of selling it to him, the widow puts it up for auction. An American buys it (in the play he was a Brit) and hilarity ensues. Well, not exactly. At the time, watching Richard Harris chewing up bits of the auld sod and spitting them out, I thought Harris had reconciled himself to the fact that he would never play Lear on the screen, so he would do the role in this film instead.

What was interesting to me was learning that when the play was first presented in Ireland (Keane wrote it in 1965), the audiences were known to applaud when the interloping Brit gets killed.

There are so many categories of bad movies that 101 entries hardly seems a big enough list. “Titanic” offered a teaching moment while I watched the DVD with my 10-year-old. When she asked me why I thought something was stupid, I got to explain the concept of anachronism, and why it was ridiculous to have Kate Winslet calling her rich husband a “master of the universe” in a film set in the early part of the 20th century. She agreed that it was pretty stupid, so thank you, Jim Cameron, for that opportunity.

RE: #316

Oh, yes…I’d forgotten that one. Thanks for reminding me, though.

It’s movies to avoid before you die (or to die before you see), i.e. the movies you should make the greatest effort not to see.

This means not just bad movies but movies that (1) are actively harmful in some way and (2) you might in fact see, if you don’t make a special effort not to.

The shot with the book was unsubtle, although I’ll note that given the ultimate resolution of the film’s plot, it actually turns out to be the setting-up of false expectation, not foreshadowing.

I liked Starship Troopers. The actual message of the movie is ‘The only thing fascism is good for is killing bugs.’. I listened to the director’s commentary, which was filmed in late 2000 or early 2001 (after W was elected, but before he took over), and he made some incredibly insightful predictions about what W’s presidency would be like. He essentially said that W was a fascist, and America would regret electing him. He nailed it.

After watching the 70-minute ‘Master of Disguise,’ I felt like I wanted that hour+ of my life back, and wanted to sue the creators of that movie. Truly truly dreadful. Avoid that movie like the plague.

Not enough mentions of Pretty Woman hereabouts. Easily the most offensive, evil movie ever made.

I thought Juno was pretty bad, too. As writers go, Diablo Cody’s an excellent stripper.

I really liked ‘My dinner with Andre’.

‘Being John Malkovich’ on the other hand was stupid and pointless. The bit of ‘Contact’ that I saw on TV also appeared shockingly bad. I didn’t see ‘Sgt Pepper’, but the soundtrack was bad enough to give a disturbing intimation of it. ‘Wild wild west’was bad.

For mine, a fascinatingly bad movie is one that is made by a bunch of really talented people, but turns out pear-shaped nonetheless. I didn’t see ‘Golden Compass’ but it sounds like it may fit the bill.

Nothing can compare to “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover” in sheer awfulness. My girlfriend made me go to this movie against my will.

Not many people showed up in the theater and most of them left by the time the flick reached the halfway point. That’s the first time I’d ever seen a mass of people walk out of a movie. I stayed on until the bitter end to satisfy my girlfriend and her newfound interest in art movies. The movie descended into an artsy cannibalism scene at the end that strained all credibility and taste. What was left of the audience stumbled out in stunned silence.

A very close contender for the worst movie is the incomprehensible “Barton Fink,” where you actually watch wallpaper peel and the protagonist ends up on the beach at LA with the severed head of his lover in a bowling bag. Most of the people had the good sense to walk out of that one, too, except for me. Sometimes it’s just so awful it’s like watching a train wreck: You just can’t take your eyes off the spectacle.

I’m sorry but this whole “it’s too depressing” thing is just ridiculous. You may have been depressed by Lars von Triers “Breaking the waves” but don’t tell me it’s not competent storytelling. Same goes for many of the other films knocked above. If you can’t take anything darker than Sound of music that’s up to you, but that doesn’t make sad=bad a universal truth. So there.

I liked ‘Starship Troopers’ because it confirmed my suspicion that Doogie Hauser was a Nazi.

I wish the standard film convention was that actors must have all their past movies worked in as back story for their present movies. So Mel Gibson in ‘We Were Soldiers’ would be a victorious Scottish Warlord who helped win the American Revolution before defeating Tina Turner. Oh, and he can hear women’s thoughts.

I’ll be the umpteenth person to put Vanilla Sky (probably at the top) of my list, though watching a deformed Tom Cruise run around like a moron yelling “TECH THUPPORT! TECH THUPPORT!” was LOLZ for days. And pretty much anything starring or involving Mel Gibson that’s not part of the Mad Max or Lethal Weapon series should be on the list.

Castaway.
Who can suffer through Tom hanks howling for his lost volleyball “Wilsooooooooooooon!”. Come to think of it who can suffer that much tom hanks period.

Some that I wish I’d mentioned first….

Storytelling Now this is an awful, soulless Todd Solondz movie. Lay off Happiness!

About Last Night Take coherent, but fairly thin and predictable source material (Sexual Perversity in Chicago, David Mamet’s indictment of the incredible emptiness of a certain kind of ‘70s masculinity), and vitiate it entirely by having the totally unredeemable characters redeem themselves through dreams of business success. Whether this film was the result of a Hollywood failure of nerve or an inability to get Mamet’s (very simple) point, it is deeply awful. Challenges The Natural as the film whose tacked-on happy ending most destroys the entire point of the source material.

On the other hand…

Showgirls definitely falls into the good bad film category. Hilarious, especially in its edited-for-tv version with overdubbed dialog and floating black bikinis. Don’t rent it, but if it’s on VH1, there are worse ways to spend your evening.

Barton Fink Not the most coherent Cohen Bros. film, but very good, nonetheless.

Sideways A relatively intelligent comedy. Not a great film by any stretch but I enjoyed it a lot, backlash be damned.

I even kind of liked Napoleon Dynamite.

If it’s any comfort, I found Little Miss Sunshine smug, predictable and infuriating. But it’s nowhere nearly bad enough to make this list.

“The Man in the Iron Mask” qualifies here.

Terrible movie, but I’m not sure it’s even the worst Dumas adaptation; for that dishonor, I would nominate the Hollywood adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo from a few years back (my girlfriend refers to it as “The Count of Monte Crap”).

Three Women. First it shows that as skileld Altman was a director, he was a terrible writer. Second, it ’s a mass of incoherence mixed with contemptible condescension towards the Shelly Duvall character.

Incidentally, who did Larry Clark’s Bully sleep with to get left off this list? Definitely falls into the evil category. Certainly worse than the already mentioned Kids.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114658/usercomments

I love ck dexter defending Katharine Hepburn. Nice.

I read all the way through the read to see if someone would shed some light on #144: “Don’t watch “The Usual Suspects” before reading the Foundation Trilogy.” Maybe I would have gotten it if I hadn’t read Foundation before watching the movie? Maybe there’s nothing to get?

I thought the worst movie I ever sat through was “Henry and June.” The scene at the end with what’s her name mournfully wailing, “YOONE, YOONE” was just hilariously awful. To this day my spouse and I giggle about it.

I’ll second “Master of Disguise” with Dana Carvey. When the terrible Italian-accented voice-over starts, as we push in on the little bistro, you immediately know that something awful has gone wrong with the governing taste behind this project.

Lead character’s name is “Pistachio Disguisi.” Just typing that gives me shivers.

But what about “Baby Geniuses”?

Anything directed by Stephen Sommers. He is awful!

The 2005 Hallmark-produced, made-for-TV remake of “The Poseidon Adventure” starring Steve Guttenberg, C. Thomas Howell, and Rutger Hauer.

“Margot at the Wedding” – my God, this was brutal. Owing partly to a certain scene in the movie, I have renamed this movie “Margot Poops Her Pants”.

Little Nicky and Zoolander are the two worst movies I’ve ever seen.

Emmanuelle in Rio…softcore porn with hysterically bad attempts at mysticism.

Pulp Fiction.

The most shallow and overrated film ever made. A Mary-Kate and Ashley production has better scripting. Tarantino (as usual) coasts by completely on style, most of which was ripped off from a host of much better films.
I’d rather have an awl stuck in my urethra, than have to suffer through this worthless masturbatory piece of film-school hackery ever again.

whew!

Also any movie with Hugh Grant.

Give me a break! Hardly any movies mentioned on this page are actually terrible. Overrated, perhaps, but to say movies such as “House of Sand and Fog” are awful movies is painfully ridiculous.

Give me a break! Hardly any movies mentioned on this page are actually terrible. Overrated or overhyped, perhaps, but to say movies such as “House of Sand and Fog” are awful movies is painfully ridiculous.

Give me a break! Hardly any movies mentioned on this page are actually terrible. Overrated or over-hyped, perhaps, but to say movies such as “House of Sand and Fog” are awful films is absolutely ridiculous.

I am shocked you people even went and saw and/or rented most of these movies. You honestly couldn’t tell before hand that they would suck? Please.

I liked Fever Pitch! For one thing it got me to read the book. For the second thing you can never have too many scenes of Fenway Park in a movie theater.

Greystoke – all I remember is Bo Derek in a wet shirt and walking out anyway.

Uwe Boll: Too obvious.

400: As writers go, Diablo Cody’s an excellent stripper.

Mmmm, now that’s classy. I think I’ll trade in the term “fashionable backlash” for “classy backlash.”

420: Okay, so I wondered earlier why we’re singling out SPR as having “killed people,” and I’m still wondering. It’s a drop in the bucket of American WWII myth-mongering, remembered largely for its opening sequence. So it’s really hard to see how that makes sense.

424: Actually the problem is not that she’s too mature, the problem is she’s so goddamn smug and full of smuggy one-liners.

See, now “smug” is a comprehensible criticism. I can look at the movie and see where it comes from. I may not agree with it, but I can understand it.

Okay here’s one: Pay or Die, a Filipino chopsocky in which the heroine is named Cleopatra Wong and she is assisted by a swishy-to-the-point-of-repellent gay ex-cop and a 300 pound fortune-teller. It was the front end of a double feature with The Terminator.

428: Starring Marrie Lee? So bad it’s good, surely!

Waterworld isn’t even near the worst movie ever, or the most damaging, and certainly not particularly evil at all. There are a lot of bad genre flicks that should aspire to Waterworld’s level of vision and craftsmanship. It was damn watchable for a bad SF flick.

Highlander 2 might actually manage to be evil, beyond being awful, by virtue of the violence it does to the entirely entertaining and creatively meritorious original.

Okay, I’m game. Actually, I’m going to tweak it a bit – - there are too many movies to avoid watching before you die, so I’m going to chip in movies to avoid by directors whose work you should see before you die.

Leading off:

Aviator, dir. Scorcese. Leaden, dull, miscast. Sacrificed to the bio-pic genre (or the pomo pastiche of the biopic) are Scorcese’s usual energy, personality, and fascination with working-class loser-heroes.

Curse of the Jade Scorpion, dir. Woody Allen. Allen’s “homage” addiction goes way off mark in this creepy (as in creepily bad) remake of a 30’s pulp flick. Poorly cast, crappy screenplay, creaking direction – - hard to understand why Allen pursued such an uninspired remake of a genre already so obviously ripe for parody.

Billy Bathgate, dir. Robert Benton. Take a not half-bad novel by a great American writer, mix with an unevenly brilliant director, shake don’t stir – - and the result is a constipated, remote movie that strives for myth and falls into something less than Robert Stack period Untouchables.

Apollo 13, dir. Ron Howard. Okay, okay – - Opie as director? Actually, some of Howard’s movies are pretty good, especially his early “drive-in” Detroit motor epics (Eat My Dust, Grand Theft Auto). The rest of his “oeuvre” reads like some kind of erratic, stumbling effort to recapture the National Popular movietone. Things go really bad when Howard struggles to achieve the national popular epic and ends up with a movie so corny (and corniness is a generally a virtue in this line of moviemaking), so totally and utterly unironic, so much like the Gene Roddenberry’s rendering of Ben Bova’s rendering of space romance that you actually crave more moments of outer space silence in between Tom Hanks’, Bill Paxton’s, Kevin Bacon’s, Gary Sinise’s, and Ed Harris’s grim, disembodied performances (what a waste of American thespian manhood).

1. Mulholland Drive. Yes, I got it, but that only made it worse.
2. Natural Born Killers. Or was it The Doors? Maybe both.
3. Any Robin Williams film except Mrs. Doubtfire
4. Saving Private Ryan—except for the brilliant opening sequence it was like watching a re-run of the ‘60’s series “Combat”, but without Vic Morrow.
5. Gangs of New York. If only it were a musical!
6. A Dirty Shame. As if John Waters were channeling Woody Allen at his worst, but without any of the self-abnegating Jewish humor.

“Driving Miss Daisy” was awful on many levels (racist, cliche, etc.).

“There Will Be Blood” was boring and had no plot and none of the characters were particularly interesting. It’s only redeeming value was a mildely interesting look into oil drilling early in the 20th century.

If you thought House of Sand and Fog was bad, you should have read the book. Even worse!

Although Signs is a train wreck of implausibility and lame plot devices (crop circles?), it is not dull and does have some suspenseful scenes. Very well directed (written, not so much) I assert it is neither bad or good.

Now, The Brown Bunny, that’s a bad movie. So is Wild Hogs. I could go on. In fact, most movies are bad. At least Signs manages to entertain, or at least make one want to ridicule it (which is a form of goodness).

American Beauty

“Hello. Protagonist here. Just thought I’d let you know I’m going to die at the end of the film. I’ll bet knowing that will make the trivial melodrama you’re about to sit through seem way more profound.”

God I hate that schtick.

Oh, and anything by Darren Aronofsky.

And that pretentious horror-movie-for-middle-class-wankers The Boys, though that’s an Oz flick so you’ve all probably not seen it. However, it does remind me:

Anything in which I have to watch David Wenham trying to act.

“Body of Evidence”, or any other movie starring Madonna.

Dr. Slack, you are so profoundly wrong about Naked that all your other opinions are preemptively discredited.

The Vanishing, execrable to the final “credits”, was worse for being a remake of the original, brilliant, scary-as-hell Dutch Spoorloos.

I was sorry when I saw the original, as I was unable to sleep well for quite a few days. I was sorrier to see the remake, although I did catch a little shuteye.

Also nominated for worst ending…

RE: Perfume. Not sure it was the worst movie I have ever seen, but the ending was the most jaw-droppingly holy-shit-I-can’t-believe-someone-actually-wrote-this ending I have ever seen

As to the worst movie I have ever seen, gotta go with “The Lovers on the Bridge” Truly, truly, horrifyingly bad.

A testament to the badness of this movie, (and perfume’s ending) is the amount of adverbs I have been forced to use writing this.

Couple of notes:
“Toys” was so bad I couldn’t figure the why of it.
I liked Betty Blue but I am a sucker for French cinema.
Even the few movies with Keanu Reeves I liked would be better without him. So ixnay on the lot.
All time worst movie experience for me? The Sound of Music. thirty minutes in, I was rooting for the Nazis.

Third or fourth or whatever to Saving Private Ryan. The idea that this was some kind of deep artistic anti-war statement sickens me.

Third or fourth or whatever to Autumn in New York, a film so bad that, seeing it on a day I was depressed just a couple months after a friend died from a heart problem, this movie about a woman dying from a heart problem made me bored and annoyed but not at all sad.

Big Jim McLain. Marian’s masterpiece….

it’s been a while, but i’ve always considered the worst movie i’ve ever seen to be nothing but trouble, with chevy chase, dan ackroyd and demi moore. completely unwatchable. ackroyd wrote and directed as well.

if you’re going to fail, you might as well fail big, so kudos to you mr. ackroyd.

OMG,

Some of my top ten movies are on mentioned above:

The Graduate
close Encounters of the Third Kind
Dances With Wolves

Not top ten, but very fun to watch, over and over, and also very “give me a break” on this list of bad movies:

Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Finally, I’ve never wanted to see either Liquid Sky or Betty Blue again, but when I saw each during its initial release in New York in the 1980s, as a 20something, I rated both very highly—successful and unforgettable.

Most Boring Movie:

The New Rose Hotel. When you look up the word ‘soporiphic’ in the dictionary… No one can remain awake through this movie.

Most Annoying Movie:

Vanilla Sky, The American Version. This movie pretends that you’re supposed to figure something out while you watch it, but you eventually realize that there’s nothing to figure out, and then the movie ends, and you want to hit something.

Most Disappointing Movie:

A.I. Just watch the first half of this movie and then turn it off; you’ll think it’s a classic. Whatever you do, don’t watch the second half!

Worst Acting:

The Man in The Iron Mask

Most of the otherwise great actors in this movie- Byrne, Depardieu, Malkovich- are okay, but Dicaprio’s performance is unbearable. I know, there are worse actors than Dicaprio, but he isn’t just unbelievable here, he’s annoying.

Stupidest Movie (And ALSO the most overrated movie.)

The African Queen. I love old movies, but this is clearly the worst movie ever made. This movie was supposed to be a WWII drama/romance, but as it was being made, they realized it was kind of stupidly funny, and they decided to play up the comedy. Unfortunately, the resultant “humor” doesn’t translate well to modern audiences and so the movie is unwatchable.

Worst Bad Movie:

Billy Jack. Whoever first nominated ‘Billy Jack’ unleashed some repressed memories from my childhood.

My Favorite Movies, Called Bad Here:

American Beauty, Happiness, The Fountain, Crash (I won’t say which Crash) The Piano, Breaking The Waves, 2001: A Space Odyssey, There Will Be Blood

Reds.

Julia.

Ordinary People.

All these movies sucked, for the simple reason that the point of a movie is entertainment; not practice in how to survive alone in a doctor’s office waiting room with no magazines.

Oh, and a qualified defense of Batman and Robin. Yes, George Clooney is the worst Batman imaginable. Yes, the plot is idiotic and the writing and acting bad. Yes, a significant portion of the movie is given over to Alicia Silverstone pointlessly riding a motorcycle or something (hey, at least she’s pretty). All this I grant.

But you shouldn’t totally avoid watching this movie. What you should do is fast-forward to all the scenes with Arnold Schwarzenegger (as Mr. Freeze). Because his lines consist almost entirely of an endless succession of completely moronic puns on the theme of cold and ice, and he delivers them with a relish that I, at least, can’t help sharing. “Everybody. . . freeze!” I still chuckle whenever I even think about that.

Norbit, it was crap.
Superman 3, as above. Total waste of time.

I love bad movies. The “Day After Tomorrow” is one of my favorites. But the worst movie I have ever seen was “The Astronaut’s Wife”. I kept watching—expecting it to deliver on its promise of suckiness. But, no, it was just boring. Recently got a copy of “Night of the Comet”. It was as horrible as I had remembered and it was glorious.

Wyatt Earp….

Tombstone was 10X the movie at 1/4 of the price.

“Bram Stoker’s Dracula Hate to keep adding Coppola to the list. When he’s good (e.g. first two Godfather films; The Conversation) he’s very, very good. But when he’s bad…you get this film. Watch Keanu Reeves lose a two-hour long battle with an English accent.”

Sounds like the same battle Reeves was fighting in “Dangerous Liaisons” but ten times more irritating as he was supposed to be French.

Worst movie honors go to “Gandhi” and “The English Patient.” They both have running times of approximately 12 hours and are tedious beyond redemption. Even the absense of Keanu Reeves can’t save them.

The worst movie ever made is The Magic Christmas Tree.
It’s a g-rated film made on a porn film budget.
It’s completely overdubbed as well.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0195039/

Aguirre, Wrath of God – yes I know that it is supposed to be Werner Herzog’s masterpiece, but in 1977, going to a Saturday night showing with your buddies at college after drinking beer, a German film about a crazy conquistador played by a German that doesn’t say very much with a soundtrack by a German progressive rock band, just weirded me out.
(As Basil Fawlty said, “Don’t mention the war”).

Return to Oz (starring a young Fairuza Balk) – the first movie I ever walked out on.
Anything Else (absolutely unbearable)
Blue Lagoon (excrutiating)
Crossroads (starring Britney Spears. Need I say more?)
Batman & Robin (I don’t know how Clooney’s career survived after this one)
Scent of a Woman (root canal w/out painkillers)
St. Elmo’s Fire (nauseatingly self-absorbed)

Bloom – hands down the worst movie my friends and I have ever seen. When we see a bad movie these days, it usually has at least that redeeming feature: it’s better than Bloom… Somebody should’ve listened when Ulysses was deemed unfilmable.

Well, I may have missed something, but in skimming this list I didn’t see either of the two films I have personally walked out of:

Independence Day
Trapped in Paradise

Those were truly awful.

Also, there seem to be a number of movies that people have nominated because they didn’t get it and were personally offended that they totally missed the point. I may not personally have cared for Citizen Kane, but I would never have put it on this list because I can recognize many qualities in it. If you can’t see anything redeeming about Good Morning Vietnam, American Beauty, Pulp Fiction, The Usual Suspects, Dead Poets Society (which have all received multiple mentions), or several other decent-to-great but flawed movies, you’re really not trying very hard…

OK! BattleField Earth. crap. Unadulterated crap. John Travolta made a horrific movie that boggles the senses. It is 3000 AD and aliens have conquered Earth and enslaved almost all of humanity for a millennium. Humans have DE-EVOLVED into a near neanderthal, with constant grunting(very annoying) and the clincher of stupidity, the humans fight the advanced aliens with ANCIENT American technology, even though it is a thousand years old. So, recap, the enslaved (grunting) humans are using ancient aircraft grunting and smashing controls beating advanced alien technology. To overthrow the alien (John Travolta) which is two hours of my life that I’ll never get back. Don’t watch.

Walked out of 2 movies in my life. A Night In The Life Of Jimmy Reardon starring River Phoenix. Maybe he turned to drugs to try to forget that gem. And the most recent The Hills Have Eyes. Gratuitous violence and an idiotic family just begging to be killed do not a good movie make.

Crash by Paul Haggis
Das Experiment
Derailed

Juno – I’ve been praying for a backlash because at the time, everybody I knew was raving about how it was brilliant. I’d like to join them in “hooray for strong female protagonists” and “lol shes so wise and clever”, but I know girls like that and they are neither wise or clever, they are annoying as hell because they wipe their arse with Socrates. It took me at least a month to find somebody to bitch with about how full of shit it was. Less Junos, more Ripleys please?

The Other Boleyn Girl – I loved the book. I was sure I’d hate it, but I completely fell in love with Anne’s ambition and arrogance and how that was her downfall. The movie? A Lifetime Movie of the Week piece of crap about sisterhood and “the sufferings of teh womens” and modern thinking in olden times. Where’s the family ruthlessness? Big fat Henry VIII (I am I am)?

A Streetcar Named Desire – I know I’m going to hell for this, but I only liked it for Marlon Brando’s half nekkidness, when he’s not bellowing like a rogue elephant “STELLAYOODUMBITCH!” I really tried liking this, but I’ve never been a fan of Tennessee Williams.

Ma Vie en Rose – not the Edith Piaf movie. Much worse. A little French boy wants to be a girl, but his family’s neighbours are very, “we are French! We do not do these sorts of things here!” There’s potential for it to be interesting, but it’s just very boring.

Blue Velvet – I’m sorry. I want to like David Lynch, but…eh. (However Elephant Man was fantastic)

Speed Racer – I expected it to suck, but not this badly. >.o “What about it sucked?” EVERYTHING.

Becoming Jane – “Yay! Bio-fiction! This sounds like fu-OH MY GOD.” I’m still not sure what was so “omg furbidden” about their affair, or why I needed to give a crap.

the cook,the thief his wife and her lover. i think this came out 15 years as the first NR rating that replaced X rated.anyway a total gross out movie with nudity you want to forget. add in canabilism and uncomfortable violence and you can actual walk out the theater – like i did. ( still the only time i’ve done that)

I almost forgot:

The Boy Who Could Fly, Starman, Troy, and The Butterfly Effect. The last two were so horrible I left the theater in a rage and unleashed verbal plagues on both retards who not only recommended it, but stood by the films as “great piece of art”. Bastards.

““There Will Be Blood” was boring and had no plot and none of the characters were particularly interesting. It’s only redeeming value was a mildely interesting look into oil drilling early in the 20th century.”

Oh man, TWBB is one of my new favorite movies. What got me in love with the film is that (probably spoilers ahead) it’s about this competition between two greedy people. Normally, they would be the villains of a film, but they’re the lead characters. There is no righteous do-gooder who is out to stop them. It’s this race to get the oil and it will never be used for something good. Plainview embraces his greed and Eli has to force himself to believe his faith is driving him, when it’s his greed. It is all worth it for the ending. I loved it. I thought it was brilliant. (But this is from someone who can barely sit through ‘Streetcar’ so maybe I shouldn’t be talking. Lol)

482: there was (so it is said) a live stage version of “The Diary of Anne Frank” in London, with Anne played by Pia Zadora. She was so appallingly bad that when the Nazis stormed into the Frank house at the start of Act II, a voice from the audience shouted “She’s in the attic!”

Stranger Than Paradise? Really? I thought it was great fun.

Me, I nominate Bolero. Bo Derek on a worldwide search for sexual ecstasy. Doesn’t sound too bad, huh? Unbelievably, the filmmaking is so terrible that there is no eroticism at all, and because they can’t get across via any usual methods the idea that she found what she was looking for, a fucking neon sign lights up saying “ecstasy”. It’s the standard against which I measure all other bad movies.

Oh, and whatever jackass posted “Unforgiven” must be kidding. Seriously, did you miss the last half hour? Jesus christ.

Who the fuck said that we should avoid any Star Wars?

One of the worst films I can think at the moment is “The Grudge”

Oh my God, I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry has got to be one of the worst movies ever produced. I turned it off after about five minutes. Awful. Absolutely awful.

Speed Racer
Cold Mountain
12 Monkeys
Blue Streak
National Security

Don’t ever capitalize the word “but”.

Signs is feces.

fools gold…. worst movie i’ve seen in a while

and the house of sand and fog..yeah i watched like 5 minutes and went to bed.

but signs… on a scale of one to ten… signs is raptor jesus!

“full of basic, technical errors.”

Because that’s what I watch out for in a work of art, as well as in my car mechanic. There’s more soul and beauty and real humanity, with all its horror and wonder and hatred and joy, in Argento’s little severed gloved pinky, or in a 30 second clip of Suspiria, than in the last 10 years of Oscars.

Film is first and foremost a craft and a very difficult one at that. Argento is not a master of this craft, since he makes basic errors, errors that one can see in the output of young, inexperienced film school students. A juxtaposition of more or less clever set pieces with boring and badly acted dialogue scenes doesn’t make a good film. Funky, multicolored lighting and extravagant camera moves and angles do not make a good film. Argento has little sense of rhythm or visual coherence and both are essential to the film craft. You are confusing showy ineptness with genius.

Entrapment.
They had to cut all the love scenes between Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones out of the film. Curiously (and thankfully) they have not been “restored” to a DVD… I think they just wouldn’t stick to a DVD.

Sex and the City
Two hours too long.

The Constant Gardner

Critic Anthony Lane really nails why this film was truly dreadful:

We see Justin and Tessa’s first meeting, back in London, where she rises to her feet after a lecture, delivered by Justin, and launches into a formless, flaming rant about Iraq. After which, needless to say, he has no option but to sleep with her; you can’t walk away from flames like that.

That was, indeed, the most inexplicable part of the film. But if this actually works we should have considered sending a fleet of hookers to the Pentagon and the Project for a New American Century think-tank.

My favorite scene was the threadbare cinematic shorthand to indicate a psychological state of isolation/separation: the begrimaced face flattening on the windows of his former happy home. It didn’t help matters that the very next scene was The Constant Gardener himself, sitting inside the flat, looking at photos. He must have needed a bath after raking, fertilizing, and treating his garden for pests.

The whole thing read like one of those Victorian serial narratives where the author writes himself into a tight spot and then MacGyvers a completely implausible, but necessary, solution. Just think of all the late-arriving information that patches up plot holes at the very last moment:

1. Why would a government official send a letter detailing his own crimes in his own handwriting? And why would someone keep said incriminating letter? And even if he did, why would he risk his marriage, family, job, reputation, and potentially jail time for a fling with a marginally beautiful tart? Of course, as the Downing Street Memos indicate, the British are really are bad at this. If only we could get Rumsfeld to do this. “Dear Diary, today I ordered the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and I feel spotless as a lamb…”

2. Why is it that just when the Constant Gardner asks the indelicate question about his wife’s possible black lover that a picture can be produced instantly from the nearest purse proving that he was, in fact, gay? And now that I think of it, the photo wasn’t even in a wallet or in any kind of protective sheath…the Indian woman just reached in and pulled it out like the contestants on the Price is Right game “Punchboard.”

3. How many people have access to a “dodgy” individual who can manufacture fake passports on a moments notice?

4. As Anthony Lane already indicated, how do you get a neocon ambassador and a firebrand leftist crusader together for the purposes of the narrative? Obviously in the most impossible way ever: the flaming liberal calls the Blair apologist a murdering warmonger then they immediately go on an insane sportfuck bender at her flat.

5. How many people have a webcam with a 50 foot cord?

We must also consider the moral arithmetic the film articulates: Big Pharma = Arms Dealers. We might have a CFP here friends.

Oh, a few come to mind about some really bad movies… anything by Uwe Boll (Alone in the Dark, House of the Dead, Bloodrayne etc…)

Sequels don’t count, but what about remakes? Stallone’s remake of Get Carter. One reason why Sly should direct his own movies, and not let something as important as Get Carter in the hands of a novice.

Death Proof – I’m not a fan of Tarantino, I think he is highly overrated, but Death Proof was immensely boring. The far superior Planet Terror was so much better.

I have to throw the Clint Eastwood piece of mindless dribble, Blood Work, out there. There are three well known actors in the movie: Eastwood, Angelica Houston, and Jeff Daniels. Logic says that Eastwood is going to be the hero (he has a life threatening problem, is in a constant struggle, the whole sappy sob story). Logic also says that Angelica Houston, Eastwood’s doctor, is there to help him. Besides, we can’t have a woman being the villian, that doesn’t jive with the chivalry of Clint. So that leaves Jeff Daniels. Can’t have the almighty Clint taking on some nobody in the struggle of G vs. E.

During the opening credits I looked at the guy I was with and said: “Jesus tap-dancing Christ, Jeff Daniels did it! Can I go home now?” He insisted that I stay. I spent the rest of the movie trying to keep my snickering, snoring, and yawning to a minimum. I rolled my eyes so much I’m surprised I didn’t have to have them surgically realigned. Turned out I was right, by the way.

Clint Eastwood owes me two hours of my life back. If you’re gonna do a crime thriller, please hire some more real actors to flesh out the possibilities pool. I shouldn’t be able to figure it out during the opening credits. I’d rather watch paint dry in the dark.

Never watched Cinderella II: Dreams Come True after sometime in September 2006. (It’s a direct-to-video sequel from Disney; does that count here?)

Also, beware of Tom and Jerry: The Movie (1992).

Seems like a lot of people are listing overrated movies, not truly bad ones. The hall of shame surely includes …

Quicksilver
Patch Adams
Enemy Mine
Speed 2
Hook (Julia Roberts as Tinker Bell? Someone should die for that.)

My daughter suggests a terrible South African-made horror movie, The Breed, which keeps showing up on cable.

The Brown Bunny..except for the one famous scene,this was the absolute worst movie ever. Vincent Gallo tries to be artistic,but all he really wanted was to have someone give him oral on screen.

respectfully folks, none of you are true fans of truly bad movies, nothing compares to “tits in trouble movies” a under appreciated genre of all the drive in movies that repeat the same thing over and over. The big tits come out and then the killer gets her. Bad writing, bad acting, no plot, just good old sex and fear. I used to rent four at a time for a dollar, my finger stuck on the fast forward until the utterly rediculous happened, then I’d rewind and watch that again. My all time favorite worst tits in trouble movie? Girls With Guns. Las vegas show girls have been recruited to go kill dirty arabs. The scenes alternate between topless girls relaxing in a big hot tub and gun slaughter sequences where all arabs die and all babes live.

you are so profoundly wrong about Naked that all your other opinions are preemptively discredited.

Tell me why. Give me, for just one instance, a convincing account of what purpose the hair-whipping scene served. I’m picking on it because it was by that time that I stopped trying to interpret the movie generously and decided it was swill.

I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry is probably a great choice; deliberately avoided that one. So also Speed Racer and The Last Legion and, no doubt, In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, whose title alone is nausea-inducing. Once Upon a Time in Mexico is definitely a great choice.

Memento is a bit overrated—after a few viewings you realize how stupid this story would seem played forward—but far from horrible. (Following, Nolan’s first film, is actually much better.) Troy is underrated, which doesn’t mean it isn’t cheese—and anyone calling it a great work of art should be slapped with a fish—but does mean that it can be entertaining cheese. But there are some unintentionally hilarious moments to be sure, like the sun apparently rising in the west in one scene.

More from the trying-way-too-hard files: Gandhi, of all things. (“Too long” is a fairly laughable criticism here; if you couldn’t notice anything happening during the running time, maybe you weren’t watching the screen? It has been more plausibly criticized as being too much of a hagiography, but even those critics had the sense not to try to claim it was a poorly-crafted film.)

I agree with Yosef about SPR. I think that to diagnose apathy about actual atrocity in Iraq as coming out of the first 20 minutes of that film is a) giving it way too much credit, and b) getting the reality exactly backwards. Inasmuch as a certain fragment of the American populace is desensitized to atrocity, the Internet can claim far more credit than that movie. More importantly, I think the reality is that far more people still think of war in terms of the sanitized versions of WWII presented by many iconic films in the several decades prior.

I know girls like [Juno] and they are neither wise or clever, they are annoying as hell because they wipe their arse with Socrates.

Except the point of fables is not that their heroes would be cool to know in real life. In real life, Amelie of Amelie would be a sociopathic stalker; she’s only charming in the context of the fable.

Oh, didn’t put in mine…

1. Forrest Gump: Stupid premise focused on making the idiots feel proud to be stupid and american
2. Dude, Where’s My Car: Well, it makes me proud to be british, I guess
3. Saw: PTSD generating. A film from the moral abyss.

And whoever it was above who noted the creepy “ignorance is virtue” message at the core of Forrest Gump is exactly right, as well.

THERE’s NO ACCOUNTING FOR TASTE

and never has it been more obvious than in this thread.
I own some 4,000 movies, started collecting on Beta Tape, switched to VHS, added Laser Disks, and finally DVD’s.

Panning a movie after one viewing or walkout is dangerous. So much has to do with one’s mood and state of mind. There are few if any movies in my collection that have not been screened at least 4 times. I am homebound for the most part and average about 5 movies a day as I multi-task on computers. The movies serve up the background and soundtrack to days of book writing, blogging, or research.
I cannot fall asleep without a movie playing.
I exercise on a recumbent bicycle with movies playing. I subscribe to HBO, Showtime, TMC, Starz, and Cinemax. At 62 years of age I would bet that I have watched more movies more times than anyone on the planet. So let me tell you this.
I am constantly amazed when I find something I could not get through on first viewing – eg Moulin Rouge – that becomes over time a favorite.
Vanilla Sky has it’s Prelude to a Dream that explains that you are required to view it several times.
The ‘I want my time back’ folks must be very special. I want more movies to fill my time. I’m a block from my local Blockbuster and I have rented and bought more of their movies than any customer in history. 35 movies a week and 1800 a year find their way onto one of three HDTV’s with impressive surround systems here at the house. I built subwoofers and sold them to Malco Cinemas for a living
When someone writes that they walked out on Forrest Gump, Dances with Wolves, or even Contact, I just have to laugh out loud, and The Shawshank Redemption is one of if not the greatest movie of our time. Folks who put Star Wars, Close Encounters, or ET on a list of movies no body should ever see shouldn’t be viewing movies. Anything by Stone, Shyamalan, Zemeckis, or Kubrick has some redeeming value.
I am constantly amazed at these multi-million dollar works of art – these photographs in motion. I am constantly spotting something I missed the first few times the movement of light in technicolor danced across my screen.
Some poor soul or souls poured years of work into the celluloid that eventually showed up on a digital disk and you want your 1:30 back?
I always look for one thing good about a film and I amost always find it.

I am appalled by the number of people who think “Signs” is a good movie. It is not a good movie. It is the opposite of a good movie. The writing is utterly lazy and hackneyed. There isn’t room here to discuss even a fraction of the examples one could lay out, but two of the most egregious instances that leap to mind are are:

The method by which Mel Gibson’s wife meets her tragic end. The whole “cut in half by a heavy thing but you’re still alive enough to call your family” urban legend thing? COME ON! Was Shyamalan cruising Snopes.com looking for plot devices? Lame. Improbable. Lazy. Bad writing. It might work if you were 8 years old and hadn’t heard that urban legend before. As it was, going with such a played out gag robbed the scene of any emotional impact. The only way that scene could have been any dumber was having her meet her untimely and tragic end by downing a bunch of pop rocks and soda.

The second, and even less forgivable, example of bad, lazy writing is the secret weakness of the aliens. Water is like acid to them. And what planet do they choose to invade? Earth. Which is mostly made up of water. So the aliens, this ultra intelligent and hyper advanced race of intergalactic beings, have decided to try and conquer Acid World. Oh, and they go down to the surface of this planet which features seas of acid where acid regularly rains from the sky, and acid is found in standing pools and lakes, and is inhabited by a race of creatures who are made of up 50-60% acid, without so much as an umbrella or rain jacket. Oh, also, this hyper advanced race cannot operate door knobs. Gimme a &#^@ing break.

And the whole movie is full of stuff like that. Kind of wrecks the suspension of disbelief. And yeah, those were two spoilers up there. Don’t like it? Tough. I’m trying to save you the trouble of sitting through this cinematic atrocity. Trust me, it’s for your own good.

Not the movie to avoid, but certainly one to avoid if you memorized and believe in the AFI top 100:

The Third Man

People say that the scene where Welles makes his appearance is great.
I saw this film first, then ‘Touch of Evil’, so I didn’t get that moment. It shouldn’t have to be so elitist to enjoy.
In all fairness, I did like Joseph Cotten in ‘Shadow of a doubt’, though not the ending and I did like the over-the-top ‘Touch of Evil’.

Grey Gardens – this interminable and depressing exploitation of two ladies who are obviously both seriously mentally ill but have the fortune/misfortune of being related to Jackie O is excreble. This is the only movie I have walked out on after paying for it. In fact; me and my friends made it further than most; leaving onlt 3 people in the theater when we departed about 30 minutes in.

“Now, The Brown Bunny, that’s a bad movie.”

Oh yes, how could I forget…perhaps because I wanted to?

And speaking of ‘The Sound of Music’, apparently a version was released in South Korea with all the songs edited out. Your mileage may vary on whether that would have been an improvement or not.

I like the attempts to capture the list in rules but then find movies outside the rules. Avoid all SNL-based movies that aren’t The Blues Brothers. Avoid all Rob Schneider and Pauly Shore movies; all Kevin Costner or Robin Williams movies after 1990; and Shyamalan movies after Unbreakable; all genre sequels other than Lord of the Rings movies, Harry Potter movies, Aliens, Empire Strikes Back, Superman II, and Batman Returns; Ben Affleck movies that aren’t directed by Kevin Smith—these are all important rules to know and live by, but we also all already know them.

Like paving, I’m interested in the ways that “a truly awful movie actually makes you like the previous work of the director and actors less after seeing it.” The hateful Haggis-directed Crash is in that category for me—makes it hard even for me to watch one of my onetime favorite movies, Flirting, even though I adored Thandie Newton in Flirting, just because she was in Crash. Of course, Jefferson in Paris had already done some of that damage, too. Took me a while to be able to enjoy any of the great actors from Titanic again.

I certainly wish I had back the time I spent watching Into The Wild. It was purty and all, and I don’t begrudge other people how much they seem to enjoy it, but I found the lead character both thoroughly unsympathetic and dumb. If I hadn’t been so sure that the filmmakers thought they were making an uplifting tribute to the human spirit I would have enjoyed it more—because I could have at least wondered whether it was meant to be an extended Darwin Awards sketch.

AI. Underlined, in bold and highlighted.
All copies should be incinerated.

No one has yet to mention the most torturous experience the cinema had unleashed upon mankind know as Mrs. Doubtfire?

A/I Artifical Intelligence – dumb AND depressing

Scent of a Woman – turned me off Pacino FOREVER

Neighbors – Belushi/Ackroyd – maybe I was too young but only movie I ever walked out on in my life

Showgirls – bad movie but good sex

Eurotrip, I still can’t believe that I paid to see this movie and full, evening price too! The only thing that sorta makes it not a complete piece of crap is Matt Damon singing “Scott doesn’t know”…at least I think that’s the name of the song.

As for some of these movies…geez if one really thought hard, I am sure that someone could come up with a reason that Seven Samurai stinks or The Godfather. I agree that the “it’s too depressing, violent, (insert other descriptive term here)” is just a little too I don’t know now right. I mean take Grave of the Fireflies. The movie is really depressing. It’s one of the biggest downers that I can think of, but it’s also one of the best movies that I can think of when it comes to people’s actions during wartime. Taymor’s “Titus” is another one that’s called bad because there’s a lot of bad violent things happened, but it’s still a really intriguing movie and quite well done. But then of course, I actually really like the play and hate to see fellow Shakespeareans knock it. I mean how can you listen to Aaron say “If one good deed in all my life I did, I do repent it from my very soul,” especially when performed by an actor of Lennix’s caliber, and not be moved in sme way?

I’ve always thought that inclusion of a scene – apparently cut from the shooting script – wherein Dillon and Bacon get it in on the shower, would have gingered “Wild Things” up immeasurably.

Can’t think of the title, but there is a film in which Lesley Ann Warren scratches her seven yesr itch in the form of the bloke who was in “The Blue Lagoon”. I recall a Bryan Adams song over the end credits (you’ll all be pleased to know that she and hubby reconcile) and a bit in which the object of her affections (high school pupil by day, appalling stripper by night) rhythmically jams his crotch in her face. It’s just charming, it really is.

And, I’m sorry, but I thought “Battle Royale” was one of the biggest piles of toss I have ever seen. Particularly hated the girl with bunches in the infomercial at the beginning, sort of remonstrating with them “Now don’t go trying to take off those necklaces, you hear?” while waggling her finger. Ugghh. Hated it.

Amores Perros was a long dark night of the soul. It had amazing reviews, but was just dreary and horrible.

I have never seen a movie with Nicholas Cage in it that was any good. I am not sure this is coincidence.

Robin Hood Prince of Thieves is high on my list of diabolically awful timewasting flicks. Along with the latest version of King Kong.

Whoever dissed “The African Queen” above was profoundly misguided. Even if you didn’t like the rest of the movie, seeing Katharine Hepburn say, “Nev-ah-theless” to the German captain makes the whole movie worthwhile.

Someone else wondered about the failure to mention DePalma’s excesses. Good point! Horrible stuff, that.

Has anyone else seen “Star Crash?”

Junebug billed as a “wise, bittersweet … comedy,” in reality none of the above. Just awful, leaving out the grotesque misrepresentations on the dvd jacket.

No, Junebug is anything but a Comedy and is loaded with people with negative I.Q.’s, but it’s still a decent movie in light doses. And I agree with #420 about JFK. In fact, I called it communist propaganda on IMDb and got flamed for it royally!

Joysticks was the worst of the 1980’s.
Howard the Duck is better off in the comics where it originated.
Funny About Love was anything but funny.
The Pickle made me want to puke!
The Fox and the original version of Sweet November. Between those two, I’d tolerate Sandy Dennis’ bad British accent in Thank You All Very Much before I see those again.
The only thing good abou Napoleon Dynamite was Tina Majorino.
The only thing good about Ginger Ale Afternoon was Yeardley Smith and not just because of her nude scene.
The only good things about Hook were the original concept, and Rufio.

I like Kevin Smith, but I thought Chasing Amy sucked, and Dogma was worse. The only thing I liked about Dogma was Alan Rickman’s speech about God’s attitude towards us humans during sex. Well, that and Chris Rock’s speech about the crap being carried out presumably in Jesus’ name.

Also, I didn’t see 300 but just because the enemies were Persian, doesn’t make the movie “proto-fascist.”

I would say the worst films I ever saw are War of the Worlds and Batman Begins… I’m pretty sure most people will disagree but Kathie Holmes definitely ruined Batman Begins, which without her could have been pretty good…