Most awful movies (in celebration of Hollywood's fourth declining revenue year in a row)

9/28/05 | ltn72

[SoothingDave]

"Go", "Dazed and Confused" - The camera follows mundane losers around for one night. Are audience's lives so boring that they find it interesting to watch a day in the lives of other boring people?

"Go" had Katie Holmes in it, and I'd watch her in just about anything. Excepting, of course, her current role as Tom Cruise's beard.

SD

[steve-b]

We need another category for the worst movie made from a good to great book.

Starship Troopers.

[steve-b]

The movie version of "Lost in Space."

The pain... the pain....

[MarkL]

"Take the Money and Run". Isn't that the movie where the Woody Allen character carves a gun out of the bar of soap, colors it with shoe polish, then tries to escape - in the rain? One minute he's holding the gun on the guard then the next he looks down and all he has is soap foam in his hands. That has to be one of the funniest scenes ever filmed.

Yup. That movie is full of some of the funniest scenes ever filmed. Like when the entire chain gang escapes, and they try to disguise themselves and look inconspicuous. Hillarity ensues.

Mark

[discostu]

Love your Highlander rant. The tag of the first movie is "there can be only one", why oh why can't Hollywood watch their own movies. If they'd listened to the tag it would have saved everybody a lot of trouble.

[longfellow]

GODFATHER 3
MAFIA
NAPOLEAN DYNAMITE
ROCKY 4
THE CONTENDER
ANY REMAKE OF MIRACLE ON 34TH ST.
BATMAN1-4
DEEP BLUE SEA
ALL THE STAR WARS BUT THE 1ST TWO.

[Casloy]

ALEXANDER. Admittedly, I couldn't sit through the entire movie, but what I did see was stupefyingly bad. You know it's bad when they edit it and release it on DVD claiming it to be a "faster paced" movie. Frankly, anything by Oliver Stone could be on this list

[x]

"Blood Work" with Clint Eastwood was the most disappointing movie I'd seen in the last five years or so. It was awfully stale, tired, predictable,and boring. Ebert and others didn't object because they liked Eastwood's other work.

Then I saw "Sin City." It was a visually beautiful attempt to render comics based on film noir on the screen. But the plot was nonsensical and hard to find, and the violence was reprehensible. In spite of some really striking cinematography it was trash.

I'd say the same thing about "Kill Bill" (both volumes). Some talent on the technical side, but just garbage so far as characters, motivations, and morals were concerned. Tarantino was shocking and offensive in his early movies, but there was more than just stabbings and beheadings to hold our interest.

The problem with talk about "worst movies" is that most of us have never seen the really worst movies and never will. Those are the hard core porn films that don't have to satisfy or appeal on any other level. There are soft core porn, horror, and martial arts movies of similar rottenness.

Apart from those genres, the worst movies of all time were probably made by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. There's a political moral here. Fassbinder got his funding from the German government and German public television. They were desperate to show the "New Germany" and gave out money for all manner of trash. Fassbinder boasted that he could turn out a completed movie while his competitors were still trying to read their grant forms. It's easy to be fast when you don't have to worry about plot consistency, character development or the quality of the acting. It's cruel to say it, but it's a good thing for filmgoers that Fassbinder died before Paulie Shore and others started their careers. It spared us films that would be so bad that they could destroy the universe.

I'd say more or less the same thing about John Waters and Lina Wertmuller. If you look at it right, they made the same films. Just substitute class-conscious workers for fat girls, fascists and millionaires for uptight squares, and Marxist kitsch for gay camp.

But yes, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" was unbearable. I left about the time when their dog died. It was insulting that they expected us to cry after all that boredom. I felt like vomiting. The funny thing is that the novel was supposed to be a protest against "kitsch" -- and the film embodied it.

Also horrible -- "The World According to Garp." I felt like killing Robin Williams when he explained "what it all meant." The point of it all was that life is worth living in spite of everything. That's the reason for two hours of unmemorable penis jokes. Nice to know that life is good, but I'd feel better if the film makers convinced me that they'd made a movie worth seeing after all.

[Tuxedo]

Napoleon Dynamite (just horrid), 8MM (disgusting), Face/Off (would the movie ever end?), American President, Breakfast Club (barf), any Revenge of the Nerds sequel, River's Edge (deeply disturbing), Earthquake, Natural Born Killers, Tightrope, and Rocky V are all pretty much unwatchable.

A few diamonds in the rough: Cloak and Dagger, Elephant Parts, Short Time, Disorganized Crime, and Madhouse (John Larroquette).

[Sprite518]

Never saw it, but will not watch it for sure..