Throughout history, there have been movies that should never have been made. Ishtar. Heaven’s Gate. The Happening. Grease 2. Anything starring that Jim Varney dude.
As bad as those were, this one might eclipse them all.
Direct to video, which is good, because that’ll mean no one will see you purchase tickets or enter the theatre. You can watch via Netflix and no one will ever know.
Just for fun – what’s the worst movie you admit to having seen? Go on – your secret’s safe with me – tell me in the combox. For me, one of the worst ones I recall seeing was Earth Girls Are Easy with Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis. I don’t even want to look it up on Youtube to see why it was so cringingly bad – it’s taken me this long to forget the majority of it, so if I look at any clips of it now, all those years will have been wasted.
Hard to say. There are some movies out there that are so bad they achieve the status of so-bad-its-good. Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, Plan 9, The Room, Rocky Horror, and so on. During my university days, when I was in my avoid-crass-commercial-movies-at-all-cost phase, I used to go and see one rt house movie after another, many of them French. WHile I did see a few gems, I sat through entiely too many Gallic meditations on dyfunctional families, meaningless sex, the purposeless of life unless devoted to art, no Ahhhrt, along with the obligatory suicide and/or murder, and so on. Betty Blue, Uranus and Tous les Matins de la Monde stand out. (The last one, I actually loved everything about the movie, except for the script.)
My husband and some friends and I enjoy watching laughably bad movies. My top (or bottom) five would include:
1) Manos, Hands of Fate
2) Mountain Fury (A group of radical environmentalist along with a lawyer and a very nosy reporter attempt to stop rampaging developers, with plenty of archive footage of a helicopter flying over a mountain forest)
3) The Turkish Superman (Pure copyright infringement, on a budget)
4) Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus
5) The Adventures of Pluto Nash (Eddie Murphy, need I say more?)
Honestly, this movie’s not that bad, really.
But Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus is a cult classic!
The Brainiac! A Mexican horror movie featuring a monster who killed people by piercing the back of their skulls with a forked tongue, and sucked their brains out via the wound.
There is a book Worst Rock n’ Roll Records of All Time. It’s very funny even if it is written from the neo-Marxist school of rock criticism. When they picked the albums they avoided stuff from hacks and noted that they didn’t get paid enough to listen to every Carpenters’ album and ferret out the worst one.
I feel the same way about movies. Anyone can cite stuff that doesn’t even have a chance of being a good movie like Plan 9, Mega Shark, etc. It gets much more interesting to pick movies that have A-list actors, reputable directors, Hollywood budgets–in short, all the ingredients that should produce good movie. So you are right to mention Ishtar.
Worst movies I’ve seen like I described above:
Billy Bathgate
Meet Joe Black
Casino
Secretariat
The Help
Meet Joe Black was painful to watch. Brad Pitt is pretty, but not pretty enough to make it through that.
The Sword and the Sorcerer
Sorceress
Sorority Babes at the Slimeball Bowlarama
Million Dollar Baby
All far worse than Earth Girls Are Easy.
Hey, most of the movies being mentioned in the combox are the meat and potatoes of my movie viewing habits
When I think of really bad movies, I’m more in line with Scott W.’s line of thinking. So I’d have to say American Beauty and Revolutionary Road are hands down among the worst. Give me a guy in a rubber monster suit over those travesties any day of the week.
I really don’t know if this counts, but I saw “Battlefield Earth”. It is EVERYTHING it promises and more! It is so incredibly bad! Badly written, badly acted, badly filmed, badly produced, badly everything. Problem: The suckage is so epic, that I actually felt entertained. I can’t remember to not have laughed during one single scene.
While I never saw it, the historian in me cringed at “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Slayer.”
All I have to say is the leg lamp was buried in the first movie, due to unforeseen circumstances!!! Duh!!!
this is my baby sister’s fault- go on youtube and search for Nicholas Cage’s The Wicker Man and another TRULY AWFUL movie called “The Room”- I haven’t seen either in their entirety, but the clips are still burned in my brain
Eragon. One and a half hours of bleh.
To be honest though, I’m usually able to enjoy movies others consider intolerable (1997′s The Avengers comes to mind. And Raul Julia makes Street Fighter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9hatLT-vl4 Ah, if only the whole Bible could be narratted in such hammy goodness ^_^).
Larry, I don’t know about worst ever, but you would think that after the way their 1st sequel, My Summer Story, flopped, they would have learned their lesson. & that sequel had Jean Shepherd involved.
At the least, I suspect it WILL give Grease 2 a run for the money.
The Cutting Edge. Worst. Movie. Ever. Here is the formula that was used in making this movie –
1. Take a chick flick – doesn’t matter which one.
2. Put the protagonists on ice skates.
3. Refuse to end the movie after everyone guesses the plot while still watching the previews for other movies.
My wife forced me to endure this as a test of my resolve while we were still dating. I will admit it was more fun than the time I accidentally took my contacts out shortly after chopping up habanero peppers for hot sauce. Just slightly more fun though. And I didn’t get any hot sauce out of the deal, so maybe it was a tie now that I think about it.
Worst movie ever…Intolerable Cruelty. With Catherine Zeta-Jones and George Clooney. Painful to watch. I rented it years ago. I actually went back to the store and asked for my money back, or a different rental (it was THAT bad). The clerk said no, so I told him to watch it and I would be back. The next day he called me. I got my money back AND a free rental!
That is a great story!!
I liked The Happening up until the end. How to bomb a movie in 60 seconds of cinema. PS> Great stache.
What, you don’t like feel good movies about a stupid but well-meaning protagonist who manages to succeed in spite of everything? Jim Varney is underappreciated. He was a remarkable character actor, voice actor, and impressionist (there’s a momentary impression of Blofeld in Ernest Rides Again that is utterly uncanny) who got typecast as a stupid hick because he had so much fun doing it. And how can you hate an opening sequence like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcqLB6hvZS8