Movies I Never Want To See Again
Well, alainbriongloid asked me for a list of movies I never want to see again, and I couldn't resist the opportunity. So, I compiled a partial catalog of stuff I could go the rest of my life without seeing ever again.
Just like there are some movies that are bad, but enjoyable anyway, there are some movies that are good, but that I don't want to see again. Many are, in fact, perfectly entertaining movies, but something about them roused my ire. Sometimes it was sheer unpleasantness, sometimes it was a single actor, and sometimes it was merely my personal taste making me loathe something all out of proportion.
The list does contain bad movies, but I vetted my choices for movies that were not just crappy MST3K fodder, but were more than ordinarily bad. The movie must have either sucked in a truly epic way, or ruined a sequel or franchise. Preference was given to high-budget, much-hyped movies, and movies that are popular. I tried not to include movies that are widely regarded as terrible, like the Star Wars prequels, unless something else about them was particularly heinous.
At any rate, and in no particular order, they are:
1) Catwoman. This indefensible piece of trash didn't even have the saving grace of being fun. It was just painful and stupid. There were only two cool things about it: Halle Berry's pants as Catwoman were pretty nifty, and watching Sharon Stone stab Halle Berry in the ass was great. Just between you and me, that's not enough reason to see a movie. Perhaps the worst thing about this movie is not that it was a bad movie, but that it was a bad Catwoman movie. Thanks to this piece of shit, we will never see a good Catwoman movie. At least, not for a good long time. And thus, another cool character is ruined by a shitty movie.
2) The Fog (2005 remake). The original is one of my favorite scary movies, simply because it's so simple and understated and creepy. The remake takes everything about the original that was good and ruins it. Even the hotness of Tom Welling and Selma Blair could not redeem it. It is indescribably atrocious, and I pray that anyone reading this will have the good sense to heed my warning and stay far, far away from this movie. Especially if they liked the original.
3) Event Horizon. It scared me into a three-day panic attack. I cannot abide this movie. I understand from people who weren't scared out of their minds that it's a pretty good Lovecraft-in-space sort of horror movie with a few good moments. I, however, regard it as the most horrifying thing I have ever seen. Even though the IMDB says Jason Isaacs is in this movie, I will not watch it a second time just to find him. That is how much I wish I could un-see it.
4) Pete's Dragon. What a horrible thing to inflict on a child. I recall having to watch this repeatedly in school on days when our teachers were out sick. I remember nothing about it except that it is boring, the dragon is extremely uncool, and I hated the kid who starred in it. Why it is still apparently regarded as a classic of children's cinema is utterly beyond me. I would happily hunt down and burn every copy of this movie, if I had time to do so. I'd also like to hunt down those responsible for it.
5) Hey Good Lookin'. I may take a beating for this, but I dislike Ralph Bakshi's movies in general, and I hated this one in particular. For reasons that are difficult to articulate - it's probably a Southern thing - I loathe stuff that's very "Noo Yawk!" and so I didn't find much to love here. Plus, Bakshi's character designs just piss me off. They are the opposite of appealing.
Some of his movies are tolerable. Fire and Ice was stupid, but at least entertaining in a bad sword-and-sorcery way. Yes, the characters were rotoscoped, but they at least were not his usual ugly-ass over-caricatured original designs. Wizards was pretty lame overall, with some good moments; I never want to see it again, but neither am I sorry I saw it in the first place. Cool World was an awesome idea that failed utterly in execution, leaving the soundtrack as the only salvageable thing about it.
Everything else Bakshi has done, as far as I am concerned, is rat vomit. By which I mean vomit comprised of half-digested rat, not the vomit of rats, which would be significantly less foul. I speak, by the way, without having seen Fritz The Cat; I don't know, that one might be okay.
6) The Ring. The second most horrible thing I have ever seen. I quit watching after a certain point because it was too freaky. And yet, I am hard pressed to describe exactly what it was that set me off about it. I am always perplexed by people who claim they did not find it scary. Either they're just wired profoundly differently from me, or they lack the necessary imagination to get a good case of the creeps. It was undoubtedly an effective horror movie, but I never want to see it again.
7) The Cell. The third most horrible thing I have ever seen. I quit watching after the deli-sliced horse scene. I really can't defend this movie in any way. It was dreadful enough, both in terms of script and horrific imagery, to completely override the beautiful sets and cinematography.
8) Saving Private Ryan. I will never see the rest of this movie, because the first fifteen minutes sent me straight to the bathroom, where I spent half an hour in a cold sweat, trying not to throw up my toenails. I understand that the point of the brutal opening was to place the viewer in the same shocked and terrified state as the troops, but, see, I'm usually in a state of low-level anxiety, so I don't need much goading to go to panic mode.
Don't get me wrong. I'm certain this is not a bad movie. People I trust have said it's quite good. I'm just never going to watch it. I'm angry with it. That is the kind of shit I wish I could delete from my memory. I wish people would stop telling me to see it. I'm not going to gain any insights about humanity by throwing up into my own lap, thank you. I certainly do not recommend that anyone else see it. Its success has already led to movies that use that level of violence without having a meaningful plot, and that kind of thing, done for its own sake, is just NOT OKAY.
I'm not saying shit like that should be banned (though I wish it wouldn't get made in the first place) I'm just saying I want a new rating that distinguishes between fun action-movie violence that has gore and occasional mutilation, but is overall not really disturbing (Conan, The Pathfinder, Underworld, The Patriot) and hideous war violence in which people get their legs blown off and their entrails scattered all over the place (Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down). Neither R nor NC-17 effectively do that.
9) The Matrix trilogy. Now, don't get me wrong. These are perfectly serviceable action movies with some really excellent fight choreography and some pretty kickass music. I still hate them.
I liked the first one fairly well, mostly for the action scenes, but I actively loathed the following two, so the first has become contaminated by association. They are movies that think they're smarter than they are - just like many Matrix fans, whose incessant fanboying has, incidentally, contributed greatly to making me hate the movies. It's hard for me to think of any movies more overrated, yet the number of people who insist that these movies are philosophical works of art is staggering.
The series is actively unpleasant to watch, and not just because its message is not always a happy one; visually, they movies are also incredibly bleak and uncomfortable. The presence of Keanu Reeves further condemns them. Most damning of all, their much-vaunted "originality" is nothing new to those of us even passingly familiar with the tropes of science fiction and Hong Kong action flicks, so they fail on that level as well.
You want a pretty good movie that says some of the same things the first Matrix movie said, and says it really well? The 13th Floor. And yet nobody remembers it. They are too busy shitting their pants over the Matrix.
10) The Hulk. Dear God, I almost forgot this festering pile of dog vomit. What on earth induced the studio to hand a Hulk movie to Ang Lee is and always will be utterly beyond me. It was supposed to be an action movie, but what came out the other end was unrecognizable sewage. This movie was just dreadful, and the screen-within-screen technique was less reminiscent of comic book panels than those annoying sliding popup ads that make me want to commit homicide. Eric Bana has been tolerable in other movies, but here he is a complete waste, so badly miscast that I shudder to think of how lame their pool of actors must have been to induce them to pick him. Poor Jenny Connelly is totally wasted here, as is Sam Elliott. And, as a bonus, this movie contains Josh Lucas! I hate him, too.
11) Léon: The Professional. I'm going to catch flak for this one, too. I know this movie has some die-hard devotees and that Jean Reno, for some reason inexplicable to me, has quite a few amorous female fans. I'm not saying you can't like the movie, and I'm not saying it was a bad movie, all I'm really saying is that Jean Reno is so hideous that he makes a mummified crocodile monitor in a blonde wig look like Brad Pitt. Now, you gals can try and argue that he's so ugly he's cute, which I can forgive, but I am still not going to watch this movie ever again. He is just too icky. Then again, if they'd cast someone attractive in that part, it would have been very, very wrong to have a way-too-young Natalie Portman hanging all over him, so I can kind of rationalize the casting director's choice.
12) Godzilla (1998). How in the name of god's balls do you fuck up a movie about a giant nuclear fire-breathing mutant reptile? HOW? Answer: by moving it to New York, casting Matthew Broderick, and only showing Godzilla's ass.
My main recollection of this movie is of watching Godzilla's backside as this supposedly scary mutant lizard careened down street after street running away from shit that he - sorry, she - should have just stomped flat. Where was the building smashing? The car crushing? The jets of blue fire? The wanton destruction and death-dealing? Where was Godzilla's asskickery and aggression?
Even more unforgivable, halfway through, it becomes obvious that the producers were only sleepwalking through the first part of the movie to get to the real excitement. Baby Godzillas! Which are totally not like the raptors from the Jurasssic Park movies. No way.
Oh, AND this movie featured an appearance by . . . Jean Reno!
This movie was so lame it gave me the stomach flu, which was still better than the movie. End of story.
13) Se7en. Oh, lovely. What we have here is a dressed-up murderer/morality tale with a twist at the end, meant to appeal to people who think the average serial-killer movie lacks enough pretentiousness. From opening credits to closing this movie is unpleasant, which would be forgivable if it had something meaningful to say about human nature, but you know, I watched it twice, and it really doesn't. All it does is say the same old things in a nastier, more horrific way, attempting to get the viewer's attention with shock as a way of saying it means Serious Business.
What annoys me most about this movie is not that it's the same old garbage prettied up with some moralizing schlock, like any other second-rate serial-killer mystery; it's that people flocked to this in droves, insisting it was "great cinema." Sure, if you like this kind of movie, it's a good example of its ilk. It does not transcend its genre, like Silence of the Lambs did, but it does have some good points.
Still, the faft that it's a solid example of its admittedly narrow and unpleasant genre in no way explain why people exhort others to see it time and again, as though sitting through it would be good for them. As though it had some profound truth to reveal. Enjoy it for what it is, if that's your bag, but don't insist it's fine art. It isn't. It's just another serial killer movie.
14) Batman and Robin. It's hard to muster true vitriol for a horrible movie that's widely regarded as horrible, even by the people who were in it, and so I almost didn't include this on the list. I changed my mind at the last minute because Batman and Robin really deserves a mention, not because it was so ridiculously camp but because it managed to crap on decades of character evolution whereby Batman went from a silly guy in an ill-fitting costume to a scary and dangerous man driven by the darkest part of his own soul. It didn't treat Batman with respect. It made him into the latex-clad god of repressed homoerotic impulses in a movie whose overall look reminded me of nothing more than the gay pride version of the Ice Capades. This might have been forgivable, as I love a good gay hero, and I don't even mind ice-skating movies, but Batman and Robin also featured rollback. This is automatic cinematic condemnation.
Aaah. I feel better.
I know that this list is nowhere near complete, but 14 is all I could come up with at a single sitting. There may well be further installments.
Just like there are some movies that are bad, but enjoyable anyway, there are some movies that are good, but that I don't want to see again. Many are, in fact, perfectly entertaining movies, but something about them roused my ire. Sometimes it was sheer unpleasantness, sometimes it was a single actor, and sometimes it was merely my personal taste making me loathe something all out of proportion.
The list does contain bad movies, but I vetted my choices for movies that were not just crappy MST3K fodder, but were more than ordinarily bad. The movie must have either sucked in a truly epic way, or ruined a sequel or franchise. Preference was given to high-budget, much-hyped movies, and movies that are popular. I tried not to include movies that are widely regarded as terrible, like the Star Wars prequels, unless something else about them was particularly heinous.
At any rate, and in no particular order, they are:
1) Catwoman. This indefensible piece of trash didn't even have the saving grace of being fun. It was just painful and stupid. There were only two cool things about it: Halle Berry's pants as Catwoman were pretty nifty, and watching Sharon Stone stab Halle Berry in the ass was great. Just between you and me, that's not enough reason to see a movie. Perhaps the worst thing about this movie is not that it was a bad movie, but that it was a bad Catwoman movie. Thanks to this piece of shit, we will never see a good Catwoman movie. At least, not for a good long time. And thus, another cool character is ruined by a shitty movie.
2) The Fog (2005 remake). The original is one of my favorite scary movies, simply because it's so simple and understated and creepy. The remake takes everything about the original that was good and ruins it. Even the hotness of Tom Welling and Selma Blair could not redeem it. It is indescribably atrocious, and I pray that anyone reading this will have the good sense to heed my warning and stay far, far away from this movie. Especially if they liked the original.
3) Event Horizon. It scared me into a three-day panic attack. I cannot abide this movie. I understand from people who weren't scared out of their minds that it's a pretty good Lovecraft-in-space sort of horror movie with a few good moments. I, however, regard it as the most horrifying thing I have ever seen. Even though the IMDB says Jason Isaacs is in this movie, I will not watch it a second time just to find him. That is how much I wish I could un-see it.
4) Pete's Dragon. What a horrible thing to inflict on a child. I recall having to watch this repeatedly in school on days when our teachers were out sick. I remember nothing about it except that it is boring, the dragon is extremely uncool, and I hated the kid who starred in it. Why it is still apparently regarded as a classic of children's cinema is utterly beyond me. I would happily hunt down and burn every copy of this movie, if I had time to do so. I'd also like to hunt down those responsible for it.
5) Hey Good Lookin'. I may take a beating for this, but I dislike Ralph Bakshi's movies in general, and I hated this one in particular. For reasons that are difficult to articulate - it's probably a Southern thing - I loathe stuff that's very "Noo Yawk!" and so I didn't find much to love here. Plus, Bakshi's character designs just piss me off. They are the opposite of appealing.
Some of his movies are tolerable. Fire and Ice was stupid, but at least entertaining in a bad sword-and-sorcery way. Yes, the characters were rotoscoped, but they at least were not his usual ugly-ass over-caricatured original designs. Wizards was pretty lame overall, with some good moments; I never want to see it again, but neither am I sorry I saw it in the first place. Cool World was an awesome idea that failed utterly in execution, leaving the soundtrack as the only salvageable thing about it.
Everything else Bakshi has done, as far as I am concerned, is rat vomit. By which I mean vomit comprised of half-digested rat, not the vomit of rats, which would be significantly less foul. I speak, by the way, without having seen Fritz The Cat; I don't know, that one might be okay.
6) The Ring. The second most horrible thing I have ever seen. I quit watching after a certain point because it was too freaky. And yet, I am hard pressed to describe exactly what it was that set me off about it. I am always perplexed by people who claim they did not find it scary. Either they're just wired profoundly differently from me, or they lack the necessary imagination to get a good case of the creeps. It was undoubtedly an effective horror movie, but I never want to see it again.
7) The Cell. The third most horrible thing I have ever seen. I quit watching after the deli-sliced horse scene. I really can't defend this movie in any way. It was dreadful enough, both in terms of script and horrific imagery, to completely override the beautiful sets and cinematography.
8) Saving Private Ryan. I will never see the rest of this movie, because the first fifteen minutes sent me straight to the bathroom, where I spent half an hour in a cold sweat, trying not to throw up my toenails. I understand that the point of the brutal opening was to place the viewer in the same shocked and terrified state as the troops, but, see, I'm usually in a state of low-level anxiety, so I don't need much goading to go to panic mode.
Don't get me wrong. I'm certain this is not a bad movie. People I trust have said it's quite good. I'm just never going to watch it. I'm angry with it. That is the kind of shit I wish I could delete from my memory. I wish people would stop telling me to see it. I'm not going to gain any insights about humanity by throwing up into my own lap, thank you. I certainly do not recommend that anyone else see it. Its success has already led to movies that use that level of violence without having a meaningful plot, and that kind of thing, done for its own sake, is just NOT OKAY.
I'm not saying shit like that should be banned (though I wish it wouldn't get made in the first place) I'm just saying I want a new rating that distinguishes between fun action-movie violence that has gore and occasional mutilation, but is overall not really disturbing (Conan, The Pathfinder, Underworld, The Patriot) and hideous war violence in which people get their legs blown off and their entrails scattered all over the place (Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down). Neither R nor NC-17 effectively do that.
9) The Matrix trilogy. Now, don't get me wrong. These are perfectly serviceable action movies with some really excellent fight choreography and some pretty kickass music. I still hate them.
I liked the first one fairly well, mostly for the action scenes, but I actively loathed the following two, so the first has become contaminated by association. They are movies that think they're smarter than they are - just like many Matrix fans, whose incessant fanboying has, incidentally, contributed greatly to making me hate the movies. It's hard for me to think of any movies more overrated, yet the number of people who insist that these movies are philosophical works of art is staggering.
The series is actively unpleasant to watch, and not just because its message is not always a happy one; visually, they movies are also incredibly bleak and uncomfortable. The presence of Keanu Reeves further condemns them. Most damning of all, their much-vaunted "originality" is nothing new to those of us even passingly familiar with the tropes of science fiction and Hong Kong action flicks, so they fail on that level as well.
You want a pretty good movie that says some of the same things the first Matrix movie said, and says it really well? The 13th Floor. And yet nobody remembers it. They are too busy shitting their pants over the Matrix.
10) The Hulk. Dear God, I almost forgot this festering pile of dog vomit. What on earth induced the studio to hand a Hulk movie to Ang Lee is and always will be utterly beyond me. It was supposed to be an action movie, but what came out the other end was unrecognizable sewage. This movie was just dreadful, and the screen-within-screen technique was less reminiscent of comic book panels than those annoying sliding popup ads that make me want to commit homicide. Eric Bana has been tolerable in other movies, but here he is a complete waste, so badly miscast that I shudder to think of how lame their pool of actors must have been to induce them to pick him. Poor Jenny Connelly is totally wasted here, as is Sam Elliott. And, as a bonus, this movie contains Josh Lucas! I hate him, too.
11) Léon: The Professional. I'm going to catch flak for this one, too. I know this movie has some die-hard devotees and that Jean Reno, for some reason inexplicable to me, has quite a few amorous female fans. I'm not saying you can't like the movie, and I'm not saying it was a bad movie, all I'm really saying is that Jean Reno is so hideous that he makes a mummified crocodile monitor in a blonde wig look like Brad Pitt. Now, you gals can try and argue that he's so ugly he's cute, which I can forgive, but I am still not going to watch this movie ever again. He is just too icky. Then again, if they'd cast someone attractive in that part, it would have been very, very wrong to have a way-too-young Natalie Portman hanging all over him, so I can kind of rationalize the casting director's choice.
12) Godzilla (1998). How in the name of god's balls do you fuck up a movie about a giant nuclear fire-breathing mutant reptile? HOW? Answer: by moving it to New York, casting Matthew Broderick, and only showing Godzilla's ass.
My main recollection of this movie is of watching Godzilla's backside as this supposedly scary mutant lizard careened down street after street running away from shit that he - sorry, she - should have just stomped flat. Where was the building smashing? The car crushing? The jets of blue fire? The wanton destruction and death-dealing? Where was Godzilla's asskickery and aggression?
Even more unforgivable, halfway through, it becomes obvious that the producers were only sleepwalking through the first part of the movie to get to the real excitement. Baby Godzillas! Which are totally not like the raptors from the Jurasssic Park movies. No way.
Oh, AND this movie featured an appearance by . . . Jean Reno!
This movie was so lame it gave me the stomach flu, which was still better than the movie. End of story.
13) Se7en. Oh, lovely. What we have here is a dressed-up murderer/morality tale with a twist at the end, meant to appeal to people who think the average serial-killer movie lacks enough pretentiousness. From opening credits to closing this movie is unpleasant, which would be forgivable if it had something meaningful to say about human nature, but you know, I watched it twice, and it really doesn't. All it does is say the same old things in a nastier, more horrific way, attempting to get the viewer's attention with shock as a way of saying it means Serious Business.
What annoys me most about this movie is not that it's the same old garbage prettied up with some moralizing schlock, like any other second-rate serial-killer mystery; it's that people flocked to this in droves, insisting it was "great cinema." Sure, if you like this kind of movie, it's a good example of its ilk. It does not transcend its genre, like Silence of the Lambs did, but it does have some good points.
Still, the faft that it's a solid example of its admittedly narrow and unpleasant genre in no way explain why people exhort others to see it time and again, as though sitting through it would be good for them. As though it had some profound truth to reveal. Enjoy it for what it is, if that's your bag, but don't insist it's fine art. It isn't. It's just another serial killer movie.
14) Batman and Robin. It's hard to muster true vitriol for a horrible movie that's widely regarded as horrible, even by the people who were in it, and so I almost didn't include this on the list. I changed my mind at the last minute because Batman and Robin really deserves a mention, not because it was so ridiculously camp but because it managed to crap on decades of character evolution whereby Batman went from a silly guy in an ill-fitting costume to a scary and dangerous man driven by the darkest part of his own soul. It didn't treat Batman with respect. It made him into the latex-clad god of repressed homoerotic impulses in a movie whose overall look reminded me of nothing more than the gay pride version of the Ice Capades. This might have been forgivable, as I love a good gay hero, and I don't even mind ice-skating movies, but Batman and Robin also featured rollback. This is automatic cinematic condemnation.
Aaah. I feel better.
I know that this list is nowhere near complete, but 14 is all I could come up with at a single sitting. There may well be further installments.