The Five Worst Movies I've Ever Seen
This is a meme. To participate, please list the five worst movies you have ever seen, with at least one sentence each that explains why they were so bad. Optionally, begin by listing your criteria for movie badness.
For a movie to make my worst ever list, it must be frequently or entirely boring. If it is stupid and bad in every other respect, and yet is consistently entertaining, such as Volcano "The Coast is Toast," it is disqualified.
Criteria I. Boring.
In addition, it must fulfill one or more of the following criteria. The more it fulfills, the more likely it is to hit the top five:
Criteria II a. The plot is stupid, nonsensical, requires all or most of the characters to be stupid or insane, or all of the above.
II b. The dialogue is not merely bland, but actively stupid or laughable.
II c. The acting is bad, incompetent, or non-existent, and/or actors are absurdly miscast.
II d. The directing is bad and/or pretentious.
II e. The movie is unintentionally humorous, or intends to be funny but fails. The latter is worse.
II f. Misc failings of craft: poor editing, bombastic or sappy score, bad CGI, technical inaccuracies, etc.
II g. Misc failings of content: purposeless and graphic violence, sex scenes that make the audience feel like they're getting a Bad Touch, racism, sexism, homophobia, miscellaneous prejudices, beating audience over their heads with a moral especially if the moral is something like "racism is bad," use of cute children for cheap sentiment, gratuitous gross-outs of any nature, gratuitous CGI, etc.
5. I don't know the name of this movie, since I saw it at a film festival with my father and it was never released. It was a gang noir movie, in which there was a final shocking twist that made the entire thing retrospectively make no sense whatsoever. Basically, it went like this (names made up): A drug lord, John, gives a bunch of characters a hundred pounds of coke to sell for him to another drug lord, Mike. This is done via Mike's courier, Hal. Hijinks ensue. Then, OMG! It turns out that Hal is actually working for John. Hal takes John's money, pays it to the guys, and delivers the coke to John. But... WTF... John was the one who gave them the coke the first time. So John set up an elaborate scheme for no apparent purpose, to sell coke to himself. Again, WTF?
However, that was not what landed this on my worst ever list. What did that was when all the characters were holed up in a cabin in the desert, and one of them suddenly said, "Let's get some whores!" They pick up the phone and call in the whores, who proceed to enact an incredibly graphic, twenty-minute orgy, which had no bearing on the plot. While I slowly sank into my seat. Which, as you'll recall, was next to my Dad's seat. Yeah.
4. Revenge of the Sith
3. Things to do in Denver When You're Dead.
This total misfire of a black comedy noir remains the only movie I've ever walked out on. The comedy is not funny, the violence is gratuitous and stomach-turning, the wisecracks are painful, the plot is moronic nonsense, and a good cast is totally wasted. Moreover, the characters all speak in a ridiculous made-up slang that is neither intuitively comprehensible nor sounds like anything any human being would say. So they either painfully explain what they mean by saying something like, "If this doesn't work out, we'll all be buckwheat. 'Buckwheat' means we'll be horribly killed," or else don't explain it and leave us wondering what the hell they're talking about, like, "Jimmy is a boat drink. Let's Copacabana." Simultaneously cutesy and repulsive: a bad combination.
Inexplicably, this seems to have a lot of fans at IMDB.com.
2. One Night Stand.
The title tells us there will be a one-night stand, so when Wesley Snipes meets Natassja Kinski, their incredibly slow and drawn-out flirtation becomes more and and more ludicrous the longer it's drawn out, until the audience was giggling at every portentous innuendo. They have sex. Snipes goes back home. The dog shoves its nose in his crotch, and his wife says, "She smells another bitch on you." Then it cuts to a close up of a giant jar filled with enormous, phallic, green pickles. The audience howled.
Trouble was, this was clearly intended to be deeply serious and angsty, but the director, Mike Figgis, chose to express the deep angst and seriousness by having the characters constantly speak with unintentional innuendo, and the effect was comic gold. Or would have been if the movie hadn't been so damn slow. Robert Downey Jr. has a subplot as a man dying of AIDS that has nothing to do with the main plot whatsoever. I think at one point Snipes hallucinates that Downey's at a party in a jester's suit, but maybe that was my hallucination. At the end, the two married couples switch partners and live happily ever after. By then the audience was openly jeering.
1. The Phantom Menace.
I was really looking forward to this. So was everyone else when I saw it on its very first screening. The music began, and everyone cheered. And then, as we all read the opening crawl, I felt the air slowly leave the theatre, for instead of the first movie's farrago of rebels! evil empires! space battles! it went something like this: "Naboo has entered a tax bracket of 38% due to tariffs on the manufacture and export of luxury goods. The Galactic IRS is concerned about its failure to file a W 1066, and has sent inspectors to audit its receipts for the last twelve years."
Never have I experienced such a collective WTF as I did when we all read that crawl for the first time. This is the bad sort of breaking genre expectations: when you don't give an audience what they want, and instead give them something that is not only in a different tone and/or genre, but is horrible and far inferior to whatever they were expecting.
Then the movie started. Never have a seen a Hollywood movie that was so incompetently structured, paced, and edited. Scenes did not have beginnings, middles, and ends, like they do in every other professionally produced picture I've ever seen: instead, they just started, then stuff happened, then they cut to something else.
It was boring. The action scenes were boring. The emotional scenes were boring. Terrific actors like Ewan McGregor were boring. The script was horrible. The only person in the entire movie who was not boring was Ray Parks as Darth Maul, and I assume that's because he's a stunt man and is used to working entirely by himself against a blue screen with no direction whatsoever, which was clearly what was going on with everyone else, because they were all flat in the same way. Kid Anakin was annoying. Jar-Jar Binks was embarassing. The droids were ridiculous. There can be no tension when the enemy is ridiculous. The CGI sucked, so the characters all seemed to have no weight or mass. The retconning of the Jedi mythology was awful and morally objectionable, as the idiotic midichlorian thing meant that you have to have the right blood to be a Jedi, rather than the personal will and discipline that was espoused in the first set of movies.
Horrible. Horrible. Horrible.
Dishonorable Mentions: Con Air, The Eiger Sanction, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and The Village. I'm sure I've traumatically blocked out lots more.
If there's enough public demand, I will write about the five worst plays I've ever seen. But for now... Tag, you're it!
For a movie to make my worst ever list, it must be frequently or entirely boring. If it is stupid and bad in every other respect, and yet is consistently entertaining, such as Volcano "The Coast is Toast," it is disqualified.
Criteria I. Boring.
In addition, it must fulfill one or more of the following criteria. The more it fulfills, the more likely it is to hit the top five:
Criteria II a. The plot is stupid, nonsensical, requires all or most of the characters to be stupid or insane, or all of the above.
II b. The dialogue is not merely bland, but actively stupid or laughable.
II c. The acting is bad, incompetent, or non-existent, and/or actors are absurdly miscast.
II d. The directing is bad and/or pretentious.
II e. The movie is unintentionally humorous, or intends to be funny but fails. The latter is worse.
II f. Misc failings of craft: poor editing, bombastic or sappy score, bad CGI, technical inaccuracies, etc.
II g. Misc failings of content: purposeless and graphic violence, sex scenes that make the audience feel like they're getting a Bad Touch, racism, sexism, homophobia, miscellaneous prejudices, beating audience over their heads with a moral especially if the moral is something like "racism is bad," use of cute children for cheap sentiment, gratuitous gross-outs of any nature, gratuitous CGI, etc.
5. I don't know the name of this movie, since I saw it at a film festival with my father and it was never released. It was a gang noir movie, in which there was a final shocking twist that made the entire thing retrospectively make no sense whatsoever. Basically, it went like this (names made up): A drug lord, John, gives a bunch of characters a hundred pounds of coke to sell for him to another drug lord, Mike. This is done via Mike's courier, Hal. Hijinks ensue. Then, OMG! It turns out that Hal is actually working for John. Hal takes John's money, pays it to the guys, and delivers the coke to John. But... WTF... John was the one who gave them the coke the first time. So John set up an elaborate scheme for no apparent purpose, to sell coke to himself. Again, WTF?
However, that was not what landed this on my worst ever list. What did that was when all the characters were holed up in a cabin in the desert, and one of them suddenly said, "Let's get some whores!" They pick up the phone and call in the whores, who proceed to enact an incredibly graphic, twenty-minute orgy, which had no bearing on the plot. While I slowly sank into my seat. Which, as you'll recall, was next to my Dad's seat. Yeah.
4. Revenge of the Sith
3. Things to do in Denver When You're Dead.
This total misfire of a black comedy noir remains the only movie I've ever walked out on. The comedy is not funny, the violence is gratuitous and stomach-turning, the wisecracks are painful, the plot is moronic nonsense, and a good cast is totally wasted. Moreover, the characters all speak in a ridiculous made-up slang that is neither intuitively comprehensible nor sounds like anything any human being would say. So they either painfully explain what they mean by saying something like, "If this doesn't work out, we'll all be buckwheat. 'Buckwheat' means we'll be horribly killed," or else don't explain it and leave us wondering what the hell they're talking about, like, "Jimmy is a boat drink. Let's Copacabana." Simultaneously cutesy and repulsive: a bad combination.
Inexplicably, this seems to have a lot of fans at IMDB.com.
2. One Night Stand.
The title tells us there will be a one-night stand, so when Wesley Snipes meets Natassja Kinski, their incredibly slow and drawn-out flirtation becomes more and and more ludicrous the longer it's drawn out, until the audience was giggling at every portentous innuendo. They have sex. Snipes goes back home. The dog shoves its nose in his crotch, and his wife says, "She smells another bitch on you." Then it cuts to a close up of a giant jar filled with enormous, phallic, green pickles. The audience howled.
Trouble was, this was clearly intended to be deeply serious and angsty, but the director, Mike Figgis, chose to express the deep angst and seriousness by having the characters constantly speak with unintentional innuendo, and the effect was comic gold. Or would have been if the movie hadn't been so damn slow. Robert Downey Jr. has a subplot as a man dying of AIDS that has nothing to do with the main plot whatsoever. I think at one point Snipes hallucinates that Downey's at a party in a jester's suit, but maybe that was my hallucination. At the end, the two married couples switch partners and live happily ever after. By then the audience was openly jeering.
1. The Phantom Menace.
I was really looking forward to this. So was everyone else when I saw it on its very first screening. The music began, and everyone cheered. And then, as we all read the opening crawl, I felt the air slowly leave the theatre, for instead of the first movie's farrago of rebels! evil empires! space battles! it went something like this: "Naboo has entered a tax bracket of 38% due to tariffs on the manufacture and export of luxury goods. The Galactic IRS is concerned about its failure to file a W 1066, and has sent inspectors to audit its receipts for the last twelve years."
Never have I experienced such a collective WTF as I did when we all read that crawl for the first time. This is the bad sort of breaking genre expectations: when you don't give an audience what they want, and instead give them something that is not only in a different tone and/or genre, but is horrible and far inferior to whatever they were expecting.
Then the movie started. Never have a seen a Hollywood movie that was so incompetently structured, paced, and edited. Scenes did not have beginnings, middles, and ends, like they do in every other professionally produced picture I've ever seen: instead, they just started, then stuff happened, then they cut to something else.
It was boring. The action scenes were boring. The emotional scenes were boring. Terrific actors like Ewan McGregor were boring. The script was horrible. The only person in the entire movie who was not boring was Ray Parks as Darth Maul, and I assume that's because he's a stunt man and is used to working entirely by himself against a blue screen with no direction whatsoever, which was clearly what was going on with everyone else, because they were all flat in the same way. Kid Anakin was annoying. Jar-Jar Binks was embarassing. The droids were ridiculous. There can be no tension when the enemy is ridiculous. The CGI sucked, so the characters all seemed to have no weight or mass. The retconning of the Jedi mythology was awful and morally objectionable, as the idiotic midichlorian thing meant that you have to have the right blood to be a Jedi, rather than the personal will and discipline that was espoused in the first set of movies.
Horrible. Horrible. Horrible.
Dishonorable Mentions: Con Air, The Eiger Sanction, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and The Village. I'm sure I've traumatically blocked out lots more.
If there's enough public demand, I will write about the five worst plays I've ever seen. But for now... Tag, you're it!