The 50 Worst Movies of All Time

It’s a scientific fact that four out of five flicks cause headache, nausea, and vomiting. But which cause severe gunbarrelsuckingitis?

By 1980 disco was gasping on life support. Unfortunately, nobody told the Village People it was time to pull the plug. So moviegoers were subjected to this last ode to mirror balls, disguised as an inspirational biopic of how the group’s construction worker, cop, Indian, GI, cowboy, and biker joined forces and learned to spell YMCA.

Dress up pretty boy Don Johnson as a cowboy and greaseball Mickey Rourke as a biker and give ’em guns—a drug-trafficking bank is fucking with their local bar! Cool, right? Not even if Philip Michael Thomas were thrown in as the Maytag repairman could this brain-dead buddy pic have sucked tailpipe any harder.

At last! Julia Roberts totally naked! She plays a secretary who uses her jahoobies to beat the bad guys. Ha, ha, fooled ya! This bait ’n’ switch chick flick is actually about an overbearing, Wonderbra’d rabble-rouser who yaps at an octave level somewhere between fingernails on a chalkboard and a dog whistle. Who’s she hollering at? Who else—male corporate wags who dumped a little poison here and there.

The use of unnecessary violence toward the makers of this sequel…has been approved. Not only did this sorely misguided sequel fail to elicit one measly chuckle, but it dared to try replacing John Belushi with a bloated John Goodman and a pink-cheeked harmonica-honking brat. Prepare to burn in hell, Dan Aykroyd.

In his last appearance as 007, a 58-year-old Roger Moore creaks into action against Silicon Valley blower-upper Christopher Walken and his ultrabeastly gal pal Grace Jones. Although we have a blind allegiance to all Bond films, we feel compelled to go on record saying that anyone who plays the MI6 agent should be young enough to pop a boner.

By this fifth installment in the simian saga, the story wasn’t just about monkeys, but apparently being directed, written, and produced by them, too. Battle was slapped together for a third of the original’s budget (the costumes are moth-eaten) and the climactic showdown pits ape against humans in slow school buses.

The hiiillls are aliiive with the sound of…us blowing chunks. Baron Von Trapp rules his offspring with an iron hand till peppy nun Julie Andrews brainwashes them to break into songs about baby deer and raindrops on roses—putting us in the uneasy position of feeling relief when Nazis show up to stomp their tea party.

A Breakfast Club curse? Think about it: Molly and Ally both boarded the Oblivion Express not long after its release, and for the whole of the ’90s, Anthony M. Hall had no happier reason to pull on his acid-washed baggies and lace up the white high tops than this buddy-cop caper, costarring a midget in a rubber gnome costume.

Check it—C. Thomas Howell plays a rich white boy posing as a G in order to wax it at Harvard Law School by overdosing on "suntan pills." Unfortunately, such callous racism prompted hostility among African-Americans that eight years later helped fuel the L.A. riots. To this day costars Leslie Nielsen and James Earl Jones just can’t get along.

Why’d they invent Viagra? Because a whole generation of men watched this movie on pay-per-view in their hotel rooms, hoping for some decent soft-core porn. Instead they were treated to the sight of Rosie O’Donnell shoehorned into a leather corset. Director Garry Marshall should refund your eight bucks for this masturbate ’n’ switch.

Yep, Sean Connery traded his license to kill for a red diaper. The year is 2293, and civilization has split between primitive "brutals" and a colony of effete, telepathic intellectuals. See, bad boy Connery stows away in a floating god’s forehead, and, er, never mind.

Thank God Hollywood finally got off its lazy, formulaic ass and made a musical comedy with Sylvester Stallone and Dolly Parton! Sly nailed the role of an uneducated brickhead whose voice could neuter a cat. And Dolly gives an unforgettable performance as…a country-western singer. Let’s hope Mr. Stallone cowrites a sequel!

We’re not alleging Scientology brainwashes its flaky flock, but that’d explain John Travolta’s fervor to turn L. Ron Hubbard’s book into this megabomb. The humans-enslaved-by-aliens plot is lame, and Travolta’s manic performance as a nine-foot cosmic overlord makes Ricardo Montalban’s Khan look positively nuanced.

Hey, pleasure boaters—make way! A whiny computer genius who’s got copper poisoning has hijacked a jewel-laden cruise ship that’s careening out of control at 12 knots! We hope Jason Patric was wearing a life vest, because as Sandra Bullock’s new LAPD boyfriend he helped send Speed 3 to a watery grave.

We’d change our name to an unpronounceable symbol, too, if it were connected to this cinematic pit stain. Ditching the funky vibe of Purple Rain, Prince bored fans shitless by prancing around the Mediterranean as the most implausible con man ever and falling head-over-platform-heels in love with rich bitch Kristin Scott Thomas.

Apparently, our fearsome T-800 grew a vagina during the filming of Twins and Kindergarten Cop and then got knocked up like a drunk virgin on prom night. But the weird science here is that this Ivan Reitman comedy spooge paved the way for Arnold’s redheaded stepchildren, like End of Days and Collateral Damage. If only he’d been on the pill…

We’re not sure who set back race relations more, James Earl Ray or the makers of this Old South soap opera. Because, apparently, slavery was mostly about bad actors getting it on in the hayloft and delivering lines like "Pleasure me, you ebony wench!" It’ll take hypnosis to forget seeing that English neighbor from The Jeffersons inspect a slave for hemorrhoids.

Our love for plotless, gratuitously violent movies is matched only by our hatred of murderous cults that dance with their axes à la the musical Stomp. Sure, Stallone fires his twin Colt 45s nonstop, but unfortunately none of the bullets bounce off Brigitte Nielsen’s rubber breasts and kill Cobra’s cornfed sidekick and the obligatory asshole police captain.

Hey, it’s another brilliant, intellectual, thought-provoking Woody Allen movie! Oh, boy! And Bette Midler plays his wife! They argue a lot in a shopping mall! And—are you sitting down?—Bill Irwin’s in it, as a mime! All right, mime jokes! Hey, wait…where you going? I thought we were gonna rent something together…

We’ll tell you what we want, what we really, really want. We want 92 minutes of our lives back and a five-way lesbian porn video to make up for this affront to A Hard Day’s Night—not to mention civilization as we know it. Apparently, Girl Power means farting around miserable London, acting stupid, and dressing like a street ho.

Hey, we understand that Hollywood was doing handstands in a mountain of coke back then, but Olivia Newton-John as a Greek muse who inspires an artist to create a roller disco rink? Come on! The finale, complete with codger Gene Kelly on skates, is an endless, chaotic clusterfuck that killed off musicals for years. So we owe it that much.

It pretends to be a drama about New York’s singles scene, but when was the last time you saw some douchebag bartender take five goddamn minutes to mix a drink—and be wildly cheered on for making a show of it? And while we never see Tom Cruise slurp a brain eraser off Elisabeth Shue’s rack, he does perfect the selfish-yuppie role he’s run with ever since.

Friends, have pity on Vanilla Ice. Is there one among you who didn’t once sport a jackass haircut or dress like a bargain-hunting Martian pimp at some point in the early ’90s? You, private citizen, can burn all photographic records of such excesses. Ice will have this albatross around his neck long after his razor-shaped eyebrows have gone gray and his truss hangs down past the crotch of his neon-yellow genie pants.

When he wasn’t gorging on fried Crisco-and-jelly sandwiches, Elvis was cranking out cheapo musicals—and this one ranks pompadour and sideburns above the rest on the Shit-o-meter. Sure, the King looks stiff playing an oil baron who trades places with a lowly water-skiing instructor, but Clambake gave the world such classics as, um, "Hey, Hey, Hey."

Can you imagine how many toy makers wanted Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich’s heads on a platter after this colossal load was pinched out on the moviegoing public? When a movie is so bad that little kids aren’t interested in plastic lizards that breathe fire, you know you’re in trouble. But how could this have flopped? It starred Matthew Broderick!

Every high school had one of those kids who could beat the odds and get every question wrong on a true-false test. With Howard the Duck, George Lucas was that kid. From the man who made Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and the Indiana Jones movies we get this militantly unfunny flick about a cigar-smoking duck.

Chest-shaving Belgian midget Jean-Claude Van Damme is a counter-terrorist—whatever that is—hunting has-been Mickey Rourke. Rourke, in turn, is gunning for Van Damme’s preggo wife. This film also stars Dennis Rodman, prompting the Anti-Rodman-in-Movies legislation currently before Congress.

According to Amnesty International, Iraqi political prisoners are forced to watch this robot love story as a form of torture. Ouch! As runaway domestic droids, Andy Kaufman and Bernadette Peters make toaster ovens seem charismatic, sputtering lines like "I operate most efficiently with maximum data input." Robot humor slays us!

Cross-dressing serial slasher Norman Bates seems perfectly rational compared with the loon who thought it’d be neat to remake—shot for shot—this Hitchcock classic. The only innovation in this pointless experiment is how director Gus Van Sant managed to film Anne Heche’s shower scene without revealing that she’s actually a 10-year-old boy.

"Look, honey—Peter Pan!" How many hapless parents accidentally subjected their impressionable children to the hideous spectacle of Robin Williams in tights? Oh, and the tykes won’t spend a few years in therapy sorting out Dustin Hoffman’s menacing drag queen Captain Hook? Just sit Junior in front of an autopsy video—it’ll be far less traumatic.

The United Nations Geological Survey maintains an exhaustively detailed database of arable land throughout the world. And according to its latest data, it is not possible to grow enough marijuana for this movie to make even the slightest bit of sense. There simply isn’t room.

Whoa, deep, man. There’s this movie stunt man played by a really stoned-looking Dennis Hopper, see? He shoots a Western in Peru and then sticks around afterward, only to be crucified by the movie-crazed natives. See, it’s like a parable about the death of colonialism and Western culture and stuff. Like, is that heavy or what? Pass the Long Bong Silver, dude.

Ever wonder what could possibly make you kill yourself? How about watching a young John Travolta prance around in tighty-whities for two hours and repeatedly bang his mom? At least that’s our interpretation of his creepy relationship with Lily Tomlin, his domineering 40-year-old look-alike lover. Coincidentally, Moment was released the same year as the Jim Jones mass suicide at Jonestown.

If you need a covert operative to work in a hostile environment that just happens to be littered with gymnastics equipment, Johnathan Cabot is your man. U.S. gymnast Kurt Thomas plays Cabot, who fights for America’s right to build a missile base in tiny Parmistan. On the plus side, the cinematographer helps make diminutive Thomas look human-size.

"Oh, my soul, let me be in you now…" Whoops, we bought a ticket to a WWII action flick but wandered into a candy-ass poetry reading. Supposedly about a battle for Guadalcanal, Line had plenty of existential windblown grass and precious little combat, leaving Nick Nolte and Sean Penn holding their dicks instead of their rifles.

A musical…about a love-struck poet…in France? Save us a seat! Only drugged-out hairdressers and pompous critics could endure this two-hour torture session. Not even Nicole Kidman on a giant swing could disguise the fact that this pretentious pabulum was merely a hyperactive fashion show pretending to be a movie.

Meersa arna boorba zoo zoo…Bafourna moola hooky hooky la la low… Bisguh foofa Jodie Foster la la la…bazoozoo koo koo koo! Loo loo Liam Neeson munga munga Natasha Richardson git gat giddle anna gat gasay… Loo loo lee. Mecka lecka hi mecka hiney ho chippa. Translation: Despite heavy star power, this movie fucking sucked.

Not even if Tom Green were cast as Michael Corleone and the plot revolved around an Osama scat video could this Coppola turd be any more of a disgrace to its two flawless predecessors. With no Duvall, a wretched Sofia Coppola, and impossible-to-meet expectations, this baby was released stillborn on Christmas day.

The $92 million idea: Give Geena Davis a sword and put her in situations where her blouse is likely to get ripped. Throw in a love interest with whomever—Matthew Modine? Sure, fine—and let Geena’s husband, Cliffhanger director Renny Harlin, hold the megaphone. The result? An $11 million gross. Oh, we get it—it’s a comedy!

Poor, timid Jennifer Grey will never get a chance to have the time of her life with the unimaginably heterosexual Patrick Swayze. But wait! Swayze’s tramp dance partner just had an abortion! Love triumphs thanks to a fetus ex machina. Yep, nobody puts Baby in the corner…or in anything like a real movie since this stink-o-rama.

Adam, Adam, why hast thou forsaken us? Just when we’d learned to appreciate The Waterboy and Happy Gilmore as unpolished comic gems, you went all high-concept, playing a mush-mouthed spawn of Satan. Too bad that between all the special effects and cameos you forgot to stick in a single funny gag.

Let’s see: Meg Ryan crinkles her pug nose while she yaks (and yaks and yaks) about finding love with the right man. And Tom Hanks (or maybe Billy Crystal) is a normal, joke-cracking guy until he suddenly realizes he isn’t complete without—get this—Meg Ryan. And pug nose wears some funny hats. We forgetting anything?

News flash: One-trick Saturday Night Live skits that suck don’t stop sucking up on the big screen. A Night at the Roxbury, Coneheads, Superstar—it’s enough to make a goddamn bukkake video. We never cared whether Pat, played by Julia "Who?" Sweeney, was a he or a she as long as it can go screw itself.

As we had to keep our eyelids open with toothpicks, we can only remember that this wannabe epic was mind-numbingly boring. Maybe subtitled, too. Basically, a WWII pilot played by Ralph Fiennes gets shot down, burned to a crisp, and then meets a hottie nurse. But that’s where the hijinks end and our suffering begins.

Having given up on art films like Tin Cup and The Bodyguard, Kevin Costner directed, starred, and danced with letters in this tale of postapocalyptic mail service. There’s an underdog, world-saving superhero, some bad guys who smoke, and a troubled, imperfect love interest. Sound familiar? It’s Waterworld on land, with everything that implies.

Hollywood suit: "John, babe, in contrast to cool, streetwise Tony in Saturday Night Fever, we dress you up in a banana hammock, rub you down with baby oil, and…hello, Broadway!" Travolta: "Where do I sign?" Directed by Sly Stallone, Alive proved to be the first duker in a decade-long string of crappy Travolta flicks.

Hmm, a Texas-size asteroid is headed toward Earth, so NASA sends up a dipshit oil rig crew to nuke it. This idiotic story—which makes Chitty Chitty Bang Bang look like a documentary—is told through a nonstop hiccup of sappy scenes, including one where Liv Tyler and Ben Affleck playfully feed each other animal crackers. At that point we tossed our cookies.

The Mad Libs script: Robin is a (noun) in a (noun) whose superiors are put off by his unconventional antics. However, the (plural noun) all love him, and in the end Robin’s gently comic, sweetly philosophical love for humanity wins everybody over. In this case Williams is a doctor who yuks around in clown shoes in front of game-over cancer patients.

Gaggle o’ squawk boxes Sally Field, Daryl Hannah, Shirley MacLaine, Olympia Dukakis, and Julia Roberts are cast as small-town beauty parlor gossip queens. And what do you get? A weepy chick flick so menstrual it single-handedly emasculates Ron Jeremy’s entire body of work. Why is it a tearjerker? Who knows? Somebody broke a nail or something.

Holy Batcrap! You had to smell a stink bomb when pantywaist Robin got equal billing with the Dark Knight. How did window-dresser-turned-hack-director Joel Schumacher demolish a cherished franchise? He forgot it was about BATMAN! Schwarzenegger camping it up as Mr. Freeze…and Alicia Silverstone overstuffing her Batgirl tights…and given Batty’s prominent new codpiece, let’s hope the Superfriends have a "Don’t ask, don’t tell" policy. Ugh, enough.

Haven't seen all of these. Probably thank goodness!

Of those I have seen (and felt strongly about one way or the other), the authors nailed it with Nell, Cuththroat Island, Cocktail, Howard the Duck, Hook, The Postman, The English Patient, and especially Dune. (Who can forget the spectacular pop-top jugulars?)

OTOH, I rather liked Sound of Music and Armageddon. Moulin Rouge would probably have been entertaining had I been drunk enough. Had some great choreography and cinematography in the second half.

You've Got Mail was actually pretty nicely done, even if I did like its parent a lot better, the original The Shop Around The Corner. I'm also surprised that the author omitted Heaven's Gate...

I also liked Harry Got Mail in Seattle... all three... I don't care if they are all the same, they're cute.

Best Hanks/Meg Ryan movie: Joe Versus the Volcano

Dirty Dancing makes me shudder though... did then, does now... everything about it... [shudder]

I have to agree about "The English Patient". It was mind-numbing. but then - My husband went out and BOUGHT the damm thing. I tell him he can only watch it when I'm not home.

As to the rest of the list, I can say I haven't seen the majority of them. I watched about 10 minutes of "Moulin Rouge" before I ripped the disc out of the player.

Someone else who hates Ishtar as much as I did. I can't believe I paid full price to see it. I went with my mom and sister, and we were the only three people in the theatre. I thought the movie would never end...

Don't worry, you're not alone with Ishtar. That's the one that, I believe, sunk quickly out of sight as soon as it was released, and took an entire studio with it, wasn't it?

Just got my issue in the mail yesterday. This list is similar to their other "worst of" lists. What they list shows the editor's age and taste. It should have been called "The 50 movies we hate the most". Steel Magnolias, The Postman and Dirty Dancing were movies I liked, and ones that many do(Ok, so I may be one of the few that liked The Postman). Other movies they list such as Gymkata or Cool as Ice are no brainers. Unless you were into martial arts movies in the mid eighties, you wouldn't even know what Gymkata was.

I could easily think of dozens of other movies that qualify as the worst.

How could they have overlooked this one?

That was on their "100 Best 'B' Movies of All Time" list about two years ago.

The complete ouevre of Kim Basinger?

Aww, come on, you're forgetting "L.A. Confidential"! Great flick. But does that balance out "Real McCoy"? The world may never know...

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