Thirteen Ghosts. Awful, awful, awful. Not scary, not funny, not good at all.
Con-Air. More posing than a season of Power Rangers.
The Rundown. Movie with wrestler The Rock. I stopped watching after about 20 minutes. Painfully dull.
Pearl Harbor. 10 minutes. A disgrace.
Armageddon, Daredevil. Ben Affleck is in them.
Actually its correct title is "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". I refer to it as "The Unbearable Movie"
Class 1. A bad movie you sit through because of peer pressure
"Threesome" - college freshmen (boy, boy, girl) share a dorm room (room 3S of course). Dopey PG-13 rendering of the obvious plot.
Class 2. A really bad movie you force yourself to watch because, darn it, you paid for it!
"Chain Of Desire" - A wants B wants C wants ... and wants stupidly. Ugh.
"A Summer's Tale" - I really wanted to like this movie. No grand drama, no mood music, no special effects, no big budget, ... just a gentle, believable, sensitive story of a young man's pained attempts to decide which of three desireable young women he will choose. One easily believes this is a real story of common folk The acting and dialogue are refreshingly realistic, the filming is remarkably simple and honest, and the story so very genuine. Unfortunately, the story - so true to life - is truly stupid. All four have a vague notion of desiring romance, are so dishonest to themselves and to each other about their intentions, so trivialize sensitive and important matters, so magnify trivialities, so avoiding painful decisions and thus causing more pain, ultimately working into a corner where a decision must be made and hearts broken and commitments made. Except that none really care enough for the decision to really matter. Except that the decision is, based on a fortuitious phone call, an excuse to run away. I really wanted to like this movie...but in a painfully realistic fasion, it didn't make a decision and ran away.
One could argue that it remarkably captured reality. Trust me: your life is more interesting.
What is interesting is how it demonstrates the way young adults tend to choose a mate in Western culture: feign disinterest, don't know why a mate is being sought, trivialize everything, be directionless, break hearts all around, put trivialities first. The pathos just screams for purpose and direction.
"Beowulf" - A great movie opportunity blown badly. The modest success of the techno-feudal setting and the upper-B-movie cast is squandered by a script that has only the slightest resemblance to the great ancient English legend.
(When the box descrption mentioned the "techno-fuTILE" setting, I knew something was very wrong.)
Sequels to "Highlander" - Highlander was a fine guy film that ended with total closure. Highlander 2: The Sicken...(er, 'scuse me)...Quickening totally mangled the first story, ignored the closed ending, and carried it on in bizzare ways; the Director's Cut reportedly edits the movie severly, effectively turning it into another film. Highlander 3: The Sorcerer formally apologized for the previous film and discarded it, and said of the first film's ending "no, wait, we apologize, the story isn't finished after all" so they could present some more gratuitous sword fights and beheadings. Now there is Highlander: Endgame which rolls back the story to about 2/3rds through the first film, ignored the other two, picked up the TV series (no comment), and tried to end the first story a fourth way...but it's not done, because of the Hollywood need for a happy ending which makes no sense and opens the door for (retch) a fifth sequel/ending; but that's the Producer's Cut version, which is somewhat different from the theatrical release. This movie, in and of itself, is an OK B-movie; in context of the serieses (plural plural), it's another round of "why are they doing this to me (the viewer)" and six profoundly different endings to one otherwise good story. I suggest you watch the fine cult hit film Highlander,and if anyone suggests you watch any sequels consider following Connor McLeoud's example upon them.
"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?
"Universal Soldier: The Return" - Shoulda gone straight to video. Heck, shouldn't have been made. Starts with a bunch of ex-dead-people (see Universal Soldier for the story behind that...or better yet, don't), then proceeds to repeatedly kill and restore them. "He's dead...he's back...he's dead again...he's back again..."
Class 3. Horrifyingly bad movies you simply leave, dragging yourself up the aisle with your arms because your legs have gone numb from shock.
"My Left Foot" - ALMOST left. After 30 minutes of emotional torture of the main character, I nearly left. Good thing I didn't.
"Buckaroo Bonzai" - Only movie I actually stopped watching because it was so very bad.
I must insist on Class 4: it's bad, you know it's bad, you enjoy it because it's bad.
"Attack of the Killer Tomatos" - The very defni
"Dark Star" - Best bad movie EVER. Period. Bad, knows it's bad, team had such a great time making a bad movie it's fun in a really bad way.
"Plan 9 From Outer Space" - Quintisential bad movie. Ed Wood tried. and failed. badly. Available free on the 'net if you search.
"Six-String Samurai" - Wow! That was stupid! Cross Road Warrior with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and you get the post-apocalyptic tale of a sword-wielding guitarist making the hard desert trek to become the King of Lost Vegas by winning the greatest gig contest ever. Hindering his trek are murderous bowlers (yes, I mean the Tuesday night crowd that throws concrete balls at pins), a canabillistic stereotypical '50s family, other "let's see what post-nuclear-holocaust freaks the costume department can invent", guitar-playing sword-swinging Death and his idiot cronies, and the constant loving companionship of a little orphan boy. Did I mention this was stupid?
"How To Irritate People" - John Cleese and other Monty Python cast members teach "how to be irritating" via case studies. An irritating film...but what did you expect from a Monty Python production entitled How to Irritate People?
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.
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
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.