[Burkeman1]

My pick is the recent version of Pearl Harbor. It is dreadful on so many levels I can't go into here.

[Non-Sequitur]

I can't remember the name and I don't know if this counts but about 12 years ago my wife dragged me to this STUPID film. Michael Douglas played an American intelligence officer and Melanie Griffin played his spy behind German lines, and he went and rescued her only he didn't speak German and got around it by faking a throat wound, and it was just about the dumbest, lame-ass movie I've ever seen.

[Drumbo]

Pearl Harbor was terrible, but compared to The Thin Red Line about Guadalcanal, PH gets five, er, four, er, three stars. Pearl Harbor was around long enough for more people to see how bad it was.

[Paulus Invictus]

During WW II, most of the war movies were terrible! Later, along came dogs like "Green Berets' and others of the genre. Well past bad.

[Irene Adler]

I can remember seeing Barry Lyndon, many years ago, a seemingly endless and truly boooooooooring movie. I actually believe it's the only movie I have ever walked out on.

[sneakypete]

Acyplopse Now. I've never seen a movie so wrong in EVERY area it goes into,and never seen such ham acting on such a collossal scale. Sheen and Brando should have backed up to take their paychecks. I can honestly say I have seen both better plots AND more life-like acting in Sgt Rock comic books.

[RightWhale]

Full Metal Jacket. Just plain strange.

[x]

"Dances with Wolves." Is that a war picture? When Costner shows up in the West and the officer he reports to immediately shoots himself, it looked extremely false and contrived. Either it was pointless, or far too pointed. It stood out like a sore thumb. Also Costner's "I want to see [the West] before it's gone." Would someone really have said that around 1865?

We know that some Indians looked down on White settlers, but in general, whether in "Dances with Wolves" or "Little Big Man" or "Buffalo Bill and the Indians" Hollywood always does that angle very poorly. All their natural smugness comes out, and it's very unconvincing. I didn't get a feeling from any of these movies that we were watching real Indians, rather than PC cliches.

"Pearl Harbor" was like a big, stupid, hokey comic book. Except for the extreme length, I didn't mind it at all. Probably, I just remember Kate Beckinsale and the few good parts and have blessedly forgotten the long stretches in between.

"U-571" was derivative, historically untrue, and boring. The "Thin Blue Line" was exceptionally boring -- and not boring in a successfully artistic way like Mallick's earlier films, "Badlands" and "Days of Heaven."

Platoon: was that as bad as I remember? Ditto for Fonda's "Coming Home."

[BenLurkin]

1>"Savage Pampas" The exploits of the Argentine cavalry (no kidding).
2>"The Alamo" Great story, terrible movie.

[TexasBarak]

I'm sure that there are lots of fine choices for this category, but I immediately thought of Starship Troopers.
A horrible mangling of a sensitive "coming of age" novel. Paul Verhoeven(SP) obviously thinks the military is composed of psychotic morons. I wish that Mrs. Heinlein had insisted on them changing the title, because the movie had nothing else in common with the book. I could go on for hours about this one, so I think I'll just shut up now.

[WhiskeyPapa]

My pick is the recent version of Pearl Harbor. It is dreadful on so many levels I can't go into here.

They somehow seem to have gotten the first draft of the script to the screen.

Definitely one of the worst movies ever.

Another bad war movie was the 1965 "Battle of the Bulge" with Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews, Robert Shaw and a cast of thousands of guys from the Spanish army. It was dreadful.

What else?

"Thirty Seconds over Tokyo" was a very bad movie. Another first draft rushed into production.

I thought the HBO Tuskegee Airmen movie was dreadfully bad.

Walt

[KSCITYBOY]

Older movie "They all laughed" starred Ben Gazara.... Awful movie... People in the theater we making comments out load which we much funnier than the movie.

[Protagoras]

Recently? Behind Enemy Lines

[DETAILER]

Some friends and I have what we call "hecklefest" occasionally, no set intervals of time. We just basically get together cook burgers, etc., and purposefully watch bad movies just to put them down - to the extreme. It's great fun.
Anyway, we got a movie off the B rack somewhere that was called "G.I. Bro". Absolutely the worst serious attempt at a war movie I've ever seen. The main features of the movie were the ability to run down the sides of railroad tracks, and falling down in slow motion. It was really awful.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

"Empire of the Sun".

Bleh.

[BureaucratusMaximus]

The Pallbearer

It came out fairly recently (1999?) and was the first thing outside of "Friends" for whathisname. (you know, the tall dopey looking one)