What was the WORST movie you've ever seen?

Plenty of movies try to be profound and IMHO virtually all of them fall flat. The problem is that screenwriters are not philosophers, even less are directors and much, much less are producers. Nothing turns me off a movie like pseudo-wisdom. Circle of life and all that.
 
I haven't seen all of it, but Escape from Tomorrow was awful. The Room by Tommy Wiseau was wrong in all the right ways--juvenile, yes, but it makes for a good laugh.
 
Is Eight Legged Freaks the one with the Spider-on-a-stick in a shower scene? If so it has my vote! :giggle:
I might be thinking of Arachnophobia.
 
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Photography is considered art, so why not movies?

Costumes, design, music, effects. The list of subject matter in any movie that could be considered artistic is huge.
 
CupofJoe said:
If a viewer believes it not to be art, then it is not art to them. They may be in a minority of one but it is still just their point of view. And just as valid as any other.
Someone else [and I'm thinking of an elderly Aunt] would see it merely over fussy decoration and should be overpainted in a nice magnolia. No seriously, she said something very similar about an old [pre-reformation?] fresco in a local church. It wasn't quite the Last Supper but all she could see was the faded and flaking paint and not the messages behind it. Overpainting it would make look "tidy".
I don't believe in good and bad art. There is stuff someone likes or can appreciate and stuff they don't.
I think Rothko is the perfect example.
He divides opinion. but it is just that, opinion. I am one of those people that goes in to London [okay not recently] to sit in his room in the Tate Modern for hours, just looking and trying to see what he saw. My mother wouldn't even walk in to the room calling it "dirty" and many people don't get him. As you say I think, you have to see them to get them.
I love Da Vinci's drawings but many of his paintings leave me cold. I really don't understand why the Mona Lisa is rated as a painting. It's okay but nothing special, as far as I feel. But the queue of visitors into the Louvre and about 500 years of general consensus are some what against me.
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The very place I had my Rothko epiphany - and Leonardo Da Vinci was a real Sunday afternoon painter wasn't he? Like you, I love his drawings but his paintings (the 'Salvator Mundi' in particular) are the worst kind of chocolate box kitsch - though all power to the man for inventing chocolate box kitsch hundreds of years before anyone else thought of it. I have an image of him surrounded by scrumpled-up drawings of improbable flying machines and the like, slapping a final smudge to the Gioconda, eyes gleaming, and thinking, "Yes! Yes! THIS is the one I will be remembered for!" like Johnny Depp in Tim Burton's Ed Wood.

Which brings us back to bad movies...
 
What are the visual cues of a bad movie? I can think of a few:

1. Developing instant emphysema in stressful situations even though the actors haven't done enough physical exertion to justify the breathlessness.
2. Lots of significant stares between characters for long seconds without speaking to indicate that something momentous had been said/done.
3. Soul-spilling in perilous situations where no normal human being would think of an emotional bout of introspection but would be focussed on staying alive instead.
4. Doing something completely irrational that has no other effect than to create conflict between the main characters.
5. Seeing one or more of one's close entourage die and being complete unfazed five seconds later.
6. Extreme emotional instability (this relates to 3) - shifting from one heightened emotional state to another: copious weeping followed by furious anger followed by hysterical laughter, etc.
7. Every character is preened and groomed as if about to make a visit to the White House.
 
Other hallmarks of bad movies

1 A complete absence of an intelligent script or story
2. Film editors who have no real concept of what film editing entails
3. Directors who should be doing something else for living that's not movie related
4. Movie executives can't tell a good movie idea from a bad one
5. Diabolical acting
6. Production values that range from mere mediocrity all the way down to" Oh my god the poor hero is being menaced by cheap badly made cheesy looking prop !"
 
BAYLOR said:
Other hallmarks of bad movies

1 A complete absence of an intelligent script or story
2. Film editors who have no real concept of what film editing entails
3. Directors who should be doing something else for living that's not movie related
4. Movie executives can't tell a good movie idea from a bad one
5. Diabolical acting
6. Production values that range from mere mediocrity all the way down to" Oh my god the poor hero is being menaced by cheap badly made cheesy looking prop !"
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2 - In defence of editors whose names appear on bad movies (and that includes me) I have to point out that editors can only work with the footage they have (or can steal from somewhere). If the director doesn't know his line of action from a hole in the ground, thinks continuity is a luxury, and doesn't give the editor any coverage to work with then, with the best will in the world, the most accomplished editor can't edit crap into decent shape. Skilfully edited crap is still crap.
And about 4 Most movie executives don't care about movies. They don't care if it's good or bad. All they care about is does it / will it turn a profit?

EDIT: Species: The Awakening was much better than the third one. I remember the cinematography and editing being far better than the average 'straight to DVD' level.
 
Paige Turner said:
Re: Worst film seen...

I know that some grief will come of this, as I remember seeing this on somebody's top ten list, but the first hour of Event Horizon was terrible. To put it in Monty Python terms, it was dull, boring, tedious, dreary and awful. At first, I wished Sam Neill was dead. Then I wished all the cast members were dead. When I wished I was dead, I knew it was time to go.The bad news was that the cinema only refunds the admission if you walk in the first 30 minutes. I waited an hour, but I didn't walk, I bolted.
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Damn, that's one of my all-time favourites. Just goes to show how dramatically different tastes can be.
 
Space Cowboy's

A bunch of old misogynists go to space in the most scientifically illiterate adventure ever committed to film.
 
Poking about in my movie diary, looking to see what rude things I'd said about a film for another thread, I got sidetracked (as you do) and found many contenders for this thread. 2017 was a good year for watching bad movies for me.

Survivor (2014) - "The fate of the planet lies in her hands - In the early 22nd Century, the Earth falls out of the sun's orbit..."
Dominion (2014) - not only starred but was produced by Booboo Stewart.
Alien Blood (1999) - "For a film involving aliens, lesbian vampires, gratuitous nudity, lots of machine guns, children with psychic abilities that can make people explode, and the random shooting of jugglers and bagpipers - this is one phenomenally dull film"
Scavengers A Firefly like crew of misfit (but loveable) 'scavengers' find the maguffin of Evil Destruction and are pursued around the galaxy by Captain Black McNasty and his black clad crew of nasties - some of whom are black. You know Captain Black McNasty is evil because he has this habit of shooting his crew members dead half way through conversations, and spends most of his time whispering his dialogue in a gruff mumble while trying to count spiders in the corners of the ceiling.
Evil Aliens - evil aliens. in Wales.
Stranded (2013) - THE low point of Christian Slater's career. Directed by Roger (Battlefield Earth) Christian.
Gappa The Triphibian Monster - yawn.
Alien Infiltration (aka Alien Opponent) - a would-be science fiction, straight to eBay, horror-comedy. Which failed to make the grade in any category. (Apart from the eBay bit: 75p including postage? - I should have known better.)
Fear Chamber (1968) - Boris Karloff's last film. Made in Mexico it is an extraordinary film with lots of bad and incoherence mixed in with a few moment of utterly wonderful weirdness. The basic plot is that a kindly old prof. (Karloff) discovers a rock-based life form deep within a volcano. The rock can only live and grow by being fed a chemical found within the brains of terrified women (!) so the doctor obliges.
Desert Warrior (1988) - another Post-Apocalyptical Mad Maxican riot in which Lou 'The Hulk' Ferrigno struts his stuff.
Plankton (aka Creatures from the Abyss) Italian horror crap that made Troll 2 look well made. Five 'teenagers' find a seemingly abandoned boat in the middle of the ocean and the local fish - which have been lunching on radioactive plankton and thus mutated into hyper-sexual flying fish with a taste for human flesh - eat them... but not fast enough.


There were others but that's the cream - or the scum- off the top. But the winner is:


Dracula 3000 - Holy mother of God! There aren't many films that cause physical pain to watch but this is one of them. Another of the endless number of low budget SF films in which a mixed-sex crew board a derelict space ship and find something nasty onboard.

This time it's Dracula.

And that's the end of the plot.

Seriously.

The rest is just watching the director sneaking his cast and crew into what looks like a petrol refinery when no one is about and filming them walking up and down the same three corridors for hours and hours. Occasionally they stop by to see if the local high school art class has finished making the few purpose built sets and do some expositioning at each other. (The 'recreation room' where some of the 'action' takes place has a pool table, some comfy sofas, and a weapons rack stocked with loaded semi-automatics. Like all interstellar cargo ships.) Udo Kier lends his B movie credentials with a limp, on-screen, cold reading of bits of script that are supposed to be the the ship's previous captain's log. The ONLY thing that could have saved this film from the IMDb's bottom 100 would have been copious amounts of gratuitous nudity. There wasn't any.



I win!
 
The Bad Batch (2016) is an example of how too much politics can harm a movie. It's the win of theme over substance. Also, it's a hell of a disappointment because the filmmaker, having just released an instant cult classic not so long ago, was very promising and I expected so much more of her...
 
Lesbian Vampire Killers - James Cordon in god awful lad comedy that looks up to Carry On Emmanmuelle.

Run for your Wife - modern day adaption of a play that was twenty years out of date in 1983. Grossed £602 on its opening weekend. Truly awful.

Sex lives of the potato men - Johnny Vegas and Mackenzie crook in a joyless comedy vacuum that is so bad it's bad.
 
Mon0Zer0 said:
Lesbian Vampire Killers - James Cordon in god awful lad comedy that looks up to Carry On Emmanmuelle.

Run for your Wife - modern day adaption of a play that was twenty years out of date in 1983. Grossed £602 on its opening weekend. Truly awful.

Sex lives of the potato men - Johnny Vegas and Mackenzie crook in a joyless comedy vacuum that is so bad it's bad.
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Years ago there was a news item about Sex lives. It was claimed that it [and a few other films] was made to take advantage of tax incentives that were supposed to promote film production but ended up being a route via several loopholes for people to avoid tax.
I remember trying to watch it and I'm not sure I got 5 minutes in.
 
Le Panda du Mal said:
Season of the Witch is probably the worst film I've paid money to see
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Nigel Kneale who gave us Quatermass, wrote the story and screen for that installment of Halloween but, he disliked change made to what he wrote and had his name taken off of the film .
 
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