OPO, so what was the worst film you ever saw?

(not enough to paint myself blue and go live in a tree, mind you)

What the #$*! Do We (K)now!? is the first that comes to mind. just infuriating like few others

that may not count but damn

I have a new contender. In fact, not even a contender, a clear and obvious winner so far ahead of the field that the other bad films I've ever seen have given up and gone back to the barn.

http://youtu.be/RTWwZT96gZY

Like, if I told you this film features an indie-rocker in actual blackface and that still wasn't even the most o_0 part of the film, would that give you some idea? I'm half convinced this isn't even supposed to be a real film, and just a parody entry for "Germany's most disturbing home videos."

can't remember if I nominated Amadeus up thread but amadeus

Hard to choose bwteeen The Doom Generation, The Mirror Has Two Faces, or the first Transformers film

some bad films are bad in a charming or at least fairly objectionable way

i can't really hate on any film i watch at home b/c if i keep watching it it's my own damn fault--so easy to change the channel or hit the stop button.

the one recent film (by recent i simply mean, my memory of it is still acute) i've seen in the theater that was irredeemably bad was "away we go"

i also hated joseph losey's "these are the damned"-- though at least that had the saving grace of strangeness

fairly UNobjectionable i mean

Still angry about Drive.

The Losey is a very odd film (in every sense) to pick on! I'm not saying you would like it any better, but 'These Are The Damned' is actually the severely truncated American edit of 'The Damned'.

Amadeus is vaguely enjoyable if you treat it as nothing more than pure fiction.

i like amadeus. f murray abraham, jeffrey jones, cleavage. smug sure and pretty deluded abt the artistic process but fun. upthread however dmac nominated DOWN PERISCOPE, which i had totally repressed and which all came back at once.

THE WIZARD, the fred savage/jenny lewis nintendo commercial (that never uses the word nintendo!) was for years my favorite incompetent movie. creates its own unique reality, rly has that "aliens made this after only cursory study of humans" vibe. prob nowhere near as hilarious now that i'm not a teenager tho.

movie that made me angriest remains WHATEVER WORKS.

Who the hell hates Amadeus? How can anyone have hate for such schlocky, campy fun?

that one scene of the non-mozart pantomime show he decides to write the magic flute at goes on SO intolerably long i sort of admire it, like, making us sit here for 20 mins midstream to Absorb don giovanni is just middlebrow i guess but when the longest performance scene is a guy in a horse costume pooping you've got something.

How can a film with a pantomime horse ~pooping~ in it possibly be bad?

amadeus is HUGELY enjoyable if you treat it as nothing more than pure fiction. but i liked drive, too, so my calibration may be off.

most infuriating film i've ever seen has to be requiem for a dream: loudmouthed, ham-handed, sanctimonious garbage. god, i hated that movie. can't call it inept, though.

it's hard to get too deeply upset at the merely misbegotten. some hackjob studio castoff or technically inept student film turns out crap, well, what did you expect? it's no great loss or betrayal. the very worst of them often acquire a perverse charm, as with so many MST3K honorees. the experience of being completely alienated or repulsed by some celebrated cultural juggernaut, however, can be uniquely infuriating. this is, i suspect, why so many people go for the likes of crash, the titanic and avatar when asked this question. sure, those movies are better made than that achingly unfunny comedy you walked out on after half an hour, but complete failure seldom inspires more than mild irritation at the time & money wasted.

I got the DVD of "Gonks go Beat" a while ago. The film is so ineptly made, it's 75% terrible but every so often it's really not bad. (Basically, it's teenage "Ballad" gang (woeful) vs teenage "rock" gang (better, but not great), but Ginger Baker and band pops up and is quite good)

For me there are bad films like Transmorphers or whatever which are just straight terrible and laughably so. Then there are critically and publicly acclaimed movies which when I get round to watching them make me wonder whether I am missing some part of my brain. Drive was like that. I don't understand why people went so mad for two hours of blonde, characterless people staring at each other. The whole thing was mean spirited through and through - so many unsympathetic characters. Am I wrong in thinking we're supposed to believe Ryan Gosling's character is a major dickhead? So why is he the hero of the film? I don't get it. And then so much was made of the violent scenes - or scene - someone got a kicking towards the end IIRC, but was it any more graphic than the average Game of Thrones episode?

contendo OTM, worst movie ever

OK, I probably revived the wrong thread, in that that C.ZAR film I posted, after a day or two of reflection my o_0 reaction is not so much "wow, bad art film is seriously bad" because many low budget art films are terrible, as much as it is "no one noticed the blackface? really?" but it's not so much outrage as wondering why some things provoke reactions and others don't.

(No, but really. Amadeus is "so over the top it's great". "So bad it's good" rather than truly terrible in any sense.)

Then there are critically and publicly acclaimed movies which when I get round to watching them make me wonder whether I am missing some part of my brain.

For me one of these that springs to mind is Jerry Maguire.

Then there are critically and publicly acclaimed movies which when I get round to watching them make me wonder whether I am missing some part of my brain. Drive was like that. I don't understand why people went so mad for two hours of blonde, characterless people staring at each other. The whole thing was mean spirited through and through - so many unsympathetic characters. Am I wrong in thinking we're supposed to believe Ryan Gosling's character is a major dickhead?

i liked drive a lot at the time, but i do wonder how well it'll age. very much the product of its fashion moment. personally, i liked the surfaces: stylish, atmospheric, slick as all hell in the manner of michael mann, but also weirdly disconnected. both inviting and repellent in a way that made it difficult to parse directorial/artistic intent. is the movie supposed to feel so disconcertingly alien? was ryan gosling consciously chosen because there's always a similarly disturbing vacancy in his performances? is the fascination with masculine power, lethality and stoicism supposed to seem so sexual? i'd guess yes in all cases, but i'm not sure, and it's hard to say to what end refn is making his choices.

I felt as though the aesthetic was dated when it came out. It felt like it was going for some sort of early-2000s electroclash vibe but not quite pulling it off. I dunno, the whole tone felt off to me - I could never work out what I was supposed to be feeling or indeed whether I was supposed to be feeling anything while watching that film. All said, I'm tempted to rewatch just to check I hadn't simply dozed through it the first time round.

Totally. I felt like I was watching an ad for GTA Vice City

Lady In The Water
lock thread

I like a lot of these films. I love Doom Generation, Kaboom and Araki in general.
Love Amadeus.

I like Drive and I don't think Gosling needs to be likable for the film to work. He's even less likable in Only God Forgives and that wasn't even one of the problems with that film.

I majorly disagree about Avatar and Titanic being worse than incompetent trash. Films like Chopper Chicks In Zombietown, 2001 Maniacs, Little Man and Zombie Women Of Satan(I confess that I've never seen the whole of any of these) are worse because they wallow in their crappiness and think that it's cool to be that dumb and horrendously politically incorrect, as if they are being hilarious badass rebels. At least I get the sense that makers of lots of crappy blockbusters are trying to make a good film.
What part of Titanic is worse than seeing a Wayans guy cgi mixed with a dwarf sexually harassing women while pretending to be a toddler?

Then there is Bela Lugosi crap like Ape Man, Black Dragons and Scared To Death. I can't think of many things more lethal than trash that is that agonizingly dull.
Trash should be fun but it rarely ever is. All you usually get is a depressing stench of selfsatisfied stupidity or uncaring cynicism.

Also in Drive, the bit with Ron Perleman laughing his ass off while a prostitute just stands tolerating him, that's really funny.

re: drive

i figured the vibe for mid-to-late 2000s IDIB. less punk scruffy and campily trashed-out than textbook electroclash. smooth and seductive on one hand, but also sinister in its deliberately icy inhumanity. chromatics' night drive being the obvious template (and soundtrack). and it's not like there were many other mainstream cinematic attempts to capture this on film...

also, i take it not as an action film, but as a quietly surreal horror movie.

Signs imo

closer

― iatee, Wednesday, January 30, 2013 4:38 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is a good shout.

as well as Amadeus, and in the same vein perhaps, sweeney todd

Star Trek: Nemesis. Taken by itself, the film is terribly written, has plotholes one could fly a starship through, has boring (and sometimes laughable) action sequences, a pointless and irritating side-plot, some potentially interesting stuff that doesn't come close to being realised, and lots of other reasons to suck.

But being a big ST:TNG fan made it several times worse. Like the previous film, the characters act like idiots in an attempt to be "fun". Laughing, grinning Picard simply MUST BE DESTROYED! And excuse me for being the type who takes this stuff too seriously, but: THIS is the last we see of these characters? THIS is their send-off? Plenty of movies have bored, irritated or disappointed me, but Nemesis did all that and left me depressed as well!

Worst movie I've ever seen is still Date Movie (which can probably stand in for the ____ Movie of your choice, though its the only one I've seen), but in terms of a critically and publicly acclaimed film leaving me seething with rage, that'd have to be Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.

i've seen all of the _____ Movies (incl disaster movie in theaters!) and the worst movie i've ever seen is still 100 Girls and every christopher nolan movie

Speaking of the [blank] movies, I have sat through all of Meet the Spartans. This is a contender.

hollow man NOT the worst film i've ever seen -- but only b/c i watched BOTH alien vs. predators films and a stupidly large amount of Uwe Boll joints.

I was going to say Hollow Man, but I haven't seen AvP or many Uwe Boll movies...

Ang Lee's Hulk is pretty much completely awful, I think.

Why'd you hate Scott Pilgrim so much, crypto?

For years my automatic answer to this was Natural Born Killers, which I hated while I was watching it and hated even more thinking about it afterward. But it's been a long time so I can't swear I'd still have the same reaction -- I'm just not in any hurry to find out.

The Congress is pretty atrocious. That was the worst film I'd seen in a long time.

recently watched some of the film adaptation of tropic of cancer w/ rip torn, its so bad nobody shd watch it

oh yeah god The Congress was not great, and there were so many things about it I really wanted to like

In recent times I can't think of anything as terrible as Nymphomaniac, either of them as they are both insufferable garbage.

God Help The Girl

Haha I quite enjoyed the congress, in a southland tales kinda way

re: Natural Born Killers - Does this streak of naive, faux-subversive cinema encapsulated by the likes of Fight Club, NBK, the Matrix, American Beauty etc, still exist or was it just a nineties/early aughts thing? I'm trying to put my finger on it and it's sort of along the lines of 'wake up sheeple, you watch too much TV!'; adored by people in my age group at the time (16-18 year olds who listened to alt-rock and grunge) but whose politics and message, though well meaning, ultimately boiled down to superficiality, pretentiousness, often misogynistic ritual.

alternatively tho isn't it exactly the superficial gateway material to more developed conceptual frameworks of counterculture etc that one would expect ppl of that age group to 'discover'? ie thus ever it was, these are just the examples of your generation.

either way fu matrix is awesome

yes deems, agreed. it's only because i was reading this bit yesterday: http://www.vice.com/read/15-years-later-fight-club-still-sucks-its-the-reddit-of-movies which is all very well but kind of amounts to 'it was all very at the time but now it's aged badly and i'm older and wiser'. But I'm wondering if this kind of thing is still prevalent today or if it could be seen as a subgenre largely contained to its time.

I hated those films at the time, too. Though I didn't quite put it in the "wake up, sheeple" corner, I put it in the "superficial film that thinks it's soooo clever" corner, with Usual Suspects, Seven, Memento etc. The wake up sheeple part is more objectionable, though, I agree.

The other thing is that all of the ones I've listed are perfectly watchable films, they're just... really really up themselves.

yeah, they're not not-fun movies, just unbearably pretentious, especially in retrospect. Usual Suspects was the worst for 'aha do you see?' despite it being obvious who the culprit was from the first fifteen minutes of the film. Did M Night Shayalaman put the final nail in the coffin for this kind of movie-making... Oh, oh I just remembered Equilibrium.