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

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.

Actually, the congress is bad in much the same way. It's just much much worse than anything from 99. 'Wake up sheeple' is kinda the whole plot.

has to be boondock saints

every christopher nolan movie

this is the correct answer

eurgh, Fight Club. Actually, more accurately, eurgh, people who are way too into Fight Club

Thought there might be a mention of Showgirls, Teen Wolves, and Astro Zombies: A Film Critic's Year-Long Quest to Find the Worst Movie Ever Made by Michael Adams. Anyone read this?

Sounds like an interesting book because he covers a huge variety and people say he finds quite a lot of good in a lot of them.

I just don't know how anyone has the patience to be a bad movie fan (which many of the reviewers of this book called themselves), in my experience the "so bad it's good" phenomenon is extremely rare. I can't think of any films I've enjoyed because they were bad.

I've seen this thread's question asked other times and like on this thread, the question usually gets interpreted as which film do you dislike the most or which film do you want to offend people by calling it the worst. Or the most ideologically toxic films.
I think finding the genuinely worst films is far more interesting.

Every time I hear someone say Titanic or Only God Forgives I'd like to strap them into a chair, clamp their eyes open and force them to watch the hundreds of b-movies, straight to video and tv films that make Chopper Chicks In Zombietown look like a divine work of art.

you're ignoring the crucial inputs of expectation and resources. like, Prometheus.

purposely looking for shit in b-movies is the boringest endeavor in the full range of human endeavors

there have been a few late period Woody Allen films mentioned already, but I'd like to put a word in for Cassandra's Dream as the apotheosis of his autumn years cack-handedness

I mean

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_jJJge2nPk

Somehow some people delight in finding the most incompetent low budget trash; I would advise people against doing it because life is too short, but some will do it nonetheless and I'd like to see where it taken them.
But when this question is asked I'm genuinely interested in how bad it can get; not the films that were popular but disliked by many, particularly when it's disliked because one group loves it and the other gets angry from the overratedness. Feels like a boring cop-out.

I guess there is also the feeling that people who make obvious choices have never truly suffered enough. To be honest the worst films I've seen are probably the cream of the crappy crop, not even miles close to the worst.
Obviously there can never be an objective worst and some of the most incompetent films are appealingly strange, surreal and hypnotic to some people. Mystics Of Bali (never seen the whole of that either) has among the worst special effects I've seen but it's got imagination, gusto and freshness that makes it a preferable experience to most films, for me.

The secret of so bad they're good is that bad and good are the same point on the circular arc of quality.

What films would you say were bad in a great way? Anything you would go as far to urge someone to see?

Man alive, that Cassandra's Dream clip.

I looked to see if there was an Cassandra's Dream ilx thread, and there seems to be a UK/US divide between people who thought it was the worst film ever made and people who thought it was OK to pretty good

Come Anticipate Woody Allen's "Cassandra's Dream"

dreamcatcher
2012
american beauty

What films would you say were bad in a great way?

I dunno. Roughly half of my all-time favorite films are straight terrible.

straight terrible you say

But when this question is asked I'm genuinely interested in how bad it can get; not the films that were popular but disliked by many, particularly when it's disliked because one group loves it and the other gets angry from the overratedness. Feels like a boring cop-out.

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Saturday, August 23, 2014 3:34 PM (Yesterday)

the movies that truly earn worst-of-the-worst consideration aren't worth considering. especially when we exclude "appealingly strange, surreal and hypnotic" cult favorites like showgirls, glen or glenda and the visitor.

one of the worst films i've ever seen was a shot-on-video, redneck-themed horror flick called gutpile. wooden non-performances, impenatrable photographic murk, witless writing, cheap & unimaginative special effects: it's a complete failure on every imaginable level. there are hundreds of such films out there, especially in the horror genre. i've seen a bunch, fanmade zombie movies starring the director's family and school chums, backyard slashers lit with flashlights, boasting ketchup blood and cellphone image quality. the cult is so ravenous that just about anything feature-length can get distribution & attention. but there's nothing worth saying about most such films. they're lifeless.

where gutpile lies there stinking, hearbeeps is garbage on a mission. it's hard to imagine that something so mortifyingly wrong could have ever been imagined, much less financed (and made (and shown in theaters)). it's much more sophisticated and technically accomplished than gutpile, thus "better" on some quasi-objective level, and, crucially, its badness is never inert, the mere absence of worth. heartbeeps is staggeringly bad - but it's not as bad as gutpile. this gives it a reason to exist and gives us a reason to care about its badness, push it off on unsuspecting friends.

when it comes to film, "the worst" is rarely the actual worst-of-the-worst WORST. we usually mean the worst that's somehow notable, remarkable - the worst with some component of worth. heartbeeps and fight club both fill the bill, if in different ways. gutpile doesn't.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_McI_KJIXOq0/SkwkLlxHiCI/AAAAAAAAFkQ/NYvecTumrs0/s1600/HeartbeepsP.jpg

I looked to see if there was an Cassandra's Dream ilx thread, and there seems to be a UK/US divide between people who thought it was the worst film ever made and people who thought it was OK to pretty good

I heard some Americans thought Match Point was pretty good too, but I've never met anyone British who likes it.

I remember being absolutely gobsmackingly appalled at the sheer awfulness and ineptness of Stephen Poliakoff's first film 'Hidden City', in the late 80s. It starred Charles Dance and Bill Patterson.

It's on youtube for those who want to punish themselves.

I've probably seen about 800 new films in the past decade and the three that stand out in my mind as the worst are Trust The Man, Mr Brooks and Zack and Miri Make a Porno. I think the last one takes it.

Blue Jasmine def the worst prestige film I saw last year.

Boxing Helena

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4SkqF0VdO8

Obviously there can never be an objective worst and some of the most incompetent films are appealingly strange, surreal and hypnotic to some people. Mystics Of Bali (never seen the whole of that either) has among the worst special effects I've seen but it's got imagination, gusto and freshness that makes it a preferable experience to most films, for me.

― Robert Adam Gilmour

Not sure how you can say these things and yet claim not to understand "so bad its good". I mean, I think that's a misnomer in a lot of cases, so I suppose I understand on one level. "Strange", "surreal", "hypnotic", "imaginative", "fresh", these things, along with "hilarious", "novel", "outlandish" and the like, they're all perfectly valid reasons to like a film, just as valid as technical brilliance or excellent writing or impeccable acting.

As I said upthread a year ago, my worst of the worst is a trash film not a mainstream one. But I genuinely think Titanic is a bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad film. The acting, the music, the tediousness, the hatred I feel for everyone and everything involved in it. Just awful.

but it's about true love

I don't think the ineptness is much of what is good about the clips of Mystics In Bali that I've seen. The energy of the screaming old witch, the grotesque elements and the setting seem to me to come from actual care and effort.

I don't like Titanic but I never really smelt an unbearable stench from it.

Contenderizer- I think there are incompetent films among Gutpile that are notable for awfulness aside from the technical side. I probably should have emphasized this more above but those Bela Lugosi films could never be as bad as Little Man because the latter has a stench of a repulsive mind set of a sort you won't find in a major film of recent decades.
2001 Maniacs and Zombie Women Of Satan are both banal and offensive in a way I've never seen in Oscar type films. It's the arrogance and smugness of the wallowing stupidity, the lowbrow repulsiveness that is more than just incompetence.

It's the repulsion you get from seeing comics about celebrities being brutally raped by disgusting racial caricatures. Where the misogyny, racism, stupidity and aggression is like a suffocating fog.

what dreams may come is terrible, like a kitsch bulimia.

too…late?

I've always wanted to see What Dreams May Come. Just for the pretty stuff.

BEWARE! This is a clip from Little Man, you'll probably regret watching this if you do. This is real stench. Not sentimental mawkish popular crap. REAL STENCH.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaS0v3_bQdg

the worst movie I watched expecting to love it & expecting *good art* was probably punch-drunk love

if pta ruins pynchon then he really will be dead to me

i mean i've given the bastard enough chances

What did you dislike about Punch-Drunk Love?

slow boring obvious Sandler impossible to watch