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

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

sock account revealed

2001 Maniacs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgGV9oDx94I

good quote on ilx or w/e about watson's character only existing due to sandler's need for her

dmac otm tho

it's one of the few things i'd describe as str8-up pretentious and no it does not offer a haunting study of alienation & emotional thawing, it is purely solipsistic and it reveals nothing. thinking about it makes me angry

all the characters only exist because of the writers need to eat

A rare example of so bad it's good. Don't know what film it is. I doubt the whole film is this good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9KyBdPeKHg

Bad being funny but also satisfyingly surreal, perhaps an accidental brilliance? The shouting isn't in the original version apparently. This is a dubbed version.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrnariwULfA

I think the O'Neal film is Tough Guys Don't Dance, directed by Mailer himself. Saw it in a theatre when it came out. Pretty damn bad.

I'm a Britishes who liked Match Point, it reminded me of Death Line aka Raw Meat (American director filming in London, the police presented as clowns)

The one excuse I can make for that Mailer film clip is that I'm sure there's some people who act that weirdly when they are upset.

Which brings me back to what I was saying on the Game Of Thrones thread about a reviewer saying that Harvey's geeky friend in American Splendor seems to be acted really badly, but when you see the real guy later in the film, you see that it's an accurate portrayal of him. He acts really strangely.

I think if Helen Mirren did a really accurate portrayal of The Queen, people would have hated her for it. I've seen the Queen crying on tv and she looks really strange in a way that wouldn't be comfortably received in a big film.

When I watch examples of bad acting I'm rarely confident about agreeing that it is bad. That famous Keanu Reeves Dracula scene near the start is one I could confidently call bad acting. Lots of British soap acting too.
I know clarity and impressiveness is usually prized over realism (although high exaggeration, expressionist and surreal acting isn't accepted in many contexts now) but I don't think awkwardness needs to be mocked so often as it is.

I do see plenty of bad acting in b-movies in terms of action and struggle looking unconvincing.

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.

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Sunday, August 24, 2014 7:12 AM (1 hour ago)

i've never seen either but take your point. the performances in both look atrocious, truly unbearable in the insistent, brayingly crass manner particular to failed idiot farce. the cinema, on the other hand, seems lacklustre at worst, nowhere near so howlingly wretched as that "worst movie death scene ever!" clip. (what the hell is that from, btw?)

going by your other comments itt, i gather that it's the sensibility on display that elevates these in your mind from merely bad to all time worst. you're not simply noting artistic failure, you're expressing outrage over something that offends you personally. though the nature of the offense taken is somewhat different, the basic reaction is quite similar to that experienced by those of us who single out films like the titanic and requiem for a dream for special opprobrium. we most hate the films that best push our buttons.

"Kareteci Kiz (English: "Karate Girl") is a 1973 Turkish film.Directed by Orhan Aksoy, the cast includes popular Turkish actress Filiz Akın, and actor Ediz Hun"

first one that comes to mind is a bronx tale. p much the anti-goodfellas

I think the different types of offense is where it gets more complicated. Many of the cited films seem insufficient to me because they're only sickeningly sentimental, displaying dumb commonplace (but not malicious) attitudes or trying but failing to be profound in an annoying way. That isn't nearly as bad seeming to me because it's too ordinary to be truly unbearable. That doesn't give me the feeling of being forced to eat dogshit.

I guess mainstream films that glorify Che Guevara, Stalin and Mao could be seen as the ultimate offensiveness but I'd say they were probably more ignorant in a naive way than anything. Which is kind of sinister but not the worst in my view.

I'm sure violent fantasy like Death Wish has been cited above. I've seen quite a few film critics claiming that school of "depict reprehensible people so we can feel good about killing them in total fury" is the worst thing in cinema.

Norbert was being called extremely racist and that was a fairly big film.

I've seen bits of bad taste films (might be excessively harsh to associate the aforementioned films with this, apologies to makers who are probably nice enough people) where you imagine it appeals to people who make youtube playlists devoted to laughing at disabled people, public assaults on innocent people filmed on camera phone; make jokes about beating up girlfriends and children.

There used to be a guy on a horror forum who written homophobic novels featuring heroes who killed gay men. What does bestseller fluff have to compare to that stink?
I've heard that some Christian right wing films and books have shit like that but I don't know how widely accepted into mainstream culture those books are.

I've walked out of the cinema from three films in my life, mostly through angry boredom; The River Wild, the remade The Thomas Crowne Affair and American Hustle. I'm sure these aren't the worst films ever made but they sure sucked.

might try to catch the river wild based on that tbph

I really wouldn't. The other two aren't really bad films they just annoyed me on a bad day. The River Wild is just shit.

Another awful one: GayN***ers From Outer Space. A half hour comedy about black gay aliens who come to earth to destroy women and make earth exclusively for gay men. On a shoestring budget.
It's so lifeless to the extent that the whole thing seems to be made begrudgingly. It's actually not as offensive as you might imagine because it seems like nobody involved truly cared.

having watched Grand Budapest Hotel I've come to the conclusion Wes Anderson and his self-conscious kookiness doesn't sit well with me at all. the only one I found mildly tolerable was Darjeeling Unlimited. I wouldn't call his films the worst, but they do make me feel uncomfortable and despondent when I watch them. people are very surprised to hear this from me because i think they assume I'd love this sort of stuff - and it's true, I do like that sort of stuff, just not that stuff.

It's very difficult getting that sort of stuff right to the satisfaction of those who are into that sort of stuff, in my experience.

Sometimes things can be so closely pitched to your own sensibilities that they don't appeal at all - it's something I find happens quite a lot actually and I wonder if it's a matter for a new thread as I feel the same way about the music of Nick Cave.

Yeah. Maybe it's something to do with the narcissism of small differences, or maybe it's just that adjectives like "quirky" are just a bit useless.

I can see what you might be getting at with Nick Cave, but I do think it applies in particular to humour.

cf Simpsons good, Family Guy awful.

been over a year, many terrible movies under my belt, Vulgar still holds the crown

Nominations for the excellent America's sweethearts still nonsense itt

I'd maybe allow that the graduate is now my nomination here btw

The recent Poltergeist remake is a heck of a contender.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEcArMzmeM0

Miami Connection (1987). I know that it has a cult following as an entertainingly bad film, but it didn't provide me with distraction, let alone entertainment.

Meet Joe Black, for me.

i always say hook just because it was made by someone talented with a lot of money and pretty much everything about it is wrong or tone-deaf or written badly or acted badly or miscast. though its actually hard to say if its the worst robin williams movie. definitely the worst spielberg. all the kids in it are like sub-thunderdome acting-wise and appeal-wise. which is also weird for spielberg.

obviously there are tons of horrible no-name and no-budget movies. the bad sundance movies usually offend me more than the bad genre ones though.