What are the Worst Movies of All Time? - The thread for discussing celluloid syphilis

[Meaty Spaghetti]

Jarhead and Land of the Lost when me and my dad used to go see a lot of movies we saw these, My dad wanted to see Jarhead because the trailer made it look like some war story (boy we were wrong about that) a buddy of my brother told me the movie was based off some book and he said if they did the shit they did in the marines they would of gotten there asses kicked, Land of the Lost was boring and Will Farrel was unfunny as usual and it gave me a migraine on how bad it was.

 

[Syaoran Li]

Caligula is one of the worst films I have ever seen. I don't know what's the worst part about it. Is it the gratuitous gore, the graphic sex, the awful acting, or the rampant historical inaccuracy? Don't know, but it was shitty and boring despite its attempts to be as edgy as possible.

I watched the film expecting it to be a "So Bad It's Good" guilty pleasure grindhouse B-movie, but it turned out that Caligula was three hours of my life that I will never get back.

 

[Black Waltz]

Any movie that tries to be so bad it's good.

 

[Lensherr]

This, though I'd like to add that I think the whole "inspirational teacher" genre is pretty rancid. It's such a ham-fisted vehicle, either for pedantry or feelz porn (or both.) In that spirit, I'd like to nominate Hamlet 2, the movie that taught me that the Tomatometer wasn't reliable. It was advertised as a venomous satire of the "inspirational teacher" genre (Steve Coogan is a loser drama teacher with delusions of grandeur- in reality, he sucks at everything and is the only one who can't see it) until about the 2/3rds mark, where it does a complete 180 and becomes the sort of movie it had been previously parodying. Wimping out that hard in the third act just to pull out cliched happy ending grinds the hell out my gears.

Honestly, the only movie of this type that I like is School of Rock, where the "inspirational teacher" is a total loser.

 

[Commander X]

A bad movie that's so inept it's almost fascinating would be 1994's direct-to-video release Deadfall which is like a lot of what is bad about the bad sort of "neo-noir" films - to sum up, ridiculous "twists", flimsy plots and attempts at being cool for cool's sake. It's like watching kids play dress up and trying to imitate something they saw adults do because they think it'll look cool, watching your lesser "neo-noir" films. The plot, such as it is, features Michael Biehn as a con-artist whose dad (James Coburn) is killed during a job gone wrong and so when their crew splits up he goes in search of the uncle he hadn't known he had (also James Coburn) who runs some sort of con game crew himself. Plus, in one of the details that make this film sort of memorable, his uncle's coked-up right hand man "played" by Nic Cage (in this film directed by one Frank...Coppola. Hmmm.) "Played" as in, well. Cage doing his "Cage acting" if you know what I mean.

"A hothead, huh? I’ll show you a fucking hothead, man! I’ll show you who’s a hothead! :incoherent ranting that sounds like RARR RARR RARR:"

 

[BrunoMattei]

A bad movie that's so inept it's almost fascinating would be 1994's direct-to-video release Deadfall which is like a lot of what is bad about the bad sort of "neo-noir" films - to sum up, ridiculous "twists", flimsy plots and attempts at being cool for cool's sake. It's like watching kids play dress up and trying to imitate something they saw adults do because they think it'll look cool, watching your lesser "neo-noir" films. The plot, such as it is, features Michael Biehn as a con-artist whose dad (James Coburn) is killed during a job gone wrong and so when their crew splits up he goes in search of the uncle he hadn't known he had (also James Coburn) who runs some sort of con game crew himself. Plus, in one of the details that make this film sort of memorable, his uncle's coked-up right hand man "played" by Nic Cage (in this film directed by one Frank...Coppola. Hmmm.) "Played" as in, well. Cage doing his "Cage acting" if you know what I mean.

"A hothead, huh? I’ll show you a fucking hothead, man! I’ll show you who’s a hothead! :incoherent ranting that sounds like RARR RARR RARR:"

Legendary Nic Cage performance.

 

[Duncan Hills Coffee]

A bad movie that's so inept it's almost fascinating would be 1994's direct-to-video release Deadfall which is like a lot of what is bad about the bad sort of "neo-noir" films - to sum up, ridiculous "twists", flimsy plots and attempts at being cool for cool's sake. It's like watching kids play dress up and trying to imitate something they saw adults do because they think it'll look cool, watching your lesser "neo-noir" films. The plot, such as it is, features Michael Biehn as a con-artist whose dad (James Coburn) is killed during a job gone wrong and so when their crew splits up he goes in search of the uncle he hadn't known he had (also James Coburn) who runs some sort of con game crew himself. Plus, in one of the details that make this film sort of memorable, his uncle's coked-up right hand man "played" by Nic Cage (in this film directed by one Frank...Coppola. Hmmm.) "Played" as in, well. Cage doing his "Cage acting" if you know what I mean.

"A hothead, huh? I’ll show you a fucking hothead, man! I’ll show you who’s a hothead! :incoherent ranting that sounds like RARR RARR RARR:"

For the longest time I wondered what movie this was. Those scenes were my favorite part of this video right here.

 

[Preferred Penne]

Any movie that tries to be so bad it's good.

This is why The Room should never have a sequel. You saw what happened with Samurai Cop 2 and it would be exactly the same thing.

 

[BrunoMattei]

For the longest time I wondered what movie this was. Those scenes were my favorite part of this video right here.

I randomly discovered Vampire's Kiss on TV back in the day. Enjoyed the fuck out of it.

 

[Capsaicin Addict]

I've discovered an interesting phenomenon.

When Nicolas Cage plays in an 'everyman' role -- a guy who's not super special or anything -- he does a really good job at it.

If Cage tries to play any kind of badass type, though, it just doesn't seem to work. It's usually exacerbated by Cage having one of his scenery-chewing lunacy scenes (what Ebert would call 'The Nicolas Cage Freak Out').

 

[Commander X]

Also seen recently, though I had watched bits and pieces of it before, 1966's The Oscar a star-studded bomb based on a popular novel by Richard Sale, which was in the same vein as the sort of sleazy melodramatic pulpy novels by the likes of Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann. It's a laundry list of every show biz/Hollywood cliché that were already starting to become well-worn with age in the 1930s. It's a contrived, florid fairy tale full of clumsy metaphors, belabored cliches and all that, that asks the audience to believe that Hollywood is comprised of basically decent, principled, hard-working folks, including agents and film studio presidents and unscrupulous bad apples like it's main character are the rotten exceptions.

It tells the story in flashback from Oscar Night, of Frankie Fane, once a sleazy borderline sociopath who went from traveling from small town to small town, promoting his girlfriend as a stripper at various cheap clubs and booze joints, and ends up dropping her for an apsiring New York City fashion designer played by Elke Sommer, especially after the GF asks him to maybe get a job of his own perhaps - but his new relationship goes south until he somehow catches the eye of a Hollywood talent scout and soon rises up in the ranks of stardom via backstabbing and stepping on people, his doormat pal Hymie Kelly watching from the sides. His career hits a few snags though and desperate to not end up another has-been he stakes revitalizing his career on winning a Best Actor Award - and the makers of this film actually received an endorsement from the Academy to use its trademark image and awards ceremony in the film, their actually approving the use of their image in such a sordid flick is almost mind-boggling.

It's the sort of sleazy pandering-yet-earnest, self-serious Hollywood trash no one has the old-school, out-of-touch naivete to be able to make any more. It's bad alright, but watching the whole film it's the sort of gaudy badness, the sort of flamboyantly awful film that hasn't been made in quite awhile.

First off, every scene looks like a soundstage, everyone's clothes in every scene looks like they've never been worn before, and when the film moves to Hollywood, the garish phoniness becomes even more pronounced, chintzy sets that would barely pass muster on a modest-budget tv show are intended as signs of high glamour.

The performances, however oh, the performances.

Hymie Kelly is played by none other than legendary singer Tony Bennett, in a performance which shows why this was not just his first but also his last dramatic role in a film - played with an awkward and trite "earnestness" that comes off as whiny at times, he's also physically awkward, always hunched over slightly and in the scene where he finally tells off Frankie and leaves, he ends up running out of the scene like someone who is not used to running very much, it's very awkward.

Ernest Borgnine as an obnoxious private investigator, Eleanor Parker as the talent scout who "discovers" Frankie and is used and discarded by him, in a brief role Peter Lawford as a "has been" actor (a little too on the nose for him at the time) and a very low-wattage Milton Berle as Frankie's agent who delivers his lines in a way so low-key as to be no-key, including this "classic" tell-off:

Have you ever seen a moth smashed against a window? Leaves the dust of its wing. You're like that, Frankie. You leave a powder of dirt everywhere you touch.

and then there's the main event himself, played by Stephen Boyd, best known for his role as Massala in 1959's Ben-Hur in a way that's both wooden and ham-tastic. To quote Michael Sauter from his book The Worst Movies of All Time; Or What Were They Thinking?

...it has the absolute in bad film acting. The chief offender is Stephen Boyd, who stars as Frankie Fane, a Hollywood heel scratching and screwing his way to fame. Boyd is so hopeless that he can’t even hack it as the no-talent actor Frankie is supposed to be. Tearing through the movie like the Tasmanian Devil, he snarls, sneers, makes sudden menacing gestures, snarls some more, sneers some more, and makes the cords in his neck stick out.

Boyd bellows, makes lots of hand gestures and robotic body movements - one favorite moment is when he tricks a gal into thinking he's crying then he takes his hands away from his face to reveal he was just "acting", baby and it's even less convincing than the rest of his performance. It reaches a peak in this "climactic" scene where Bennett finally rebels against his partner after being asked to carry out one too many dirty deeds to help him get ahead.

"FREELOADERS!"

 

[distnightmare]

Open Water 2 and Midsommar for the following reasons: Awful Pacing, unlikable characters, "oh the themes and realism" as the sloppy defense to make these films seem deep, stupid actions/decisions. They are probably the only movies I fully hate while every other movie I've seen has at least one thing to like about them.

 

[horrorfan89]

Caligula is one of the worst films I have ever seen. I don't know what's the worst part about it. Is it the gratuitous gore, the graphic sex, the awful acting, or the rampant historical inaccuracy? Don't know, but it was shitty and boring despite its attempts to be as edgy as possible.

I watched the film expecting it to be a "So Bad It's Good" guilty pleasure grindhouse B-movie, but it turned out that Caligula was three hours of my life that I will never get back.

bruno's really not helping his case in claiming he's not brad jones in giving you a disagree rating for that one.

that crappy journey to the center of the earth movie (the version with the rock in it) I went to see that movie hoping it would be a modernization of a Jules Verne classic the way the time machine was for HG wells or war of the worlds was. and they teased us promising it would be a dinosaur movie by putting a t-rex all over the marketing but the dinosaurs are barley in it similar to that land of the lost movie someone mentioned

 

[Pokemonquistador2]

It's not a badly made film, but Picnic at Hanging Rock frustrated the hell out of me. Lots of surreal goings on, some weird shit happens, three girls disappear , the mystery unfolds and you think the movie is going to build to some great reveal and then....nothing. The film just ends without answering any questions other than "maybe they died or were taken by aliens lol." It's not even based on a true story (despite rumors to the contrary,) so you can't even say "well, it was real life, and real life isn't always so neat and tidy. Some real life mysteries can't be solved, etc.."


EDIT: People here seem to hate MST3K's Monster a Go-Go, but I'd argue that Invasion of the Neptune Men is even worse. Annoying soundtrack, annoying gang of kid heroes, loads of padding, a muddy picture, and the film even uses WWII footage of actual atrocities as stock footage. Stick to the charming Prince of Space if you want your tokusatsu fix.

 

[Spunt]

The worst film I ever saw at the cinema was Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle. I went to see it because I was invited by an attractive female work colleague and her two equally attractive housemates, so yeah of course I said yes. Anyway, the film was beyond terrible (it's basically a series of music videos linked by horrible acting and worse dialogue), and I failed to get off with any of the girls I saw it with because we were all in such a bad mood after seeing it that we all went home instead of getting drunk as planned.

One of those girls ended up dating my boss instead.

I had seen Three Ninjas as a small child and that was extremely bad too, but I don't remember it as clearly and it doesn't have a pathetic anecdote attached to it.

 

[Frank D'arbo]

North.

IMO the pacing is what made the movie awful more so than the jokes.


My list:

The 41 Year Old Virgin Who Knocked Up Sarah Marshall and Felt Superbad about it.

InAPPropriate Comedy, I couldn't even finish the goddamn thing.

The Devil Inside. This trailer is scarier than the actual movie. In fact, my auditoriam was laughing their asses off on opening night and booed the dogshit ending. It's thankfully forgotten.

There's also dozens of Z-grade films that would fit but I can only think of stuff that got released by studios rn.

 

[Adolphin]

The Star Wars sequel trilogy was some of my greatest waste of time ever. While the whole Star Wars universe suffers from plotholes, those three movies made them even worse. Watching them was like someone ate the old Star Wars trilogy, chewed it, swallowed, and then vomited it in the form of the sequels. Then this vomit was fed to us. A six-hour emetic regurgitation of the grossest degree.

 

[The Penultimate Warrior]

Epic Movie or Disaster Movie. There's absolutely nothing worse than a comedy that isn't funny, and this pair are about as amusing as The Road. Given how many pop culture references they were filled with I can only imagine how much worse they'd be to watch now.

Also, whilst perhaps not the outright worst, Terminator Genysis, The Predator, AvP2 and Blues Brothers 2000 actively offended me by taking something I love and ruining it. Which given their wasted potential is in a way far worse than something you know is going to be bad.

 

[66andtwothirds]

some of the worst I've seen

The Room (2003)

Joker (2019)

American Beauty (1999)

Pleasantville (1998 )

Battleship (2012)

That's my Boy (2012)

Saving Private Ryan (1998 )

Star Wars: Attack of The Clones (2002)

The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence (2011)

Super Mario Bros. (1993)

Battlefield Earth (2000)

 

[Raging Capybara]

So there's a twitch channel called Forgotten_vcr that streams mixtapes made of horrible z-tier films, usually from Hong Kong, resulting in hilarious sequences.

Here you can find some of the movies featured in his mixtapes. You will notice that almost everything is available on youtube and some of them have millions of views. Now that's my question: who is watching these godawful films? Who is supposed to feel nostalgic or even curious about some Godfrey Ho garbage Ninja schlock?