Bad Movies
Johnathan Pierce wants nominations for the worst film you've ever seen.
How do you classify a 'bad' film? Some people in the comments thread even nominated Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey
There are a lot of different criteria for badness. There's the low-budget Z grade schlock like Manos, Hand of Fate, which I can't nominate since I haven't actually seen it. Then there are plenty of the ridiculously pretentious and incomprehensible 'art' films that used to be shown late at night on Channel 4.
Then there are the lame sequels and prequels marking the point where some franchises jumped the shark. Think of Star Trek V (the one where Captain Kirk meets God), or the dreadful Phantom Menace.
And what about the 'entertainingly bad' category, such as Ed Wood's classic "Plan 9 From Outer Space
My nomination is the 1929 British melodrama "The Flying Scotsman", which could fall in that category. If the synopsys wasn't bad enough..
A young fireman on the famous Flying Scotsman locomotive falls in love with a beautiful young woman. What he doesn't know is that the girl is the daughter of the man he replaced, who was fired for drinking on the job and has vowed to get his revenge on the railway for firing him.
This turkey started out as a silent film, but turns into a talkie half-way through. Because it was originally intended to be silent all the way through, there was no actual script. So the cast just improvised their own dialogue, which is so bad it makes George Lucas look like Shakespeare.
I saw this in the 1970s at a evening of railway-themed films presented by film historian and rail enthusiast John Huntley. To quote Huntley himself, "If he saw this film, the man who invented talkies would go out and shoot himself".
The star of the film was the locomotive itself, only six years old at the time, making it the equivalent of a film made today set on board a Virgin Voyager.
Posted by TimHall at September 16, 2006 05:33 PMHmm, i'd agree with quite a few on their list, Van Helsing and Pearl Harbor would definately be up there in my vote.
I'm going to vote for a movie called 'Monkeybone' though, it's supposed to be a comedy, but when you get things that are obviously supposed to be gags (including some nice visual ones) they make no sense. After watching that to the end then watching the deleted scenes it all becomes clear, the editor has been through the movie and cut all the setups from the gags out.....if there's a movie editing course anywhere, this should be the homework on the 'how not to do it' week.
Posted by: Martyn Read on September 17, 2006 09:42 AMSince I'm a massive DVD collector / film and tv fanatic, it's probably easier to mention the films which I like rather than don't like, the list would be shorter!
However, my vote would probably go for Invincible produced by Jet Li and Mel Gibson, and starring Billy Zane. It's an absolutely astonishingly bad film which tries to be a cross between the matrix and crouching tiger, hidden dragon, and manages to be as good as neither. It really has to be seen to be believed, 87 minutes of complete dross, and an insult to my DVD player. I've still got it on DVD though, it can't even be sold on eBay easily.
Posted by: Chadders on September 19, 2006 10:54 PMI've seen some truly horrible films.
Van Helsing and Pearl Harbour don't even come close.
Yes, they're terrible, terrible films, but if you think they're within screaming distance of the really awful, I think you simply haven't seen enough films.
One of the worst films to ever see cinema release that I actually sat all the way through was a dog called Turkey Shoot.
However, at points it got so unrelentingly awful it became somewhat funny, in the same way that seeing a guy crawl out of a burning car wreck only to get stung by a hornet and then blindly fall into a sewer and die has some kind of sick humour to it. On that score, it just manages to lift itself off the mat of the worst possible film.
There are some other films that I've only seen a few minutes of that look like they're probably even worse, but I have no real desire to make certain, so Turkey Shoot remains the worst film I've watched all of.
Of somewhat more recent films to see /major/ cinema release (Turkey Shoot's run was, I believe, mercifully very limited in both time and geography), I would rate "The Quick and The Dead" one of the worst; I cleaned the heads on my video after that one to make sure no trace of it remained in my VCR to infect any merely bad films I might watch after. Like Turkey Shoot, it got so bad it became somewhat funny, but it doesn't quite get as so imaginatively bad as Turkey Shoot; I can see someone making a film as bad as TQaTD all the way to the end, though I imagine large quantities of drugs must have been required to get through some days without just walking away... I can't imagine how they managed it with Turkey Shoot - it's just not physically possible to get stoned enough and still be conscious.
Sounds like it got off to a bad start when they called it "Turkey Shoot" in the first place.
Hey, I forgot "Cassandra Crossing". Starts by casting O.J.Simpson as a Catholic priest, and goes rapidly downhill from there. But that's one of those films that's so implausibly preposterous that it's quite entertaining (and that was a big budget film with an all-star cast).
Posted by: Tim Hall on September 20, 2006 10:32 PM