1. “Zack and Miri Make a Porno”. I spit on this fucking contemptible c*** of a film.
A tie between MAMMA MIA, and BENJAMIN BUTTON. Unwatchable horrors, the pair of them.
I had higher hopes for Zack and Miri, Tropic Thunder and Pineapple Express but I woudn’t say that they were the worst films of the year just disappointing. I also forgot that I saw 27 Dresses on a date, it was painful.
hancock
forgetting sarah marshall ( i really hated this one)
indiana jones
hancock
forgetting sarah marshall ( i really hated this one)
indiana jones
The motion picture travesties of 2008 are incapable of reaching a sum. So, I’ll just talk about the ones that I actually saw, and also skip the straight to DVD releases.
The Spirit (succcccckkkkkkked)
Pineapple Express was very disappointing (word to Maria)
You Don’t Mess With The Zohan
88 Minutes
Into The Wild (I have to boycott anything that Emile Hirsch is in, I hate that guy)
21
White Noise 2 (I know it’s a straight to DVD, but it was reallllly bad)
Every horror movie of the year (Not including Funny Games, I liked that one)
Indiana Jones was pretty bad
Meet The Spartans
The Happening (really bad, but at least it was fun to watch)
Speed Racer
Meet Dave
The Love Guru
Bangkok Dangerous
Beer For My Horses
College
Step Brothers
Superhero Movie
Jumper
Fool’s Gold
Forbidden Kingdom
Get Smart
X Files 2
Wanted
What Happens In Vegas
Definitely Maybe
First Sunday
Made Of Honor
Righteous Kill
Transporter 3
Sisterhood Of The Traveling Pants 2
Space Chimps
Vantage Point
Twilight
Untraceable
*I’d just like to add that I work at a video store, that’s how I’ve seen all of these landfill-ers.
Thank god I haven’t suffered through too many of the dogs listed here. But I’m shocked that people have mentioned Dark Knight. That is a little spiteful, isn’t it? You could call it overrated, but not one of the worst movies of the year.
Worst 5 I’ve actually seen:
5- Mummy 3 – Bad effects, bad pacing, bad acting, bad everything.
4- The Happening – So very dull. When the evil killing machine is… well nothing, that sure makes for a dead end plot, at least in a visual medium.
3- X Files I Want to Believe – It’s been a while, but I think I remember the TV series being more interesting than this film.
2- Eagle Eye – This was the most idiotic action movie in years (at least Wanted was intentionally idiotic so I’ll give it a pass). The contrived plot devices, the convenient coincidences, the ripping off of far superior movies, all just offended me like a Bob Sagat stand up routine. I put this one in the list instead of Jumpr because I would have used that jumping power to loot and steal as well, so I got a kick out of that one scene.
1- 10000 BC – This was the “Eagle Eye” of “historical epics”. Even Uwe Boll thought this was crap!
Oh yeah, Eagle Eye. Thanks Tony Stark, that movie really did suck.
Rodney – “get on the tits of the indy crowd”…priceless!
This list brings to mind the reverse and its inherent problems…distinguishing between “great” and “good” films. Here you have to distinguish between flawed and truly wrongheaded films. Rambo, In The Name Of The King, Doomsday and 21 may be derivative, dull, overdone or flat, but they aren’t awful films. The truly misguided were films like:
Meet The Spartans – unfunny (with one exception…I love that Spears bit), gross-out stupid, and interminable for a film barely 80 minutes long.
Jumper – a one-note thriller with a lead we couldn’t possibly be expected to like, root for or care about. And that kid is really an awful actor.
Speed Racer – vomiting candy colors non-stop and inciting grande-mal seizures is no way to go through life, son.
The Happening – possibly the worst film of the year, and I go in wanting to like each and every one of MNS’s films. I even sort of liked Lady. Forgive me. But this was a non-event. And Wahlberg was not the guy for that role. Actually he was perfect for that role, but I think you know what I mean.
The Onion Movie – a little direct-to-DVD action. This was insulting and unfunny.
The Love Guru – unfunny (what is it with comedies this year?), pandering, petulant third-grade humor.
Bangkok Dangerous – Flat in every sense: color, tone, acting, narrative; across the board a failure.
War Inc. – wait a minute, The Happening has some competition. Unfunny and dull and cheap-looking, like someone’s kids put the sets together. Just bad, awful.
Righteous Kill – a nonsensical mess.
The Spirit – Never before have my wife and I looked at each other as the credits of a film started rolling and said, at the exact same moment, “That stunk.” But we did at The Spirit!
Non-2008 films I watched that I disliked:
DULL DULL DULL
Day Night Day Night
The World
Goodbye Dragon Inn
Great World of Sound
Pulp
The Situation
Summer Palace
Music Within
Boarding Gate
Vince Vaughan’s Wild West Thing
The Tiger and The Snow
The Wizard of Gore
OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies
TRULY AWFUL
Slipstream
Charlie Bartlett
Smiley Face
Branching off yet again…to examine elements of very good films could have made them great if changed.
Perfect example: Gran Torino. Two things really stood out. 1) It was quite funny, but that humor was almost exclusively demeaning or racist content, and there is a discomfort tied to laughing at those lines that makes you second guess your reactions. 2) Several major roles are played by people that don’t seem to have ever acted before, and it really shows. I mean, there are some BAD line readings in the film. Not sure why Eastwood decided to go that way. But I am a fan of the film overall despite these things.
I wouldn’t call the new indiana Jones flick the worst film of the year when there were so many others that were worse. I would actually enjoy watching Indiana Jones again as what it is a piece of fluff no where near as good as Raiders or Temple of Doom but still far better than say Saw V (this franchise need to stop and stop now…the first one was great but after that it has been a long and steady drop in quality. If I want to see a torture flick…I’d see Salo); Momma Mia, Meet Dave, Jumper, The Love Guru, THe Bank Job, The Onion Movie, (Should I go on?)
In my case the worst movie of 2008 would have to be “The Happening”. Waste of time and probably would have been better without Marky Mark.
The Incredible Hulk. It made Ang Lee’s version look good.
Oh c’mon! Juno and Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist were cool!
Juno ranks among the most overrated movies I have endured. There was an overpowering stench of desperation in its determination to be hip.
No one speaks or acts the way those characters talked, day in, day out. Trying too hard to be hip…just isn’t hip.
I’d rather re-watch Ghost World or Napoleon Dynamite before enduring Juno again.
It is still staggering to believe Juno won a screenplay Oscar.
Also in 2008, Hall of Shame awards go to the Mike Meyers flick that need not be mentioned here, the latest Saw installment and all other examples of torture porn, and the overexposed Will Farrell.
Cheers,
Steve
CinemaUprising.Blogspot.com
“Quantum of Solace” was the shit. Indiana Jones was probably the most disappointing movie of 2008 for me. And yeah, I loved “Funny Games” a whole lot. I can see why people who saw the original might be mad that it’s almost the same movie, but if you look at it as an individual movie all by itself, I think it is quite good.
Okay, Lemme see….The Love Guru. I would just like to say one thing “To those who say the top ten best lists as the worst…are high on their own farts” Thank you for your time.
Nothing was more atrocious and insulting than The House Bunny.
Cinematic Cteve indeed, Juno was a travesty and it boggles me to this day how it ever received any attention.
As for 08, gladly I didnt see too many films but from all the ones I did see, I think they were all pretty horrendous. The Happening is definitely up there as many already mentioned as is Mamma Mia. Repo The Genetic Opera was also quite laughable. Terrible music, direction, and some of the laziest shooting ever to grace a major release.
Crap-Did you realyy expect Repo to be anything good? Besides I wouldn’t call it a major release. It played very few places. Never even opened in Michigan. The Happening was terrible and Mamma Mia I avoided like the plague-altho people who criticize Americans taste in movies should know that it was the number one movie in Britain last year.
Juno was way overrated-acting was okay but the script was too overly hip(just like the terrible columns Diablo Cody is now writing for EW).Another Sundance bait film(like Little Miss Sunshine the year before).
Crap-Did you realyy expect Repo to be anything good? Besides I wouldn’t call it a major release. It played very few places. Never even opened in Michigan. The Happening was terrible and Mamma Mia I avoided like the plague-altho people who criticize Americans taste in movies should know that it was the number one movie in Britain last year.
Juno was way overrated-acting was okay but the script was too overly hip(just like the terrible columns Diablo Cody is now writing for EW).Another Sundance bait film(like Little Miss Sunshine the year before).
Steve….no not really but I went in with a false sense that maybe it could at least be enjoyable. I mean hell, they had both Anthony Head and Sarah Brightman but still managed to fuck it up. I wasn’t expecting anything mind-blowing but I was hoping for a few good musical numbers.
The Remake of… The Day the Earth Stood Still …“There was ‘nooooo way’ i was standing still !!!!!!!!, In the Name of the King..”Horrible!!!!!!!!!!!
I didn’t go see many bad films this year, but the worst I saw was (did you saw is was backwards, I just realized that) “A Christmas Tale” (Un conte de Noel). I’m sure it wasn’t as bad as… say, Twilight or Hancock or Repo… but I didn’t like it too much.
The worst film I saw in a theater in 2008 was a documentary called Millions (A Lottery Story)
The worst film I saw in a theater in 2008 was a documentary called Millions (A Lottery Story)
the x files 2 and cloverfield !!
i dont watch bad films
I Come with the Rain (Anh Hung Tran) is unbearable bad! Anybody seen it? I couldn’t believe it. What has happened to Anh Hung Tran :(
Yeah, I saw I Come with the Rain at a jam-packed Tokyo screening (the allure of Kimura Takuya and Lee Byung-hun is strong in these parts) and it’s definitely a contender. The ham-fisted Christ analogies really made me wonder what has happened to the director of something as subtle as The Scent of Green Papaya. Next up, Murakami’s Norwegian Wood.
The soundtrack was quite nice though. Godspeed, Silver Mt. Zion etc.
Ryan
Twilight, obviously. And Babylon A.D. God, that movie was so terrible.
It appears that I’m the minority here, but I liked the new Indiana Jones. It’s definitely my least favorite in the series, and had some shitty moments, but I still enjoyed it.