I couldn’t announce the title in any good conscience, but…
http://tinyurl.com/3ab3c9
Is my pick.
CHICAGO. Worst Ever.
Justin, anything by Steven Siegal far trumps Van Damme in shittiness.
Looker
And JCVD, while not a great film, is the best thing Van Damme’s ever done. Seagal doen’t seem to have the ability to pull off what Van Damme did in that film.
DEATH IN VENICE. You can’t just try to make a truly, truly terrible film. It can only be achieved by trying to make a good movie and failing miserably. I know I will be in Hell if Death In Venice is playing on the screen.
Ditka and Tom-You have never seen The Greatest Show On Earth. Makes Crash look like Citizen Kane.
David, wow. LOOKER. I’d forgotten all about that one. Was it mentioned in any of Crichton’s obits?
Steve, I have indeed seen THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH. It is CITIZEN KANE compared to CHICAGO.
For the sheer foulness of its vision of American culture: Forrest Gump. The ultimate conformist tripe. A truly reprehensible product. Celebrating the American everyman as a nearly retarded moron, and the American dream as a Dr. Pepper advertisement.
For similar reasons, the manipulative and saccharine Pay it Forward.
I’ll catch shit for it…… but I’d also say that Iron Man is a movie with a foul message of a privatized army storming into foreign countries and blowing shit up. It’s a deeply conservative film under the guise of an extremely liberal film. This blatant inability to make its own message cohere is disturbing. I know I’m in the minority on this film, but the solutions that it proposes for very real problems we face are idiotic at best, terrifying at worst. For this reason I would say it’s one of the worst I’ve seen.
A movie can be poorly constructed, shot, edited, written, acted, whatever….. but still remain spiritually superior to a movie which is expertly crafted yet exhibits a hollowness or a cynicism or a duplicity. I’d rather watch a shitty horror movie with a boom mic in the frame than see Tom Hanks or Robert Downey Jr. tell lies about my world for two hours.
Spiderman, 300 and Dawn of the Dead (remake) actually make me angry thinking about them.
I’ve certainly mentioned “Looker” every time the late unlamented racist and global-warming-denier’s name is brought up
forest gump
Wow. LOOKER. Just, wow. I actually saw that when it was released. I feel like I’m going into a fugue state just remembering it.
I’m glad to see that 300 is getting some attention.
Les Diamants du Kilimandjaro by Jesus Franco…. horrible… horrible.
Colin-What whould you expect from a Franco film?
Emily-Gee I actually like the remake of Dawn of the Dead. Now the remake of Day of the Dead-that is truly awful altho the original was pretty crappy to begin with.
David-I know Crichton didn’t believe in global warming but the racism bit I wonder about.If you are referring to Red Sun I didn’t find it racist. On the other hand the worst thing about Looker was fostering Gene Simmons on us without make up.
Hmmm, Children of Men and In Bruges as worst films ever made? Sounds a little hyperbolic to me. How about Leonard Part 6?
Crichton’s novel “Red Sun” is explicitly racist. Phil Kaufman toned the movie way down.
scarecrow, scarecrow slayer, and scarecrow gone wild. Bloodrayne, Exterminator city, House of the Dead. Also 1408 was pretty terrible
In the theater, easy, JASON X.
I agree with Justin,
i could never watch a Jean Claude Van Damme movie!!!
Alone in the Dark, come on tara reid as an anthropologist?
Glitter with Mariah Carey dogg
Bad is good.
Bad trying to be great is godawful.
I’ll take Gore Gore Girls over I Am Sam any day of the week. I’ve seen both. And I Am Sam – which costars Juliette Lewis, who is one of the worst actresses ever (especially painful in Husbands & Wives – which is otherwise excellent) – is so bad it’s criminal.
God what else? Fatal Beauty – starring Whoopi. Seen it. I was embarassed for her.
Pretty much anything Burt Reynolds was in at any point between Smokey & The Bandit and Boogie Nights. Cop & A Half – I was unsuccessfully trying to hook up with someone who worked in a dollar theater, which is how I ended up seeing that one (thankfully, I didn’t have to lose a buck for it at least, though that was as good as the evening got). Lust will make a man do strange and inexplicable things. Poor poor pitiful post-Loni bankrupt Burt.
The Godzilla movie where he fights the big flying lobster is a doozy. One of few flicks best watched dubbed. The little reverb twins are unbelievably strange.
The Deep End—this was a few years ago and at the time it had lots of buzz. Although I love Tilda Swinton, this was pretty bad.
And the documentary Tarnation. Wow, that was a 90 minute exercise in relentless, tedious narcissism.
I was thinking about this again and I would just like to say 300 one more time.
Can I offer the most disappointing? Polanski’s Ninth gate. Polanski, Depp, a gothic noir about first editions—for me this should have been my favorite movie of all time. And instead, it’s a bit dull, silly, plodding. Occasionally I watch again because I’m in such denial.
Good call Richard. Some parts (I think I’m recalling a car chase/tail scene or something) lack any understanding of cinema at all. That whole movie just stumbles along.
Funny post Richard. I must have blocked it from my mind, but looking back now, I remember thinking the exact same thing. I haven’t seen it since. Ah, too bad. Oh, well.
I find almost all parody movies to be the lowest form of film… Epic Movie, Date Movie, Sacry Movie (1 through seventy-six). I like some of the classic parody movies where they were actually trying to be a bit inventive and I enjoyed Shawn of the Dead, but that’s about it, I think that the ____ Movie franchise should be put in front of a fireing squad for what they have done for the quality of filmic enterainment in the USA… just me ? also I think that a lot of the aforementioned films don’t deserve to be in this page, some of them are good, some mediocre , and some are bad but WORST movie ever… that is a hefty claim.
Ditka
And, in light of the nominations coming out today, how about the worst movie ever to win best picture? That honor must go to Crash.