Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Ricochet Movie Fight Club: Question 18
Last week Brian Watt came out of his corner raging for a Page One knockout. Philo’s Page Three uppercut sent him reeling and Brian ended up clinging to the ropes, eying the clock but still upright when the final bell sounded. His jaw may be a little sore today, but not too sore to ask: What is the worst movie (not a made-for-TV movie) ever made?
From Brian:
It should be a movie shown in a movie theater produced or distributed by a major studio (MGM, Universal, United Artists, 20th Century Fox, Columbia, RKO, Warner Brothers, Disney, etc.); a movie that others may have raved about which prompted you to see it; that was so bad, you may have walked out or griped about it and felt cheated for wasting your money on it; so bad that you may have even heckled it or made catcalls at the screen in the theater while watching it; and so bad that you may actually think less of others’ taste in movies – whether critics, celebrities, or friends — who actually hold this awful film in high regard.
Of course, the more comprehensive your answer on why the movie is so awful, the more persuasive your answer will be.
The Rules:
- Post your answer as a comment. Make it clear that this is your official answer, one per member.
- Defend your answer in the comments and fight it out with other Ricochet member answers for the rest of the week.
- Whoever gets the most likes on their official answer comment (and only that comment) by Friday night wins the fight.
- The winner gets the honor of posting the next question on Saturday.
- In the case of a tie, the member who posted the question will decide the winner.
Notes:
- Only movies will qualify (no TV shows) however films that air on television (BBC films, a stand-alone mini-series) will qualify.
- Your answer can be as off-the-wall or controversial as you’d like. It will be up to you to defend it and win people to your side.
- Fight it out.
Special thanks to Arahant for compiling a list of previous questions.
Movie Fight Club Questions by Week:
- What is the best film portrayal of a book character? Winner: Charlotte with 18 likes for Alan Rickman’s portrayal of Professor Severus Snape in the Harry Potter movies.
- What is the best motion picture comedy of the 21st century? Winner: split decision. In an exemplary display of genuine sportsmanship, Randy Webster conceded the fight to Marjorie Reynolds’ pick Team America: World Police.
- What film provides the most evocative use of location? Winner: Taras with 21 likes for Lawrence of Arabia. Wasn’t even close.
- What is the best film that utilizes or is inspired by a work of William Shakespeare? Winner: Dr. Bastiat with five likes for The Lion King, a film inspired by Hamlet.
- Which movie has the best surprise ending, or unexpected plot twist? Winner: Repmodad with 18 likes for The Sixth Sense.
- What pre-1970s black-and-white movie would be most enjoyed by a modern 18-to 25-year-old audience? Winner: E J Hill with 9 likes for a Casablanca. (He didn’t exactly designate it his official answer, and most of the likes may have been for the modern Casablanca trailer rather than for it as an answer to the question, but nobody seemed to dispute it on those grounds, so that’s how the cookie crumbles.)
- What movie did you go to based on the trailer, only to have felt cheated? (i.e., the trailer was 10x better than the movie?) Winner: Back to back wins by E J Hill with 9 likes for Something to Talk About.
- Name the worst movie portrayal of your profession (where applicable.) Winner: LC with 8 likes for Denise Richards’ Dr. Christmas Jones in The World is Not Enough.
- What is the worst movie that claims to be based or inspired by a true story? Winner: Tex929rr with 16 likes for the, “…terrible acting, and countless deviations from history,” in Pearl Harbor.
- What is your favorite little known movie? Winner: A last-minute rally for Tremors made the difference as Songwriter took the week 10 win!
- What is the best movie that you never want to watch again? Winner:
HitlerCharlotte with 15 likes for Schindler’s List. Sorry, Richard Oshea but Jesus won the real fight.
Week 11.5 Exhibition Match (as a make-up of sorts, since Songwriter didn’t get the week 11 question submitted in time) Name the best movie theme song ever? No winner declared but I’m pretty sure it was I.M. Fine with “Moon River.” - Name the best animated feature-length movie of all time. Winner: I.M. Fine with 10 likes for Pinocchio, and justice for I.M. Fine prevailed.
- What is the worst acting performance in an otherwise good film? Winner: In one of the most brutal fights we’ve seen yet Repmodad fended off a furious 12th-round onslaught by Gary McVey to give Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves the win with 20 likes.
- What is the quintessential American movie? Winner: Miffed White Male pulled off the comeback with 20 likes for The Right Stuff. There was a two-way tie at 19 for second place as well.
- What’s the most entertaining movie set during WWII? Winner: Arahant clearly won with Casablanca’s walloping 30 likes despite the withering onslaught by Sisyphus on the final day.
- What is the best movie love story? Winner: Songwriter with 20 likes for The Princess Bride with 20 likes. Up managed to make a strong showing and Dr. Bastiat is still conducting recounts trying to “find” some uncounted votes.
- What’s the best’ buddy’ movie? Winner: Brian Watt wins with 12 likes for The Man Who Would be King.
Published in General
Jose’s taking “the field”.
No, but I did make a point of downloading one of the live Sands recordings of “Fly Me to the Moon” by Frank Sinatra to my phone and put it on (headphones) during takeoff.
Sounds like good take-off music.
Because Netflix? I don’t think it was shown in theaters.
If it was, it needed two intermissions. And no one came back after the first one…
Okay, I was thinking of Kill the Irishman. That was in theaters.
He actually had some good parts in non-Trek movies also. The Brothers Karamazov and Judgement at Nuremberg come to mind, not to mention a couple of Twilight Zone episodes.
I think a lot of that was pre-Trek. He also rapped in a 1999 romantic comedy film.
The worst movie ever? I nominate “Howard the Duck”. The worst movie that LucasFilm ever made. Yes its even worse than the Star Wars Prequels.
My choice: The Invention of Lying
The first act set up an amusing, quirky comedy about a world where nobody could lie. Then the second and third acts turn this premise into a ham-handed attack against religion. I struggle to call it a satire because I think a satire has to have a sharper edge, While this basically amounted to an hour and a half of Ricky Gervais stating, “Religion is lying to gullible people, get it?” Over and over again…
We watched it at a family function. Nobody knew about the sucker punch in it, and I don’t think anyone wanted to watch it after that, but we were all too polite to suggest watching something else.
I can’t vote for “Grease.”
My wife is deaf and TV’s and movies didn’t have captions back then. Grease was the first movie she ever went to. She had only the vaguest notion of the story but she fell in love with all the dancing and the scenery. It is still her favorite movie and the joy on her face as she watches and remembers her first experience with it make me realize that if it can have that effect, it must be good.
It wouldn’t be comfortable but certainly possible to do. With those slow planes you could just stand outside the cockpit and hang on for dear life, or even lash yourself to the wing root.
So bad that most people won’t even remember it, but I nominate “Howard the Duck.” It was so bad it wasn’t even campy. It was supposed to be dark like Batman, then it was supposed to be funny, well, because it’s about a super hero duck. But it was neither. It broke all its own internal rules and ended as a complete disaster, like they ran out of ideas and money. It’s the worst movie I ever sat through.
https://ricochet.com/784969/ricochet-movie-fight-club-question-18/comment-page-7/#comment-4870700
I may in the minority here but I read Jurassic Park and thought it was disappointing. Interesting idea and setup, and then page after page of people running from monsters, which we’ve seen a million times before.
But I did like the movie for the visuals of the dinosaurs.
Sorry I missed this entry. I hadn’t read all the way through.
A dangerous choice, because probably no one here has seen it, but I literally HATE this movie:
Safe, by Todd Haynes.
(1995, so not the 2012 Jason Statham movie, which I haven’t seen.)
It’s about a bunch of women who have Multiple Chemical Sensitivities and form a kind of commune with a guru and a pyramid. I hated them all so much, I wanted to slather them with hot paint stripper, and I have had hot paint stripper splash on my face.
Apparently The Room was so bad that we needed another bad movie to tell us about how bad it was. (Full disclosure: I have not seen either.)
So many to choose from. The Mrs and I could not make it through “The English Patient”. Let me say that for some movies you immediately sense the pomposity of the production staff – it’s as if they announced THIS IS AN IMPORTANT FILM before the first reel starts.
When I told her of this topic she casually said “Steven King movies are usually pretty bad” with no specifics. And she remembered us once walking out of a movie; that would be a unique experience but neither of us can remember the movie.
I can’t believe no one has mentioned the original Batman movie from 1966.
I walk out of a lot of movies.
But I ran out of Welcome to Marwen (2018).
In this movie based on a real case, Steve Carell plays a borderline weirdo who got beaten to a pulp and brain-damaged after he confessed his fetish for women’s footwear to a bunch of rednecks in a bar. The attackers eventually went to jail, and he rehabilitated himself by creating and photographing elaborate World War II scenarios with Barbies dressed up as resistance fighters.
Pretty depressing, and unsavory, and creepy, especially the fantasy sequences in which the Barbies come to full-sized life. But at least there’s plenty of dramatic story material for a movie, right?
Wrong! The filmmakers mysteriously decided to begin the movie after all the drama was over, as if this was a misbegotten and unnecessary sequel, Welcome to Marwen II.
I snuck out of Welcome to Marwen at the multiplex, and snuck into remainder of the Will Ferrell Sherlock Holmes movie. Which was terrible, but still better than Welcome to Marwen.
Official answer.
The one known as Sisyphus has lapsed into a catatonic state and is unable to respond.
It resolved my crush on Lea Thompson, who played Beverley Switzer. There’s an idea for a topic, what role killed your previously strong interest in an actor? My other example is Goldie Hawn in Swing Shift, as she played a fair approximation of my evil grandmother who dumped her volunteer soldier husband during WWII for an abusive drunk. I went from avid fan to no longer able to watch her.
Honorable mention.
After the “success” of chav King Arthur*, starring Charlie Hunnam, filmmakers greenlighted chav Robin Hood, starring Taron Egerton.
I had heard the new Robin Hood movie was terrible but I was curious to take a look at it anyway, so I bought a ticket to a different movie, one I had already seen at the multiplex, and sat down to watch Robin Hood.
It began promisingly; that is, promising of uncommon idiocy on the part of the filmmakers. Robin Hood, you see, is a Crusader. In this version, Crusaders are footsoldiers dressed in camo right out of Desert Storm, absurdly running around with bows fully drawn in place of rifles. Evidently the filmmakers thought the audience would otherwise not get their heavy-handed analogy: “The Iraq War is just like the Crusades! See? See?”
Perhaps mercifully, the movie projector stopped after about 20 minutes. Evidently not one ticket had been sold to that showing of Robin Hood.
*King Arthur: Legend of the Sword flopped at the box office, but it was too late to stop the production of chav Robin Hood.
Titanic.
Spent most of the movie hating the thoroughly unredeemable main characters, and then being disappointed in the end when Rose didn’t die with dumbass. Yeah, I know that was part of the point of the movie, but it would have saved us all the trouble.
I just can’t enjoy all the great work and cinematography when I don’t care that the bad guy lived through despicable means and wish the ”good guys” died.
Official answer.
But I agree that ”The Hobbit”, at least the first part which is all I saw, was a great disappointment. It is the last movie a saw in a theatre, so I guess it stands out for me there, and just wasn’t worth seeing the other parts when they came out.
I can believe that. Everything the French import gets dubbed. I think it is a side-effect of their insistence that the french language is superior to all others. French subtitles on a native english soundtrack triggers their inferiority complex on the subject. (Is it still an inferiority complex if true?)
Watching US TV shows at my in-laws makes everything hilariously bad. Especially for series with a lot of vocal comedy. The Cosby Show was particularly strange.
Because the real rich people on the Titanic behaved well, James Cameron had to invent the Billy Zane character, to act the way rich people are supposed to act: trying to kill the hero, lying and cheating his way onto a lifeboat.
Cameron is a piece of work. Avatar, as lame and childish as that film is, being predominantly a remake of Disney’s Pocahontas, is also a Leftist condemnation of the American military (and surprised it hasn’t made this growing list of awful films…along with Pocahontas). And then there’s the forced “joke” in Terminator 2 about kneecapping police officers that the audience is meant to laugh at.
After a quick skim of this whole thread…
It it bad that I’ve seen twenty-four of the nominated movies – in theaters?
(With about as many more that I’ve seen on video)
So, you’re the one who has been propping up the industry for these terrible films! Aha!
I nominate Shakespeare in Love.
Yeah, I know, awards and all that but terrible pretentious garbage, with Paltrow exhibiting her amazing acting range, all the way from A to B.
Official answer.