In before Battlefield Earth becomes undisputed champ.
So, what IS the worst film ever made?
Our piece last week on Eddie Murphy's cinematic train-wreck A Thousand Words - a possible nominee for the worst film ever - had El Reg commentards queuing up to recount their celluloid nightmare experiences. And chilling reading it made, to be sure. Inspired by your litany of cinematic shame, we've decided to run a poll this …
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Monday 19th March 2012 17:24 GMT George Nacht
Re: every
OK, I´ll bite. The new Italian Job was way better than the confusing original. And no, I am not a troll. I love heist caper movies, in a sense that I want to see a handful of likable characters overcoming the odds. In the original I was treated to an army of anonymous,disposable thugs, that looked like they could pick up the armored car and simply carry it away. Michael Caine was simply a jerk in it. And do not get me started about the sickening ending...
OK, this is about the vote for the worst movie.... Well, Pearl Harbor comes to mind very fast.
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Monday 19th March 2012 17:52 GMT Lee Dowling
Re: every
BLASPHEMY! Kill the heretic!
"New" Italian Job (I always make a point of adding that prefix) - decent movie, REALLY, REALLY badly named. It was like someone remaking The Shawshank Redemption or The Matrix or A Clockwork Orange with the EXACT same name (no sequel rider) and a completely different plot.
The original wasn't brilliant but it was a cult movie that enjoyed good success and had a good following. Ruining it by some poor American Hollywood "homage" is not the problem, the problem was ALWAYS the name. You could have come up with a million different names that paid homage without trying to trounce the original and cash in on the name. Hell, Italian Job 2 would have been better. At least we could have just written it off as yet-another-sequel to bash.
It was okay, at best. The first was brilliant at the time and still remembered 40+ years later. You can't judge both films simultaneously.
Anyway:
Worst film ever? I could name a few dozen. There are thousands of candidates, certainly, but most are just "bad". I'd have to go for "O Brother, Where Art Thou?", though.
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Monday 19th March 2012 22:17 GMT TheRealRoland
Re: every
'You weren't supposed to blow the bloody doors off!'
Nah, it was ok, both the original and the new one. I remember going to a viewing of the new one, with 249 other new minis. Fun!
Horrible movies? I'm still wondering why Red Dawn was never Oscar material...
Or any of the Stephen Seagal movies
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Tuesday 20th March 2012 11:38 GMT George Nacht
Re: every
No, I am not American. And I really did not expected such an outrage, meaning, I did not expected to gain attention of and insult so much fellow commenters.Please, let me apologize, you are right, the new I.J. is not really a remake, and I should not have been such a ... well... my English is not up to correct word in this case.
I am very well aware of the cult status of original Italian Job, and I love M.Caine all the way from "Zulu" to "Dark Knight".
It is too late to remove my comment, so please consider me thoroughly corrected now.
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Monday 26th March 2012 08:55 GMT Squander Two
Re: every
The Thomas Crown Affair. At no point in the original did Steve McQueen manage to give the impression that he'd ever even met a businessman; his entire performance comes across as a hippy's idea of what a successful financier might be like -- which it was. The remake isn't just good; it's great.
And The Talented Mr Ripley is way better than Plein Soleil.
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Monday 19th March 2012 18:36 GMT GumboKing
Zeist?!?
Thirded. I still remember before heading in to Highlander 2 saying "It's got Connery in it it will have to be good." After, "WTF, they are from a planet named Zeist?!? What a load of crap, It is bad enough you made them aliens, but even a 3 year old could have come up with a better name for a planet than that." Shudder.
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Monday 19th March 2012 18:22 GMT Graham Marsden
@SaveTheSharks
ITYM "Highlander II - The Sickening"!
I saw it on pirate video and thank the gods I did because it saved me having to queue up for my money back!
Alternatively, the Hitch-Hiker's Guide Film: This film is bad. Really Bad. I mean you just won't believe how hugely, mind-bogglying bad this film was. You may have thought the Highlander II or Waterworld were bad, but that's just peanuts to this film. Listen...
A film that takes Douglas Adams wonderful wordplay and either sets up the joke but then forgets to do the punchline or does the punchline without the setup meaning it falls totally flat. And as for the ludicrous Hollywood Meddling "Arthur and Trillian fall in love" sub plot? Belgium, man! Total swutting belgium!!
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Saturday 24th March 2012 21:54 GMT Sean Timarco Baggaley
Re: @SaveTheSharks
Unfortunately, if you read about the project, you'll discover that most of the script was written by... Douglas Adams himself. (Yes, even the "Humma Kavula" scenes, and those 'spade-in-the-face' visual gags on Vogsphere. Douglas Adams himself really did write those.)
I rather liked it myself. It's far from perfect, and relies heavily on a very British cynicism to make any sense out of it, but it's a pretty good attempt to squeeze a six-episode radio play / novel / TV series / text adventure (all of which differed substantially from each other, remember) into a mere 90 minutes of medium-budget movie.
The original radio series was extremely episodic in nature and had very little by way of plot. It really is a rehash of the classic 1940's-era science fiction story template of "some guy gets a guided tour of the future / an alien world / etc. before being returned home (eventually)." That was already an SF cliché by the 1950s.
Douglas Adams was very fond of chopping and changing the original to fit each medium. He was also very much a comedy sketch writer at the time, and it shows in the early Hitch-hiker novels; it wasn't until a couple of books into the series that he finally worked out how to plot. And I think he made the mistake of trying to shoehorn a plot into his screenplay. It meant cutting out lots of set-pieces and sketches in favour of moving the plot along, and this is probably why it doesn't work as well as it could have. But it's a pretty decent stab, all told.
I'd have preferred the effort had gone into a TV miniseries instead as there's just too much material for a single 90 minute film—and Adams himself claimed to have been unsatisfied with the original BBC TV series, so a remake actually made sense. (Zaphod Beeblebrox's two heads proved impossible to create on-screen with the technology of the day, so we were left with a very obviously fake animatronic head that couldn't even move its lips and eyes realistically. CGI makes that sort of thing so much easier to do.)
Adams' later "Dirk Gently" novels lent themselves rather better to the movie format, I think.
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Tuesday 20th March 2012 13:51 GMT Not That Andrew
Re: Six down votes............ this is madness
Actually the original Tron is also pretty pants, even though it has some shiny for it's day FX. The sequel doesn't even have the excuse of groundbreaking FX it's just painful. But by no means the worst movie ever.
The worst movie I have seen is some execrable kids movie which my brothers spawn dragged me to when I was babysiting it. Thankfully I forgotten it's name, but the scars will remain. And there was a perfectly good Harry Potter movie showing at the same time, but nooo, it had to see that piece of shit.. I don't think the other moviegoers appreciated me yelling "You've got a goddamn gun! Just shoot the fucking squirrel!" at the screen.
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Tuesday 20th March 2012 15:25 GMT Chika
Re: Six down votes............ this is madness
Madness? THIS IS SPARTA!!!
Wonder if anyone has noticed the story that the BBC is running at the moment about Disney's latest turkey, "John Carter"? They go on to list in a side article quite a few worthy rotten tomatoes, including The Adventures of Pluto Nash.
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