Maggie’s Blog

Here are the current top 10 WORST MOVIES EVER according to myself and my husband. This list is always in flux, so if you happen to see a movie on here that you love, wait a while, it may slip off the list given time. We watch a lot of movies.

TOP 10 WORST MOVIES EVER:

1. The Happening: I have really tried to be supportive of M. Knight Shyamalan’s work, despite the continuous decline since Sixth Sense, but this movie really broke the camel’s back for me. Not only did I find the dialogue awful, the acting (which I hear was intentional) horrible, the science highly questionable, and the plot lame, but on top of that, he gave up the one thing that usually got me through his last few flicks with a generally positive feeling: the cinematography. There was nothing notable about the setting, too many close-up face shots of people who really weren’t that pleasant to look at THAT CLOSE (but hey, who is?), and there were times when the picture actually made me feel dizzy due to the way the camera moved. Maybe this was intention, but if so, I was not impressed.

It also made me create this comic. If you loved this movie, you are far more forgiving and patient than I. Andy says there is no excuse for liking this movie. He hated it that much.

2. The Wild: I’m not sure quite how I was convinced to watch this movie, but all I could think while doing so was, “Did the producer’s six year-old son/daughter watch the Lion King, and then write the script for this movie?” I particularly liked the plot holes, like how these four animals crossed the entire Atlantic Ocean in a few days in a tugboat without starving to death or dying of thirst.

3. Buckaroo Banzai: A little known B-flick, and rightfully so. This movie came very highly recommended to us, and I must say I still don’t quite understand why, unless it was their intention to bore us for an evening, and then laugh about how we actually believed them. The truth be told, there were moments when this film was almost funny, but I always felt that I was missing most of the jokes (or that I simply wasn’t high enough to enjoy them). The plot was all over the place, the characters were at best shallow, at worst unexplainable, and the one chick in the movie was so obnoxious I think I may have missed a lot of the film simply because I was rolling my eyes.

On the other hand, if I had been high, or had understood the seemingly inside jokes, maybe this would have been pretty fun.

4. The Beast with a Billion Backs: I am fully aware that our disappointment with this movie may simply have been a case of exorbitant expectations, but come on. Most of the jokes were rehashed (and not as good as the originals), the plot was weak, and it felt long, which is always a killer on movies for me. And besides, Andy fell asleep half-way through, and he loves Futurama as much as I do.

I know others who thought this film was fine. I would say that if you haven’t watched a lot of Futurama, it still doesn’t have a plot, but at least the jokes will seem fresh. Matt Groening, you cut me deep.

5. Blade Runner: Saggy 80s boobies may have kept The Terminator off this list just for the mere giggles of it, but it wasn’t enough for Blade Runner. This may be one of the worst book-to-movie adaptations I’ve ever seen, if only because I don’t think they even tried. I have read Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and the book was good and thought-provoking. The writers/directors of Blade Runner seem to have decided that all that thought stuff was a waste of film, and proceeded to cut out anything that resembled intelligence. Except the pigeon. Which wasn’t in the book.

I was actually surprised to learn that Harrison Ford played this role in the middle of the Star Wars movies, because Han Solo is fantastic. In Blade Runner, the only face he seems to make is the I-don’t-know-what-just-happened-but-I’m-bleeding-and-scared look.

I could go into all the inconsistencies between the book and the film, but I think the redirect was intentional, if awful. It’s painful to see them try to make the story deep, when all they had to do was follow the original plot. The book wasn’t very long; it could have been really spot-on, with room for embellishment. That might be worth seeing, if they ever do a remake.

6. Star Wars III/Revenge of the Sith: Not a big shocker here, except perhaps that it’s not higher on this list. The acting is laughable, the idea was good but the special effects killed it, and… yeah. It was just bad.

7. Serenity: Now I know there is going to be a lot of bellyaching by people whose opinions I truly respect about why this movie is even on this list. The truth it, it made it here of its own free will. Primarily a film made for the fans of the TV show, it played out more like a bad fan-fiction than a follow-up (or sum-up) film. The acting was not nearly as good as it was in Firefly series, and the characters became flat and undeveloped (presumably because the moviemakers felt that this wouldn’t be necessary, since the only people who would be watching it would be previous fans of the show). We have two opinions here: one previous fan, one Firefly virgin. We both very much disliked this film. The plot went no where, even from the perspective of someone who knows what the previous plot was, and it developed the ideas to no greater depth. Character motivation was usually unexplained (or weakly, if existent), and the climax was a let down. The one interesting issue (which I won’t mention here, in case you would like to see this film) is not developed to the extent that it could have been, which is really too bad.

And they kill one of my favorite characters, who was also probably one of the better actors for this movie, making it doubly shameful to take them out like this. Especially when the reaction to their death is so weak. I get it, they’re in the middle of the climax action sequence, but still. Weak.

This probably also suffered from high expectations on my part.

8. The Holiday: This film, in context with the others, probably seems like it’s out of the blue, but Andy and I have recently become fans of Jack Black, and we were hoping to see something interesting in this film as he portrayed a romantic interest to Kate Winslet. We were disappointed. Not even that, actually: we were bored. This is one of the few films, I believe, that I actually fast-forwarded through. It did not seem to affect our understanding of the story whatsoever for having done this, and it did keep us sane. It was predictable (even in fast motion), and dull (even in fast motion), which was truly pitiful.

Let’s just say, we definitely felt that we’d wasted an evening.

9. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Another film that will probably have some disagreement from intelligent people, and to them, I say quite honestly, you are free to your own opinion. However, having read most of the works of literature that these characters come from (PARTICULARLY 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea), I was disgusted by their shallow and laughable treatment in this film. I realize the movie is based off a comic book and doesn’t come directly from the books, but to be perfectly honest, this movie made me never want to read the comic. Frankly, the way they portrayed Captain Nemo, Dorian Gray, even Mina Harker appalled the English Major/reader in me. Why not just take Raskolnikov and make him a witty thief? It would make about as much sense.

Granted, I’ve got a bias here against stories that have to utilize pre-made, pre-famous characters in order to tell a story. I hate historical remixes with famous people, also, which may explain why I disliked this film. However, the plot was still terrible, and I still can’t get over Mina Harker (even as a vampire) wearing a leather bustier. And that’s why it made this list.

10. Steamboy: This may shock some. It certainly shocked me. I wanted to see this movie since I saw it advertised at the local movie theater in Manoa. I’d like to think it only suffered from high expectations, but that’s simply not true.

Steamboy is pro-abortion. Every single good fetus of an idea it has is almost immediately aborted for a far less interesting train of thought. Whenever I thought, “Ah! Now *this* might be interesting!” the movie promptly ignored the infinite possibilities within its grasp and dragged itself into a cesspool of mundane WTFness. Even the science–in many, many parts though perhaps not *all*–was terrible. Whole systems of moving parts that seemed to do nothing except aid the already flailing plot (leg-trap-machine, anyone?).

Yet all of this I could have overlooked if I’d given one crap for any of the characters. I can’t even remember the main character’s actual name, only that at the end he’s called “Steam Boy”. That’s how much I cared. Every single person was either stock and undeveloped (other than as the human manipulator of the massive machinery in the background), or they were so horrible I didn’t *want* to like them. The only important female character–Scarlett–falls into this latter category. She beats her dog, for goodness sake! And we’re supposed to like and sympathize with her? It wasn’t funny, it was tragic, and I’m nowhere near a member of PETA. If she had any other redeemable qualities, perhaps I could understand how she could basically be the almost-but-not-quite romantic foil for “Steam Boy” but she didn’t. Most of her lines are simply her screaming the names of either her servant or the various other characters. Literally, just the names.

The plot was negligible; the characters, dull at best. The science, pretty darn bad. I think what happened with this one was that an artist created a few plates of the main character, the steam-ball, and Steam Tower, and then handed it off to the movie makers saying only, “Here! Make a movie about this.” The writer then took these pictures and strung them all together haphazardly–perhaps due to a serious time constraint–and didn’t bother to edit anything. When the illustrators for the film then asked why the heck this or that was happening, the director merely shouted, “JUST DRAW IT!” and let it go at that.

The visuals are really the only good part of this film, and I’d suggest just downloading some still images from it rather than watching the movie as a whole. It’s just not worth the time. I’m not being a meany here: it earned its place on this list.

Also: trains do not stop that fast. Period.