“The worst movie ever made” is a phrase that gets batted
around for many movies. This is
especially true of the current culture, where a binary stance on movies is
common. People only see movies as great
or terrible, with little in between. The
experience of watching a movie must be either the greatest experience that an
audience has ever had, or one of the worst experiences they’ve ever partaken
in. Rotten Tomatoes gives the illusion
that there’s more than just good or bad by providing a percentage for people
looking to see whether or not to watch something. Yet, people seem to mostly only pay attention
to whether a movie is fresh or rotten.
The binary system strikes again.
The Sunday “Bad” Movies is usually a place where some middle
ground is found. Though a movie could be
terrible, there will usually be something good within it that can bring some
light to the dark reputation that it has.
Very few movies do not have that thing that keeps them from fitting into
that label of “the worst movie ever made.”
There’s usually some point that can defend why it shouldn’t be included
in that category. Some movies do fit
that category though, such as this week’s Battlefield
Earth. Sometimes there isn’t a
single redeeming quality.
Most of the movies that have been included in the Sunday
“Bad” Movies have had that one redeeming quality that made them worth seeking
out. Whether it was a performance, a
piece of music, or all around entertainment, the movies had a reason for being
watched. They weren’t wastes of
time. There was something within them
that kept them from hitting that point.
That’s including the many movies that have been a part of the blog that
are considered the worst of all time.
That’s why this post will be a look at some of the worst, according to
IMDb’s Bottom 100, as well as the Wikipedia page about the worst movies of all
time. Most of them have something good
within them, and those things will be highlighted. Battlefield
Earth will also get its time, don’t worry.
Jack and Jill
This movie comes up once in a while. It’s considered the worst of the Adam Sandler
movies, with only Going Overboard
near it in terms of bad quality. Adam
Sandler played two roles, as a twin brother and sister. He made up his own language for the siblings
to speak. There was some massive product
placement for a cruise line. There were
unnecessary cameos that were Adam Sandler showing off his connections. And there was Al Pacino.
If there was one redeeming quality about Jack and Jill, one thing that made it
worth checking out, it’s that Al Pacino was actually pretty good in it. He played a heightened, comedic version of
himself. He fell in love with Jill. He starred in a Dunkin’ Donuts commercial as
Dunkacino. All of these things might
seem outlandish, but Pacino sold them to the best of his abilities. It seemed like he was actually trying. He even got to deliver the best joke in the
movie when everything ended and the Dunkacino commercial played, and he told
Jack that they should burn it so nobody will ever see it. It felt like meta commentary for the
movie. Al Pacino sold it that way, at
least.
The Happy Madison movies have a history of this sort of
thing. Similar to Jack and Jill, Bucky Larson:
Born to Be a Star also had one performance that was worth checking out in a
movie that didn’t deserve it. The main
character of Bucky Larson found a roommate in Kevin Nealon’s character. Nealon put in a top notch performance as the
jealous and angry roommate who cared about nobody but himself. It was the shining light in one of the worst
movies put out by Happy Madison. It
might not save it from being bottom of the barrel, though. At least it was an attempt at something. Kevin Nealon tried.
Tarzan, the Ape Man
A couple weeks ago, Tarzan,
the Ape Man was covered on the Sunday “Bad” Movies. There were many bad qualities with the movie
that were detailed in that post. The
lead actress, Bo Derek, did a fairly terrible and unbelievable job as
Jane. The direction seemed to focus more
on her body than the actual story being told.
The story itself was written in a way that the main character didn’t do
anything. Her story depended on everyone
else doing things to lead her from point A to point B. It was a crapshoot of a movie, outside of one
small thing.
The work with animals throughout Tarzan, the Ape Man was fantastic.
Though the animals had to have been trained in order to act out their
roles, they still felt wild. A lion
attacked Miles O’Keeffe, the guy playing Tarzan. There was a wrestling match with an orangutan
that ended the movie. The chimpanzees
and elephant were acting like chimpanzees and elephants instead of feeling like
trained animals. It gave a realism to
the movie that helped solidify the African jungle setting. The movie was worth watching for the animal
work.
Birdemic: Shock and
Terror
There’s not a whole lot to like about Birdemic: Shock and Terror.
It was a very boring movie, for the most part. The opening was an extended scene of the main
character driving. There was another
extended scene where everyone in a boardroom clapped at some good news. The acting was terrible, which didn’t make
things any more exciting. Of course,
there were the bad bird effects, too.
Everyone knows about that part of the movie. That’s why the movie became as famous as it
did.
However, not the entire movie was bad. There was one scene, another extended one,
where the two main characters were on a date.
They decided to dance. The song
that played over their dance scene was the full version of a song called Just
Hanging Out. Damien Carter showed up in
the movie to perform this song while the main characters danced to it. It was the high point of the movie. Yes, the second half of Birdemic: Shock and Terror was entertainingly bad. There’s no doubt about that. But this song was the one decent thing
throughout the entire movie. It was the
one thing that people could point at and say “Hey, that’s actually not bad.”
The song was such a diamond in the rough for the movie that
when the sequel came out, Damien Carter was back to perform another song. It was probably an ironic inclusion since he
was one of the things that people talked about among the bad effects, bad
acting, and bad pacing. That doesn’t
mean it wasn’t deserved.
Some other movies in the Sunday “Bad” Movies had music as
their good feature. The Apple was a disco rock musical from the early 1980s that had a
crazy, outlandishly bad story. It had
some catchy tunes though, and the soundtrack made the movie as fun as it
was. Even The Room had some decent music.
Say what you will about the quality of the movie, but the one bit of
score that was used repeatedly was actually a decent piece of music. The songs that played over the sex scenes
were ridiculous, but they were fun for what they were. The music in that movie was the only part
that wasn’t a trainwreck.
Gigli
Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez made two movies together and
neither of them were good. This was the
lesser of the two movies. The basic
story was that they kidnapped a mentally disabled teenager while Ben Affleck
tried to sleep with Jennifer Lopez, who was a lesbian. Not a great story. Oh, Al Pacino showed up for a bit, too. That’s two movies discussed here that Al
Pacino had a part in.
Most of the movie wasn’t good. The story, the acting, all of that stuff was
pretty bad. The one thing that kept it
from being a complete disaster was the look of it. That’s not to say that Gigli was a cinematic masterpiece.
It wasn’t. It looked like a
decently budgeted movie, though. It
didn’t look cheap, which is where many of the bad movies lose themselves. It looked like a theatrical movie that was
well put together. That can go a long
way in making something watchable.
Ishtar was much
the same. Though the final product was
of notably bad quality, it looked like a professionally made movie. The scope of the visuals were good. Really, as a whole, Ishtar wasn’t nearly as bad as people say. It wasn’t good, but it’s nowhere near the
worst and doesn’t deserve to be in the conversation with some of the other
movies.
Movie 43
The humour in Movie 43
was its downfall. So many big actors
were coerced into taking part in the anthology comedy film from the mind of
Peter Farrelly. For the most part, the
movie was a disaster. Unfunny sketch
comedy that, as was the case with the first segment, went nowhere. When it did go somewhere, it was too
outrageous. The comedy was bad. Everyone agreed that the comedy was bad. They might have different least favourite
segments, but they agreed that the movie was bad.
Only, some of the segments were good. It wasn’t a complete waste of a movie. There were good sketches in it. For me, there were three good sketches. The home schooling segment might not have
completely stuck the landing. It showed
promise, though. It tried something that
mostly worked. The superhero speed
dating segment was by far the best part of the movie and a legitimately great
comedy short. Then there was the
machinery segment that came out of nowhere, hit hard, and left a pretty good
laugh in its wake. Three good
segments. It wasn’t “the worst.”
Showgirls
A point can be made for movies that go so far over the top
that they end up being entertaining for it.
Showgirls was not a good
movie. It did, however, jump full bodied
into the extreme sexuality, melodrama, and politics that the story was
telling. It went all in. The crazy extreme way in which it told the
story of a girl going to Las Vegas to become a dancer made it stand out. It made all of the bad choices more
enjoyable. It was delicious to watch the
bad people doing bad things and getting bad reactions. The entertainment was in how insane it got.
There are many movies that do this same insanity in
different ways. Batman & Robin was like a feature length commercial for Batman
toys. The costumes were weird and had
nipples. The one-liners never
stopped. The architecture looked like
nothing before, and nothing that would ever exist. Troll 2
saw goblins, not trolls, attacking a family and their friends during a trip to
the small town of Nilbog. The dialogue
was poorly written because of translation problems. The acting was enthusiastically wooden. The food and drinks were all green. It was so dumb, yet so entertaining.
There are many more movies that fit this characterization,
which means they must have been doing something right. Whether it was dumb luck, or there was
actually something good hidden there that made them entertaining, they
worked. They were good times, even
though the movies were terrible. It
takes a special something the pull that off.
After all of those examples, there’s only one place left to
go. Battlefield
Earth was this week’s movie. It
didn’t have any of the redeeming qualities that the other movies discussed
had. There was not a single redeeming
quality in Battlefield Earth. The search for the good in it was as dystopic
as the movie itself. It was a barren
wasteland of bad filmmaking that supported the claim that it was one of the
worst movies ever made.
The performances throughout Battlefield Earth were nothing to write home about. John Travolta was pretty bad, and Kim Coates
could have been better. What held
everybody back was the script. The
characters were poorly written and their dialogue was worse. The motivations didn’t work. It gave the actors little to work with. It’s tough to give a great performance with a
terrible script. There have been
exceptions, but that’s usually the case.
Battlefield Earth
also looked like hot garbage. There were
Dutch tilts all over the place for no reason other than the cinematographer
thinking that they looked cool. They
served no purpose to the overall storytelling.
The effects were bad too. The
movie relied on special effects for some of the more crucial science fiction
elements. In 2000, the level of CGI was
not good enough to make things look realistic.
The effects could have worked in a situation where the world was
supposed to be cartoonish, whether the whole movie was animated or it was a
stylized reality in live action form. Battlefield Earth wasn’t trying to be
stylized in the effects. It wasn’t a
throwback. It wasn’t going for a
cartoonish feel. It was supposed to be a
dystopian real world. The effects failed
on that front.
The most egregious of the bad effects were in the final
moments of the film. For some reason,
the director decided that the final shot should be John Travolta’s character
being locked up in a cell in the vault at Fort Knox. They didn’t build a set for it. Not really.
There was a small set, but when they craned out, everything became the
worst effects in the movie. It was a
wide shot of the entire vault in Fort Knox and it looked like early millennium
computer graphics. For a movie that left
a sour taste in the mouths of the audience, it sure knew how to push that taste
to the limits in the final moment.
There was no entertainment value in the movie, there was no
good music, and the story was a jumbled mess.
Aliens had taken over Earth and the human race was almost extinct. The aliens decided to use the remaining
humans as slaves, though there were also some wild tribes of humans living in
the wilderness. One alien trained some
humans to mine gold, and the humans took that opportunity to fight back. That’s a simplified version of it. There was a lot of politics and even more
travelling over a short period of time.
One of the humans was taught everything about the aliens because that
was never going to backfire for the aliens.
It did though. It backfired hard
with the human uprising.
When there’s not one thing that a movie has that can be seen
as good, there’s a problem. A movie can
be made for entertainment value, or it can be made to raise awareness for
something. A movie that doesn’t get
people thinking and doesn’t give them a good time isn’t a movie that should be
out there. There are bad movies, then
there are the worst of the worst. Battlefield Earth fits into the worst of
the worst category. It has earned the
title of one of the worst movies ever made.
Now let’s get to some notes because this has been a longer
post and I know we all want to get out of here:
- Battlefield Earth was suggested by @rosstmiller, who also suggested Going Overboard (week 67), Jack and Jill (week 101), Leprechaun in the Hood (week 120), Son of the Mask (week 207), and Jaws: The Revenge (week 240).
- The movies that were mentioned in this post were Jack and Jill (week 101), Going Overboard (week 67), Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star (week 221), Tarzan, the Ape Man (week 273), Birdemic: Shock and Terror (week 100), The Apple (week 196), The Room (week 25), Gigli (week 225), Ishtar (week 192), Movie 43 (week 243), Showgirls (week 170), Batman & Robin (week 138), and Troll 2 (week 175).
- Forest Whitaker was in Battlefield Earth. This was his first Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance since Freelancers (week 14).
- Kelly Preston made her second appearance in Battlefield Earth. She was previously part of the cast of View from the Top (week 83).
- Jim Meskimen returned to the Sunday “Bad” Movies with Battlefield Earth. He was in Jingle All the Way (week 160).
- John Travolta was mentioned as part of the cast of Battlefield Earth. He was also in Perfect (week 195).
- Battlefield Earth was the second Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance for Christian Tessier, who was previously in Timeline (week 222).
- Jason Cavalier showed up in Battlefield Earth. He already showed up in Nine Lives (week 228).
- Finally, Battlefield Earth featured Kim Coates, who had made his first Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance in Officer Downe (week 242).
- Have you seen Battlefield Earth? What movies do you think deserve the title of worst movie ever? Are there any movies that people consider the worst that you can see some good in? Let me know in the comments.
- If there’s a movie that you think I should watch for the Sunday “Bad” Movies, let me know on Twitter or in the comments. I like to include suggestions in what I’m watching because sometimes there will be movies I never knew about that people let me know about. Feel free to send me suggestions.
- Sometimes I’ll watch bad movies and share clips of them with people through snapchat. If that sounds like something you would like to see, add me (jurassicgriffin).
- Another week is done and another will be coming up soon. What will be coming with that week? Every year, around this time, in February or March, there’s a movie that comes out that looks super ridiculous. The Great Wall was one of those movies. That’s not what I’m watching. The Hurricane Heist looks like that this year. That’s not the movie. I’m going back to the 2016 movie that fit this type. I will be checking out Gods of Egypt next week. I’ll see you soon with a post for that one.
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