Ugh, No Excuse...
- Jack Frost (1998)- Really, honestly, who thought this was a good idea? A busy father named Jack Frost (I'm not kidding) dies and returns to his sad son as...a snowman. Oh, not just any ordinary snowman, our man Jack, no, a horridly realized CGI snowman! Michael Keaton and an odd cast that includes Henry Rollins and Dweezil Zappa can't save this awful premise, and a horrible script that somehow took many different writers to work up simply shoves a boot in the face of the whole affair. The director, Troy Miller, later gave us Dumb and Dumberer. One of the worst films with a budget I've ever sat through.
- Mr. Magoo (1997)- I'm not really sure how to explain this, but throwing together an action director known for Jackie Chan films, a screenwriter who worked on Naked Gun and Real Genius, Leslie Nielsen, and an old cartoon that most children had never seen before somehow seemed like a great idea to Disney. Oddly enough, the film is ten times worse than even that strange combination promises. There are glimpses of a pre-Alias Jennifer Garner here, and Malcolm McDowell proves his career is in real peril by showing up. This is a great example of why Disney is floundering. Can you imagine how much money went into producing and marketing this dud? One of the most boring films I have sat through at a theater; at a mere 87 minutes, it still drags by.
- Breathless (1983) - Actually, I can see where this one might have seemed like a decent idea to a bunch of suits sitting around the table. Let's remake a classic of edgy cinema with an American director known for his edgy film, David Holzman's Diary. We'll find some sexy stud known for at least one artier film (Days of Heaven) and a hot French actress willing to disrobe, and bam, we have a sure-fire film that should play both in Peoria and to those stuffy critics! Boy, something happened on the way to the set. It turned out Valerie Kaprisky looked better than she acted, that Richard Gere tried to Xerox Jean-Paul Belmondo's mysteriously charismatic performance only to discover just how incredibly difficult it is to make it work, and poor Jim McBride found out that naturalism is easy, but interesting and intriguing naturalism is hard as hell to pull off. Where the original seems effortlessly cool, this remake tries so hard to be cool, it ends up funny. Very funny. And it was aiming for cool. Not good. Not good at all...
I try to be a bit careful throwing phrases like Worst Film around. I find most people are really lying a bit. What they usually mean is, "I was most disappointed in this film," or, "I can't believe they wasted that much money on THAT!" Sure, I didn't like, say, Signs, but really, compared to Manos, The Hands of Fate or some of the other really screwed films Mystery Science Theater 3000 made its name laughing at, it really can't compete with the truly awful.
This is not a list of the truly awful. It is a list of films that have no excuse for how very, very bad they are. Nope, no low budget to blame the faults of these horrible films on. A good amount of money, time, and talent somehow went in to making these bad films, and I am mystified at how those inputs resulted in films this bad.
I once sat through a horror-film version of Jack Frost with a girl I once dated who worked at a video store. The premise was this condemned murderer was being transported to another prison during a blizzard when the vehicle that was transferring him collided with a truck carrying toxic chemicals. The killer was thrown out of the truck and into the toxic chemicals that had spilled onto the highway. When mixed with snow, the chemicals changed him into an evil snowman. Awful, just awful.
Ah, the things you'll do and watch for love (or cheap sex...).
Sadly enough, I know of that film. I've seen about five minutes or so of it. Remembering it was what made me decide to add years at the last moment!
It looked pretty bad...
The worst film I sat through on a date was probably Drop Dead Fred. My date loved it. That was our last date.
In fact, Fred would probably find a nice home here on this list.
Shalom, y'all!
L. Bangs
The worst movie I ever saw on a date was that Keanu Reeves movie where he saves the winery. I think it was called A Walk in the Clouds. She then dragged me to the Julia Roberts borefest Something To Talk About. That was our last date. I still get the night sweats over watching them.
The only thing worth mentioning about that film was the box cover for the tape: it was a hologram, and if you moved it a certain way, the snowman on the cover would draw fangs and look all bloody and insane. Not a good reason, though, to sit through it.