Following on in the spirit of this weekend’s question about dumb questions, and the fact that this week starts off with April Fools’ Day — oh, and the apparent yet inexplicable box office success of G.I. Joe: Retaliation — let’s talk about this:
What’s the dumbest movie ever made?
I’m talking all-out idiotic, no-redeeming-qualities, not-even-accidentally-entertaining dumb.
It’s a truly difficult choice, but I’m gonna go with Gigli, which features some of the dumbest dialogue ever spoken by actors using really dumb fake accents, when they aren’t just about rolling their eyes at how dumb everything they’re required to do is. It’s dumb with an extra helping of dumb with dumbsauce and a side of dumb.
Your turn…
(If you have a suggestion for a QOTW, feel free to email me.)
Sorry, “Gigli”, but “Highlander 2” retired the title a long time ago.
Highlander 2 had exactly one redeeming quality: the airplane safety
video that randomly showed up in the middle of the film. Otherwise, I’d
agree with you.
I’ll go with any nine out of ten horror movies from the 1980’s.
Highlander 2 had one redeeming quality. It ended quickly.
Transformers 2: Revenge of the fallen is pretty easily the most unfathomably dumb movie I’ve ever encountered.
You know you’re in trouble when the first thing you see the hero do is execute a surrendered and co-operating prisoner of war, for absolutely zero reason. Never mind the racistbots, leg humping, perpetual sunset, cluster**** camerawork and the fact that the big bad at the end not only completely forgets his abilities of teleportation and telekinesis because further application of them might result in him winning really easily, but then goes and plants himself directly in the path of a tactical railgun (owmybrain) that we also forget is already aimed right there.
I’ve got some here:
– Battlefield Earth
– Transformers 2
– Beowulf (the one with Christoph Lambert)
Battlefield Earth – so true.
Yeah, Battlefield Earth is so on my list.
the mileage we’ve gotten out of ragging on ‘battlefield earth’ has elevated it for me. the other two though…worthless turds.
Ah-HA! Battlefield Earth, that’s what I was thinking of, yes! Truth be told, I didn’t see it, but I wouldn’t have, would I? After everybody and his dog said how lame it was.
Gotta go with that awful Channing Tatum “Fighting” flick.
Or possibly Jack Frost II… nah. Tatum.
Southland Tales.
I nominate “the cable guy” and “Are we there yet”, very rarely have I ever walked out of a movie.
Actually that would make a good question of the week (although I prefer of the day) – that is, what movie/s have you walked out on?
Any movie by J.J. Abrams and or his entourage. Specifically Star Trek 2009 and Prometheus. Plot holes? Nobody will notice! A point to the story? Nobody cares. A solid dramatic tone? Nah! An adult-minded sensibility? Fuggedaboutit. Originality? Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
yowza. harsh assessment of star trek. i loved it, but that’s neither here nor there. could it be more a case of not-what-it-should/could-have-been, rather than outright dumb?
The thing about Star Trek is, yes, the script has some astoundingly dumb moments. (Nothing quite as bad as the team-up of the galaxy’s worst geologist and biologist, but still pretty howl worthy.) But, unlike Prometheus, it never pretends to be more than it is.* And, it’s engaging enough to carry itself through the questionable plotting.
*That “what it is” is what sets off a lot of it’s detractors, such as Patrick: it’s a Star Trek-themed sci-fi adventure film, not an episode from the original series’ second season, or TNG’s 5th season.
ST 2009 wouldn’t be the dumbest movie I’ve ever seen, but as a casual movie-goer, it was the kind of experience that makes me think twice about going back to the cinema for a long, long time. It was useful, however, in determining which critics might actually share my tastes…
Tromeo and Juliet was probably the dumbest movie I’ve ever seen. Here’s my favorite scene:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUC5VQ6Rv6A
Independence Day. Everything about it, from the jingoistic David Arnold score to the idiotic climax to Will Smith’s lines is unfathomably dumb. I just can’t watch it for more than five minutes.
I’ve always found Independence Day pretty painfully stupid myself. Funny thing about the “jingoistic” score: David Arnold is a Brit. Maybe there was a little bit of tongue-in-cheek to his bombast? :-)
Perhaps. I always preferred Arnold’s non-Emmerich scores, except for Stargate.
Me, too. That actually feeds my thinking that Arnold is deliberately way over the top for his Emmerich scores, since Emmerich’s films are so bloody ridiculous to begin with.
Gotta go with a classic, Plan 9 From Outer Space. Complain all you want about modern movies, but nobody does stupid like B-level SF programmers from the postwar years. Though Z-Grade Italian schlock from the 70s and 80s comes pretty close–if you ever get a chance to see the Lou Ferrigno-starring Sinbad of the Seven Seas, take it. That thing is nearly as hilarious as Plan 9.
A modern contender: the 2003 adaptation of Michael Crichton’s “Timeline” It’s been justly forgotten but it surpasses standard Hollywood stupidity and starts to feel like a movie in which a professional cast and crew were, for some reason, put at the service of a 6-year-old director. My favourite bit is the archeologist heroes reacting to a discovery by firing off a SIREN (?!) and rapelling down the hole into the dig as though they were putting out a fire. It’s been there for 600 years, dudes! It’s not going anywhere!
Monster A Go-Go and Manos Hands of Fate were way dumber than Plan 9.
My favorite dumb movie is Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny. Nothing happens for endless string of time, there’s a framing device inside a framing device (so we can pad out the Thumbellina story to feature length), it’s all a giant advertisment for a now-defunct theme park, and the end of the movie completely forgets what was set up in the beginning. It’s hilarious and enraging all at the same time.
Friday the 13th Part 7,8 and, more specifically 9, which is not even ironically called Jason Goes to Hell. The same goes for any horror movie where people purposefully put themselves in harm’s way for the sake of tension. There’s nothing quite as dumb as going skinny dipping at midnight with your boyfriend after all your friends have disappeared.
You know what? Sleepaway Camp wins.
Many M. Night Shamylan movies. Seriously, water? Water kills them? I’m pretty sure that if aliens existed, if they had the technology to travel all the way over to our planet, they probably would have done at least a little bit of research about the Earth. “Oh, it’s made of mostly a substance that is deathly poisonous to us? Yeah, let’s go there!” And the one with the trees. Really, trees? I was a little bit interested in this new Will Smith movie, until I saw ‘M. Night Shamylan.’ No, thanks.
Well, they actually weren’t aliens- they were demons. The water wasn’t regular water, it was holy water that the girl had inadvertently blessed (they said the “aliens” were first defeated in the Holy Land). It holds up better than “aliens,” and I think Shyamalan has confirmed it, but it admittedly could have done a better job explaining the meaning of events in the movie itself.
..umm…That doesn’t make the movie any better…
I think it does, it just should have been explained better. I’ve gotten tired of the trite complaint of “aliens hurt by water? STUPID!” There is an explanations that works in the context of the story, it’s just not presented very well.
Given that this is the first time I’ve heard this explanation, and for years everyone has been talking about “aliens,” “not presented very well” is a huge understatement. If 99% of your audience misses it, then it’s presented horribly.
I agree. I don’t like movies/tv shows where things are over-explained to the audience like we’re toddlers, but come on, ANY explanation here would have been nice. It was still rather dull and anti-climactic, though. I almost want to re-watch the movie. Almost. Still not gonna.
The Last Airbender‘s script is M. Night Shyamalan’s worst offender. It manages to be boring, overwritten, filler, and painfully on the nose. I realize he was trying to explain things to non-fans of “Avatar: The Last Airbender”, but they’re not that dense. And the fans… well, disappointment would be a massive understatement.
The poor casting only makes things worse. It’s a shame, as it’s a beautifully shot and scored film. If only the acting, direction, and casting weren’t so stupid. Shyamalan has a great visual sense, but he needs to get the memo that he’s better off directing other folks’ scripts than his own.
i was thinking ‘babylon a.d.’, but i don’t think “dumb” is its problem. or at least not its biggest problem. that one hurt so much because it failed so miserably to come through on a really decent premise.
so, i’ll go with ‘corky romano’.
“Monsters Crash The Pajama Party.”
Porky’s was the most dumb-ass movie I ever saw. I don’t believe it has any redeeming features, but it did well enough with its target audience to warrant two sequels, I understand, and several immitators. It’s not in the same category as Plan 9 from Outer Space – that’s so bad it’s good! Porky’s is so bad it makes you legs carry you out of the cinema without you even willing them to do it.
The only redeeming quality of Porky’s was the nudity. Everything else was bad… especially that ‘Lassie’ scene with Kim Cattrall in the locker room.
The only redeeming quality of “Porky’s” is that apparently it’s the movie that helped pay for getting “A Christmas Story” made.
Prankster’s assessment of the ’70s and ’80s Italian schlock is pretty accurate. Just about any of those Ferrigno movies is pretty ridiculous. The dumbest one I can recall seeing is Starcrash, a dirt-cheap Star Wars ripoff from 1978. It would be hilariously awful if it weren’t so nonsensical and boring. From the “stars” that are pretty obviously Christmas lights in a black background to the blatant lightsaber ripoff weapons, to a robot that mysteriously starts talking like Yosemite Sam for no apparent reason, it’s a train wreck – yet somehow they convinced Christopher Plummer to appear in it as the Emperor of the Galaxy, or some such thing. He looks like he’s sleepwalking through the part, but he still gives a better performance than any of the other actors in the film. They also somehow got John Barry to write the score, but it, too, sounds like it’s more or less on autopilot.
On the other hand, it also features former Bond woman/B-movie queen Caroline Munro running through half the film in what amounts to a leather bikini, which almost qualifies as a redeeming value for this guy. YMMV. (There’s also an appearance by a very young David Hasselhoff, but good luck getting to that point in the film, as he shows up relatively late, and by then Starcrash has abandoned all attempts to make any kind of sense.)
Damn! I was going to go with “Starcrash.”
I mean, any movie with Marjoe Gortner, and the immortal line: “You know, my son, I wouldn’t be Emperor of the Galaxy if I didn’t have a few powers at my disposal. Imperial Battleship, halt the flow of time!”
Birdemic: Shock and Awe is pretty terrible, but often quite fun.
Wayne’s World left me thinking “well, there’s several hours of my life I won’t get back”.
speaking of dumb questions…
A two-way tie between Scary Movie 4 and Bad Boys 2 – this from a guy who watched Manos Hands of Fate (non-MST) twice in a single afternoon. Space Jam and Junior get honorable mentions.
Sucker Punch anyone? Boring and dumb CGI-fest…
I don’t know about the dumbest movie ever made, but Paul W. S. Anderson’s films certainly have some of the dumbest movie moments I’ve ever seen.
For instance, Aliens vs. Predator starts off with a satellite detecting something in Antarctica, and cuts to a control room where all the monitors are flashing red and there are audio alarms going off as well, and one techie says to the other techie something like: “Hey, I think something’s going on.”
Later on in the same film, all the cannon fodder, err, I mean characters meet up and Charles Weyland shows them what they were all brought to see. He shows a holographic representation of what is clearly a pyramid and actually says: “My experts tell me it’s a pyramid.” Well no shit Sherlock, if you need experts to tell you that, you need experts to tell you that a spatula is a spatula. An on it goes.
Or take the first Resident Evil film. I don’t know if people have seen or remember the laser scene, but here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXgsCPFhSgc
The ending of the scene just begs the question: why didn’t the computer just start off with the grid pattern and dice everyone up right away? I mean, it’s clearly the most efficient way to do it, and any logical system would work that way. Was the programmer a sadist?
i’m so forgiving of Paul W. S. Anderson’s transgressions; god help me, i love some of his movies. but that laser scene…
In a sense, I sort of feel the same in the sense that they’re the kind of movies that are fun to make fun of with friends.
i wish i could say it was a “so-bad-it’s-fun” kind of thing. but, no. i can’t help but actually love his movies.
Scary Movie. Couldn’t sit through the whole thing. Can’t believe they made a sequel.
My favorite dumb movie has to be Armegeddon, a film with so many scientific inaccuracies that, according to IMDb, incoming researchers at NASA are required to spot as many as possible. (It’s somewhere around 200, I think). I own the Criterion DVD of it, because I believe that if you must own a bad movie, you might as well get the best version available.
‘armegeddon’ is a lovely film, and it is so wonderfully absurd from start to finish that you must, you must, overlook the silliness.
I’d have to go with David Lynch’s “Wild at Heart,” which is the only movie I ever walked out of (when the freakin’ Good Fairy arrived in a bubble, I and the two friends I was with stood up as one and headed for the exit, no words being said between us). Lynch has made several films I enjoyed, and I loved “Twin Peaks,” but Wild at Heart was just stupid. I think it won the Palm d’Or at Cannes, though, so obviously YMMV. Not being a film critic who gets paid to see movies, I’ve never wasted my time with Gigli or Armageddon or a Transformers movie, so those may in fact be stupider. But I had high expectations for Lynch, which were crushed.
Gus Van Zant’s PSYCHO is the dumbest in terms of ill-conceived.
The 1925 Larry Seamon WIZARD OF OZ is the most idiotic film I’ve ever sat through.
I’m shocked Uwe Boll hasn’t had any entry yet.
Garbage Pail Kids