From a comment by Adam in another thread:
What is everybody’s opinions here of the worst movies of all time? At the same time, I’ve been watching some of the Siskel and Ebert year end shows on the worst films of the year, and they pointed out that they weren’t interested in going after little indpendent films, but films that either had no excuse for being so bad, or that were only made financial reasons, i.e the big budget studio films.
My choices in this regard are:
1.It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World. Even though Peter Falk is in this movie, it’s a bad, bad, bad,bad movie. It’s loud, violent, and cynical without a redeeming character in the film. I know some people regard it as some kind of comedic gem, but I regard it as neither funny nor pleasant.
2.Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I honestly don’t understand the positive reviews. To me, it was basically 2 hours of ‘how can we embarrass Richard Dreyfus?’
3.The Deer Hunter. This gets more mixed reviews. I think people who were afraid to say bad things about a Vietnam veteran war movie basically showed what they really felt when the director released the similar film Heaven’s Gate, which, as the story goes, bombed so badly that it bankrupted a studio. The Deer Hunter is boring, indulgent and filled with supposedly meaningful symbolism that are really nothing more than obvious and stupid cliches. A glass or something breaks at the end of the incredibly long wedding scene and some doll sheds a tear. How profound! A truly awful movie.
On another matter on a similar subject, Scoopy wrote about how To Kill a Clown is outdated coming from the hippy era. Scoopy and others might be interested in a film called ‘The Todd Killings’ from that same era. Without giving anything away, it features a somewhat older hippy (mid 20s or so), who believes he is fooling both the military and the police, but finds out they weren’t so easily taken in.
Scoop’s note:
I’ll start it off, considering some movies that are rated 7 or higher at IMDb
Chariots of Fire (7.1, winner of the Oscar as Best Picture). Well, I can’t fairly say that Chariots of Fire is a bad movie, because I have tried to watch it several times, and have never made it through long enough to evaluate it. I have fallen asleep each time. You may think I am exaggerating, but that is literally true. I think I have tried four times, and have fallen asleep on each occasion.
Blow-Up (7.5). The reaction to this film always reminds me of the response to the film that the castaways made in Gilligan’s Island, which ended up winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes, thus suggesting the appeal of incoherence to the arty set. Critics loved Blow-Up – proof that if you make something pretentious and self-important enough, you can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time.
Eyes Wide Shut (7.5). Has there ever been a case where so much skill and genius were used so poorly? To me the saddest thing about this movie is that Kubrick had always been the best filmmaker in the world with difficult literary adaptations. Lolita and Barry Lyndon are virtually unfilmable, but Kubrick managed to turn them both into terrific movies. A Clockwork Orange seems almost impossible to capture on film. It’s written entirely in a non-existent language! Yet Kubrick turned it into an iconic work of genius. And then there was Eyes Wide Shut, in which everything worthwhile about the film was already in the source novel, while everything Kubrick changed resulted in a disaster.
No comment needed on these two beloved stinkers:
Call Me By Your Name (7.8)
The English Patient (7.4)
And if you calculate “most overrated” by the IMDb score minus what the film actually deserves:
Return of the Jedi (8.3)
The Blair Witch Project (6.5)
