Bad Movies

What is the worst movie of your experience? It is an interesting question and one people enjoy talking and writing about, I think partly because there are so many ways a movie can be bad and so many types of bad movies.

There is the obvious category of films so badly designed, cheaply made, oddly cut, and amateurishly directed as to be easily recognized as awful – though usually harmlessly awful and often amusingly so. Many people pick one of these, such as Robot Monster, Plan 9 from Outer Space, or Monster a-Go Go, as their choice for the worst movie.

Then there are the more professional looking and usually more coherent bad  movies of the sort that would have fit well on Joe Bob Briggs’ Drive in  Theatre – films such as Swamp Thing, Hell Comes to Frogtown,  Snake Eater, Billy Jack, or Barb Wire. There are lots of these, and some of them are very bad indeed.

Worse are the shocking and grotesque supernatural horror movies which prey on the fears and weakness of superstitious, ignorant, or overly impressionable people  to terrify their audience and do little else. There are plenty of these too.

We also have the present day genre of gross, moronic, half wittedly adolescent, guy comedies -  many  of which make Porky’s, the original of the type, look like Ernst Lubitsch or Billy Wilder by comparison.  There are some plausible choices  in that bunch.

Earnest, tendentious, preachy moralizing and propaganda movies can be so bad on that basis alone as to rate consideration.  Good examples include several films from Stanley Kramer  and a large  fraction of Hollywood’s left wing agitprop films of the last forty years.

A close relative of the propaganda movie is the self-promotingly   pompous, “artistically significant” movie. There are plenty of hard to take specimens of this class around too, both foreign and domestic.

My present choice though, comes from none of these worthy categories.  My selection for the worst movie, or more precisely  the worst waste of a movie, I’ve endured is an extravagantly bad expensive and expansive “epic” film with a trashy and ridiculous plot, a famous director, a cast of talented  and successful actors, several over the top performances, an absurd conclusion, and the producer of Gone with the Wind who is said to have seen this film as a chance to match that movie’s success – Duel in the Sun.  I cannot think of another movie where, despite potential for making something good, so much went into creating something so bad. It is something else.