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I’m generally pretty forgiving when it comes to bad movies. I’ll tie myself in mental knots trying to figure out plots, rework scripts, or explain a director’s incoherent vision. But sometimes, even I can’t find the silver lining. Let’s face it—some films just suck.

Anaconda

Details:
1997
Genre: Action/Adventure

There are bad movies. There are terrible movies. And then there are movies that reach some new plane of horror so mind-numbingly awful that watching them makes you lose the will to live. (It’s kind of like the evil video in The Ring, only you’re afraid you’re going to be sucked into the film and forced to deal with contrived plots, bad scripting, and third-rate special effects.) I don’t know how they did it, but the folks who created this piece of offal managed to do almost everything wrong, even as far as C-grade horror movies go. I mean, who the hell decided to cast Jon Voight as a South American snake hunter? (On the other hand, why did Jon Voight agree to be cast as a South American snake hunter?) Watch for the scene where the waterfall flows up instead of down—priceless.

Angels Don’t Sleep Here

Details:
2001
Genre: Thriller

Damn you, Robert Patrick. If you hadn’t been in this movie, I would never have wasted my money on it. Now, I’ve seen some truly terrible flicks in my time, but this is definitely the worst—badly scripted, indifferently plotted, and what the hell was up with the sound? Was the budget so low that they couldn’t afford a boom mike? Of course, having Robert Patrick made it seem that much worse, because Patrick is a fine actor who makes everyone else look like acting school rejects. He came as close as anyone could to making this script work. Unfortunately, even he couldn’t keep this film afloat.

Brigadoon

Details:
1954
Genre: Musical

I like musicals. I like Scotland. I like Gene Kelly. I didn’t like this movie. Maybe it was the goddamn theme song—a whole freakin’ choir howling, “BriiiiigaDOOOON, BRIIIIIgaDOOOON!” over and over and over… Beyond that, I was just confused by the logistics of the thing—okay, so if the town only appears once every hundred years, and if this has apparently been the state of affairs for at least a few millenia (in our time, not theirs), why are all the townspeople wearing circa-1700s clothing? According to their timetable, the 1700s would have been two days ago… and I doubt they all left town to go clothes-shopping. It’s petty, I know, and one shouldn’t expect logic from musicals, but hey: if they won’t even bother to get the most basic details straight, I’m not gonna bother to like it.

Citizen Kane

Details:
1941
Genre: Drama

I know it’s a classic, I know Orson Welles was a wunderkind, I know he did some great camera work and innovative stylistic tricks on this film… and I honestly couldn’t care less. The whole thing bored me to tears. Of course, I was only an adolescent when I saw it, but I doubt my feelings have changed, and I’m certainly not going to sit through it again to check. By the time the damn thing ended, I was ready to beat that guy to death with his stupid sled. Rosebud, indeed.

Elizabeth

Details:
1998
Genre: Drama

I’ll admit it: I’m a history purist, particularly when it comes to Tudor/Elizabethan history. The story of Queen Elizabeth I is so dramatic in itself, there’s no need to throw in anything extra. Which is why this movie pisses me off so much. They screwed up everything—the costumes, the castles, the characters. Far from being the tough and clever politician she was in real life, the Elizabeth shown here is fragile and trembling, entirely influenced by the men around her. Then there’s Joseph Fiennes, who just pisses me off—he tries to mimic his brother Ralph’s intense smoulder, but only manages to look dyspeptic. Bad, bad, bad in so many ways.

Pretty Woman

Details:
1990
Genre: Comedy

Your typical Hollywood love schmaltz, with a twist: rich boy meets hooker, rich boy hires hooker, rich boy is nasty to hooker, yet hooker still falls for rich boy… and people think this is cute? The rich guy’s a bastard, the hooker acts like a five-year-old, the whole situation is beyond just being a feminist nightmare, it’s a nightmare, plain and simple—and yet it’s considered the definitive romantic comedy of the decade. This movie doesn’t just annoy me, it actually creeps me out on an actual visceral level. And it truly terrifies me that so many women seem to find it the paragon of romance—talk about fucked-up Cinderella complexes…

Shakespeare in Love

Details:
1998
Genre: Comedy/Drama

As mentioned above (Elizabeth), I’m not a fan of Joseph Fiennes. Since he’s a major part of this movie, it follows that I’m not a fan of it. This could have been a decent story, but it was ruined with bad acting, silly plot devices, and far too much running around—and you gotta love the fact that they just brushed aside Shakespeare’s wife and kids to make room for this romance.

The Sixth Sense

Details:
1999
Genre: Thriller/Suspense

Bruce Willis as a righteous, pissed-off cop? Yes. Bruce Willis as a ruthless international assassin? Sure. Bruce Willis as a child psychiatrist? Um… no. By the time the film finally rolled around to the much-vaunted “twist” at the end, I was so sick of the kid and his creepy psychiatrist (what kind of shrink follows you all over town, anyway?) that I really didn’t care who was dead and who was alive. The scenes with the dead people were kind of freaky, though. Should have been more of those.

The Unsinkable Molly Brown

Details:
1964
Genre: Musical

Oh, look—it’s the musical that sank a thousand ships. (And that’s saying something, since there are some truly godawful musicals out there.) Not only were the song-and-dance numbers horrendous, the whole damn film was titanically bad. I sat through the whole friggin’ thing waiting for the sinking scenes… and all I got was thirty seconds of the lady in a lifeboat, exclaiming “I’m unsinkable!” What a ripoff.

The Wicker Man

Details:
2006
Genre: Thriller

Why, why, why does Hollywood have to keep remaking perfectly good old movies? The original 1973 version of The Wicker Man was brilliant—funny, mysterious, well-written, and scary as hell at the end—so of course it was inevitable that Hollywood would do a remake and screw it up horribly. Obviously the director had seen the original version, since he copped most of his one-liners from it; somehow, though, he managed to extract all of the humor, suspense, and atmosphere from the plot, leaving a nasty and misogynistic yawn-inducer in its place. The actors all seem bored, and for good reason, too—and if they can’t be bothered to care about this dreck, why should I?