Hall of Shame

Dear Lord, I have sat through some crap over the years. But in mitigation, bad films are always so much more fun to write about. Here are some random links to a selection of the worst movies on this website:

• "So what would be the best course of action? Would it be (a) Holy crap, there’s a dangerous wild animal on the loose! Close the doors! Lock the doors! Wind up the windows! Whatever you do, stay inside the car! Or would it be (b) Holy crap, there’s a dangerous wild animal on the loose! Everyone out of the car and let’s all run off randomly into these woods that we don’t know at all in ones and twos!"
• "She swans through the film like she’s some sort of cross between Barbara Steele and Barbara Shelley. When in fact she’s somewhere on a line between Barbara Bush and Barbara Cartland."
• "Surprisingly, neither the one-dimensional characters nor the rambling, unsatisfactory plot constitutes the film’s biggest problem. Nor indeed is the budget CGI used to create the aliens a stumbling block. No, the biggest problem here is that the film has absolutely no idea what decade it’s set in."
• "No, honestly - the character’s called Herpes."
• "not only is every single person in Fraser’s HQ equipped at all times with a powerful weapon, whatever their role - and remember that this is a secret base on a lonely asteroid so they are unlikely to have many visitors - but also, despite advances in space travel way beyond the dreams of current technology, the weapon of choice for both pirates and space marines remains the M-16 automatic rifle."
• "takes an original, intriguing, historical, creepy concept and totally pisses it up the wall with a mishmash of random horror ideas that only intersect when they take the trouble to contradict each other"
• "like listening to a staged debate on the nature of sexuality which is interrupted every five minutes to allow members of the audience to lick each other’s tits"
• "every line of dialogue sounds like the title of something. Something bad and unreadable. With a dragon on the cover"
• "he looks like the forgotten sixth member of Spandau Ballet. Gummo Kemp."
• "Nothing at all about this film makes me care about the lead character. I don’t want him to succeed and if he fails it’s his own miserable fault"
• "For most of the movie, this wooden actor drones on in a flat, lifeless monotone, explaining what his character is feeling, what he’s thinking, what he has just done, what he plans to do next and occasionally what he is actually doing while we’re watching him doing it."
• "In an astonishing display of cheap film-making the planes are Vulcan bombers in the stock footage of them taking off and the Red Arrows in the stock footage of them in flight! By the time they reach Big Ben, they’re model helicopters!"
• "In the fairly large control room is a device for showing where everyone is on the ship. Given that there are only five rooms and they’re all linked, plus they all have wall-mounted intercom telephone things, you do wonder why this machine is necessary."
• "it is hobbled by its own desperately low ambitions, apparently believing that simply ticking the boxes marked ‘violence’, ‘drugs’ and ‘satanism’ doth an effective horror film make."
• "As the clock ticked down on this will-sapping ninety-minute movie, my hopes of some sort of storyline appearing gradually faded."
• "In a nutshell, what we have here is a group of people we neither know nor care about trying to do something we don’t understand for reasons that aren’t clear."
• "for unexplored jungle, it doesn’t half have some parts that are easy to drive along."
• "why did anyone think it would be scary in any way to have characters attacked by invisible things in the dark?"
• "the fact that the ‘haunted’ item is a mirror is completely irrelevant. It could have been a haunted candlestick, a haunted alarm clock, a haunted pizza-cutter or a haunted Swedish-made penis enlarger for all the difference it would make to the plot."
• "A film to be watched only late at night while very, very drunk. Unfortunately I saw it sober in the middle of the afternoon."
• "Sometimes you just want to relax with a shitty horror film, but bloody hell, does it have to be quite this shitty?"
• "It’s horribly shot, has no discernible story, drags on way too long and is of no interest to anyone except those who made it and British horror completists."
• "Yes, they are physically attractive people. Yes, they are reasonable actors. Yes, they are simulating copulation. We get it. Can we move on with the plot now please?"
• "What’s the point of this montage? Is this supposed to make us like these four morons? Are we supposed to be impressed? Supposed to empathise? Fuck them. They’re idiots."
• "It’s important for people to see how casually racist even a minor kids’ film could be, reflecting the appalling state of American society only a couple of generations ago."
• "By the end of the film, we still won’t know all their names or their relationships, although a couple of them are lesbians apparently."
• "an hour and a half of a little lad and a hot chick kicking the arses of production line martial arts goons"
• "they save the day using a combination of a molotov cocktail and a fire extinguisher which, if they had stopped to think about it, really cancel each other out"
• "Not only did I not laugh, I couldn’t work out where I was supposed to laugh if I had found it funny."
• "this film has a story so basic that you could write it on the back of a postcard and still have room for the address and the stamp."
• "to distract him from obsessing about stabbing a pumpkin-masked maniac last 31st October, his sister is taking him to a Halloween costume party full of pumpkins. Glad she’s not my therapist."
• "You can almost see the exact point in this production when the effects budget ran out."
• "a film that makes you long for the fast-paced action and edge-of-the-seat tension of Tarkovsky’s Solaris."
• "I’m buggered if I could follow what was happening, a situation not helped by two women who look very similar having their heads cut off and then magically restored to each other’s shoulders."
• "All the explosions in the war scenes are clearly little thunderflashes which send up a shower of sparks but conspicuously fail to move even a handful of actual earth the way that real rockets and shells do."
• "he tells his son he won’t leave his side for a moment then promptly leaves the room to stick the ape carcass in a convenient incinerator"
• "those not involved in the actual fights simply stand around looking bored while people they care about pretend to kick seven shades of shit out of deadly robots."
• "The animation is some of the worst I have ever seen, based entirely on simple repeated loops of motion. Nothing happens that doesn’t then happen four or five times again in succession, sometimes in two alternating directions."
• "cheesy 1950s B-movie sci-fi at not only its cheesiest but also its B-movie-ist and frankly its 1950s-ist."
• "The threadbare, nonsensical, contradictory ‘plot’ peeks out occasionally from behind several lengthy, dull, softcore sex scenes and a few quite good fights, "
• "Also - and frankly I’m surprised this would ever need pointing out to anyone - the labs that animal rights activists break into tend to have, you know, animals in them."
• "It is a well-known fact that all hot women with a professional interest in science are either astronomers or marine biologists."
• "at one point Debbie Gibson forcefully and deliberately pushes a handful of whipped cream into Tiffany’s cleavage. It may quite possibly be the single most erotic thing I have ever seen."
• "What a cheesy swizz! You pay good money to see an escapologist and he escapes while we’re watching other people."
• "Between them, the pirates and the buccaneers are responsible for, I would say, seven of the ten oddest accents ever heard in a feature film."
• "a pretentious, arty, plotless, amateurish collection of largely random ideas which is as boring as it is incomprehensible. The best thing you can say about it is that’s it’s only 52 minutes long."
• "The townsfolk wonder if it was a bear that killed the woman (German bears must be very agile because it got in through a first floor window!)"
• "he has blonde highlights in his hair - so it’s good to know that this remote mining colony still has functioning hair salons."
• "imagine that you have to do make-up for half a dozen werewolves, who are in about half of the movie’s running time, and your entire budget is not quite enough to buy a decent Chinese meal for two."
• "Suddenly continuity becomes something that just happens to other films."
• "I guess it’s a good thing that they have no characterisation as that would make them more like real people we could genuinely hate, whereas they are currently just cardboard cut-outs that we don’t care about."
• "I suppose one must give props for the threat of an enormous, prehistoric, paraplegic, bulimic cat. Not too many of them about, even in my DVD collection."
• "her pimp then turns up, furious with her for spending ten minutes talking with a vicar when she should be out giving blow-jobs. But apparently not minding her taking a couple of hours off the game every weekend to show Bela Lugosi features to nerds."
• "a ridiculously over-ambitious gothic fantasy epic shot for about £2.50 and dragging on for about 100 minutes"
• "poorly conceived, badly written, bizarrely directed. alarmingly miscast, indifferently structured and full of thoroughly unsympathetic characters who you will quickly grow to hate"
• "Nothing ever gets resolved, or even developed. Anything which isn’t two or three folks kicking the shit out of each other is rushed past like some sort of formality"
• "like looking at a really terrible website full of different fonts and colours with endless flash animations and rows of dancing hamsters. This is chuck-it-all-in-because-we-can film-making which completely obscures the simple story at its heart."
• "like watching randomly selected scenes from completely different films, all of which star the same actors wearing the same clothes"
• "this is where the whole sorry mess of a film tips over from being just badly made and risibly scripted to actually being naive and offensive"
• "straight up, if you can show me any attempt at a special effect which is as woefully cheap and stupid as this, then I will buy you a very large drink."
• "'Mercifully short' is the kindest thing that can be said about this pile of Thai tosh."
• "Quite why experiments in remote viewing would require a convicted psychopath with no tongue is something that concerns us as little as it concerns the idiot who wrote this."
• "These are just the lowlights of a film which makes No Sense Whatsoever."
• “may very well be the single worst line of movie dialogue I have heard this year. And it’s November."
• “I’ve only bothered reviewing this to show my amazement that such a piece of bastardised tat exists”
• “the sort of ‘comic relief’ that would make a Bollywood producer say, 'My goodness, that is a bit unsubtle and not terribly funny.'”
• “In an acknowledgement of how copperplate the ending is, one character actually screams, 'I guess you haven’t seen the end of Jaws, you bastard!'”
• “If I had to sum up the film in one word it would be ‘over-ambitious’. Unfortunately, if I was allowed three words the other two would be ‘pretentious’ and ‘dull’.”
• “a strong contender for the dumbest premise of any zombie film ever made”
• “one of the least attractive pairs of artificial, pierced breasts I have ever seen”
• “a ‘punk nightclub’ which has all the anti-establishment nihilism of a Debbie Gibson album”
• “there isn’t even a wise-cracking Token Black Guy to liven things up”
• “Right at the end there is a disco light-ball in the background as if the director suddenly remembered: 'Oh yes, there was supposed to be disco stuff.'”
• “When you’re arranging an illegal, underground, no-holds-barred, bare-knuckle fight between your own brother-in-law and the mountainous representative of a gang of foreign drug dealers, it’s important to play by the rules.”
• “the only time I wasn’t bored stiff was the occasional laugh which I got from misjudged attempts to convince the audience that this is set in Los Angeles despite the rather obvious fact that it was filmed in and around Southampton”
• “I think the younger chap’s painted face is intended to make him actually resemble a snake, but really it just looks like he’s been to the village fete and told the face-painter, 'Can I be a snake please?'”
• “like watching a feature-length trailer for a film that’s only slightly longer”
• “the most lazily cobbled together piece of disinterested work-for-hire crap I have seen for quite some time”
• “a character who may just be unfunny comic relief or may actually be intended to have learning difficulties”
• “If you watch slashers like people watch porno movies, fast-forwarding through the dull bits, you might enjoy this - and it will be over in a quarter of an hour”
• “A film which elicits unbidden, involuntary, instinctive cries of 'Oh for God’s sake!' and 'This is so-o-o-o bad!' and 'Christ there’s another nine minutes. I hope eight of those are the end credits.'”
• “Oh, so you made me think that a vengeful psychotic spirit from my past was trying to kill me, while also removing my only hope of rescue, just in order to forcibly make me spend an evening doing something I have repeatedly told you will upset me. Oh... you guys!”
• “this is a film which looks like it was more fun to make than to watch - and to be honest it doesn’t look like it was much fun to make”
• “Scenes of rocket-propelled cops are very obviously speeded up to almost comical level because there’s no way for the stunt doubles to actually travel that fast.”
• “a twist ending so obvious that you have probably guessed it while reading this sentence”
• “The opening of the film carries a 1995 copyright date, the closing credits say 2000 - which is quite appropriate because when you finally reach the end of this mind-numbing shite you really do feel like you’ve been watching it for five years.”
• “something like this should never be shown in public, let alone sold or rented for money”