The Worst Movie Ever Made?

The print edition of Entertainment Weekly has a story about Manos: The Hand of Fate, possibly the worst movie ever made. Netflix carries the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version, which is unbelievably rated 4 stars since it features a horrible movie.

Has anyone seen this movie? Do you have a movie you think is really the worst movie ever made?

Comments

[Chris Perry]

Yes, I have seen Manos: Hands of Fate. It is an exceptionally poor, grade-Z horror film, but I have seen movies just as bad if not worse. I think any number of Bela Lugosi flicks (The Devil Bat, White Zombie) are just as bad. At least Manos is pretty funny and not just tedious like the ones I mention above. My vote for worst movie might have to go to The Last Movie with Dennis Hopper.

[Chris Perry]

Another one just came to me that probably tops all of these: Orgy of the Dead by Ed Wood. In all seriousness, it's basically an hour and a half of a guy sitting on a throne cackling while scantily clad women dance around.

The 'Bride Of Frank' and 'Robovampire' are the worst movies I've seen.

IMDb Bottom 100

http://us.imdb.com/chart/bottom

A little background on Manos:

http://ask.yahoo.com/ask/20040806.html

Yes I saw it. Yes it was the worst I've seen.

[AG]

It is the worst movie I've ever seen, yet it is totally worth a viewing.

[John Resig]

I've seen Manos, it was bad, and yet, watchable. In my opinion there are two types of 'bad' films: Ones that are bad, but fun to watch (like Manos, Resident Evil, Blair Witch 2) and ones that are bad and not fun to watch (Star Wars Christmas Special, Master of Disguise).

[eli]

Yes. It is the worst film I have ever seen.

But the MST3K version is a true gem. I am not surprised at the 4 -star rating.

[Mike M]

Wild Wild West, dear god that was bad.

[Joe D.]

I have recently seen the MST3K version (from netflix) I even have the torgo screen saver ;-) I can't even imagine sitting through this without the MST3K gang on the bottom of the screen. Beloved with Oprah is the worst trying to be serious movie I have ever seen. 3 hours of hell on earth. There are plenty of so bad its good movies we can all laugh at trying to be serious. This one is a so bad its bad.

Liquid Sky? Attack of the killer tomatoes? Battlefield Earth? These are all bad.

Robot Jox. Pretty horrid.

[Carl]

Kangaroo Jack

Runners Up:
Magnolia
The Thin Red Line
Beloved
Godfather 3

[CaT]

Solaris, very slightly better than Manos but a nice runner up.

[Tony]

Battlefield Earth, hands down. Just horrible...and it was *trying* to be good.

Absolutely, positively disagree with both Attack of the Killer Tomatoes and Magnolia as bad...but that's just me. Both are gems in my book. Tomatoes is campy fun, and Magnolia is just beautiful in many ways.

[Jeff Ray]

The reason the Netflix rating for MST3K is 4 stars for an awful film is the skewering it gets.

Manos is special for so many reasons. I personally love it for the Frank Zappa-esque bad guy and the fact that it looks like it was filmed on an old fashioned home movie camera.

[PlungeBob]

For me it would be "End of the World"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075990/#comment

[SAP]

Hard to say. For the fifteen minutes I was awake, it was pretty bad.

The Net (1995) was the worst movie ever made. I could only watch the first 10 minutes of that movie. Oh - that is bad!

[Rob Emmerich]

The Scorpion King. This movie was bad in and of itself, and this from a person who loved both the Mummy movies and all the other summer blockbuster nonsense that comes out every year. The DVD includes deleted scenes - they cut the ENTIRE plot. Battlefield Earth was nearly as bad but Travolta's character saved it. LXG was bad but only b/c it had potential.

[Steven Hoober]

Manos in MST3K is highly worth it.

Worst movie I ever saw... Battlefield Earth is right up there. Plan 9 is really unwatchable also. I am the biggest movie snob I know and I just can't get most of the movies listed above into the painfully-bad category.

My vote goes for POSSESSION (1981), directed by Andrzej Zulawski, starring Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill. Watch actors rocking back and forth in rocking chairs, turning around in office chairs, pacing to and fro through rooms, walking through empty city streets in broad daylight, throwing random unmotivated fits in empty subway stations during the day, repeating the same stupid actions again and again and again. I had to finish it at double speed after about 53 minutes. I wish I hadn't bothered. What a steaming pile of crap. It makes Ed Wood like Scorsese or Francis Ford Coppolla.

Most of the James Bond movies with Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan, "Licence to Kill", "Casino Royale", "Batman" and "Batman Returns", "Mars Attacks!", "Sleepy Hollow", "Big Fish", "The Shawshank Redemption", "The Green Mile", both the "Kill Bill" movies, "Pulp fiction", "Reservoir Dogs", "Jackie Brown", "True Romance", any cartoons by Pixar or Disney, anything by Merchant-Ivory, any period drama, any zombie movie, any Tom Clancy or John Grisham movie... The list is endless. Basically, pick a popular movie and it's likely to be utter garbage designed to please the masses, who are stupid and easy to please. "Men in Black" 1 & 2.

Anything produced by Don Simpson or Jerry Bruckheimer. Anything directed by Michael Bay, Tony/Ridley Scott, Dominic Sena, Paul Verhoeven, James Cameron, Steven Spielberg, and other no-talent hacks. Anything starring Tom Cruise, Colin Farrell, Wesley Snipes, Nicolas Cage, John Cusack, Robert De Niro, Robert Duvall, and other over-rated actors. Studio pictures generally suck.

[Chris Perry]

How about some votes for worst movie-making, as opposed to whose haircuts you don't like or movies you didn't have patience for because they weren't in your favorite genre? "Worst" and "Least favorite" are two different things.

I have nothing against their haircut or particular genre. I just think they are over-rated actors that have nothing more than good looks, a distinctive voice, and charisma. Far too often, people become massive celebrities that are nothing more than a body and a voice, or they will go to great lengths to change their appearance - witness weight loss/gain by Christian Bale, Matt Damon, Edward Norton, Robert De Niro, Hilary Swank, all second-rate actors... They're so desperate to get roles, they starve themselves almost to death and exercise to adrenal failure... Poster children for superficial method acitng.

[Chris Perry]

Or, you could say that going to great lengths to change their appearance is part of being a very devoted actor. As for DeNiro, he might be taking crap parts nowadays, but to write off movies like Raging Bull or Taxi Driver for the reasons you list above seems a bit misguided.

[Brandon S.]

I watched Manos on the MST3K DVD, and it is absolutely the worst movie i've seen. The acting is beyond bad, and the plot is so thin you could poke a hole in it. I'm not sure how so many people have seen this movie, but I would absolutely avoid it. "Eegah" is one of the other REALLY bad movies that MST3K did, but the commentary on that is 10x better than Manos....I think that those guys do better with campy trash than actual trash.

I write off Raging Bull and Taxi Driver very easily. They are as over-rated as most Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro movies. One-note characters is all De Niro can play - violent, paranoid, needy, annoying.

Going to great lengths for a role doesn't make you a good actor. It makes you a desperate and insecure actor. I say Christian Bale, Matt Damon, Hilary Swank, Jude Law, Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and their ilk are vastly over-rated as actors. Why would you be so stupid as to damage your health for roles, by unhealthy extreme diets?

[Chris Perry]

"Why would you be so stupid as to damage your health for roles, by unhealthy extreme diets?"

Because you are devoted to art. Whether it's stupid or not is a determination best made by the artist making that choice.

[steve]

worst movies = 28 days later, napolean dynamite, hellboy, hangman curse

Geez, no one's mentioned Ronin? The rest of the movies, I don't particularly care much about. Ronin, on the other hand, rocked.

"Why would you be so stupid as to damage your health for roles, by unhealthy extreme diets?"

A 10-20 million dollar paycheck for only a couple months work, plus a percentage of the gross. That's why.

[ThatGuy]

What about Telephone with Whoopi Goldberg? Johnny Mnemonic and Ebola Syndrome also sucked.

I remember watching "Possession". The woman was cheating on Sam Neil with a monster (I think), weird film. I remember it as being one of those movies that just has a weird bad feeling to it.

Yea, there are movies that are so bad they are good, bad uninteresting movies, and then there are movies that seem like they were created in another dimension by a race of beings that are only capable of superficially imitating us.

I remember my roommate rented a movie called "Nexus" from Blockbuster a few years back because he liked the box art. This is a movie that made me physically ill. I still think about it and every once in awhile I will try to find out information about it online.

Opinionated anonymous makes some good points. Movies like "Kill Bill", "Mars Attacks" and "28 Days Later" are the type of movies that make me angry when I'm watching them.

As for the "going to great lengths" for roles. These are people who were comitted enough to acting to make it their life's work. Are they silly for spending time memorizing their lines and thinking of different approaches to use when acting? Who said the weight loss was dangerous? Are people dropping dead while losing weight to play certain roles? If anything, there are much more desperate actors out there than the A-list celebrities.

If you really want to see people adding and droppings pounds quickly, look at people like fighters or jockeys that have to make certain weights.

Judging by the trailer for "Machinist", it looks really bad. I didn't believe Christian Bale's acting at all. It just seemed really lifeless and dull. Maybe that is the character, but it's not exactly a challenging role. Any stoner could play it. I have put off seeing the movie, despite comparisons to "Fight Club", "Memento", "Sixth Sense", and the like. I don't seen what's so great about Bale in "American Psycho", "Equilibrium", and his other roles. Another hard-working stiff like Matt Damon, with the same general lack of talent and ability.

[Fitness Freak]

? Are people dropping dead while losing weight to play certain roles ?

Ask Matt Damon. He suffered adrenal gland failure due to losing 40 pounds for "Courage Under Fire." And for what? 13 minutes of screen time in a crappy Denzel Washington, Meg Ryan movie. Would you defend his performance in that movie, or Bale's in "The Machinist"? I wouldn't. I think actors now are forced to do stupid stuff like this as a kind of initiation. Something to say they're entitled to fame and fortune when, realy, they suck.

I read that Christian Bale's diet for "Machinist" was a can of tuna and an apple a day. He lost over 60 pounds, from an already lean frame. Will anyone tell me that is not dangerous? Another example is Jared Leto eating raw vegetables to play a junkie in "Requiem for a Dream." Or Joaquin Phoenix losing to play the Malaysian prisoner in "Return to Paradise." Most of these performances/movies are forgettable and disposable. And I believe all these actors have stated their health suffered as a result.

[Jim Stewart]

Memo to the guy who hates Pixar movies (and apparently, everything else)-- those films, particularly "Nemo" and "Monsters", are among the funniest, most purely beautiful, story and character oriented films ever made. What's not to like? You seem to hate so much... what do you like? My least favorite movie is Con Air, and any other movie that uses violence as the equivelent of a cum shot in a porno movie (that goes double for you Tarantino!). I also hate "Diner". I don't even really have a good reason, but it and many other Levenson films are so smug that they fill me with unaccountable rage. Go figure.

[Jim Stewart]

Oh... and Manos is a scream. I highly recommend it. Utterly surreal and baffling. I actually think it's better to watch it the first time without the MST3K guys. Enjoy your own thoughts about before hearing their take.

[neven]

The Manos MST would earn 5 stars in my book - they pull off the incredible stunt of making that brain-eating "movie" enjoyable.

At the time I saw the original movie, it was the worst I had ever seen. Since then, The Beast of Yucca Flats has replaced it in that prestigious role.