Some of the Flat Out Worst Movies I Have Ever Seen

You may remember an earlier post where I wrote about some of the more overrated movies I have seen. While they were overrated, they were definitely not the worst movies I have seen. These are some of the most awful movies I had the misfortune of sitting through.

5. Anaconda (1997)
Director: Luis Llosa
Starring: Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Jon Voight, and a whole lot of other people you might have heard of

Anaconda was a great example of a movie that attempted to win just by fitting in a large number famous people like Jennifer Lopez and Ice Cube. The movie was simply a B-movie that incidentally wound up with an all-star cast. It follows a film crew making a documentary on the Amazon river who meets snake hunter Paul Serone (Jon Voight). Serone overpowers them and forces them to help him hunt an anaconda. I think even by giving you this two-sentence summary, I made the movie sound a lot more awesome than it actually was. The nonsensical story was in no way helped by the preposterous special effects. Even considering the time it was made (I mean post-Jurassic Park), it was unexcusably obvious the snakes (that were literally faster than speeding bullets) were CG. Also, the Amazon more or less wound up looking like an amusement park ride. Jennifer Lopez has this uncanny ability to annoy the hell out of me in every movie she is in, and overall the only good thing that came out of the cast was Jon Voight’s unintentionally funny performance as the movie’s bad guy. Overall, one has to wonder why this movie even needed to exist.

4. Obsessed (2009)
Director: Steve Shill
Starring: Beyonce, Idris Elba, Ali Larter

Obsessed tells the tale of Derek Charles (Idris Elba), an investment banker and devoted husband to Sharon (Beyonce), and how he got the unwanted attention of new office temp Lisa (Ali Larter). The movie was basically the bastardization of every Michael Douglas movie you have ever heard of (like Fatal Attraction and War of the Roses), only it was suspiciously missing Michael Douglas. The entire chunk of the movie where Derek was thrown out of his own house when Sharon suspected him of infidelity made absolutely no sense at all, and there was something comical in Ali Larter’s performance throughout. I think it’s fair to say it was pretty obvious what kind of target audience the movie had. Two of my favorite scenes in the movie were when you see Derek drumming a song on his steering wheel on his way to work at the beginning of the movie and when Derek was drugged by Sharon so she could violate him; the latter was funny purely because of the utterly clumsy mise-en-scene. What you see is Derek stumbling back to his hotel room, and the camera shows Derek as being fuzzy but everything around him is crystal clear.

3. 88 Minutes (2007)
Director: Jon Avnet
Starring: Al Pacino, Neal McDonough, Leelee Sobieski

88 Minutes was a movie that had received a fair amount of hype before it was released, largely because it was expected to be the first good movie Al Pacino did in his post Gigli days. Pacino starred as Dr. Jack Gramm, a forensic psychologist whose testimony put serial murderer Jon Forster (McDonough) on death row. It is the day of Forster’s execution, and all is going well until Gramm receives a threatening phone call informing him that he has 88 minutes to live. It doesn’t help that a series of murders styled after what was believed to Forster start appearing all over Seattle, thus casting doubt on Gramm’s testimony. From the point at which Gramm received his phone call, the movie went into real time as he raced around Seattle to find out what was up. 88 Minutes was absolutely riddled with plot holes, namely what the objective of the bad guy was. In one scene it seemed like the villain was trying to kill Gramm, and in another it would seem like he was simply trying to frame him for these murders and thus get Forster off death row. The movie also constantly made references to a party Gramm was at the night before. It was funny how characters seemed to keep remembering something new whenever the plot called for it. Overall, 88 Minutes was a painful show of smut to watch where Al Pacino (yes, the same Al Pacino who was in The Godfather, And Justice For All, and Scent of a Woman to name a few) showed how past his prime he was in his acting career.

2. Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987)
Director: Sidney J. Furie
Starring: Christopher Reeve, Gene Hackman, Margot Kidder

Superman: The Movie (1978), directed by Richard Donner, was basically responsible for inventing the superhero movie genre as we know it now. Superman featured a surprisingly deep story, a terrific cast, and amazing special effects to boot. And like many other successful movies of its time, Superman had too many sequels, each worse than the last. The series culminated in Superman IV: The Quest for Peace in 1987, a final attempt to milk money out of the cash cow. The production was working on a budget that was a fraction of the first film’s. The story was a pathetic attempt to cash in on the issues of the day, such as US/Soviet nuclear disarmament. Finally, you can see how much older the entire cast has gotten. Margot Kidder, who played Lois Lane, was really attractive in the first movie, but she looked absolutely hideous in this movie; the years were not very kind to her and she was dressed in some ridiculous costumes. Gene Hackman (Lex Luthor) made a complete cartoon character of himself when he was paired up with Jon Cryer as his nephew Lenny, and I have to say it took some miracle for his career to survive this catastrophe. Needless to say, Superman IV was Mark Pillow’s (Nuclear Man) first and last movie.

1. All 7 Police Academy movies (1984-1997)

Police Academy was a series that went on for 7 movies. It started off as a movie about a group of lovable losers joining the titular police academy and then graduating to become respectable police officers. The movies took what actually was some great comedic talent (Michael Winslow and G.W. Bailey to name a couple) and threw them into a script written with completely low-brow humor in mind. As the movies progressed, cast members came and went and the humor got progressively more retarded. It didn’t help that many gags (like anything pertaining to the really tall officer aptly named Hightower) were used far too many times to remain funny. I feel like I probably wouldn’t hate the original Police Academy so much if it didn’t have so many sequels, which it did.