Movies that suck.

I suffered for 103 minutes last night.

(This is a scary amount of text, I know. Just skip to the part below the _____ to get to the point of this thread!)

My wife loves Twilight. What she loves most about it is Robert Pattinson.
This means we are to watch all movies that feature Robert Pattinson, which has it's ups and downs.(Remember me was good, Twilight is.. not..)

But last night we watched a movie that redefined the scale on wich movies are judged:

The Rover

We saw the trailer a while back. It looked kinda wierd, but promising.

After 103 minutes, pretty much nothing had happened. Nothing that mattered anyway.

It was a pretty well-shot movie, haunting music and the actors were pretty great. It could have been good.

*Light spoilers* These are only spoilers if you intend to see the movie. Don't.

"Australia. Ten years after the collapse" Collapse? What happened? doesn't matter.
We follow silent and mysterious Guy Pierce on a quest to find his car. His car was stolen by.. some guys who abandoned their own fully-functioning car because they couldn't figure out the reverse gear(I guess). These guys are running from a.. place where they had a gunfight with.. some other guys because of.. something. Who cares.
Guy takes the other dudes's car, catches up with them and asks to trade, to get his car back. For some reason they refuse, punches his lights out and places him gently on the ground next to the carkeyes so he can continue his quest when he wakes up.(wtf?). We learn that Guy is a cold-blooded murderous fucking asshole, just like pretty much everyone else in this grim future. He manages to cross the path of one of the carthieves' brother(Pattinson), who was left for dead back where they fought the.. other guys. Guy uses the cortically subilluminated Pattinson to track his car. The unfreindly duo get into some shenanigans that further illustrate what complete pieces of shit they are.
I care for no character in this movie.
The movie ends with no answers at all. And when you finally find out what's so goddamn special about the car, the realisation of 103 minutes forever lost becomes almost too much to bare.
Fuck this movie. Fuck it up its stupid ass.

One good thing about it though, is that we vowed to never again see a movie we know nothing about. We've wasted so much time as it is on shitty movies.

____________________________________________________________________

Here comes the point;

What are some of the truly awful movies you've watched, and why should I avoid it?

 

Any movie "starring" the multi-talented (laugh-gag-puke) actor (laugh-gag-puke) David Caruso.

The last truly awful movie that I intentionally sat through was a "children's" movie, Where The Wild Things Are. The movie was too complicated for younger children--the appropriate target audience, I would have thought--and too childish for older children, which seemed to be the target audience. Max was downright scary at times.

 

I watch a lot bad movies, more often than not with the MST3k or Rifftrax treatment. But for truly awful movies, one of my first choices is Avatar. Much like Twillight, the only way I would consider seeing that stinker again is with the Rifftrax audio track.

 

Copies the PC Disney version of Pocahontas (never have seen that, not going to start) for the most part with bits of Dances With Wolves (I liked that one). White people/outsiders/etc bad, locals <indians/aliens/whatever> good. Our hero realises this, ditches his people for the good side and helps them fight the big bad force that is the outsiders with their fancy equipment. In this case I was rooting for the stereotypical space marines and hoping they just carpet bombed the locals until they wiped them out; would have it made much more interesting to watch and arguably more realistic.

Yes it has been done often, and definitely much better than this. The overcooked graphics remind me of poorly done HDR photography (yes, most things do circle back to photography with me at some point), and the gaia / mother earth crap made me long for something "relatively better" like one of the Transformers travesties. The last good Transformers film worth watching was in 1986 and starred Orson Welles as one of the voices.
You may ask "Why did you see this if you think it is so awful?"
Easy answer - It was playing in the break room more than once at a previous job and I dealt with the awful background distraction rather than leave the employee lounge. Between numerous partial viewings and more frequently ignoring it, I have seen all of it.

 

In 2000, I talked my wife into seeing "Dungeons and Dragons" at the movies (always been a PnP D&D fan). Man, what an absolute stinker:

Dungeons &amp; Dragons (2000) - IMDb

I think the 3.6/10 rating on IMDB is too good for this film.

The worst thing for me? ending the film with a thousand dragons flying every which way sending fireballs flying. In D&D, dragons are super rare creatures and it just pissed me off that the game was sooooo badly let down by this piece of s^&* movie. Would love those 2 hours back!

 

That describes my feelings for both the first two Star Wars prequels and the first Star Trek reboot. I think I was a glutton for punishment and watched the 2nd disaster when it came out as well, but part of me thinking was "Lucas can't screw up this film as bad as the first one , can he?" The answer was of course yes, so I stayed the hell away from the third one.
Star Wars was worse due to the inclusion of one of the justly most hated characters in science fiction film history, but it took some self control to not walk out of the theatre for the 2009 Trek film. I did have a good laugh seeing the lens flares every 3 seconds in the Star Trek sequel from the brief bit I saw in the employee lounge, missed nothing on that one from what I saw and have read about it.

 

Avatar wasn't a great movie, but it wasn't terrible. But what made it great in the theaters was that it was the first movie to do 3d well. It was finally an immersive experience with depth on the screen. You didn't have cheap shock like spears thrust in your face. It was just 3d. Insects looked more realistic just flying around. The film changed the way I looked at 3d after that. It was finally viable for movies, not just a cheap gag. But if you didn't see it in the theater then you missed a true engineering marvel. Im glad I was there.

 

Thing is, I'd rather a better storyline and good acting over grand special affects and 3d.

 

Avatar and Hugo are probably the only two movies I've seen where 3d were integrated into the film and truly made it remarkable.
Otherwise I'm not really a fan.

I love low budget, Roger Corman, made because we had a camera and a dream, movies.
Needless to say, I've seen a lot of bad movies but I tend to get angry at movies that don't try or screw up something special more than the ones that try but don't quite make it.

 

Avatar = I'd have to be paid to watch it. Putting aside the fact that I don't usually care for SF/SFF, there is nothing in the many clips & trailers that caught my interest.

Some B movies are entertaining because they are so poorly done.

To keep on topic, I'm having a hard time coming up with another bad movie that I actually sat through without picking up a book to read. I was very disappointed in how American Gangster took such a stupid twist once Frank Lucas (I had to look that up) was caught. Along that line of thinking I'll list The Road To Perdition. It's very difficult to mix comedy and heavy drama, and Sam Mendes failed miserably. Don't get me started on Hanks' character surviving the shotgun blast long enough to.........I'll stop myself.

 

Well all stories follow similar paths. That's why they are so universal in their appeal. Whether it's sci fi, fantasy, western, gritty city streets. Hero goes off, becomes a man, gets the girl, conquers insurmountable odds. Only the backgrounds change. So saying you don't like sci fi or fantasy movies means you have missed out on some good tales. My ex wife was pretty myopic in her views of movies. It took other people to convince her to see crouching tiger, hidden dragon. Which she loved. People laughed at the thought of gladiator, but it turned out to be a pretty good movie. So maybe you shouldn't limit yourself. And speed Gibson, movies and shows are not like cheese or wine. They don't get better with age. They stay the same. So you miss out on a lot with your luddite existence and refusal to try to appreciate anything new.

 

I am always open to new films or television. Unfortunately too many of the new productions are just awful. I did enjoy that Edge of Tomorrow or whatever that Tom Cruise film was called, that was superbly done and avoided cliches or problem areas that could have happened with the subject.
I would rather watch nearly any Ed Wood film than some of the recent sci-fi flicks that I have seen. At least Ed knew he was shooting a low budget B film and relished in it, rather than spend a massive budget for poor eye candy and not much else. But I always give a film/show the chance to stand or fall on its own merits or lack thereof, and waytoo many of them fall these days.
I enjoyed Vampire in Brooklyn and Passenger 57 for instance and those probably both had not so good reviews from the critics.

edit: I really wanted the Transformer films to be good eye candy with enough plot to hold them together but the "Michael Bay touch" with the almost required earplugs did not do anything good to them.

 

There were a lot of terrible movies back then too. It's kind of like how people think homes built back in the day were better. A lot of the crappy old homes were scraped and rebuilt. The ones that lasted were well built, but that wasn't the majority. My point was that what avatar brought to the screen was the first good 3d experience. And that was lost on the small screen. The hobbit movies would not be in 3d if it wasn't for avatar. But yeah, nowadays special effects are not that hard. Look at district 9. Great movie, decent special effects, $20 million dollar budget. If you have bad special effects now, then there is something wrong with you.

 

@borla 's mom's sex tape.

:-D

Someone had to make a mom joke and it's my job to do it at Borla's expense.

 

Ouch! That's nasty, even coming from you, ZS. Hehe

 

Civil discourse is dead in this society, @Borla.

 

Personally, I'd like to see the @ZombieSquirrel sex tape, 'cause there's bound to be lots of knife play.