In a completely non-scientific poll, I asked my 535 Facebook friends to comment and tell me the names of movies they've seen that they totally HATE. Like, hate so much they left the theater, or grabbed the DVD out of the player.
I'm talking about movies that suck so big you get ANGRY.
One of my cousins, Norm, named The Cars That Eat People [so obscure I couldn't find it on IMDB]. That sounds like a definite clunker.
I got this idea because in 1999, my brother and I went to see a movie called End of Days. "At the end of the century, Satan visits New York in search of a bride. It's up to an ex-cop who now runs an elite security outfit to stop him." ACK. As we were walking to the car after the film I said "I hated that so much I wanted to get up and walk out, but I figured you were enjoying it." My brother glared at me. "I wanted to walk out but I thought YOU wanted to see it." Epic communications fail.
I also walked out on Batman Returns. That was one where Michael Keaton played Batman. Wrong bat actor, bad bat movie. Just dreadful.
There's no accounting for taste though. I bet some of you out there loved End of Days and Batman Returns. I loved Silver Linings Playbook, and my friend Judy hated it and walked out. Go figure.
Another person said she hated The Color Purple, which is one of my all-time fave movies.
Norm's wife hated Contact, another movie I love.
Sometimes the reasons we hate a movie are entirely subjective. My dad loved war movies, and dragged me to a lot of them when I was a kid, but he HATED Braveheart. He had forgotten his hearing aid the day we saw it, and he had cancer and felt crappy a lot of the time. He also complained about there being "too much blood and gore." [yep, bullets are a lot cleaner than broadswords]
See, I look at movie blood and wonder "how many gallons of syrup did it take to get that effect?!" - because I was a theater major at Georgia and I had a friend who did effects for low-budget horror films. He used to explain to me in detail how gory effects were done, which was awesome because "horror" movies ceased to bother me after that. Once you view them clinically, you realize horror movies are just the cinematic equivalent of Red Bull - all jolt, no food value.
A couple of people named Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. I started watching that on TV in a hotel room when we were in the mountains some years ago, and I was so disgusted we turned it off. Michael was really miffed too - that's his birth country. Making fun of an entire nation is just lowbrow, crass, tasteless crap, IMHO. However, having said that, the Kazakh guy who translated for me when I was in Petropavlovsk for Michael's adoption had seen Borat and thought it was hysterical.
The movie The Master got some Oscar nominations but my friend Lindsey wanted to walk out of it. Just the trailer looked weird and boring, to me.
When I was at UGA, I was a member of the University Union, the group responsible for showing movies on campus. I started the Bad Film Festival, in honor of classic terrible movies like Glen or Glenda, and Plan 9 From Outer Space - movies so bad they were inadvertent comedies.
Ah, the salad days of being a college film geek...
One man on Facebook said he hated the Terence Malick movie The Thin Red Line, a movie I've always thought might be interesting. Movies that critics love don't always interest me, though. I was explaining to Michael this morning that when The Blues Brothers came out, critics hated it. I loved it and it made millions at the box office.
You want to see something fun? Watch the scene below from The Blues Brother, featuring the great Ray Charles. Besides some great music, you get to learn how to do the Watusi and The Jerk...
Comments