I am old enough to remember six of the best and how painful they were. Trust me, seven of the worst is even more painful and the scars stay with you for a lot longer. There are many things around the internet asking for the ten best this and the ten best that. I would posit that the bad art frequently has just as much of an effect as the good stuff. Here’s my selection. Leave your choices in the comments or on facebook.
Many of these were the first time I saw a certain type of movie, or where the source material was betrayed. But let’s start with the corruption of a character… Batman Forever.
Continuing the countdown we have at number six a movie hardly anyone will remember. Except the friends who forced me to go and watch it because I have never let them forget that fact. The lesson stayed with me for the rest of my life and saved me severe pain later when the same group tried to convince me that watching Chevy Chase would be better than watching Robert De Niro. They went to see ‘Memoirs of an Invisible Man’ whilst I went to see ‘Cape Fear’. I have never let them forget that either. Here’s Blind Fury ‘starring’ Rutger Hauer.
There are two films that cannot go on this list. One is ‘Memoirs of an invisible man’ and the other is Star Trek V – I have never seen either film.
And at number 5 we have a complete betrayal of the source material… a beloved book trashed by the film. Of course the book was a Stephen King book so this is par for the course. Pet Sematary was my favourite Stephen King book and so this hurt even more.
This next one is what can happen to you if you go to a cinema trying to impress a girl. Do yourself a favour and just take her for a meal and go watch movies that you actually like with your pals instead. Or you could watch this and end up looking like The English Patient yourself. Seriously, I needed morphine more than he did by the end.
Getting into the medal positions and we have another movie from the late 80s. I have placed many excuses in the previous entries but this next one I must bear the blame for. I have no idea why I went to the cinema to see it – but I surely did regret it. The Accidental Tourist turned me into The Accidental Viewer because I have no idea why I was in a cinema on my own watching this. Actually David Barras might have been there. Yeah, let’s blame him.
And we get to the top two. The first of which is perhaps the only film I have ever physically walked out of. A collection of cliches so long that they managed to make a movie out of them. The Specialist.
And the winner is… the only film on here that I did not go to the cinema to see. Because it was never shown in a cinema. A painful film that I could not bear to watch all the way through for reasons too obvious to go into here. I Spit On Your Grave. And if I find out where the director is buried then I surely will.
That’s it. Let me know your choices or defend these if you dare.
Clearly, you have never succumbed to the logic:
“It’s got Nicolas Cage (and/or John Travolta) in it—how bad can it be?”
It can be bad. Nic’ll be gutted not to have made your list…
My real luck here is that I only included films I have seen and I even tried to limit it to films I have seen at the cinema. With No1 being the exception I could not resist. There are some things even I will not go and see – the likes of Battlefield Earth would undoubtedly have made it – had I ever had the brain lapse to go and see it.