Medium Cool is a weekly series related to popular culture, mostly film, TV, and books, with some music and games thrown in. We hope it’s a welcome break from the anger, hate, and idiocy we see almost daily from the other side in the political sphere.
Arguments welcomed, opinions respected, fools un-suffered. We’re here every Sunday at 7 pm.
What’s the worst movie you ever paid to see? Mine was some terrible movie with maybe Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino? I saw it at the dollar movie place and it still wasn’t worth it.
Movie you thought was going to be a comedy, and turned out to be nothing but? For me it was the first movie Gene Wilder made after losing Gilda Radner.
What’s the worst TV show ever made? Lots of competition there, so we can do that one by decade.
Worst book you ever read? (or at least started to read, even if you didn’t finish it)
Worst book they made you read in school?
Worst concert you attended?
Worst family dinner?
Worst food craze?
The worst of everything. Have at it.
Baud
Showgirls.
WaterGirl
@Baud: That’s the answer, what was the question?
Nice to see you back.
Baud
@WaterGirl:
Worst movie.
Nina
John Travolta in Battlefield Earth
Chet Murthy
I paid $ (very little, TBF) to see Surf Nazis Must Die. It was bad. And forgettable.
PST
@Nina: You have to have actually seen the movie. Which means you have to admit you actually saw the movie.
Jharp
Blood Sucking Freaks. Movie. Mid ‘70’s.
A friend dragged me to it and I didn’t have the guts to tell him I was leaving.
I was 14.
ShadeTail
The worst movie I personally ever saw was Starship Troopers. They took a political thesis and turned it into a low-quality gory slasher movie.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Worst 1/3 of a concert. 1982, Folsom Field in Boulder, triple linup, John Couger first, Jethro Tull second, The Who third.
Couger came out, did a couple of songs, nobody cared. He then tried getting the crowd into it for a couple of songs, when he was visibly getting cranky on stage, everybody started booing him. He then stormed off. Everybody applauded.
Tull was okay (I’ve seen Tull a lot over the years, some better, some worse). Who were good.
So, come to think of it, it wasn’t a bad 1/3 of a concert because it was great watching that well-known douche lose it.
cmorenc
“Prometheus” by Ridley Scott, who is capable of far better than this lame sci- fi flick that in form was a teen slasher-monster movie, just with much older people taking the teen roles.
”Blue Velvet” is another awful piece of pretentious dreck, embarrassingly amateurish acting, including Dennis Hopper’s hokey hyperventilating.
”Man Who Fell to Earth” – I went to see it with a friend who had a college buddy with an important role in the production crew, with us both excitedly primed to like it. Walking out afterward, barely resisting the urge to leave halfway through, we re- dubbed it “The Movie that Crashed to Earth”.
Josie
Atlas Shrugged – worst book ever. I forced myself to read it. I am now older and wiser and stop reading if I don’t enjoy something.
ETA: Obviously, not a poorly made movie, but seeing Psycho as a young teenager freaked me out and marked me for life. I still don’t like taking showers.
bbleh
Atlas Shrugged.
(felt like I had to try…)
ColoradoGuy
Worst Hollywood movie: Zardoz.
Expletive Deleted
Tie between Skinamarink and Cats for worst movie. Comedy that wasn’t has gotta be Sleeper, that has not held up, woof.
Suzanne
I have two of these.
1) While stuck at my ex-MIL’s house, I picked up a Tom Clancy book she had lying around. I think it was called The Bear and the Dragon. She has terrible taste and every other book was some self-help pseudo-spiritual bullshit. Over the time I was there, I got more than a thousand pages into it. I finally realized that I did not give even the slightest fuck what happened, and I stopped reading it with something like 150 pages left to the end.
2) One of the first times I met my current (and forever) MIL, we went to a restaurant. I got terrible food poisoning or something once we got home and was stuck in the bathroom. She had some kind of farming magazine and a copy of Twilight in there. I looked at the magazine, then finally picked up Twilight. I got about 50 pages in and decided that I would rather be alone with the misery of the crap fountain than put myself through another page.
Central Planning
Chariots of Fire, but only because I was forced to go with my mom when I was 11.
Expletive Deleted
@ColoradoGuy: I unironically adore Zardoz. Boorman, what a legend.
Gin & Tonic
Worst movie? The Al Pacino version of Scarface. I should have walked out. The only movie I have ever called “obscene.”
Worst TV show? I dunno, but Mr. Ed is a strong contender.
Phylllis
Worst movie has to be Vampire’s Kiss with Nicolas Cage. The only movie that’s ever made me walk out of the theater. I believe I actually loathe what little I saw of it.
I hated, hated, hated the book Tropic of Capricorn. Absolute trash.
TBone
Walked out of the theater for Anger Management, although I liked Analyze This.
Citizen Alan
There are a lot of options, but I’m going to go with Made In America starring Whoopi Goldberg and Ted Danson. Simply because it was so bad that during the closing credits I stood up in the (mostly empty) theater and loudly yelled “THIS IS THE WORST MOVIE I’VE EVER SEEN!” and I don’t want to go back on my word.
My second choice would be the third Matrix movie. I never bothered with the fourth.
See above.
On The Air which lasted about 7 episodes in the late 1980s. It was a sitcom set in the 1950s about a TV variety show. And it was written and produced by David Lynch and starred a lot of the B-cast from Twin Peaks! It was the strangest damned thing I’d ever seen. I was hypnotized by it.
Atlas Shrugged. I made it to 5 pages into Galt’s Speech, started flipping ahead, realized the motherfucker was going to talk philosophy into a microphone for another 50 pages, and just threw the book across the room.
Don Quixote but mainly because it was for Spanish II and I had to read the Spanish version. It was mentally exhausting.
Sunday dinner about 15 years ago. I’m home, eating with my mom and dad. Mom makes spaghetti. I take a bite, chew for a few seconds, and then swallow.
Me: So … you doing anything different to the recipe, mom?
Mom (somewhat excitedly): Well, now that you mention it, I forgot to pick up a can of tomato paste. But I was looking in the refrigerator and noticed a left-over can of V8!
Craig
@cmorenc: Ridley Scott after Alien and Blade Runner really is just a mediocre director looking back at his career on IMDB. I liked The Martian.
Steve in the ATL
@Nina: I concur. So, so bad.
Citizen Alan
@Chet Murthy: Troma Films don’t count! They’re meant to be that way!
Craig
The Phantom Menace. So bad. I do like that it inspired Mr. Plinkett’s Red Letter Review of it though.
Princess
Worst movie: Red Dawn
Barbara
The Reader
3 Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri
The Cook The Thief His Wife and Her Lover
Pretentious and off-putting if not downright offensive.
WaterGirl
@Baud: I thought maybe it was the worst family dinner. :-)
Johnnybuck
JAWS 3-D
Atlas Shrugged
Hello Larry
West of the Rockies
@Baud:
Oh, that was wretched! Elizabeth Berkeley in a foul mood, stomping around for two hours. I also loathed Punch Drunk Love with Adam Sandler.
Percysowner
Neighbors with Jim Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. I didn’t like the characters, didn’t like the humor. I went to the bathroom and then sat outside the theater waiting for the move to finish and my husband to come out. I hear it now is considered a comedy classic by some people, but it was NOT my cup of tea.
Scamp Dog
@ShadeTail: I’m with you on hating Starship Troopers! Somehow they managed to draw incidents from the novel and make something that was the total opposite to it. Dreadful!
WaterGirl
@Josie: Psycho was the last scary movie I watched. That’s when I discovered i Did. Not. Like. scary movies.
Czar Chasm
Movie – The Crow. Aside from the first scene with Brandon Lee, the movie couldn’t be further from its source material.
The Comedy Is a Lie – Kids. I was SO lied to by my friend.
TV Show – Pass. There’s too much content to identify an anti-superlative.
Book I Started to Read, but Said “Nah” – True Allegiance, Ben Shapiro
School Book – Any of my history books back then
Concert – Alien Sex Fiend – Richmond, VA, 2000
Family Dinner – Clan Dinner of 2004. My generation almost threw down with all our elders. That initiated the unspoken rule of No Politics at all future family events.
Food Craze – Cauliflower rice. Spaghetti squash is. Right. There.
West of the Rockies
I have thrown two books in my life, hoping they would shatter: As I Lay Dying and The Stranger.
YMMV.
Worst concert: John Waite the night I Ain’t Missing You went #1. He started 45 minutes late, no opening act, no words to the audience, and played only 11 songs in an obviously bad mood.
Chacal Charles Calthrop
Worst movie: Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, which was such interminable misogynist torture porn that I simply walked out on it.
worst book: there are so many bad books but I remember failing to finish the Revolt of Islam by the 19th century poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. He wrote some good stuff but that one made absolutely no sense whatsoever.
worst family dinner: the Thanksgiving when I was a child where the arguments and the drinking got so bad the turkey never even made it into the oven and everyone left before the meal even happened. The defrosted turkey was left out on the counter all night and thrown away the next day.
going to bed hungry without any supper sucks at the best of times, but it really really sucks on Thanksgiving. I think people do not believe that is how children should be raised any more (but JD Vance wants to go back to those good old days!)
WaterGirl
@Gin & Tonic: Thanks for the ear worm. //
Barbara
@WaterGirl: Me neither. I won’t watch.
narya
Worst movie: Pink Flamingos
worst book: Bonfire of the Vanities
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Gin & Tonic:
On the other hand, Scarface does have this banger of a song going for it. That, and it served as a major influence for GTA: Vice City
Suzanne
The Red Badge of Courage.
I, like, love to read and always have. This was just absolutely boring as fuck. I will never understand why thy made sophomores read that piece of dreck when there is so much else out there.
hitchhiker
Worst movie: A Clockwork Orange
Worst book they made me read: The Old Man and the Sea
Worst book the experts said was good: Hillbilly Elegy, (phony af)
Worst concert: Dylan with the Band doing a wall of sound thing in a terrible venue in Seattle
Worst family dinner: they were all alike. 8 kids at the kitchen table acting like rabid animals while parents took their plates elsewhere and ignored us.
Worst TV show of the 50s: Queen for a Day (iykyk)
dmsilev
@Suzanne: That was the Clancy book that convinced me to stop reading Clancy books. The ‘high’ point was when President can-do-no-wrong Jack Ryan decided that the US should invite Russia to join NATO, fully aware that it meant a shooting war between NATO and China, and made it happen in like a day.
Paul M Gottlieb
@Jharp: I met the auteur behind “Blood Sucking Freaks.” in the 1990’s. He was a contractor working on the Y2K project. He was very proud of his work on that film. I hated it
WaterGirl
@hitchhiker: You had 7 siblings? Isn’t that nearly a baseball team?
Martin
@ShadeTail: It was a satire of the book. Verhoeven grew up during WWII, and chose to satirize the violence and fascism in the book. Problem was that in 90s America, we couldn’t tell because it was too close to American action movies earnest promotion of violence and fascism.
Mapanghimagsik
For now, Twisters. The irony of avoiding the summer heat watching a movie that refused to mention climate change is not lost on me.
BellaPea
Worst movie: Gina, starring Gena Rowlands. It had an off-putting scene of her talking to a premature baby in an incubator.
Worst book: I read part of a Norman Mailer book about Egyptians back in the 1980s which sucked bigly.
Worst TV show: I try not to watch bad TV. Would have to say Home Improvement because Tim Allen is such a conservative dick.
bbleh
whoa FOUR votes for Atlas Shrugged! I am impressed! A TRULY awful book!
Cheryl from Maryland
Stage performance of Woyzek. We didn’t come back after intermission. Wayne would shudder every time I said “yellow peas.” Another stage performance – “The Little Foxes” by Lillian Hellman starring Elizabeth Ashley. Left again during intermission. The play is set in Alabama, and I grew up in Virginia, so not the same Southern accent, but the voices and dialogue were awful and wrong. As Mary McCarthy said of Lillian Hellman, “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.
TBone
Dorothy Parker book review:
I haven’t ever read a bad book, because why would I.
Lethe
Picked up a Gor series book at the Sally Ann’s thinking it was a John Carter of Mars. Maybe made 10 pages before it went in the trash.
That inoculation saved me a year later, tho. Met a guy at a bar, went to his house. On the way to the john I snuck a look in his bedroom (as you do). Saw that he had a waterbed with a bookcase headboard and all the Gor books. Went straight to the john and out the window.
Barbara
@West of the Rockies: I’m definitely not a Faulkner fan. Nor a big fan of James Joyce’s “innovative” works. In the words of E.B. White: “It takes more than genius to make me keep reading a book.”
prostratedragon
Don’t much get inyo this kind of thing but I must say, based on a viewing of some excerpts, that I’m extremely glad not to have paid to see the movie Cats. On the Air, I rather liked.
Peke Daddy
The worst TV show ever, by definition. A show cancelled halfway through its premiere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turn-On
I remember watching it.
hitchhiker
@WaterGirl: Yes it is, tho’ we were more inclined to just form little packs and try to sabotage each other.
Steve in the ATL
@bbleh: I would add a vote to that tally but I didn’t take the English class that read it. So I’ll go with Silas Marner instead. Want to make kids hate reading? That’s how you do it!
scav
I remember distinctly hating everything written by O’Henry. I believe this encounter nearly poisoned the entire genre of short stories for me.
Suzanne
@dmsilev: I think I have blocked out the entire plot. A thousand pages and absolutely none of it stuck.
I’m also musing on how I filled time before I had kids and it seems like someone else’s life. The idea of burning hours on a shitty book, when I already get far fewer opportunities to read than I’d like…. Just mindblowing,
TBone
@bbleh:
– Dorothy Parker
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
Worst book they made you read in school?
The Scarlett Letter. It’s not bad or anything and I get why students are assigned it, but I recall Hawthorne’s prose being very dry. It was a slog to read. Maybe because it was written in the mid-1800s?
What’s the worst TV show ever made?
The Big Bang Theory. It’s a Chuck Lorre comedy, easily the most bottom of the barrel, lowest common denominator garbage ever.
“I like comic books.”
[Laugh track goes to 11]
MomSense
@Suzanne:
Clancy’s niece was one of my favorite students. She had stories.
hitchhiker
@BellaPea:
Whenever his name comes up I tell the story of how my brother Charlie once went state’s evidence and helped put Tim Allen in prison for selling a couple of pounds of cocaine.
It was the 80s, in Michigan. My brother was a (known) pathological liar, but he was able to avoid prison (that time) in exchange for helping set up an FBI sting. A number of people went to jail, including Tim. He was then called Timothy Dick, I believe.
Sure Lurkalot
Rod Stewart, circa 1971 in St. Louis. The tickets were $6, a theretofore unprecedented price.
Stewart was shitfaced drunk and the mandolin parts of Maggie May were performed on an electric guitar. The whole show was worse than awful.
mali muso
@Craig: I’ll see your Phantom Menace and raise you Wild, Wild West. Will Smith, Kevin Kline, Kenneth Branagh and Salma Hayek in the weirdest, stupidest piece of cinema that graced a summer “blockbuster” screen (and that’s saying something).
Josie
@Steve in the ATL:
One year I taught a sophomore English class which should have been an English as a second language class. We slogged our way through Julius Caesar and Silas Marner since they were both required. Turned out they preferred Shakespeare.
Al
Lifeforce – 1985, a movie about space vampires. Only time I walked out of a movie. Runner-up was Thin Red Line – 1998. The allegories were so over the top that it took you out of the movie. To be fair, this 65 year old reader would have walked out of a lot more movies if I had to actually go to the theatre instead of vegging out on the couch with Netflicks or Tubi.
tailfedders
Worst movie: The Wicker Man with Nicholas Cage.
E.
@Phylllis: There is something wrong with me because I thought that movie was hilarious but have never heard of another person who thought it anything but terrible.
scav
Stupidest food craze? Wine coolers.
Least pleasurable way to get the worst hangover.
piratedan
I’ve kind of become inured against bad films since I immediately drop into MST3K mode as soon as I encounter performances that are less than and plot holes that require not only a suspension of belief but no belief system at all…
i’ve attempted to get thru certain autobiographies that were voiceless…..
If we’re talking bad TV, then I have to give a shout out to the old early 80s series Master Ninja starring Lee Van Cleef and Vincent Van Patten.
School required reading – Billy Budd. After Moby, I was not ready to return to the seas.
weird food trend I never understood, the passion for hot without flavor, why eat it if you can’t taste it?
Jackie
The Power of One – which ended up being an excellent movie, but the trailers led me to believe it was a sports movie about a puny white kid taking on big muscular Black men in the boxing ring. A David vs Goliath type of story. It was rated PG-13, but my 11yr old son was into sport movies Big Time… and I figured the rating was due to language.
The movie was actually about apartheid pre WWII in South Africa. The puny kid was British and was moved into a concentration camp by the Boors – who were of course supporting Germany. Anyhoo, LOTS of violence with a little boxing mixed in. My son was sobbing through some of the scenes, but didn’t want to leave.
It was a powerful movie and we actually bought the video and the soundtrack – and watched several times, knowing which scenes to avert our eyes/fast forward through.
I hate when movie trailers are completely misleading.
Steve in the ATL
@scav: ooh good call!
brantl
Worst book forced to read in high school? Great Expectations, by DICKens. What a load of whale dreck.
JDM
I was at a conference in Monaco in 1989 and one evening’s diversion was a Russian movie comedy. We were assured it was a top Russian comedy and was hilarious.
That was not true.
hells littlest angel
@Baud: It’s also the best worst movie. I still shudder at memories of it.
LoveNOLA
@Peke Daddy: Wow. I saw it and young me hypnotized. Would love to see it again and find out if awful or trailblazing.
Martin
I’m not sure which category this falls in but the most disappointed I ever was after a movie was 10 year old me, who was right in the sweet spot to see Star Wars as the greatest movie ever (as comparison to the Disney stuff that preceded it) eagerly showed up in anticipation of the Star Wars Holiday Special, airing just days after my birthday, being even better.
Even 10 year old me knew it sucked. I won’t say that it’s objectively the worst movie, but in context, I’m not sure you could come up with something worse.
TBone
Worst dinner experience: I brought a cooler full of live lobsters to feast on with friends. Since I knew my SIL didn’t eat seafood, I got her a filet mignon. When she saw how much fun we were having with the lobster and drawn butter, she asked my brother for a taste.
Big mistake. The entire (expensive!) contents of her stomach were emptied right then and there 😆
Percysowner
Worst trend in pop songs Dead Teenagers in the early 60s examples descriptions from Wikpedia in italics
Teen Angel Couple’s car stalls on railroad track; boyfriend pulled girl out in time but she ran back to get his ring and got killed
Patches Patches commits suicide by drowning; her boyfriend follows suit.
And the worst of the bunch
Running Bear
The song tells the story of Running Bear, a “young Indian brave”, and Little White Dove, an “Indian maid”. The two are in love but are separated by two factors:
The two, longing to be together, despite the obstacles and the risks posed by the river, dive into the raging river to unite. After sharing a passionate kiss, they are pulled down by the swift current and drown. The lyrics describe their fate: “Now they’ll always be together / In their happy hunting ground.” Basically we have teen lovers doing stupid things with an added dash of racism including “Indian chanting” of “uga-uga” during the three verses, as well as the “Indian war cries” at the start and end of the record.
Steve in the ATL
@Josie: smart kids!
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): dude, that’s not even close to the worst Chuck Lorre show. Two and a half men, Charles in charge, muppet babies….
pajaro
@Steve in the ATL:
Steve, I so agree with you on Silas Marner.
Most disappointing rock concert–Van Morrison, about 20 years ago. I was really looking forward to hearing him. He just mumbled his way through the lyrics, never made eye contact, and acted like hated being there.
Mike in NC
“Confederacy of Dunces” was book I hated.
Geoduck
@Lethe: “John Norman” is still alive and still writing Gor books. According to Wikipedia, there are 38 of the things now.
Can’t think of anything so awful that it’s stuck with me, but there’s the old joke: “The movie was so bad even when it was shown on airplanes people were walking out.”
MagdaInBlack
@Jackie: The book is one of my favorites.
KrackenJack
@bbleh: I prefer her work after she married McNally and wrote Road Atlas Shrugged
Ceci n est pas mon nym
The sequel to “Love Story”. I can’t even remember what it was called. I don’t think we watched the whole thing, I think we bailed halfway through. In a lifetime of movie watching, we’ve only walked out on perhaps 2 or 3.
“Dumb and Dumber” might be a close second. We watched that only because of the show time, when we finally got the kids settled with the sitter and went out to see what was playing. That was the only one that lined up with our time window.
(We saw “Clue” also purely for reasons of timing. It was such a silly little thing, we thought at the time we were the only people in the world to actually see it. We’ve been constantly amazed how beloved it is. But actually, it was pretty funny. So it doesn’t go on my “bad” list.)
Craig
@mali muso: yeah, that movie is terrible.
Gravenstone
Sucker Punch.
5 minutes in and I was ready to kill every single male character on screen. Very, very heavy handed writing and direction.
Martin
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): In fairness Big Bang Theory has more misogyny than comics.
Layer8Problem
@hitchhiker: Now I’m wondering if he’s any relation to Andy or Philip K.
TBone
@tailfedders: I liked the 1973 original with Christopher Lee.
Splitting Image
The worst TV show I’ve ever watched was True Blood. There are probably a lot of worse shows out there, but that one was recommended to me. It was excruciating and I hated almost every character in it. (I seem to remember that Stephen Root had a good bit, but that was about it.)
One of the few books I’ve ever put down without finishing was The Valley of the Dolls. I was passably entertained by the movie, but the book made me wish I was doing something else.
The worst book I ever read in high school was Anthem. One of my English teachers had the brilliant idea of creating a student committee to draft part of our reading list. They came up with a decent list including Brave New World, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and a few others. We all got to vote on which ones to read and we all had to read the winner plus one other of our choice. Anthem got the most votes. It was that kind of high school. I did at least discover Thomas Hardy.
I’m not even sure how to rank bad movies anymore. From the comic book movie craze I think there are probably dozens that are worse than Howard the Duck, which at least was memorably bad. I’ve seen three Fantastic Four movies and can’t remember a single minute from any of them.
Omnes Omnibus
Movie: Showgirls. I saw it in a second run theater that served beer by the pitcher, and that wasn’t enough to make it tolerable.
Book: That I finished reading: As I Lay Dying. That I couldn’t be bothered to finish: Atlas Shrugged.
Concert: I did care for the one Beck show that I saw. He was too convinced of his own genius. Hell, even Ryan Adams was less of a dick.
Sure Lurkalot
Worst family dinner: liver, boiled potatoes and canned spinach. That appetizing combo was in regular rotation at my house as a kid.
Worst food craze: Pumpkin spice. Popcorn? Cheerios? Doritos? Really?
khead
@Al:
Lifeforce? Don’t you blaspheme in here! One of my guilty pleasures. For the campy, hammy sci-fi and not the nekkid lady! Promise!
@scav:
Judges also would have accepted the hard seltzer craze
Edit – And, yeah, Showgirls was TURRIBULL. I remember wanting to pour bleach in my eyes after it was over.
catbirdman
Worse movie: Cabin Boy, because I was expecting a lot from a Chris Elliott vehicle.
Movie you thought was going to be a comedy, and turned out to be nothing but: The Cable Guy, but I kinda liked it anyway because it was legit edgy.
Worst TV show: Cop Rock.
Worst book: Atlas Shrugged. (And it sounded so concise!)
Worst concert: Tie between Tubes World Tour in 1980 (also my first concert) and The Cure around 1986.
Worst family dinner: Liver/onions.
Scout211
Worst concert: 2006, Stockton (CA) Arena. Bob Dylan.
I really was looking forward to seeing him again in concert. It had been years (decades?) since I’d seen him in concert.
First of all, who ever thought that there should be a music concert in a hockey arena? The acoustics were horrible. And Bob Dylan was excruciatingly bad. He whined and he mumbled and he never seemed to pair the lyrics to any conceivable melody, let alone the ones he composed. It was just whine, mumble, mumble, talk, mumble whine.
So disappointing.
zhena gogolia
I always miss these while having dinner!
Worst movie: Tie between Last House on the Left and The Draughtsman’s Contract (I only made it 20 minutes into each).
Worst book: Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-body Problem.
zhena gogolia
@catbirdman: I loved Cop Rock!
zhena gogolia
@Omnes Omnibus: Hahaha, why did I know for sure when I read the topic that somehow As I Lay Dying was going to come up?
ETA: And you HAD to finish reading it!
Weftage
Worst movie: Anything by Lars von Trier, but most especially Breaking the Waves. Why this story, why this way, why now? I’m sure you had a terribly deep artistic purpose, Lars, but I came away convinced you just like watching people be degraded.
A close second for Worst Movie would be American Gun (2002; James Coburn’s last film role). It’s fairly interesting right up to the grotesque last-minute plot twist that completely negates everything that the film had appeared to be about until then.
Worst play: It Had to Be You, by Taylor & Bologna. The emotional equivalent of nails on a chalkboard.
Worst book: Goodness, an embarrassment of choice here. Oh, let’s say The Da Vinci Code.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@TBone: “We keep the old religion” (may be misquoted). I loved what that turned out to mean.
I saw that movie after I’d known Edward Woodward from “The Equalizer” and I thought his casting as the prudish religious police detective was a hoot.
The movie kind of tainted “Sumer is y-cumin in” for me though. I know and love that song from singing groups.
zombie rotten mcdonald
my worst concert, coincidentally, is the same band that I also saw previously, when they became my favorite band, the Mekons.
Based on a Rolling Stone review, I saw them on the Rock ‘n’ Roll tour and they straight up, hands down hammered me flat they were so good. Equal mix good humor, punk vitality, county earnestness and alternative out guitar songs. With he angelic voice of Sally Timms.
On the subsequent tour, I took my SO, talking about how good thy were. Unknown to me, they were trying to support their next album, which their record label turned down and they, apparently, had been dropped mid tour in the middle of America with no way home. So they were staggeringly drunk. One of the very few shows I ever walked out on.
Happy ending. Next time they can through, I went with trepidation because they were so good that first time. And once again, they were transcendent. I’ve seen them many times since, and they have always been great.
Mike E
I’ve seen so many of the examples people here have listed, movies and concerts, and most don’t rise (plummet) to the worst category for me heh… I agree with Neighbors (John Belushi wasn’t a winning choice for straight man), Prometheus which had me quite stabby throughout most of it, but the worst movie I paid to see was Tarzan with Bo Derek. Yikes.
catbirdman
@Omnes Omnibus: Concur re: Atlas Shrugged.
I’ve seen Beck only a few times, and it’s really run the gamut. First time was a few years ago at a mid-sized venue — quite forgettable. Second time was last year in a very small club in LA, which was fantastic. Third time was earlier this month, with the LA Phil at the Hollywood Bowl, which was epic — among the best shows I’ve ever seen.
Omnes Omnibus
@zhena gogolia: Years later, I told Rik Warch that we called it As I Die Reading. It got a genuine laugh.
Suzanne
The TV show that absolutely makes me change the channel the fastest is Everybody Loves Raymond. I find it detestable. Not funny, just stupid….. and everyone else seems to think it’s great and I just do not get it.
RaflW
Worst book I ever purchased: A Dead man in Deptford by Anthony Burgess. No recollection of what caused me to buy it, but the first chapter was impenetrable (Or, as a NYT reviewer called it in 1995 “Burgess’s legendary intoxication with language and wordplay”). Still sitting in the unread pile, maybe for future insomnia?
Jay
@Lethe:
Weird thing, in the BDSM community, there are bunch of “Gor-eans”. They are all female subs.
kalakal
@Lethe: I read a few pages of a Gor book once. Couldn’t agree with you more – it was rubbish
Suzanne
@Weftage:
Oh damn, I forgot how terrible that was. I had to go into the bathroom at the theater and vomit. Not hyperbole.
zhena gogolia
@JDM: Oh, can you remember which one? Irony of Fate or Diamond Arm?
RaflW
@Suzanne: I’m with ya on that. I’d just barely rather watch reruns of The Ropers, one of the more execrable of spinoffs, than Some People Enjoy Raymond.
What gets made for TV has always sort of puzzled me.
zhena gogolia
@Omnes Omnibus: It truly was incredibly bad.
I like some of his other books.
M31
worst movie — on a date, mid-80s, some super-intellectual French movie that was all people just talking, then a guy goes to piss and it’s all blood and that was some kind of metaphor. We left.
worst concert — a bass singer and a harpsichordist and I’d never seen such weird off putting stage manner in my life, the harpsichordist was barely looking at the singer, was just slapping the page turns and throwing music on the floor after every piece. Pretty famous player too! Years later I thought that probably the two of them hated each other. Never forgot it it was so unsettling.
sixthdoctor
Worst movie – The Dark Tower. Huge King fan, ignored bad reviews and the opening crawl was such inane bullshit the people around me heard me say “oh, no.”
Honorable mention to The World is not Enough based solely on the last line, where I yelled OH FUCK YOU! back to the movie.
Worst TV show – True Detective season 2 but this was so bad it’s a fun bad watch. To me, House got unwatchable very quickly around season 3.
Just look at that parking lot
Worst concert I saw was Jerry Jeff Walker in 1981, Durango Co. He was wasted and kept slurring the words to all his song. When he played his anthem , Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother(the one song everyone came to hear) ,he forgot the lyrics. He was booed and heckled until he got so pissed that he just left, which made everyone break into a raucous cheer.
Neighbors was a horrible movie, but the book it was based on , 1980’s Neighbors by the late Thomas Berger is riot. You can find copies of it online.
Omnes Omnibus
@catbirdman: This was the Odelay tour and it was a mid-sized venue. I never bothered to see him again.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
I keep thinking of stuff. That’s what always happens to me with “best of” and “worst of” discussions. I’m going to nominate Every Which Way But Loose for my all-time list. Certainly in the top 5 worst movies I’ve paid for.
And for worst play, I’ll nominate a Pinter play, The Homecoming. Why would anybody write such a thing? Why would anybody produce it?
I see some of my favorite works listed in people’s “worst of” lists. Takes all kinds to make a world I guess.
@Suzanne: Never saw it so I have no opinion, but wasn’t Peter Boyle a recurring character in it? I would watch him in just about anything. Also I liked Ray Romano in The Big Sick.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Omnes Omnibus:
I was racking my brain for that one. Thanks for the (painful) reminder.
Per others above about Joyce. Ugh.
zhena gogolia
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): The Scarlet Letter is just simply bad. It’s not because it was written in the 19th century. It is totally and utterly unreadable. (And I make my living reading things written in the 19th century.)
WaterGirl
@Jackie: I bet neither of you will ever forget that experience.
wjca
Ulysses. It doesn’t qualify for “forced to read for school”. Not quite. We were required to read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. My analysis of the latter, in class, was “The problem with Joyce is that he doesn’t know how to handle the English language.” The professor had not been expecting that! He asked (i.e. did not require) that I read Ulysses. I managed 100 pages, which he agreed was giving it a reasonable chance. It was far, far worse.
(Dis)honorable mention has to go to The Eye of Argon, which a bunch of us read back when it was still being passed around in mimeo form. We would take turns reading aloud — you kept reading until you burst out laughing (at how horrible the writing was). Average was about 1 page (i.e. one 8 1/2 by 11 typed page). I don’t think we ever did force ourselves to get to the end.
zhena gogolia
@hitchhiker: Haha, Queen for a Day traumatized me at an early age.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Suzanne:
See, I love watching that show. It’s funny because they’re awful people being awful to each other, but they’re still redeeming enough that it’s not just completely mean spirited, like Two and Half Men or The Big Bang Theory
WaterGirl
@Sure Lurkalot: Nearly gagging at the dinner menu. Just the smell. shudder
Suzanne
@sixthdoctor: Do you ever wonder, with these adaptation movies….. how the hell can they start with source material that everyone likes, and yet still manage to ruin it? Like, the hard part was done for you!
Tehanu
I used to have a policy that I always finished a book. Then I read The World According to Garp, thinking on every page — especially as I was getting toward the end of it — that surely on the next page I would finally “get” it: I would get why everybody thought it was so great. I turned over the last page and read it, and then said to myself, “I will never again as long as I live finish reading a book when, like this, I hate it so much.” I’d have thrown it in the garbage if it hadn’t been a library book.
Suzanne
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
This is the worst genre of pretty much anything. It’s just sadism. Sorry. I hate it.
Ivan X
Worst movie: There have sure been plenty, but recently, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery made me want to throw things at my TV. Usually I just turn it off or walk out, but in this case, we saw it through to the bitter end, and were bonded in mutual our contempt for it. What a total piece of shit.
Worst book: I tried reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, and I found the writing to be so atrocious I couldn’t get through the second chapter. I remember reading someone saying it reads like a seventh grade book report, and recently, about his Elon Musk bio, that he comes from the “his eyes lit up” school of writing. I agree with both of these sentiments.
Worst book I was made to read: Tough one, because I pretty much just refused to read anything I didn’t like. Fucking Wuthering Heights, maybe. That shit is not for me.
Worst concert: Hoo boy. Me and mine walked out on The Breeders for their palpable arrogance, but I feel like I certainly had to have seen worse, and have just blotted it out.
Worst family dinner: Any where the exes are forced to be there together because of the children.
Worst TV show: I hate practically all TV, so, tough one. Friends stands out to me, but only because it was so popular, it probably wasn’t objectively worse than any other sitcom, and I just don’t like sitcoms, they’re all premised on misunderstandings which make me squirm.
I’m sure I’ll have new answers to all of these in like 30 minutes.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Resident Evil Two was the worst for me, I tried walking out of the theater and it turned out to be my living room.
And just about any zombie flick, I don’t get why people find them scary, to me they just absurd in a not fun stupid way.
MagdaInBlack
@Just look at that parking lot: My worst concert is a similar experience in Bloomington, IL. A Waylon Jennings concert with him wasted. We walked out.
zhena gogolia
My worst concert was Sweathog opening for Black Sabbath.
laura
The two worst books I ever read or attempted to read were both by Dave Eggers: A Staggering Work of Heartbreaking Genius- time I’ll never get back with that one book on vacation after law school. Did I learn? No I did not, and so, attempted to read A Hologram for the King.
Worst meal- easy, it was a Thanksgiving in the late 60’s at Auntie Suzi and Uncle Charlie’s and cousins John and Tom who had a dirt bike and go cart! Auntie Suzi “got cute” and stuffed a turkey with rice, covered it and into the oven. First it steamed and then it literally exploded. There was fighting and crying and we were hustled into our coats and out to the car. We may have had some breakfast for dinner and we all learned that you Do Not Fuck with the Thanksgiving Dinner menu. Lessons were learned that have stood that of time. And yes, they divorced.
E
@zhena gogolia: That’s a matter of opinion, no?
kalakal
Worst concert ( or half of one) : The Pretenders. They’d just released their first album and were still a bit raw. The first 40 minutes weren’t bad at all but then they ran out of material. The next 40 minutes was a collection of cover versions of stuff like Beatles songs. They were a great band later, I think they got rushed into touring too early. The album was great, the crowd were really enthusiastic so it was a huge letdown
K-Mo
I’ve seen a lot of bad movies in my day- when I was younger I could watch almost anything and enjoy it well enough. But I walked out of Natural Born Killers which thoroughly bad in any lens I can apply, but also just painful to watch.
Matt McIrvin
The worst book I read all the way through may be Earthlove: A Space Fantasy by Neil C. McAleer, who is probably best known for writing a biography of Arthur C. Clarke. Earthlove is a sort of New Age romantic allegory that reads like someone read Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull and decided there needed to be something like that that wasn’t quite so gritty and grounded.
Another remarkable one was Terror on Planet Ionus by Allan Adler, who, astonishingly, was one of the co-writers of the classic film Forbidden Planet. The best I can describe Ionus was that it was like the Simpsons parody “Knight Boat” but written straight in the 1950s and with aliens. There’s this guy who has a super high tech war boat, and aliens abduct it to another planet so he can use it to fight a monster called “KarKong” because for some reason this cool guy and his cool boat are the only things in the universe that can possibly defeat it, and everything about this story is just laughably dire.
zhena gogolia
@E: Yeah, I guess it’s my opinion.
I just wanted to push back on the idea that all novels written in the 19th century are as unreadable as The Scarlet Letter.
OlFroth
Movies? Forrest Gump. Nothing but a feature length Deus Ex Machina. Runner up, The Blue Lagoon. Just awful. Book that they made me read in school: Billy Budd. Just dull. Book that I willingly read: Atlas Shrugged. That’s no way to run a railroad, and the entire book is predicated on a perpetual motion machine.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@zhena gogolia:
Good to know it’s not just me. It’s been awhile since I read it in HS
sixthdoctor
@Suzanne: The choices were baffling. 4000 pages of source material and half the movie was based on a minor subplot in the last book.
zhena gogolia
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Same here. It’s been an even longer while than it has been for you.
Ivan X
@catbirdman: I can easily understand why one would hate it, but I like Cabin Boy. However, it’s probably because writer/director Adam Resnick’s hilarious memoir, Will Not Attend, is one of my favorite books.
Splitting Image
@Suzanne:
In a couple of cases, the creators actually seem to have started with a highly developed sense of Artistic Vision(TM). Over the course of pitching their Vision to the studios, they’d get offered a job working on a property which seemed similar enough to what they wanted to do that they decided to shoehorn their own Vision into the existing property instead of using the source material.
Examples include the 1999 version of Mansfield Park and the allegedly-Pratchett series The Watch.
hitchhiker
@zhena gogolia:
It’s still traumatizing to think of those women, vying for most pathetic, and then having the audience clap-meter thing decide who got the prizes and who got nothing.
Ahhhhhh.
delphinium
Worst movie: Dogville by Lars von Trier starring Nicole Kidman, horrible in every way. The Patriot starring Mel Gibson is a strong second, just absolute dreck.
Book: Besides Atlas Shrugged, would add Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follet – maybe it got better later on but couldn’t make it thru more than the first couple chapters.
Ivan X
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: How’d you feel about RE1? I saw it in the theater and found it to be surprisingly scary and entertaining. The rest of the series is pretty forgettable, except, you know, I’ll watch anything with Milla Jovovich in it, because.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Yes, with main character Tarol Cabot, described by the Gor fans as whiniest protagonist since Thomas Covenant
Phylllis
@E.: I’ve debated trying to find it and give it another go, because Nic Cage can be…interesting in his acting choices. But then I remind myself that we have instincts for a reason.
Subsole
@Baud:
This is almost the correct answer. Except I didn’t pay to see it, so…
@Nina: Now this one, regrettably, I paid to see. Just an absolute disaster on every single level. From the cinematography to the story to the acting. Just a horrible mess.
Fake Irishman
@Jackie:
Have you ever read the Novel version of the “Power of One?”
There’s a lot more about boxing in the book especially linked to PK’s growth, and his interaction with a bunch of characters he wouldn’t have met, which is fabulous. It actually made me appreciate the sport.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Ivan X: It was ok, and felt like it had promise, which is why I watched the sequel.
Nora
Worst movie: The Thief , the cook, his wife and her lover.
Second place: A Boy and His Dog.
Movie whose trailer was completely different in tone from the actual movie: Trainspotting. The trailer made it look like a lighthearted fun movie. It was anything but. Absolutely harrowing.
Worst book they made me read in school: Billy Budd. Why did anyone think it was a good book for sophomores?
George
When I was in middle school or high school, the Super Bowls used to end in late afternoon or early evening. One year, after the game was over, I remember switching to the local broadcast station and watching a film titled “The Alien Factor.” It was a poorly made movie but I was glued to the tube. I think I watched it out of pity more than anything.
zhena gogolia
@hitchhiker: And the sleazy MC!
Omnes Omnibus
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: God, I was given a set of the Thomas Covenant books when I was a kid. I read the first one and part of the second to see if it got any better and then gave up.
UncleEbeneezer
@sixthdoctor: I’ve never watched The Dark Tower movie but I hope after King dies someone takes another crack at it because I think you could make a hell-of-a series of Dark Tower Universe films with the right person running it (someone besides Steven King).
October Light
Worst Balloon Juice thread:
Medium Cool – The Worst of Everything
On a daily basis, we’re bombarded with enough negativity. We need more threads about great, hidden treasures.
narya
@Tehanu: ooooohhhh, I hated that book, AND everything else of his I ever read. Loathed Owen Meany too.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Martin:
I’d say those are pretty evenly matched, historically lol
I remember Penny didn’t even have a last name
The Sheldon Cooper character also strikes me as mocking autistic people
Ivan X
I love how fast this thread is blowing up. It’s a constructive, non-harmful way for people to get their hate on!
Omnes Omnibus
@Fake Irishman:
The book far surpasses the movie.
Ivan X
@October Light: That’s literally every other Medium Cool.
zhena gogolia
@October Light: That’s very meta!
But don’t you find it interesting when one commenter’s worst is another’s best? I think there are some Scarlet Letter fans in here.
Matt McIrvin
I liked a lot of the high-school literary classics mentioned here, but one I thought was a big steaming pile was Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native. Maybe the overwrought romantic prose style was just too much for me. Contains the line “Oh, Eustacia, you have held my heart in the hollow of your hand, and like a devil you have dashed it down!”
K-Mo
@Sure Lurkalot: In Baltimore they put Old Bay on/in everything. There are some good results (fries, ice cream) but *lots* of overkill (popcorn, Mac and cheese, chicken salad, bagels,etc).
sixthdoctor
@UncleEbeneezer: IIRC Amazon produced a pilot a couple of years ago set during the Wizard and Glass era but it didn’t get picked up.
zhena gogolia
@October Light: And I loved Pink Flamingoes and Cop Rock. I find that interesting.
Subsole
@cmorenc:
I think the newer Alien movies (Prometheus, Covenant) are not necessarily bad on their own. They should have just left the alien out of it and run with the discount-rack Blade Runner/I, Robot story they wanted to tell.
Now, the Alien vs Predator movies? Dear God, those were traaaaash. As someone who read and loved the original Dark Horse comics when they came out, I walked out of that theater MAD.
karen marie
@Gin & Tonic: Bite. Your. Tongue!
DesertFriar
Worst movie (theater/Family Movie): Disney’s Super Dad (w/Bob Crane). Absolutely awful. Not 1 laugh in the whole movie. Close 2nd 10.
Worse movie critics loved. Last Tango In Paris.
Worst movie (VCR/DVD) A Joe Piscopo movie called Two Bits and Pepper. Found the DVD in the library and brought it home as the girls were going through a “pony/horse” phase. The family would not talk to me for a month.
Worst book they made me read: David Copperfield.
Worst concert: We lived in Huntsville AL ~30 years ago. There was a spring Festival called Panoply which had arts, crafts and music. We were walking by the music stage when a band was just starting up. We left 20 seconds into the 2nd song. Band was Hootie and the Blowfish.
Worst TV show: 700 Club
Quinerly
@Nora: ha ha! I love A Boy and His Dog. Watched it again about a month ago.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@zhena gogolia: I’m one of them.
Back in school, Hawthorne was one of the few authors I actually read all of when he was assigned. No idea why I enjoyed his stuff so much, but I did.
I didn’t read Scarlett Letter or House of the Seven Gables back then though. Read both much more recently as one of my occasional “maybe I’ll read some of the stuff I didn’t in high school” forays. And enjoyed both. Even chuckled a few times in Seven Gables as I realized Hawthorne was actually making jokes.
I may not always be appreciating these things for their literary value. There are cultural things in both that I found fascinating.
PAM Dirac
Worst movie: Close Encounters of the Third Kind – Imagine that you get a message from an alien civilization saying, “Meet us at this place and time.” What would you do? who would you tell? How would you prepare? Might make a pretty interesting story, but no we get a couple of hours of Richard Dreyfuss playing with his mashed potatoes only to be made totally irrelevant when we get to the big finale.
Worst book – Foucault’s Pendulum by Eco. I can’t even remember exactly why I thought it was so bad but I remember forcing myself to finish, because that is what you do with books, and really, really struggling. I also brought up to have a real respect for the physical copy of a book, but when I finished this one it went right into the trash.
catbirdman
@Ivan X: Yeah, I put forth something else but I’ll go ahead and agree with you about Friends. It was crazy-popular and it objectively sucked.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Suzanne:
That’s fair. I usually don’t care for them either, but there’s just something different about ELR. The jokes always land for me and the characters have their sympathetic moments
Betty
Most disappointing comedy show I attended was George Carlin back in the 70s. The sound system wasn’t working right so he got furious, shouted, probably cursed and walked off the stage. Oh well, I was able to enjoy his act on tv.
zhena gogolia
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: I was speaking somewhat in jest about The Scarlet Letter. It’s supposed to be a masterpiece. I was traumatized by it in high school and have never gone back. But Goku thought it was because it was written in the 19th century, and most things written in the 19th century are totally my cup of tea.
ETA: And I’ll remind OO that As I Lay Dying is also supposed to be a masterpiece.
BRyan
Inching into a new relationship, traded book recommendations with prospective new love. He gave me the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. I gave him Atlas Shrugged. (In my defense, I was 22. A very young and dumb 22.) Why we lasted seven years together was a mystery.
Spanish Moss
@zhena gogolia: Do you know what is worse than being assigned to read The Scarlet Letter? Having your 10th grade class take turns reading it aloud in class for weeks! Absolute torture.
JaySinWA
I tend to memory hole worst things.
The one truly bad movie I can put an name to was Signs and I had to look it up. I know I’ve seen worse, but the hype to sappy ending ratio was impressive. M. Knight what’s his face for the loss.
Matt McIrvin
@zhena gogolia: As I mentioned in another recent thread, I was never fond of Hawthorne, but The House of the Seven Gables was worse than The Scarlet Letter which at least has some decently written psychodrama in it.
I actually liked Faulkner’s mix of weird stylistic experiments and Southern-culture-induced PTSD.
Subsole
@hitchhiker: As someone who legit like Clockwork Orange, what didn’t you like about it?
zhena gogolia
@Spanish Moss: Hahaha! We had quizzes on it every week. Like having to reproduce exactly what Roger Chillingworth said to Hester Prynne in Chapter X, stuff like that.
catbirdman
@kalakal: Ah, that’s too bad because in 1981 the Pretenders were my second-ever concert (after The Tubes, which was so bad I listed it here). They had two albums under their belt by then and totally kicked ass, in my foggy memory!
Omnes Omnibus
@zhena gogolia: My high school IB English class formed the Hester Prynne Fan Club.
Spanish Moss
Hi WaterGirl. I have an idea for a future Medium Cool: Your favorite musuem.
Craig
@catbirdman: almost every show on network/basic cable is far worse than Cop Rock. There was at least a desire to try something with Cop Rock. Did it succeed? Not really, but I’ll take the opening court scene over any Dick Wolf nonsense anyway.
UncleEbeneezer
What’s the worst movie you ever paid to see? Ishtar in the theater. La La Land (rent/stream)
Movie you thought was going to be a comedy, and turned out to be nothing but? Knives Out. The “comedy” just didn’t hit for me. Loved Glass Onion though.
What’s the worst TV show ever made? Small Wonder has to be up there. If you lived in New England in the 80’s it was on tv all the time and it was pretty terrible (though I liked it as a kid).
Worst book you ever read? Tough Guys Don’t Dance by Norman Mailer.
Worst book they made you read in school? I hated pretty much all of them
Worst concert you attended? Big Head Todd & The Monsters. They opened for Dave Matthews Band (who were amazing live!). I was on shrooms and the whole BHT&TM set I was really starting to low key freak out and felt miserable. Their music was NOT helping. But I made it through and the Dave Matthews set was phenomenal.
Quinerly
@Just look at that parking lot: hate hearing that about JJW. He is a favorite of mine. I love “Navajo Rug.” So sad when he passed. Worse shows for me was a really messed up Clapton who played less than 40 mins. St. Louis. Late 1980’s and The Allman Brothers at NOLA Jazz and Heritage Fest in the 1990’s. The sound was off and no matter where you stood it was so loud the entire sound was distorted/muffled.
Steve in the ATL
@Spanish Moss: I’ll go ahead and me to the Cluny in Paris and the Roman History museum in Rome as the two worst!
Subsole
@brantl:
I always thought it was ingeniously meta that that book ended up being such an utter damned disappointment.
UncleEbeneezer
@JaySinWA: I’ll see your Signs and raise you one Oppenheimer. Most over-hyped, over-rewarded, shit-ass movie since Crash.
schrodingers_cat
The worst thing we had to read when I was in school was a collection of devotional poetry written in the 13th century in Marathi. I would have enjoyed reading it more if I wasn’t being tested on it.
It was tough.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@zhena gogolia: Well, like I say, I’m probably appreciating the ones I like for the wrong reasons. My reactions to most “this is a masterpiece” literature is “Why? It was OK, but what makes it great?” I can think of many books in that category. And some don’t even pass the “It was OK” bar.
Same reaction to a lot of art. Most of it I don’t get, and the ones I like are not really for the artistic technique or other artistic reasons. I like the subjects.
Craig
@Omnes Omnibus: not missing anything. He’s pretty much a one hit wonder.
Peke Daddy
@LoveNOLA: Today? On premium channel and pretty big. There is one episode still in the can.
MagdaInBlack
@Omnes Omnibus: For unexplained reasons my husband loved the Thomas Covenant books. Like you, I found them…unreadable.
pieceofpeace
@Citizen Alan: Hahaha………she liked it, I presume…or was proud of finding a ‘substitute?’
karen marie
@brantl: I’m going to suggest the reason you didn’t enjoy it is that you had to read it yourself. Mil Nicholson does Dickens the way it was intended – read aloud by a very talented reader. She’s read a bunch of Dickens for Librivox, all of them absolutely delightful.
I don’t have a book I can name off the top of my head as the worst thing ever – I put them out of my mind. I started a book blog many years ago to keep track of what I’d read, grading the authors, so that when out looking for my next read I could look up an author before committing myself to buying something. I haven’t kept it up, in part because I only do audiobooks anymore. If a book particularly annoys me I put it in a “books I hate” section and never look at them again.
I’ve been listening to Martha Wells’ Murderbot series. I like it very much. I think I’m on book 3. The first time I started listening to book 1 – maybe last year? – I was “what the fuck is this shit” but I gave it another go, and I’m glad I did. I think the problem was that I listen as I’m going to sleep and that’s not especially conducive to understanding what I’m hearing.
As far as movies, pretty much any Oscar winner is going to be a dog, in my opinion. Many years ago I decided I’d watch all the Oscar winners, starting at the beginning. There was nothing that wasn’t a dog among them. I finally gave it up as a bad job.
Worst meal: Many years ago I tried to relive a fond childhood memory and made canned spaghetti and hot dogs for dinner. There should be a law against feeding that crap to anyone but especially to children. They deserve better.
K-Mo
@piratedan: A good memory from my childhood is going with a bunch of friends to see some crappy horror movie and it turns out the sound is out. The theater refunds everyone’s ticket but lets us stay in the theater watching the video feed. A whole bunch of people stayed and called out the sounds and voices. It was spontaneous and hilarious.
Falling Diphthong
Worst Movie: The Midnight Sky. I made it through 10 minutes before I paused to ask the internet “Okay, I missed something about how this Earth-like moon is LIKE a moon of Jupiter, and they went through a star gate or something, right? They aren’t claiming it’s ACTUALLY a moon of Jupiter, right?”
They were. Just as Earth’s environment struggles, we discover that all this time there’s been a moon of Jupiter with earth-like gravity, a breathable atmosphere, fully developed ecosystems with plants and animals, shirt-sleeve temperatures, and the sun is even just as bright as on Earth! Gosh that sure is convenient! At least for the vanishingly small part of humanity that will get to putt off to the new unspoiled world, leaving all those pesky problems behind. We just never noticed that particular moon of Jupiter before.
bluefoot
@catbirdman:
Cop Rock! I can never decide if that makes it into the so-bad-it’s-good category.
Worst book I ever finished: A mystery novel called Perpetual Check. Hilariously badly written, like a high schooler trying to write a mystery novel. There are many worse which I couldn’t/wouldn’t finish. Most notable for me, because of how impressively bad it was, was Twilight. I think I only lasted about 20 pages despite the fact my niece really wanted me to read it.
Same with television. There is a LOT of bad tv that I won’t spend the time on.
Worst movie I paid for: Probably The Phantom Menace? I hated Forrest Gump but it was at least engaging in parts.
Worst meal had nothing to do with the food and everything to do with the insane family drama being played out over the meal.
Quinerly
@UncleEbeneezer:
Dave Matthews Band is always fantastic. I will say his hardcore fans and the hardcore Phish fans at NOLA Jazz and Heritage Fest are perhaps the most obnoxious to hang and camp with. Pre Katrina, our group of 30-40 from St. Louis used to urban camp in one of those campgrounds on Chef Menteur Highway. The Phish and DMB fans were the worst. They trashed the campground one year.
Dan B
Worst book would be A Confederacy of Dunces, as has been stated. I kept reading it to discover the “uproarious genius”. Did not finish.
Worst meal would be when I was doing the landscape for the Weyerhaeusers. They took me to dinner. Me: Fantastic! So luxurious. Everyone tossed up the Mexican food for hours. The restaurant is still across I-5 from Firt Lewis / Mc Cord.
But the holiday meal was at our aunt’s house, Thanksgiving in the 60’s, Cleveland suburbs, aunt from Scots Irish in northwest Arkansas. Our aunt was proud she’d gotten up at 4 AM to put the turkey in the (dehydrator) oven. Our uncle was proud if the electric knife. So we had dry turkey shreds covered with gummy giblet gravy and lumpy mashed potatoes, gummy cranberry relish, green bean casserole with canned beans and more gluey stuff. It was nearly impossible to swallow the turkey/ gravy/ giblet/ potato combo. Before dessert – fantastic pies! – the new dishwasher was loaded and conversation was drowned out. At least we liked our cousins and our aunt’s and uncle’s enthusiasm for their rendering fine food into a memorable thing. Amnesia would have been much appreciated, except for dessert.
RaflW
@Nora: I agree Trainspotting is harrowing, but I thought it was so good. (Sidebar: good lord, that movie came out 28 years ago. Eep)
HumboldtBlue
@WaterGirl:
I have seven siblings as well. Mom gave birth to nine children in 10 years, one didn’t make it. I’m an Irish twin with my older sister.
Craig
I recently watched A Man in Full on Netflix. Unbelievable how terrible it is. I’m not sure when people decided Jeff Daniels was an actor of gravitas. Everything about this show is shallow, pretentious and downright dumb. Nothing makes any fucking sense. I hate watched the end just to make sure it was going to die and not be horror movies into more seasons. People seem to like the book, but Tom Wolfe has his own problems outside his story about Junior Johnson.
Quinerly
@Subsole: I loved Clockwork Orange.
schrodingers_cat
Worst movie I have seen in recent times: RRR thinly veiled RSS propaganda in a sleek package. Soo long. I saw it only because a lot folks were telling me about it and asking me questions about it.
dexwood
We walked out on “Prometheus”. My “Man Who Fell To Earth” story. It was filmed in various parts of New Mexico – Artesia, Madrid, Albuquerque. My friend’s mom worked in an Artesia drugstore and sold Bowie some items. I was on a gopher on the Albuquerque set. Never met Bowie, but I did drive Buck Henry to the airport in my VW beetle. He had a flight to catch and I was in the right place at the right time. He was funny and kind. Gave me a tip.
ETA: sat through the movie, but didn’t like it.
karen marie
@Suzanne: I feel that way about Friends. Its popularity is inexplicable to me.
RaflW
@PAM Dirac: That’s a great/hilarious synopsis of Close Encounters.
Quinerly
@karen marie: count me in your Friends camp. Did not care for it.
I’m a huge Seinfeld fan.
SW
“In Search of Lost Time”
I’ll never get those ten years back.
Anthony
Worst food craze was putting sugar in entrees.
Worst movie I paid to see was the most recent Antman.
Quinerly
@Suzanne: never watched an episode. Hated the name.
bluefoot
@bluefoot:
Wait, I take it back re worst book. There was a book (whose title escapes me) by Philip Jose Farmer that I read that was the beginning of the end for me for reading science fiction for decades.
Craig
@RaflW: Trainspotting is one of the best book to script adaptations in post 80s cinema. Spot on dope culture. Not everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s beautiful.
glc
@ColoradoGuy:
I’d forgotten Zardoz. I think I’ve probably seen worse movies but the difficulty is I’ve forgotten them all. I did feel some sympathy though with the notion that for Sean Connery it was more interesting than doing another Bond film.
My recollection is that The Rocky Horror Picture Show is worse, but that may have been intentional.
On the other hand, Earth Girls are Easy and The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai are among my favorites, so I’m not claiming to be afflicted with good taste.
@cmorenc:
With regard to Prometheus, I was in a plane, and I believe I only made it through the first 15 or 20 minutes before abandoning that one, so I don’t really have a settled view on it. But I suspect you may be right.
UncleEbeneezer
@Dan B: Yes! Confederacy of Dunces! I really didn’t get the humor/genius, at all. I didn’t hate it but just didn’t understand all the hype.
karen marie
@Splitting Image: At the mention of Pratchett and The Watch, I am reminded of the worst movie of all time – or at least the movie which offended me to such a degree that my blood pressure goes up just thinking about it – the 2005 Hitchhikers Guide. Just unbelievably bad. Everything about it. The original BBC series had way better production values and far better actors
@Nora: A Boy and His Dog. Horrible movie! I saw it when it came out and loved it. I watched it again a couple years ago and was horrified. Do not recommend it at all.
zhena gogolia
@dexwood: I just barely sat through it.
Martin
Ok, I’m going to distract y’all with the Kamala Holding Vinyls generator.
Do your thing.
Chris
Worst movie I ever paid for: The Room, easy. I’m sorry, it’s not so bad it’s good. It’s just bad. It’s not even hatewatch worthy. It’s just bad.
Worst book I ever read: God, where do I even start? I was raised in the French educational system, and I can list enough awful literature to take us through the end of the week, or I could if I hadn’t blocked most of it out. It’s crazy. This is the culture that gave the world Alexandre Dumas, Maurice LeBlanc, Jules Verne for pity’s sake, so much work pioneering some of the most thrilling genres in fiction, and yet over and over what we had to read in school was fifteen pages of Balzac describing a spot on the wall.
Can’t rightly say what the worst TV show I ever watched is. Largely because I stop watching pretty quickly if they don’t grab me.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I knew this woman who worked at the publisher back in the day, and she claimed that every-time one of the books came out (like, say “Gor #124 Houseboat of Gor” all the women in the office would go have read through of in some editors office because they though it was just hilarious that the spicey bits always ended with “and then, he tied her up”
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Chris:
Never actually watched it. Only ever watched the Nostalgia Critic review of it.
It does have some pretty funny quotes:
Chris
@Suzanne:
The only Tom Clancy I’d really recommend is very early stuff. The Hunt for Red October, Red Storm Rising, and The Cardinal of the Kremlin are some of the best Cold War thrillers there are. The Bear and the Dragon, though, is long after he started going downhill.
Trivia Man
@ShadeTail: I liked it. I read it as satire of fascism.
And the book was instrumental n my social awareness – what is a government? A good one? A bad one? Why? I’ve been pondering ever since i read it.
Citizen Alan
@pieceofpeace: I think she was just proud of her own creativity in funding a substitute for something as fundamental as tomato paste. That did not change the fact that the spaghetti had an overpowering taste of carrot juice
Of course, I also recall that she was not a believer in draining pasta before serving it. Which meant that eating spaghetti involved fishing wet noodles out of a tepid bowl of water with tongs, so naturally everything was soupy anyway.
I learned to cook for myself at a very young age.
Steve in the ATL
@Chris: in the late eighties when I was living in Paris I saw the Dukes of Hazzard dubbed in French. If that wasn’t the worst thing ever on television, it has to be close!
bluefoot
@Martin:
So far my favorite is her holding Bedtime for Democracy. Something about the album and the expression on her face makes me laugh.
karen marie
@cmorenc: That movie engendered in me a strong dislike of David Bowie.
Quinerly
@pajaro: Van Morrison is one of the worst in concert. Seen him 3 times…2 of those times at New Orleans Jazz Fest. NOLA heat and humidity, last act of the day. He was dressed in layers of black with black hat (both years). Mumbled and complained about the heat….both years. Yet, refused to remove his 3 layers of black clothing. I have been a huge Van fan for years and have been willing to accept his peculiar ways….until his anti vax crap. Done with his shows. (Although, I did play his 2006 obscure “Pay the Devil” album last week. Love that album. And I still want “Into the Mystic” played at my funeral.)
Jay
Can’t believe nobody has listed “Attack of The Killer Tomatos” yet.
Worst meal, about 12 years ago, T and I decided that we would have a camp meal from when were were kids. Heinz baked beans with cut up hotdogs and buttered toast. Was not like what I remembered. We tried again, and I made fennel, also known as “whatch you got stew” a staple of Boy Scout camping trips at the end of the trip. Fried spam, canned Irish Stew, canned vedge, ( peas, carrots, lima beans) served over a bed of minute rice. I guess when you are a teen and burning 6,000 calories a day,………
Worst book(s) Anything by Scott Orson Card after 1986.
apocalipstick
Legend of the Lone Ranger with Klinton Spilsbury.
burnt
@narya: I was going to nominate another book, but that was because I had forgotten how bad this book was. Bonfire of the Vanities: sexist, racist, turgid, self-satisfied, etc. @narya excellent choice.
hitchhiker
@Subsole: I didn’t like the rape scenes. I didn’t like the characters, or the sense that I wasn’t supposed to like them, or the random introduction of the government evil, or – especially — the sense that I was supposed dig how skillfully the film presented all this unlikeable shit.
Or something. I don’t know. It wasn’t for me.
What did you like about it?
raven
The Deer Hunter, great wedding terrible fucking movie.
p.a.
Worst ‘concert’ was also worst movie: Zep’s The Song Remains the Same. Concert footage & some concept video stuff. B-O-R-I-N-G. Close 2nd the movie Americathon. Guess it was trying to be a liberal critique of US culture, but no.
Worst book I had to read: something by economic historian HJ Habakkuk. I remember it as a modest-sized book, maybe 225 pps, and I’m not lying when I say maybe 15 paragraphs total in that 225 page word-count. Punctuation, asshole!
Worst dinner: all holidays w the wingnut relatives as we stuffed our faces until we passed out while they whined abt being oppressed. I coined a term paraphrasing something from Eat Drink Man Woman abt those dinners: “family holiday torture-dinner.”
Quinerly
@Sure Lurkalot: wow! Long before I ended up in St. Louis in 1982.
My college boyfriend and I camped out on the sidewalk at NC State University for a block of tickets for Rod in 1981. I think they were student prices of $20 a piece. Brought 20 back to our college (East Carolina University) and sold them at a pretty big profit.
As for the show….it was great. Rod was hot (I had a huge crush on that era Rod. Boyfriend also had the same haircut). We were third row. And I got arrested (nothing to do with selling the tickets). That’s another story.
raven
@Sure Lurkalot: I saw him with Jeff Beck, Ron Wood Mickey Waller and Nicki Hopkins in 1968. They killed it but PG&E was better.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
And speaking of “good book series that turned to utter crap” Honor Harrington,
The books up to #10 were good (in a sci-fi mil porn kind of way) and then writer decided to short circuit the space war to turn in it all into platform to preach his dumbass ideas about politics were the hard right and left are in a conspiracy to take over society. The really vile part was the series was clearly leading to a climatic space battle between the main character and this admiral on the enemy side that was the main characters equal as a military leader. And then the writer just offs the opposing admiral for long prose gun porn, and stupid politics that made no sense.
Jay
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
yeah, there were only two female characters in the Gor books, the Princess/Warrior/Partner and the empty vessel. And all the Gor Girls in the BDSM community want to be the empty vessel.
Rape fantasies I guess.
Never met or heard of a Gor-ean Dom, because man, the liability involved.
I had a Gor Girl for a sub for a brief period, and when we were drawing up the contract, I was “noping” out whole paragraphs in an Earls. Not gonna do that, not gonna do that, not gonna do that. Wait Staff was very “attentive” to our table for some reason.
Mel
Worst movie: The Lemon Sisters. It was blazingly abysmal.
Worst concert: Pia Zadora (looong story behind that one, but suffice it to say it was badbadbad).
Is a “Worst Date” category in play?
Mine would be a toss-up between the Catholic school Christmas party where my date turned out to be a seminarian, or the date with the mortician who had a coffin for a coffee table, and wanted to do “a full face makeup” for me – using his mortuary kit, one would assume. HELL, no!!
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Jay:
Second Life it’s supposed to be two or three guys fighting while a dozen women wait for one them to pay attention. lol
Ah, passing the checks, if one will? I have been told they don’t get that communications is critical and lack of it is dangerous.
John Revolta
Late to the party but I don’t have much to add anyway………… I think I delete the awful shit from my memory. I didn’t enjoy The Scarlet Letter; I could see how it was well done but it was just not. My. Thing.
However I will admit to having seen My Mother the Car on TV back in the day and while my tolerance for dumb entertainment was pretty high back then, no way was I going back for a second helping of that.
Louise B.
Worst movie: Somewhere in Time with Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour. Saw it in the theater with friends while in college. Came out of the theater laughing – not the intended response.
Roberto el oso
This is a great list of comments, although I have to say that a LOT of the worst books/worst movies are on my top 10 list.
Worst movie: American Beauty / Marie Antoinette (the Sofia Coppola one)
Worst TV show: Cops
Worst book: something by Robert Anton Wilson, recommended by a soon-to-be girlfriend
Worst book in school: La Fille Sous Le Lion
Worst concert: Dream Syndicate (they opened for Gang of Four, who were fabulous)
Worst family dinner: in 9th grade my mom had the flu, my dad was working late, so I “made” salmon croquettes, deviled eggs, and mashed potatoes — truly terrible (I’ve gotten much better since)
Worst food craze: buckets of crawfish in bars
Lacuna Synecdoche
I can’t believe no one has mentioned, for Worst TV Show:
The Apprentice.
It normalized and popularized a fascist asshole who became president for a term.
If not the worst, and I believe it is, it’s still the show that resulted in the most damage to America in television history.
The only thing that comes close to doing that much damage is the entirety of Fox News programming.
Chris
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
I didn’t get very far into that series. I think the premise of “Haven expands militarily because they have to feed their out-of-control welfare state with other people’s riches” was already irritating enough to me that I was like “you know what, I got enough books with bad politics already.”
scav
@Steve in the ATL: Ahhh, but the guy dubbing Magnum in French was hou-la! Having never bothered to watch it chez moi, I fell over in shock when first hearing Tom Selleck.
Tim in Cape Fear
Hard to pick a “worst” anything. If I didn’t dig it, someone else did, and who am I to say? It works FOR ME or not. Having said that, Coppola’s Dracula had me fear for my very sanity. “Really? Did he… that…. Really?” You know, like that.
K-Mo
@catbirdman: Agreed
Phein64
Worst Hollywood Movie seen in a theatre:
Tie: The Mummy 3, and Rush Hour 3. Embarrassingly bad movies that should never have been made. Kids made me see them. Made me think less of all the actors involved. Do not see them under any circumstances!, but especially if you like Chris Tucker or Maria Bello.
Dan B
@Mel: I’ve had dates with some weird guys but yours… what to say!?
Jay
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
I think it’s because the Gor Girls do a very superficial reading of the Gor “books” and have little understanding of the BDSM ethos and practical knowledge base.
So they come in with a fantasy list, half of which no decent Dom will ever do because it is mentally and physically dangerous for the sub.
They don’t study up on kink, the psychology, the physiology of the human body, the art of bondage, blood barriers, how to safely suspend somebody, etc. They don’t understand that Shibari takes a long time to learn to do right, a long time to effect the bondage, because it all has to be able to be released in a minute or two, if the sub goes into distress, medical or mental.
As a Dom, you come to the meeting with a “nope” list. Over time of course, those lists change, if you are having a long term BDSM relationship.
This of course, holds true for many subs, “The Many Shades of Grey-ers”, etc.
E
@Phylllis: Just watch the manic scene where he torments his secretary about finding a lost file and recites the entire alphabet to her. It’s like a kind of super-distillation asshole condescending boss. I thought he and the writers nailed it, but I may be completely alone on this.
Fake Irishman
I’ll jump in late here. “Event Horizon” was a movie I didn’t care about until I was bored and happened on it on cable one night. The first 15 minutes set up a really interesting premise.
Then the movie proceded do fuck-all with it. Awful awful awful.
kalakal
I’ve seen a lot of terrible movies
a few stinkers
The adaption of the game Wing Commander pure tripe
Cat on a hot tin roof the Paul Newman/Liz Taylor one – just awful
A special category is the British Comedians get given the keys to the toy box and produce a self-indulgent unfunny mess.
Examples The Hound of the Baskervilles Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Possibly the most amazing cast ever, possibly the worst film ever
Bullshot – A Bulldog Drummond spoof, good cast, terrible film
E
@E: . . . Of course I also liked The Scarlet Letter, A Confederacy of Dunces, Ulysses, Silas Marner (are you sure you guys aren’t mixing this up with Ethan Frome?), As I Lay Dying, and even, though less so. The Stranger.
kalakal
@Fake Irishman: Totally agree
Emily B.
Worst movie I ever paid to see: Armageddon
Worst book I had to read in school: Lord of the Flies. 40-some years after 7th grade, I’m still bitter.
Worst food craze: white chocolate. What is the point??
Noskilz
I think the worst movie I ever actually bought a ticket for was Dragonheart at the local dollar theater. Admission was just a dollar, but I still felt ripped off.
The worst movie I have seen thus far is probably Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2. People go on about bad science-fiction and horror movies, but a failed comedy is just wretched. I can enjoy Manos or The Beast of Yucca Flats, but Blart 2 was just excruciating. It didn’t cost me any money to see, but it was a complete waste of my time.
Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq)
Anaconda. Jurassic Park concept, Full Monty budget.
ETtheLibrarian
I have se eral worst books I was forced to read:
Billy Budd
Vanity Fair
Hamlet
And THE WORST OF ALL WORST Wuthering Heights. I fucking hate that book. It is NOT romantic.
Citizen Dave
@Louise B.: lurking at the end here, but you prompted me to point out that Somewhere in Time is kind of the pride of Macinaw Island. I recall our B&B having a video copy of it about 20 years ago, which we watched! Can confirm listing it here. Recall it being extremely cheesy.
I would also put any Chuck Lorre show here. I hate it that Big Bang Theory is supposed to the show for science folks.
Recently I’ve been really enjoying the long-running podcast How Did This Get Made?, if you like to revel in awful movies
ETA: Once read something explaining why there is no such thing as “white chocolate “. There is no chocolate in it; it’s just fat. So, agree. Terrible.
CapnMubbers
@Jay: Killer Tomatoes is on my so-bad-I-love it list.
Worst movie: I really wanted to like Shock Treatment, follow-up movie to Rocky Horror. Nope.Maybe tied for worst: Laser Blast, a perennial second movie at the drive-in.
kalakal
@ETtheLibrarian: Ah a fellow Wuthering Heights loather. I hate, hate, hate that book.
My other is The Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller. Narcissist goes “look at me, I’m so cultured and a free spirit’ in between whining about daddy’s next cheque being delayed in the post
Jay
@CapnMubbers:
Scientist: “It’s worse than you think General, ( angry large tomato tied down and struggling on a semi trailer flat bed), “This is a cherry tomato!”
Tim in SF
Worst book was Lord of the Flies. I didn’t like it at the time, and my hatred and resentment at the lie on which the book is based has only grown and festered over time. Someone should write a book about these boys and force high schoolers to read that, instead.
Ivan X
@E: I find it to be a somewhat flawed movie but it’s one of my favorites. I mean, if you like Cage, you can hardly get more Cage than that.
kalakal
@Jay:
The Swarm
Engineer “This nuclear plant is designed to stand up to fires, earthquakes, and floods. It’s safe”
Scientist “Ah, but have you considered an attack by giant killer bees?”
Chris
@Tim in SF:
I always preferred Two Years Vacation to Lord of the Flies. Imagine my pleasure when I found out that the real stories were far more like the former.
billcinsd
Spoilers on ~10 year old movies
It’s a tough call between “Taking Lives” an Ethan Hawke-Angeline Jolie-Kiefer Sutherland piece of crap. Jolie is an FBI agent trying to find a serial killer who takes on the identities of the people he kills. Despite the fact that all the dead people are like 5’96” and 150 pounds she hones in on the taller and heavier Sutherland and sleeps with Hawke (spoiler” the real killer). She finds Hawke in an elevator with a knife after Hawke kills a witness at the hospital. She has an immediate breakdown and Hawke escapes. She pretends to be pregnant to lure Hawke out to kill her and she catches him.
This was bad but was it as bad as “Observe and Report”? Seth Rogan wants to be a cop of any sort. He date rapes a girl he liked in HS when she was depressed, drunk and drugged. The worst of the date rape was when Seth considers maybe what he is doing is wrong and sort of stops having sex with her, she says “don’t stop”. Ish. Later he becomes a mall cop and shoots a dude
The Lodger
@zhena gogolia: My Great American Writers teacher insisted As I Lay Dying contained examples of Faulkner’s sense of humor. He cited *one*. I don’t remember it.
Luminous Muse
@Citizen Alan: Must confess that when I was a musician scuffling in NY I got a couple of songs placed in a TERRIBLE Troma movie. And the fuckers never registered it with ASCAP so no royalties
Villago Delenda Est
Worst book I’ve ever started and gave up on? Tie between Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.
This is from someone who did indeed skip the supporting with endless facts parts of The Wealth of Nations, but read the rest of it. Also, too The Bible and the endless begats.
Subsole
@Just look at that parking lot:
Re JJW, he pulled the same shit when I went to his birthday concert years ago.
Fun concert, but God, that man is the absolute opposite of Willie Nelson.
Ivan X
@Luminous Muse: Sounds like Troma. But that sucks. Also, what’s a terrible Troma movie vs a good one?
Subsole
@zhena gogolia:
Oh thank God. I thought it was just me. Lord, that book was just interminable.
Almost as bad, Heart of Darkness by Conrad. Just such a slog.
Villago Delenda Est
@Johnnybuck: Michael Caine has never seen Jaws 3-D but he has seen the house it paid for, which he says is very nice.
Juice Box
It’s been 50 years give or take, but I’m still bitter about The Great Gatsby. Why did every assigned book have to be a tragedy. Is adolescence not tragic enough?
hueyplong
Just scrolled through these comments and realize that I was warned off nearly all the things mentioned except for things I actually liked and about which I disagree with the commenters. I missed even the undoubtedly horrible, school-assigned books because my junior highs and high school were public ones that were ok at math but not so good at English/literature. Accordingly, I and others were able to read the classic comics and get a B on the test on several books mentioned above.
A movie that seemingly everyone liked and I very much didn’t was The Gods Must Be Crazy. I despise Gilligan’s Island-type fast forward, which was plentiful. As a middle class, melanin-challenged American, I may be way off base, but it felt kind of patronizing and racist to me as well, which made the audience’s uproarious laughter more awkward to sit through. Haven’t seen it since, so I don’t know if I’d view it differently now.
There are lots of well-loved movies I don’t like at all, but they’re a matter of personal taste and don’t seem right to call “Worst I’ve Seen.” I will, however, say that I think pretty much anything with Michael Bay’s name on it reliably sucks and am somewhat disappointed that he isn’t slagged more above.
Ruckus
Have read a lot of books in my life, when I was a kid, I believe 11 or 12 mom took me to the city library to get an adult card because I read fast and read a lot of books and had read everything worth reading in the kids section. I thought she was going over the counter at the librarian that refused to give me an adult card because of my age. And I think that the librarian thought the same thing because she relented a lot faster than I thought she would.
There is a point to all of this, and that is that I’ve read a lot of books, some not worth the effort in any way, shape or form but many well worth the time. I built a bit more than reasonable sized bookcase not long ago and it is absolutely full of books, not one more will fit. That and the numerous libraries that I’ve had cards to over the years has filled my life with books.
And yes there have been more than a few that were not worth the effort, watching TV commercials would have been a better waste of time. But the ones that were have filled my life with a richness that no other way would provide.
Villago Delenda Est
@Omnes Omnibus: Agreed. Cripes what a slog.
CapnMubbers
@Jay: Tomatoes gathered around a campfire. Undercover agent: “Pass the ketchup.”
”Uh-oh…”
Ruckus
@Villago Delenda Est:
Did you get past the first 10 pages of Atlas Shrugged and/or The Fountainhead?
Villago Delenda Est
@Spanish Moss: The Louvre. No competition here.
Don K
@zhena gogolia:
LOL!! My mom would put that on just for a laugh.
Worst TV show: My Mother the Car
Worst concert: The Who at the Pontiac Silverdome, the worst music venue in history. It took 30 seconds of listening to realize what they were playing. The Who were touring with The Clash, who were much better but were roundly booked by the Detroit crowd (punk was never a thing here). Eddie Money was added for this show and I detest Eddie Money. I regretted spending the time and money on this show, and I adore The Who.
BretH
Worst movie: Furry Vengeance. Don’t ask.
Worst concert: A very drunk (sensing a trend) Edgar Winter at a bar in New Orleans – just power chords and mumbling until we gave up.
Worst book: yeah, Silas Marner
Villago Delenda Est
@Ruckus: I went about a chapter into The Fountainhead before I threw it across the room. As for Atlas Shrugged, about 10 pages because it was more of the same. We Are The Living was at least somewhat readable.
Almost Retired
@Jay: OMG, you’ve triggered me! In my gap year between college and law school, I was working at a restaurant in Marina del Rey, and the assistant manager was an actor who was perennially between gigs. He was an asshole and a total martinet, or at least that was what I thought at the time. One night, a bunch of us were watching HBO after work and Killer Tomatoes was on. And there he was, in a bit part as a guard in the first few minutes. His name was Nigel Barber. You made me go to his IMDB page. He’s aged well, and seems to have had a sort of an OK career. But…yeah…that movie sucked. And so did Nigel.
SFBayAreaGal
Great Expectations was the worst book I had to read in my English Lit class in high school.
SFBayAreaGal
@Ruckus: Nope. Hated those two also.
SFBayAreaGal
@Nina: Loved the book
NotMax
Flicks: Frankenstein’s Great Aunt Tillie, John Goldfarb, Please Come Home, Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?, Skidoo, Atoll K..
Boob tube: The Chicago Teddy Bears, Supertrain, Pink Lady & Jeff, Manimal, Turn-On, The Hathaways, The Trouble with Larry, The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer, The Brothers Grunt.
Ruckus
@hitchhiker:
Worst family dinner for me was when I was 12, parents were done and left both sisters and me to finish. Oldest sister, 18 home from collage, stabbed me with a fork in the forearm when she told me to get my arm off the table and I told her, fuck off. She did not appreciate the suggestion. Now she didn’t hit any nerve, muscle or bone, so it really didn’t even hurt all that bad. I pulled it out, chased her upstairs and she got the door shut and locked just in time. So I hit the panel with an everything right jab. Almost broke the door. Till her dying day she never treated me like that ever again. We even became good very good friends as well as siblings for decades. Took a couple of years, but we got there.
SFBayAreaGal
@hitchhiker: Oh God. I hated the Old Man and the Sea. I couldn’t figure out why this was something that was required reading.
SFBayAreaGal
@brantl: Me too.
Ruckus
@Lethe:
Lucky it wasn’t a 2 story – or more…..
R'Chard
The worst food craze was the “my chili pepper is hotter than yours” craze. Hoping they’ve reached the limit — people have died.
Worst movie: ‘A Boy and His Dog’ >gaahhh< That was also probably the worst date ever.
SFBayAreaGal
@Dan B: I was stationed at Ft. Lewis 9th Infantry Division.
Subsole
@UncleEbeneezer:
I would also love to see a more true to the novel adaptation of The Running Man.
Subsole
@JaySinWA: What stank about that movie was that it actually did a really good job building tension and establishing a kind of rural creeping paranoia. The kind you really only understand if you’ve been alone in a cornfield in the dead of night. At least for the first 3rd of the movie.
And then at the end it just went completely off the rails.
Subsole
@Quinerly:
I genuinely don’t know if I liked the Kubrick ending or the book ending more.
Death Panel Truck
@West of the Rockies: As I Lay Dying is a fine book. I’ve read it three times over the last 20 years. It helps if you understand you are reading a black comedy. Some people take it too literally.
Subsole
@karen marie:
I didn’t think Hitchhiker’s was horrible.
It reminds me a bit of the new Dune movies, in that it was pretty much exactly what I pictured the characters and the tech and the world to be like. Especially the Vogon city.
It was just a case of “how on earth are you going to translate this story and its humor onto the screen????”
I give them points for trying, but I don’t think they managed to leap the gap.
Subsole
@karen marie: Interesting. What shifted your opinion?
Subsole
@Chris:
“Oh hi, Mark.”
Craig
@Don K: I’m so confused by your comment that punk was never a thing in Detroit since The Stooges and the MC5 are all about that. Mileage.Vary.Whatevs.
Subsole
@Trivia Man:
I loved Starship Troopers when I read it in high school. Then I got a job working around veterans, and my perspective changed.
Heinlein basically struck me as…a very particular type of veteran I became acquainted with. This was around the time the Iraq war was kicking off.
Basically, there is a type of veteran who served during wartime, but managed to miss all the horrors of war…and by God they were going to do all they could to make sure someone else’s kids didn’t.
Go read Haldeman instead. Dude is sooooooo much better. David Drake can be pretty amazing, too. Especially his fantasy books.
ascap_scab
A Clint Eastwood movie called Firefox.
Clint is recruited to be a CIA spy then sent to Russia to steal a super secret Mig fighter jet and get it back in to US hands.
I wasn’t that interested in seeing it, but it was mid summer and like a thousand degrees outside and I had no air conditioning.
I sat through all the crap trailers and ads that I also wasn’t interested in. The movie finally starts and gets about 20 minutes in, then the film breaks. We all sat there, in the dark and silence for another 20 minutes. Finally the lights come up and some usher comes in and says they called a projectionist who is on his way.
Another 20 minutes go by and the film restarts with the house lights up. It takes them another five minutes to figure out how to turn the house lights off.
The first reel ends. Then nothing. It is another ten minutes before somebody starts the second reel. At this point, I’m really pissed about the whole experience. Another 20 minutes go by and the second reel breaks.
That’s it, I’m done. I go to the box office and demand my money back. They refuse. I tipped the ticket seller with some of my finest insults and invictive phrases. I made plenty of accusations about the ticket seller’s lineage and heritage involving various invertebrate animals.
No, I never went back to that theater. And fuck Clint Eastwood.
Keith 1953
Rolling Stones, June 17, 1978, JFK Stadium, Philadelphia. Hot, humid, late, Keith so wasted he couldn’t sing, played one hour, no encore. Found a print record here.
https://www.burlingtoncountytimes.com/story/entertainment/local/2012/10/16/10-memorable-philly-area-rolling/17372048007
Subsole
@hitchhiker:
LOL.
Except for the rape scenes, pretty much everything you disliked. I loved the cinematography, the way the actors were just throwing themselves into the roles, the way it was essentially a movie about the many ways teenagers scare the living shit out of grownups.
The violence was in service to developing the characters, so while it was gratuitous, it didn’t feel pointless or just there for shock value.
It also was a movie that I thought hewed pretty closely to the book.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Yes, there is mil-scifi and then there is The Forever War.
NotMax
One movie I ought to have bailed on but kept watching while thinking “this can’t get any worse” was Event Horizon.
Upshot: Worse and worse it did get,, all the way through.
JoeyJoeJoe
@Jay: way late to this thread, but there is also a movie called Attack of the Killer Donuts:
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt4480398/
Craig
@Subsole: cause that guy can’t close the show. I don’t see why anybody finds his crap. They must make money somehow, but he’s the lamest film writer/director of the last 30 years
Villago Delenda Est
@SFBayAreaGal: Moi Aussi! Two tours, with a trip to Korea for a year in between them.
Villago Delenda Est
@SFBayAreaGal: duplicate due to timeout
Jay
@JoeyJoeJoe:
Did the Killer Donuts come for the Cops first?
Both for vengeance and strategy?
Bruce K in ATH-GR
I watched a lot of bad movies back when I was on volunteer ambulance duty, but they’ve been blanked out of my memory over the decades, mercifully. I remember paying to see The Good Shepherd in a theater in Athens and deeply regretting it – bleak and ugly and dealing with pretty horrible protagonists. Then there was An Officer and a Gentleman, which many have professed to love, but I couldn’t stand – that’s the one I would have walked out on if I hadn’t been at 35,000 feet over the North Atlantic at the time.
NotMax
@Bruce K in ATH-GR
Torture at 35,000 feet up is After Earth. Dreadful doesn’t begin to cover it.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@NotMax: God, I hope that wasn’t the only movie being shown to everyone on the flight. Back in the day, they projected the movie onto a screen on a cabin bulkhead, they repeated it throughout the flight, the headphones were those pneumatic-tube things, and you couldn’t turn it off or choose another movie.
NotMax
@Bruce K in ATH-GR
Sadly, yes.
Subsole
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Dead thread, but if you get the chance, read his short stories.
They are, somehow, even better.
And again, if you can read David Drake’s sci-fantasy or sci-horror, do so. He’s more famous for his mil sci-fi, but I honestly find a lot of it gets very samey, very fast. The Warrior was an amazing piece of mil sci-fi, though.
Subsole
@Craig:
Basically, I think he kind of shot his wad with 6th Sense and Unbreakable. Those two are actually excellent movies, just on their own merits.
It was all downhill after that.
Chris
@Subsole:
I hated Starship Troopers right off the bat because Heinlein struck me as a very particular type of poli-sci nerd that’s instantly recognizable from both people you had to read and people you sat in the classroom with: the type whose deep and convoluted political insights, at the end of the day, don’t add up to anything more complex than “I think the only people who can be trusted to run things are people who are exactly like me.” The ur-example is Plato, a philosopher, deciding that only philosopher-kings would be wise enough to run a city. The more often referenced example these days is the founding fathers, a group of white men who owned a certain amount of property, deciding that only white men who owned a certain amount of property could be trusted to vote (though somewhat to their credit the system started moving away from that fairly soon after independence because even among them this view was hardly unanimous). And then we’ve got Heinlein, a veteran, who’s decided that only veterans have the civic fortitude to be trusted with the votes.
Ella in New Mexico
“ Every Which Way But Loose” in 1978. Me and my hubby-then boyfriend-were kind of forced to go with a group of friends who were really excited about it.
Sucked so bad.
Just Some Flyover
Movies- tossup between Gummo and Precious. Gummo was by Harmony Korine (Kids) so you have to know what you’re getting into but I cannot get certain scenes out of my head years after I happened upon it on a movie channel. Precious was straight up poverty porn and again, I need brain bleach to cleanse myself after seeing it just once.
Books- any physics textbook…although I performed lots of physics by throwing them across the room so it’s not as if I didn’t learn anything.
Concert- any cover band playing in a small venue playing at a volume for a large venue.
TV show- I was in the Friends primary demographic when it was on. Couldn’t stand it and to this day I hate the theme song if I hear it anywhere.
Dinner- getting up and leaving in the middle of a Christmas dinner with my parents after one of my father’s severe mood swings. I don’t know what originally precipitated that particular mood swing (as if he needed anything particularly rational) but he really went crazy after realizing the potatoes were not warm enough for his liking.
BellaPea
@Craig: I really liked A Man in Full as the book. Wolfe really gets the culture of the South. The TV series missed some of the great moments in the book and the ending was a sheer hot mess. I was really disappointed.
Gravie
Sooooo late to the conversation, but I must mention the movie “First Family” (1980), a so-called comedy written by Buck Henry, and starring Bob Newhart, Gilda Radner, Madeline Kahn, and a raft of other wonderful actors. It was gross, stupid, and like a death ray for your sense of humor. We couldn’t believe what a piece of shit it was, and were outraged and betrayed.
Book I couldn’t finish: The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski. Unremitting cruelty, barbarism, and horror. I understood then, and understand now, that it was a scream of outrage over man’s inhumanity to man, but it was revoltingly explicit in describing that and when I couldn’t endure another second I screamed and threw it across the room.