Worst Movie Ever

Dirt friends and contributors share movies that would been better left unwatched.

There’s an art to the bad movie—movies so cringe-inducing that they become a genre in their own right; the unwitting comedies excused as camp—but some movies at their core are nothing more than just bad.

These are the movies that simply seek to steal two—dare I say even four—hours from your life without anything in return except a simmering resentment for your wasted time. The worst movie ever is a product of the environment it is watched in. A bad movie can turn good with the right crowd. But just as easily, a mediocre rom-com can take on the mantle of the terrible right after a break up.

I was subject to my worst movie ever while on a road trip to Joshua Tree with two of my guy friends. After watching the entirety of a Bills game, I was somehow convinced to watch Pineapple Express (2008)—a consequence of the tyranny of the majority. I have great appreciation for the utility of the buddy stoner film, a shared gathering pool of the inebriated. Yet, the movie left me extremely lonely and woefully aware of the difference between my friends and I. They were the audience the film was made for, the target of each joke. They laughed with the movie—and I couldn’t even laugh at it. When I left midway through the movie—with the excuse that I wanted to look at the stars—they graciously paused the movie to join me, meaning that we all had to keep watching it later.

The problem is that once you turn on the worst movie ever, you are paralyzed, consenting to the whims and ill-fated creative fantasies of the director. Walking away is never a real option, lest you be haunted by the eternal question of whether it did in fact suddenly come together. Instead, all you can do is acquiesce to the torture, knowing that it will soon enough end as everything does, those hours lost forever.

— Norah Rami, Dirt Editorial Intern

Rob Arcand

I rewatched Taken (2008) to see if it was still the same noxious right-wing fantasy I remember and was shocked to discover that, for all of its violent wish fulfillment (which to me always set it apart as a landmark of post-9/11 American cinema), the film is actually French. In a way, I guess this makes sense: it is, as you might remember, mostly set in Paris, and as much as its gritty fight scenes and car chases tend to operate in a visual language inherited from Hollywood, these cliches have been ubiquitous internationally for generations. While it might be inaccurate to point to the film as exemplary of all the gung-ho vigilantism and domestic paranoia of the Bush years (a gesture I was prepared to do pre-rewatch), the film still serves as a useful index for a broader reactionary spirit that also became common with right-wing parties across Europe during this period. The delight with which director Pierre Morel takes in finding new ways to shoot, stab, and electrocute immigrants as part of his grand crusade to restore the atomic family is shocking in its splendor, and the film’s air-tight script and editing leaves little space for sociopolitical reflection. It isn’t hard to see why the film was so successful—and therein lies much of the problem.

Nicholas Russell

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014)

Alex Aciman

The worst purportedly "good" movie I've ever seen is Le Signe du Lion (1962) by Eric Rohmer. I have never wanted to leave a movie theater as badly as I did during that film.

Georgia Rippin

Meet the Spartans (2008)

Ilana Michelle Kaplan

Lucky Numbers (2000) from Nora Ephron

I love Nora—I wrote a book on her—but this movie is deeply unwatchable and Lisa Kudrow being in it is its only redeeming aspect

Lauren Mechling

Lars von Trier’s Breaking The Waves (1996), sandwiched between my mom and dad at the Angelika.

Matthew Specktor

This question is fundamentally unanswerable (cf. Hopkins: "No worst/there is none", etc.), but I keep circling back to Tough Guys Don't Dance (1987).

Norman Mailer, man. Probably would've been a better mayor than he was a filmmaker, alas.

Miranda Popkey

Silver Linings Playbook (2013). Not really, but I exited that theater absolutely lit UP with righteous fury; you know what can’t solve actual mental health problems? A DANCE COMPETITION.

Katie Hayes

I get pissed off every time I think about The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007). How do you take a movie concept so made in a lab for Katie—I watched it before Brad Pitt fell out of all our favor, mind you—and fuck it up to the extent that I actually turned it off halfway through? How do you make a story about hot outlaws THIS boring? A waste of a film budget and a waste of my time, just like Brad Pitt, an abusive asshole, is a waste of human beauty. May another stunning man with world-weary eyes and flowing blonde hair someday fill the cowboy-shaped gap that this bullshit nothing-movie left in my heart.

Noah Hurowitz

Crash (2004)

Sari Botton

The Neil Diamond edition of The Jazz Singer (1980) is so bad it's good. (There were two prior editions, one with Al Jolson, the other with Danny Thomas.) Diamond can't act to save his life. Olivier is eating the scenery. Nothing that takes place is terribly plausible.

Joe Therrien Kelly

On a purely personal level it’s The Shape of Water (2017). I would have been with the townspeople holding a pitchfork and torch. That thing was a monster! Girl stand up!

Olive Leatherwood

It Ends With Us (2024)

Boston, Massachusetts has a storied history as the backdrop of some of cinema’s greatest works—The Departed (2006), Good Will Hunting (1997), The Town (2010), Ted (2012). Baldoni’s execution of overacting and an oversimplified portrayal of domestic violence jeopardized that strong record and he should never be allowed in Fenway Park again.

STRONG OPINIONS STRONGLY HELD