Rotten Tomatoes

A response to the LiveJournal “Writer’s Block” prompt:

What is the worst movie you’ve ever seen? Did you sit through it or walk out? What made it so dreadful?

Let’s see…worst movie I’ve ever seen in a theater. Top three candidates:

Dungeons And Dragons (2000)

So bad that the group of friends I was with started heckling the movie, and the rest of the audience joined in. Of course, that means we found something fun about it, so it probably doesn’t count. (Similarly, I rather enjoyed Van Helsing as a comedy, even though it doesn’t seem to have been intended as one.)

The House of the Spirits

This should have been a great movie. Epic story, all-star cast…but it was intensely boring. 16 years later, I barely remember a thing about it other than being bored out of my skull, but the boredom itself left that much of an impression.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

On the plus side, it had giant robots blowing stuff up, and they put more thought into the story than I expected them to. And there were certainly good moments spread throughout the film. On the minus side, the visuals were so complex that they were hard to follow. That’s a problem I had with the Transformers’ designs in the first film, too — they look insanely cool in still shots, but start them moving and you end up with two clouds of shrapnel fighting each other. Plus Michael Bay has a very different sense of humor than I do, which didn’t help. And amazingly enough, the movie was tedious. I don’t know how you can possibly take a movie about giant robots and explosions and make it dull enough that I checked my watch at least five times during the film.

Yeah, that one probably deserves the title.

I don’t recall ever walking out of a movie before it was finished, unless the movie itself stopped due to technical problems (which has happened a couple of times). I’ve been seriously tempted to switch off some movies I’ve watched at home, though.