Worst Review Movies of All Time

[Guest Emperor]

1. Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever

 

Lucy Liu and Antonio Banderas are opposing super-deadly secret agents who team up to take down the corrupt head of their agency in order to save a young boy who has been injected with a deadly weapon/virus thing -- sounds like a can't-miss setup, right? Well, you might have thought so if you were one of the folks responsible for this mess, but predictably, audiences were not fooled -- "Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever" elevated "universally panned" into an art form. Or at least something more closely resembling art than this muddled mess of an action film. When a movie is widely regarded as being inferior to its own Game Boy adaptation, you know "worst movie ever" is not only apt, it might actually be an understatement.

 

2. Alone in the Dark

 

Ah, yes, Uwe Boll. You knew he had to make more than one appearance on this list, didn't you? But let's be reasonable -- it stands to reason that pretty much any director given the task of lensing a horror-film videogame adaptation with Christian Slater and Tara Reid in the lead roles would wind up with a stinker on his hands. On the other hand, a more distinguished filmmaker might have been able to wring a redeeming quality or two out of this wretched script and these ill-cast actors. Not Boll. "Alone in the Dark" revels in its utter lack of entertainment value. Perhaps the only person who might have actually enjoyed this movie was Denise Richards, here surpassed by Reid as the least convincing scientist in film history.

 

3. King's Ransom

 

"King's Ransom" grossed roughly five times its box-office take as a rental title; unfortunately, that quintupling still only amounted to just over $15 million. Even taking into account the friends and extended families of the cast and crew, that means a puzzling number of people willingly paid good money to see Anthony Anderson mug it up as a loathsome philanderer in a film consisting almost entirely of coarse stereotypes and third-grade humor. P.T. Barnum famously noted that a fool and his money are soon parted; at least once a year, a film is released with what seems to be the sole purpose of irrefutably proving him right. In 2005, "King's Ransom" was that movie.

 

4. Twisted

 

Director Philip Kaufman ("The Right Stuff") had Samuel L. Jackson, Andy Garcia, and Ashley Judd to work with in "Twisted"; unfortunately, he also had Sarah Thorp's painfully inept script. The plot is too stupid to discuss in-depth here -- suffice it to say Judd is a cop with daddy issues, Garcia's her partner, Jackson's her boss, and any of them could have been told by your average freshman community-college film student that "Twisted" wasn't worth making. It's the type of movie that calls itself "Hitchcockian," but the only thing it has in common with the deceased director is their shared lack of a pulse.

 

5. The Master of Disguise

 

Poor Dana Carvey. His "Saturday Night Live" bits remain some of the funniest in the show's history, yet his post-"SNL" years have been spent wandering in a vast, terrifying, creative wilderness. Carvey battled his way back from a life-threatening health scare before filming "The Master of Disguise," which probably gave him the added perspective necessary to deal with the reams of negative reviews that followed. It's tempting to miss Carvey, and to wish he'd make more movies, but watching -- or even thinking about -- a movie in which the erstwhile comedian plays a character named Pistachio Disguisey makes it easier to resist that temptation. Fare thee well, gentle funnyman -- at least we'll always have "Na ga da it."

 

6. Rollerball

 

Most people would stop shy of calling the original "Rollerball" a classic, but at least it had James Caan and John Houseman going for it; the 2002 remake, in comparison, features LL Cool J, Chris Klein, and a script possibly written by monkeys. Director John McTiernan, perhaps realizing what he had to work with, seemingly times the explosions to mask the cruddy dialogue and distract from the asinine plot, but it isn't enough. Still, by default, "Rollerball" is the second-best movie of the 21st century to at least partially take place in Kazakhstan.

 

7. Epic Movie

 

O Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker, what hath thou wrought? The rapid-fire absurdist comedy genre pioneered by the directors of the "Airplane!" and "Naked Gun" movies lost much of its appeal well before the dawn of the 21st century, but it's never been imitated as badly as it is here. The desperately unfunny "Epic Movie" -- "directed" and "written" by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer -- substitutes sheer, moronic overkill for actual jokes, and the result is more like a 93-minute outtake reel cobbled together from talent-show performances at a halfway house for the mentally ill than an actual movie. An epic waste of time, money, and Crispin Glover.

 

8. Battlefield Earth

 

It's been said that there are no second acts in American lives, but starting with 1989's "Look Who's Talking," John Travolta made a notable exception for himself; by the late '90s, he'd come back from his extended post-'80s rut to become one of the most sought-after actors in Hollywood. Travolta, no stranger to the fickle winds of fame, decided to use this newly-acquired muscle to assemble his dream project, a film adaptation of the L. Ron Hubbard novel "Battlefield Earth." All you really need to know about the movie -- which went on to become one of the most notorious flops in film history -- is that Travolta cast himself as a giant dreadlocked alien named Terl.

 

9. Deuces Wild

 

I remember watching TV commercials for this movie and thinking, "Wow, that's a lot of slo-mo I just saw." So you can't accuse "Deuces Wild"'s marketing campaign of false advertising: one expects fight scene after fight scene slowed...way...down from this movie, and, yeah, it sure delivers. But "Deuces Wild" doesn't stop there. Hilariously exaggerated street slang and accents? Faux-gritty cinema verité direction? Characters getting all emotional during thunderstorms (twice!)? It's got it all. It'd be tempting to call this the perfect midnight movie, except watching tough guys fight like tortoises is sleep-inducing at that time of night.

 

10. House of the Dead

 

Again, Uwe Boll..... basically take Alone in the Dark, put in some Zombies and you have the same bad movie.