Being a B- movie enthusiast, I enjoy watching bad films who have entertainment value because of how bad they are, have camp value in other words. Examples of films I enjoy in that way are: The Refrigerator (1991), Troll 2 (1990), Frankenhooker (1990) and The Beastmaster trilogy, especially the last one; "The Eye of Braxus". There are however films which are either don´t quite make the camp value (because the filmmakers have some misunderstood "ambition" and don´t understand that they are making a B- or even a C- movie) and are just bad and in no way entertaining. There are also films who are just too bad in every way for us to enjoy at any level. Here are some of the most "memorable" films I put in that last category. The top five worst films I´ve seen with short reviews:
1.Lady in the Lake (1947): Without a doubt the most abysmally failed experiments in cinema history. This is an attempt to make a first-person narrative in a film, and there is a reason it has never been tried since. The film consists almost exclusively of point-of-view shots, which is supposed make the viewer experience the course of events through the films protagonist. It fails miserably. While watching the film you get no sense for the films diegesis (the place and time which the film´s events take place) or the characters. Most of the time the actors look like they are reading their lines from cue cards while staring you in the face. The story line is just another murder investigation/ detective mystery kind of thing, and a very uninteresting one at that. The script is also quite bad. The dialogues are full of attempts on behalf of the scriptwriters to be witty or cleaver but it´s all kind of hit-and-miss. The experience of watching "Lady in the Lake" is at it´s best moments embarrassingly laughable but at it´s worst it´s just disturbing, even painfully disturbing.
2. Who´s your Caddy? (2007): I was curious about this film because of how long it held the "top" seat of the IMDB bottom 100 list. It is now rated at 1,7 out of 10, with 11.337 votes. And yes, it is that bad! The people who made the film I wrote about above at least deserve some credit for trying something new at the time. Watching "Lady in the Lake" is at least an experience, even though it´s an unpleasant one. There really is no excuse for crap like "Who´s your Caddy?" The storyline is stupid (it´s about a black rap musician who gets into this elitist golf club where his father was a caddy to settle some old score) and the humor is so trite and unfunny... like I said, there is no excuse for this sappy and cliché ridden piece of crap.
3. Howard the Duck (1986): Yes, here we have one of the most infamous flops of cinema history. There really is not much to say about this except it´s tacky, stupid and has zero entertainment value. This abomination goes on for nearly two hours... and that sarcastic duck in the trench coat is just annoying.
4. Scary Movie (2000): I remember renting this piece of crap in one evening, ten years ago. Some friends of mine had recommended it to me. They said it was funny, even "hillarious". So I sat through this and did not even smile once. It was more of an ordeal than entertainment.
5. The Honeymooners (2005): The idea behind this film is almost as bad as the results...almost. I´ve never watched an episode of "The Honeymooners". I really just know these series through "Family Guy". The story behind how I saw this film was that one evening a few years ago, me and an ex- girlfriend of mine decided to have a bad- film evening. So we rented "Gigli" (which we both found entertainingly bad), a film called "Phat Girlz (starring Mo´Nique, which I found just abysmal) and the film in question. My partner did not even want to watch this, so I did alone the morning after over my breakfast and morning coffee. Well, I honestly found myself laughing a few times over this, mainly because of how bad the script was and how trite the humour is. That Cedric the Entertainer (a title he has mercylessly misattributed to himself), who plays the bus driver "Ralf Kramden" (the films protagonist), really made me sigh and shake my head a few times. The biggest joke of this film is in my opinion that people actually went through with making this bullshit of a film.