Originally written March 21st, 2006.
Recently, around the internets, in reading people’s opinions on V For Vendetta, a commonly mentioned argument (in both positive and negative reviews of V) is that Alan Moore has a right to be gun-shy about Hollywood because League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was, quote, “the worst comic-book film ever.”
From now on, the punishment for anybody saying this is as follows: be strapped to a chair in a theatre with your eyes pried open like in A Clockwork Orange (with drops, I am not unhumane) and forced to watch the following, nonstop:
Superman III
Superman IV
Steel
Elektra
Catwoman
Batman and Robin (not just the worst comic-book movie ever, but easily one of the worst movies ever made period)
Popeye
The Punisher (Dolph Lundgren version)
The Punisher (Tom Jane version)
Ultraviolet
Garfield
Man-Thing
Swamp Thing
Howard The Duck
Judge Dredd
Captain America (the one where the Red Skull is Italian)
Barb Wire
Fantastic Four (the Corman version)
Spawn
The Shadow
Flash Gordon
Faust
All of the sequels to The Crow
Monkeybone
Red Sonja
And that is the short list. LXG wasn’t a good movie, but geez, people, it was just a mediocre timewaster action flick. The bottom of the barrel is so much further down.
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I register a small objection to the inclusion of “Popeye” as a bad movie. It is fun times.
Batman Forever was far, far worse than Batman and Robin.
Flash Gordon? Seriously? I love that movie. No way should that be on this list.
I love Flash Gordon too, but loving it in an ironic way is not saying it is good.
I have seen far, far too many movies on that list.
I have seen everything on that list, unfortunately. V for Vendetta was definitely a middle of the road adaptation, certainly better than any of the ones mentioned here. Although I didn’t think the Thomas Jane version of the Punisher was quite as craptacular as the rest of the list, it certainly wasn’t great. It kind of pisses me off, because you would think the Punisher would be the easiest movie to make since there’s no special effects or suspension of disbelief problem with spandex.
Come on, Popeye doesn’t belong on that list. Even given that it is a Robin Williams film, and even given that everyone involved was on a bad day, the combined talents of Jules Feiffer, Robert Altman, Harry Nilsson and Van Dyke Parks can’t possibly be considered on a par with the total mess that is Judge Dredd…
Whereas I, in turn, insist on takeing people who say movies like ‘Batman and Robin’ are among the worst movies ever made and strapping them down in a theater with their eyes pried open (without drops, because I’m a bastard) and making them watch the following (without benefit of Mystery Science Theater 3000):
Manos: The Hands of Fate
Invasion of the Neptune Men
Prince of Space
Robot Monster
Eegah
The Incredibly Strange Creatures That Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies
You could probably make an argument that ‘Batman and Robin’ is one of the worst blockbuster movies ever made, or that it has the lowest dollar-to-quality ratio ever, but simply on a level of cinematography and direction, it is empirically ten times better than something like “Manos”. I agree that ‘Batman and Robin’ is freaking terrible, but in a post on how people need to get some perspective and realism in their complaints about movies, well…
I spelled taking with an “e”. I am filled with shame.
Let’s not forget the non-Corman Fantastic Four films.
Pain is they.
Alright, everyone loves some film on this list. That does not invalidate the point. Even if you love one, or two, or three of these movies, they are not ‘quality’ flicks. Even if you think that some of these are quality, there are still over 25 movies that are bad, bad, bad. The barrel is deep, deep, deep.
God, there was a STEEL movie?
Also, you forgot “The Phantom”.
Yes there was a steel movie. It starred Shaq.
Disco Snell,
Batman Forever worse than Batman and Robin? You’re joking, right? I could come up with 20 reasons why Batman 4 was worse than Batman Forever without even mentioning George Clooney (who, in my opinion, should have stuck with the killer tomatoes). Mind you, I’m of the opinion that Batmans 2-4 all sucked toejam.
As for MGK’s list:
I enjoyed Howard the Duck, The Punisher (2004), Flash Gordon (1980), Popeye, and Red Sonja. Judge Dredd, Swamp Thing and The Shadow were watchable – as was The Phantom. Swamp Thing 2, with heather Locklear, was really stupid, but far more entertaining. You forgot Son of the Mask in your list.
And just to make everyone else vomit, here’s my top 20 comic book movies:
1. V for Vendetta
2. 300
3. X2: X-men united
4. Sin City
5. Batman (1989)
6. Hulk (2003)
7. Batman Begins
8. Blade
9. Hellboy
10. X-men
11. Spider-Man III (any film that pisses off so many Gwen Stacy and Venom cultists is a plus in my book)
12. Spider-Man
13. Blade II
14. Mystery Men
15. The Mask
16. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
17. Daredevil
18. The Punisher (2004)
19. Spider-Man II
20. Fantastic Four
John, movies like Manos come from the B-movie era, which created an entirely different form of cinematic animal. Moreover, Manos is an original property, and as such doesn’t have the added crutch of knowing in advance that people already like it.
Batman and Robin not only has the general advantage of knowing that people like Batman, but additionally knowing that people liked the previous Batman movies. (Well, I personally thought Batman Forever was weak sauce, but you get my point.) And saying “on a level of cinematography and direction it is empirically ten times better than Manos” just shows me that you’re confusing your terminology a bit, because Manos’s flaw isn’t cinematography or even direction per se, but rather horrible editing and a total lack of plot. Trust me, Batman and Robin possesses some of the all-time bad cinematography. Ask a DoP sometime.
And Salieri: yes. It starred Shaq. I trust I need say no more.
But…how can you not love the giant magnetic sledgehammer!
I’m sorry, I cannot let pass the description of (and I still can’t believe they advertised it like this) LXG as mediocre. It aspired to mediocrity and fell disastrously short. It was breathtakingly bad, and that’s just on its own merits. However, it’s not being criticized entirely on its own merits.
Most of the terrible fucking movies on your list are, indeed, terrible fucking movies. No argument. But in how many cases is their source material that much better? Yes, STEEL sucked. The overwhelming majority of the comics Steel has ever been in have sucked. Ditto SPAWN, ditto half the stuff on there. Oh no, someone turned Elektra into a badly-written excuse for half-assed kung fu cheesecake! Oh, wait, yeah. Never mind.
The source material for LXG, however, was legitimately brilliant. Okay, yes, that’s also true of SWAMP THING, HOWARD THE DUCK, and several other items on there. LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN, however, was the single most cinematic thing Alan Moore ever wrote. It’s got a solid three-act structure, wonderful visuals, snappy dialogue, and a huge action-scene climax. It even sets up its own sequel. All you’d have to do to make a good movie of it is shoot what’s on the page. That’s almost NEVER true of comics adaptations, and certainly not of Moore’s work. In this case, though, there it is. A structurally-perfect film story right on the page. And instead they threw it all out and made a terrible fucking movie.
It’s not necessarily true that LXG is a worse movie than many on that list. But it is true that it’s a greater failure.
Zenrage,
I realize I’m in a very small minority on this Batman Forever being worse than Batman an Robin issue. And while I won’t bore you with a whole list, allow to to elaborate a couple of my reasons:
*Val Kilmer was indescribably bad as Bruce/Batman. Clooney didn’t impress, but the script gave him less to do.
*Nicole Kidman’s embarrassingly bad performance in a terribly scripted role. So bad they stopped trying to give Bruce a girlfriend in the next film…
*Jim Carrey’s completely overwhelming domination of the film, as a Riddler who preens and camps but doesn’t actually tell riddles
*The criminal misuse of Two-Face, demoted to being a Riddler henchman, and a boring one at that.
*The ultra-non-sensical plot…well tepid and stupid, at least the goings on in B&R made sense, both as a plot and for the characters.
In short, every single performance in B3 was worse than B4, the characters were more ill-used, the plot was much weaker. It’s only my opinion, but I’m sticking to it.
Disco Snell,
I have to, respectfully, disagree. Your points as to why B3 sucked are all valid, but I still believe that B4 was even worse.
*Val Kilmer was the worse Batman, granted. He was just wooden. Whereas Clooney had his full range of wooden and indifferently wooden.
*The roles of The Riddler and Two Face wasn’t nearly as bad as the idea of teaming up Poison Ivy (plants) with Mr Freeze (ice). But let’s face it, this is a symptom of a bigger problem. Hollywood should never have tried to put in more than one villain per movie. The regular bullshit of “putting more in a sequel” has always been a bad corporate decision, not a bad directorial one.
*Jim Carrey not telling as many riddles as he should have versus Mr Freeze doing nothing but spit out stupid one-liners.
*Jim Carrey at least had the physical charisma to pull off his role, which was just as well, if not better than Frank Gorshin’s original portrayal.
*Two Face’s role as a bank robber was not nearly as criminal as Bane’s reduction to a zero-dimensional thug.
*Robin sucked hard in both films equally.
*Joel Schumacher actually believed he needed more black light effects and MORE rubber butt shots in B4, and thus he sucked harder in B4.
*Uma Thurman trying to force emotional response was worse than Tommy Lee Jones overplaying them.
*Nicole Kidman actually tried to play her role well versus the batgirl role being written around Alicia Silverstone’s naughty schoolgirl image from her Aerosmith videos.
*The Riddler coming home to a small drab apartment rounded out that character more than Mr Freeze wearing bunny slippers and trying to lead his henchmen in singing Christmas tunes.
*Two-Face stealing funds to operate The Riddler’s brain amplifier was better than Mr Freeze stealing diamonds to power his freeze gun (ice powering ice, get it? *ugh*) and Poison Ivy’s role as a wanna-be Freeze squeeze.
*”Oh no! Boiling acid!” versus Bane’s “Bomb… Bomb… Bomb…”. That one’s a toss up.
*B4 used the same shot of Bane growling twice.. within 5 minutes of each other.
*The Batmobile driving up the side of one wall versus Mr Freeze’s van and the Batmobile and Robin’s motorcycle leading a high speed case over a statue.
*Robin’s character at least had acrobatic skills to fall back on in a fight. What was the Batgirl character’s experience in? Falling off a motorcycle? Turning on a CD player?
*Alfred as Max Headroom? The only thing that compares with that horrible scene was Bruce Wayne “scratching” a CD player in B2.
*In B4, Alfred, again, making preparations just in case his wayward niece pops in and wants to be a costumed crimefighter (after he fell ill)? At least in B3, Robin made his crimefighting debut in his old acrobat outfit before Alfred overstepped his bounds.
*The ending of B3 where they break the big machine and everything snaps back to normal like a giant elastic band versus Alfred dying from the same disease that Mr Freeze’s wife is dying from and Mr Freeze just happens to have a cure for Alfred’s stage of the virus, and Freeze just happens to carry the cure in ready-to-use vials in his battle armor AND Batman just gets Freeze to forget about how he killed several people throughout the film and hand them over with a touching “you’re a doctor first” speech.
Watching B4 is like how Bill Maher described the Bush Administration. It fucked up so many times, that by the end, you were saying to yourself.. well at least its consistent.
Prob with Clooney is that he playing a Gay Batman. It had, indeed, gotten to the ‘Champagne Helmet’ point.
(For those of you who do not know, the ‘Champagne Helmet’ point is named for the instance in “The Island of Doctor Moreau” where Marlon Brando, the title character, used a Champagne Bucket as a prop, putting it on his head as a ‘Brain Cooler’; he later explained that the movie had gotten so terribly silly by then, he had just gone with the flow. Thus, when a Cast member, Director, or other creative talent in a film suddenly decides, “Oh screw this, I’m never gonna get my money/reputation/self-worth back”, and then does something as utterly ridiculous as everything else in the movie, they have reached the ‘Champagne Helmet’ point. Other examples include the hasty re-casting of the part of Bela Lugosi in “Plan 9 from Outer Space” and the decision to use the fan-created line “I have HAD it with these mothafucking snakes on this mothafucking plane!” in “Snakes on a Plane”. Now you know. Use this knowledge wisely.)
MGK, I must partly disagree with this comment:
“Manos’s flaw isn’t cinematography or even direction per se, but rather horrible editing and a total lack of plot.”
See, I would argue that the choice on the part of the star/director/writer/producer Harold Warren to begin the film with a seven (plus) minute driving montage classifies as a poor directing choice (also editing, but he chose to film it in the first place). Also, the scenery chosen, the nature of the framing in many of the scenes, and the general imagery chosen suggest some poor choices in the cinematography.
When you take into account that the movie was filmed using a camera that WOUND UP and only filmed for two minutes at a time (without sound), then perhaps the editing isn’t as horrible as it seems, as the editor at least had an excuse.
I don’t dispute anything related to B4, however.
I’ve willingly watched Manos ten times. I watched B4 once. In my opinion, that’s case closed.
See, in any reasonable screenplay, the opening of Manos would be described thusly:
“We open on a POV scene of a car driving through the country.”
That’s it. It’s not a flaw of writing, it’s not even a flaw of directing (because it makes sense to do multiple takes and get the best driving shot you can get, if you have the time and the film). It’s a flaw of editing because it’s the editors job to not make it into a seven minute montage. Now admittedly Harold Warren probably was telling the editor what to do, but that happens.
As for the wind-up camera and two-minute shot limit, big deal. Go look at any major Hollywood movie. Most shots that get used are less than two minutes. For real. A regular can of 35mm film only runs eleven minutes, you know.
I’m pretty sure that Ultraviolet is not based on a comic.
Monkeybone was based on a comic? Man, I loved that movie in a “Holy crap WTF?” kind of way. Especially how parents had brought their young children in to see the adorable cartoon monkey. That was the best part.
I’ll agree that the editing of ‘Manos’ is, in fact, terrible. But to claim that its cinematography is not as bad as ‘Batman and Robin’, and that I must not know what “cinematography” means when I select that term as an example of something ‘Manos’ does worse than any other movie ever made, is a bit, well…ludicrous. Cinematography is the art of camera placement and lighting, and within the first minute of ‘Manos’, when you get a close-up of a woman delivering dialogue…shot from behind, so the entire screen is filled with human hair…that is game, set and match to the argument that ‘Manos’ is worse in cinematography than anything else you’d care to name. (I won’t even go into the lighting of the night scenes.)
Look, I’m not saying that ‘Batman and Robin’ isn’t bad. It’s pretty terrible. But when, in a post about “people needing to get some perspective about bad movies”, you call it “one of the worst movies ever made”, I’m going to have to call “pot/kettle” here. Because you’re neglecting a ton of movies that make ‘Batman and Robin’ look like ‘Citizen Kane’. And you should be aware of how silly that sounds the second you find yourself defending ‘Manos: The Hands of Fate’ in relation to it.
What … no mention of that David Hasslehoff classic, Nick Fury: Agent of Shield?
I like Superman III, The Shadow, and Monkeybone.
I really, really like The Shadow. The dialogue is just genius.
John, cinematography is the art of lighting first and foremost. Camera placement ultimately is the purview of the director, not the DoP, and unless someone’s billed specifically as a cinematographer rather than a DoP it means they didn’t do dick with the camera, which is the case for both Manos and Batman and Robin.
And the night scenes in Manos are indeed pretty crappy, but given the budget constraints of what they had to work with and the general incompetence of all involved, it’s honestly a small miracle that they’re even remotely watchable – and the day scenes are fine, if bland. In comparison, Batman and Robin is just lit for shit through most of the picture. Stephen Goldblatt is a workmanlike DoP (his work on Young Sherlock Holmes was particularly good), but everybody has one or two shitburgers to their name and this is one of his.
One huge difference between an Alan Moore story like V for Vendetta or League and something like Popeye or Steel is the source material. Yes, the source is a comic for everything listed, but there are few people who can honestly claim that they see Moore’s comic stuff as “just another comic.” Whereas most comics fall in the realm of pop entertainment, Moore’s stuff tends to strive for (and usually achieves) something more like postmodern literature. A failure turning fluff into something good might not be perceived as nearly as big of a flaw as failing to turn something that already has artistic merit into something comparable.
I’m really, really not looking forward to the film version of Watchmen. I have to agree with Moore in that it simply can’t be filmed and retain even a shred of the merit of the original. It’s like trying to paint Beethoven’s ninth symphony. Can’t be done.
But again, you keep going back to “Well, considering its budget and the equipment they had and the fact that everyone involved was an utterly incompetent hack, and…” Those are good reasons why ‘Manos’ is a lot worse than ‘Batman and Robin’, but they are not things that make it better. I’m not grading on a curve here, and I’m not putting ‘Manos’ into a sort of Special Olympics category in which it is rewarded simply for trying real hard.
That was, if you go allll the way back to my initial post, kind of the point–that you can say ‘Batman and Robin’ is the worst movie made by that director/screenwriter/actor/cinematographer/key grip, or the worst movie made per dollar spent on it (although even there, I think it’d have some strong competition, because so many tremendous film fiascos tend to have people trying to salvage them by throwing money at them), but “worst movies ever made” implies that if you look at every film ever made, then judge them relative to each other, that ‘Batman and Robin’ would be near the bottom. And because of the sheer profusion of low-budget films made by utterly incompetent film-makers, that’s just not true. As bad as it was, there’s a certain level of crappiness it could not descend below simply because it was made by professional film-makers. Bad professional film-makers, but professional nonetheless.
And (he says for the third time), in a post specifically about “having perspective” and not making hyperbolic claims about how terrible a movie is, you probably should not make a hyperbolic claim about how terrible a movie is. It undermines your point.
yes, most of these are floating turds.
But I love Superman 3.
granted it’s because of Pryor that I loved it, but tell me some silver age stories were not as asinine, or even more so.
Flash Gordon is campy goodness. I’ve never seen the serials or read the comic strip, so I don’t know if it’s original structure was changed dramatically, but it is entertaining and seems like it was at least produced competently.
LXG fell short because they eliminated what made it work as a comic. it was dumbed down and we were given a horrible father/son dynamic. But given the choice between watching LXG 3 times straight or say Catwoman, or Superman 4 even once, I’d have to take the 6 hours of LXG.
You know, ten years later, Batman and Robin isn’t so angering as it is hilarious. Same with Judge Dredd. And shit, the Tom Jane punisher had some pretty cool violence, even if it was a ridiculously bad movie (with JOhn Travolta being perhaps the worst part). But I don’t disagree with them being on this list, I’m just saying: they’re watchable.
And V For Vendetta sucked. I would watch The Punisher over that any day. At least The Punisher doesn’t try to be anything but a stupid action movie. V was a vacuous, stupid action movie that had aspirations and pretensions of being “important.”
Can you tell V For Vendetta is my favorite comic?