Two words.

Endless. Love.

My Measure-of-Badness movies are Meet Joe Black (long, long, LONG, dull, AND it has Clare Forlani in it, being supremely annoying.) and Eight Heads in a Duffle Bag (Stupid gross-out humor. I saw it for free and still felt ripped off.) If you haven't seen either one ... don't.

The worst movie I've seen in recent years is Pearl Harbor. One critic said that he was making a list of every line of cliched dialog, but he stopped when he realized he was writing down half of the lines. And the entire love-rivalry plot was groan-inducing.

I'd also add Showgirls, but that falls in the "So bad it's hysterical" category.

What, Hayden, you gotta problem with highschool Reaganite counter-revolutionaries? You don't believe we could be invaded and subdued by Cuba at any moment??

No, I believed all of these things as strongly as I believe that ketchup is a vegetable, but to name the high school mascot the Wolverines? Completely unbelievable.

Pinko.

Why do you hate America?

I think I'd rate Hardware, Highlander 2, and The Punisher (2004) as some of the worst movies I've seen in the theatre. Since I'm a Brandon Lee and Mark Dacascos purist, no need to delve into the worst I've seen on video.

I'd also add Showgirls, but that falls in the "So bad it's hysterical" category.

I'll add Barbarian Queen to that list. I saw it the evening after my last final one semester. On a scale of 1 to 10, it started at -3 and went downhill from there. Just what I needed.

It's best remembered now because it starred Lana Clarkson, whom Phil Spector is accused of having murdered.

There's always Manos, Hand of Fate, but the MST3K guys kinda rehabilitated it. Has anyone ever had that strange feeling of landing on a movie you're sure you've seen before, only to realize that it was on MST3K? That happened to me with I Accuse My Parents.

I'd say that Van Helsing, Jurassic Park 2: The Lost World, and Shanghai Knights are three of the worst movies I've seen in the theater. Of those, I really only endorsed going to JP2. The others were picked by friends, and I had nothing else to do that night.

then those structural problems in the finished product had to have been there in the script.

Actually, you'd be surprised, I think. Not only can a film be changed from the script more than you describe there, sometimes structural problems are not as readily visible in the script as they are in the finished product.

Also, while you're right that things don't usually change that much from the script during shooting, they can change a LOT during editing.

A lot of people have this impression that editing is just "stringing the shots together in the right order." The editing booth is actually where the movie is made, not on set. Shooting the movie is just the process of manufacturing the raw materials you need to build a film.

I'd also add Showgirls, but that falls in the "So bad it's hysterical" category.

I actually put Red Dawn into this category. Wonderful, cheesy Reagan-era fun.

I think I'd rate Hardware

The one about the killer robot and the industrial artist? I actually liked that one.

I (as noted above) enjoyed Van Helsing. Jackman and David Wenham were great -- but I thought they needed to go deeper into homage/satire. Too many people expected straight up were-horror, and weren't sufficiently dissuaded that was the nature of the product.

Still, very amusing.

I walked out on Shanghai Knights, so I can't rate it. Same with Bram Stoker's Dracula.

I completely don't remember what happened in Hardware -- I think we made a pact of amnesia once it was done.

Oh! Freejack and Millennium were also horrible.