The Worst Movies Ever

            Is there any topic more awesome that bad movies?

            No!

            In fact, the chance to write about dumpster deserving drama duds has me breaking a promise to myself to not sign up for anymore blog hops over the next two weeks. (Not that I don’t love participating in them, but I desperately need to put some time in on my WIP.)
        
            Don’t get me wrong; I love B-Grade movies. Some of them have a charming quality that makes them entertaining. Others are so bad that they make me laugh. However, the movies I’ve listed for this column don’t fall into either of these categories. The films included here are the ones which made me wish I could pour bleach over my brain and have all memory of them erased. These are cinematic efforts which I deserve to be paid for suffering through the entire ordeal. All of them should come with warning labels that life is too short and too precious to waste it watching this film.
                 
            Here they are in descending order. Literally descending.  
 

The Toolbox Murders – It starred Cameron Mitchell. While not an A-List actor Cameron did quite a bit of work in Hollywood. But as we all know, a little bit of acting talent is usually not enough to save a poorly written and poorly directed movie.

A long time ago, Friday nights were bad movie nights. My friends and I rented a handful of clunkers, popped some corn, and enjoyed the cinematic badness. This was the movie that cured me of that particular habit. To be fair, it is probably no worse than any of the other movies we had watched during this wasted period of my life. It did just happened to be the one that cured me.

Oh, right!  You probably want to know what the movie was about.

Some guy is mad at some people and he uses all the tools in his toolbox to exact revenge on them. I guess you have to give him props for creativity.

Battlefield Earth – This is easily the worst mistake John Travolta has made so far. Seeing what they did to a great story by L. Ron Hubbard is like watching a bear maul a cute little stuffed animal.

There’s one school of thought that states that small production companies can be forgiven for turning out clunkers. In order to truly be deserving the undying scorn of film aficionados a bad movie has to come from major studio. This one fits the bill.

You don’t really need to me to tell you about this monstrosity, do you? Dang, I was hoping you’d say no.

John Travolta is an alien. They have invaded Earth; because, that’s what aliens do. Despite technological superiority they are eventually defeated by the humans. (I think that’s how it goes. I don’t really feel like wasting the effort to plumb my memories for what happened in the movie version of this story.)

 

Pirates of the Great Salt Lake – My wife and I made the mistake of watching this because we like Kirby Heyborne. We thought it would be funny. It wasn’t.

The plot dealt with a couple of misfits who steal a rowboat and spend all of their time roaming the Great Salt Lake acting like pirates. In the end we are given a message that is intended to be uplifting, but I understood it as: It’s okay to be a loser.

Basket Case – You don’t remember this movie? Lucky for you. I managed a small, independent movie theater at the time this monstrosity came out. In the six years I worked there, this was the only movie we were able to get First Run. It even came with cheap (really cheap) surgical masks “To keep the gore off.”

The masks were cool. People would have been better off paying us for the masks and skipping the movie.

What was it about?

Twin brothers are born. One is normal. The other is a hideously deformed creature that amounted to a head with arms. Life goes about the normal routine for them – meaning the mutant brother killed anyone who bothered his brother. Until they both fall in love with the same girl.

Skyline - Aaarrrggghhh. It hurts to remember this movie. Please, make it go away. I promise to be good.

The two people (and I use that term loosely) who put this catastrophe together had been working on Battle: LA. For whatever reason, they left and decided to do their own version of the story. I put this in the category of - Things Man Was Not Meant To See.

Aliens invade LA. People run around and get killed. (Wow. That makes the movie sound much more exciting that it really was.)