After wasting two hours on yet another worthless movie, I’ve decided to make the world a slightly better place by warning others about the top five worst movies ever. Or, if you prefer, the bottom five best movies ever. Either way, I strongly encourage you to bookmark this page for further reference, so that in the event that you’re ever faced with a choice between watching one of the following movies or overdosing on laxatives, you’ll be prepared to make an informed decision.
5. Running with Scissors. Based on the eponymous memoirs of Augusten Burroughs, if you want to get the gist of this “comedy-drama,” I suggest going up to the guy sleeping on the subway in a pool of his own urine and asking him to tell you knock-knock jokes based on that time his mother had a breakdown, so he hooked up with a schizophrenic drug addict. At the start of the film, Burroughs’ life is dysfunctional and depressing. At the end, it’s still dysfunctional and depressing, but he lives in New York. And writes. The only reason this movie is only number five on the list is that it would be bad form to have five movies tied for number one.
4. Thirteen. Thirteen is what you would get if you condensed an entire Lifetime movie marathon into 99 minutes. The end result? The story of a girl who goes from straight-A student to drugged-up, promiscuous loser. The only way they could’ve laid it on thicker is if the movie ended with the protagonist sneaking off into an alley to violently stab a hobo to death. Or, you know, if she moved to New York to write her memoirs.
3. Open Water. Inspired by the story of a couple left behind by their tour group while they were scuba diving, the majority of this movie consisted of the couple treading water while they argued with each other, repeatedly saying “Did you feel that?” In other words, its like the movie Jaws, if you replaced the shark with a long nap.
2. The Last American Virgin. This suckfest from the early eighties combines all of the worst elements of a raunchy teen sex comedy and a fatal bowel rupture. *Spoiler alert* - this is the only romantic comedy that I have ever heard of where the main character contracts an STD from a hooker, pays for the romantic lead’s abortion, and, ultimately doesn’t get the girl. The movie ends with the protagonist, driving along in his car, crying profusely. So it was the perfect date movie, really.
1. Elephant. If you’ve ever fallen asleep out of sheer boredom in the middle of a tragic massacre, you know what this movie is like. The first hour of the movie consisted mostly of the camera following random, underdeveloped characters as they wordlessly wandered their high school’s hallways.
The final twenty minutes depicted a school shooting that, as far as I could tell, was supposed to be caused by a) violent video games, and b) homosexuality. I’m guessing that at some point a friend said to the creators of this movie, “You know, I’ll bet that it’s impossible to make a movie that is so awful that it actually manages to make an occasion as horrific and shocking as a school shooting seem mind-numbingly dull,” and that they just turned to him and smiled knowingly, gently shaking their heads at the speaker’s naivete. On the whole, the most exciting part of this movie was when I pushed pause so I could go use the restroom.