Reel Trash

I saw the writers at Defector discussing this a couple of weeks ago, and since I haven't finished either a video game or book recently, I'm stealing the question: What is the worst movie you saw in theaters?

I put the question to my coworkers and they replied, variously: Lovely Bones, The Time Traveler's Wife, and Fifty Shades Freed. The latter two insisted these were movies they saw while on dates, the former went with friends, and is apparently not a big horror fan.

Alex said Date Movie, though he later tried to add Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, but I'm going with the first one he named. His girlfriend responded How to Deal, which she went to with friends.

The responses do highlight the different ways you could approach the question. Alex cited the Rotten Tomatoes scores for the ones they selected, which suggests a lean towards more of the critical consensus of how good the movie was. My coworkers seemed to take the approach of which movie they, personally, enjoyed watching the least.

That's the divide I found myself hung up on, trying to choose my answer. Because I thought of a half-dozen movies. Some are just lousy movies, and others, while I wouldn't call them good by any stretch, at least had some sort of vision or premise behind them. I simply didn't like that premise of vision.

The '90s Super Mario Bros? Bad. Just a shitty mess of a movie. Batman and Robin? Not good, but I can at least grasp that Schumacher had a specific vibe in mind. I have no nostalgia for '60s Batman or "camp" in general, so it didn't work for me. 

If I took Alex's approach, it's probably Super Mario Bros. or Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, though there's a part of me that wants to pin it on Drillbit Taylor, a film I can neither see any reason to exist or for Alex and I to have gone to see it. But my review suggests I enjoyed it in spite of how cliche it was, so I guess I can't play revisionist historian.

Which is fine. I'm ultimately going with the film I enjoyed watching the least, and that's Saw. I don't think I knew the term "torture porn" before Alex dragged me to this, but I did by the end of this movie, and I knew I hated it. It was sadistic to no purpose, and the reveal at the end that the killer was in the room with the two victims the entire time, playing a corpse so perfectly they never noticed, made me audibly groan and nearly roll my eyes out of my head.

Even if the movie succeeded in making the victims truly despicable, and I can't remember why anyone was getting targeted so the movie clearly failed on that score, I just want scumbags to die. So they can't harm anyone else. If I want elaborate deathtraps, I'll read a comic with Arcade in it. At least his shit is colorful and has a hint of twisted whimsy.

So that's my answer.