What is the most crappy scifi ever?

[StarLost]

I never understand why people don't like Starship Troopers and Independance Day. The former is a great movie to watch with lots of beers and a few mates, the latter is superb for a rainy sunday afternoon.
Neither is trying to be some kind of super real amazing coolthing, they're just trying to be typical movies. They succeed very well at that.
I even quite like Armageddon, it's just plain good fun.

Ones I can't stand: Anything to do with star trek (don't like star trek), Contact (long and boring), deep impact (the kid pisses me off), whatever that Arnie movie on mars is.

Ah Simon, did you read the book? If not, it might change your opinion. Heinlein despised what Hollywood did to it, hence no other Heinlein story has appeared in film (see "Grumbles From the Grave").

A further addition to the worst scifi: Dune (the movie not either of the miniseries. You had to be a hardcore fan of the books to get anything out of the movie (besides Kyle McLaughlin has the same lack of acting ability as Di Caprio).

Battle Beyond the Stars!! John-boy in space! Also Message From Space. I like sailing ships and walnuts are tasty, but a tall ship in space and a glowing walnut for a spiritual messenger???

Oh, too much ... remember this one. In total agreement.

Did Robert Vaughn really need the money that bad?

Thou shalt not allow physics to intrude upon Hollywood's bubble of reality...

Besides, aren't all nukes magical engines of destruction that will eventually swallow the entire universe? Maybe that's why they're so bad...

Cheers!

Jim

Nay, grasshopper: Thou shalt not let reality intrude upon Hollywood's bubble.

StarLost! Haven't seen you in AGES! Nice to have you back, after the great M6-o-clysm and all.

Thankyou, kind sir. Yes, still out here, though I am sure certain others may not share your opinion.

Greetings to the rest who remember, and hello to those who don't.

Someone brought this one up and I thought it would get more discussion for worst: Barbarella. Personally, the lack of familiarity with it does illustrate what I said earlier about "age" and "ever".

Piegar was a hoot (the cliche blind angel who never got any ... )

 

[sputnik]

I'm surprised no one's yet mentioned "The Fifth Element".

Maybe not as bad as some on this list, but still, this is sci-fi by someone who apparently thinks that's a synonym for "spectacle". As in, no plot, or science, or internal consistency, as long as there's amazing vistas and good special effects.

Painful.

 

[willy88]

StarLost, could you please not quadruple post?

 

[sputnik]

Ooh! Hope nobody ever makes this....

http://gizmodo.com/photogallery/horriblemovies/1002470033

 

[Bullethead]

Worst SF Movies:

• "Yor: Hunter from the Future". This is probably the 2nd worst movie of any genre ever made, leaving only...
• "Plan 10 from Outer Space". Widely acknowledged as the absolute worst movie of any genre ever made by any race in any part of the universe.
• Disney's "The Black Hole". This was actually put forward as a serious movie, not a ridiculous kid's feature. But it failed even on that level, too.
• Anything involving stopping a giant meteor from hitting Earth.
• "The Day After Tomorrow", for claiming its ridiculously impossible conditions were actually to be expected.
• "Star Wars Episode I". This one should be on the list twice: once for Jar-Jar alone, and once for the rest of it.
• "Dune", for using 3/4 of its running time for perfectly covering the 1st 70 pages of a 600-page book, and then going completely off-topic to rush through the rest. Plus it rained at the end, which would have killed all the sandworms and thus all the spice-adicted main characters, too.
• "Star Wars Episode VI" for the Ewoks, which not only put a disgraceful ending on an otherwise cool series of movies, but set the stage for the horrors to come in the recent movies.
• "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". The books are some of the funniest things ever written but the movie wasn't funny in the least.

Worst SF TV shows:

• Any anime involving giant robots driven by children.
• "Quark", a show about a space garbage truck that was so bad it was cancelled after the 1st episode.
• "Space: 1999". I watched this show avidly because the explosions were very cool, the 1st ones I remember that had big chunks go flying out when always before it had just been a fireball. And the individual episodes were pretty good stories. However, the whole premise of the show was completely nuts, and it only got worse in the 2nd season when they picked up that shape-shifting chick.
• The original "Battlestar Galactica" for a bunch of reasons both general and specific.
• All versions of the "Stargate" series. I didn't see the original movie so can't comment on that, but if it was like the TV shows, it should be in the list above, too.
• "Lost in Space", especially the 2nd season with the carrot people.
• "Land of the Giants", which was as bad as any of the giant killer whatever movies.

 

[JamesG]

I'm surprised no one's yet mentioned "The Fifth Element".

It gets a pass because it had Milla Jovovich in it. :wub:

But yeah, the rest of the movie was both irritating and forgetable.

 

[Ghostrider]

Worst SF Movies:

... You left out Zardoz. :rofl:

 

[Andy44]

Wow, somebody brought up Yor! My dad and brother and I rented that turkey and laughed all the way through it. The funniest thing about it was the sound effect of a cave woman screaming, which was used over and over throughout the film.

Yeah, Fifth Element sucked. Am I the only one who thinks Gary Oldman's character looked and talked like a spaced-out Ross Perot?

There was a made-for-TV movie back around 1980 or so called Meteor which really sucked. I think Natalie Wood was in it.

Thankyou, kind sir. Yes, still out here, though I am sure certain others may not share your opinion.

Well, I remember arguing with you alot, but it stayed civil. Better the demon you know than the angel you don't, I suppose. Always good to see old Orbiterheads come back to town.

 

[Bullethead]

Wow, somebody brought up Yor! My dad and brother and I rented that turkey and laughed all the way through it.

I find it impossible to laugh at "Yor" because I saw it when it was in the theaters and was expecting a good movie. I felt not only cheated by the experience but also scarred for life. Remember, this thing came out a little before even VCRs so there was no such thing as renting a bad movie to laugh at while getting drunk. You had to go to "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" for that .

Speaking of which, I suppose "Rocky Horror" deserves credit as a bad movie with at least some SF elements, including all the name-dropping in the theme song. But I really liked seeing it. Of course, what I was going for was the silly audience participation, absolutely trashing the theater, and doing pelvic thrusts with hot, drunk chicks.

However, as I understand things, all that fun stuff originally grew out of heckling by the original batch of disgruntled customers who thought they'd been ripped off by a bad movie. But by the time I was in college, that heckling had become the main attraction and was the reason you went to the show .

Another made-for-TV movie that sucked was "Impact Earth", which the Science Channel was running a week or 2 ago. Bad actors playing badly developed characters using bad science. That one they had before that about tinkering with hurricanes was also a stinker.

 

[jedidia]

Last year there was a movie in the cinemas called "Sunshine" (it may have been a British production :blush. I didn't see it, but the synopis would indicate that it could easily make the cut for crappiest-ever candidate:

The sun is dying (for whatever reason), and a crew of intrepid space adventurers is sent off to deposit and detonate a nuclear bomb in its core to kickstart it back to life...:blink:.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to detect the teeny flaw in the plot. For comparison: the sun's energy output is about 4e26 J/s. The most powerful hydrogen bomb to date (according to google) produced 2.4e17 J. Not even I can suspend my disbelief quite that far.

Well, Sunshine is a strange candidate...

For one, the elements of the main plot are completely drawn out of the nose.

For another, the problems they face getting so close to the sun with their spaceship are depicted in a surprisingly realistic way (apart from the nuisance that they have magical gravity inside their ship and find themselfes sudenly in solar orbit without burning any Delta-V, while an hour before they where heading right at it...)

For the bomb, well... It's got the size of Manhattan. Doesn't make "kickstarting the sun" (who reduced activity because of a comet that impacted it... not too bright either) any more feasible and rises questions about the engines used, however you hear them mention FUEL-CALCULATIONS when they have to do an unexpected correction burn (which is more than you get from most SF-movies).

So, I'm a bit torn between things they did very good and things they did very bad.

What absolutely makes the movie for me, however, is its developement from seemingly serious SF, to a thriller, moving on to psychological drama, ending up in the psychedelic and in the last minutes even getting abstract. The feeling of the movie is in constant change, and you never quite know what to make of it. You are not just suspended by asking yourself "what happens next", but also by "where the hell is this leading to anyways?". Camera-moving and style also change with the changing "theme", being traditonal Sci-Fi low-intensity shots in the beginning, rising to aetheticly beutiful and solemn sequences, getting claustrophobic over time and in the end so shaky and messed up you hardly understand what's going on.

So from a Dramaturgic point of view, as well as from an artistic, I consider this movie almost a masterpiece!

 

[GregBurch]

... You left out Zardoz. :rofl:

Ahh .. now there's a challenge. You weren't taking the right drugs to appreciate Zardoz.

Actually, I could defend Zardoz. Yes, there was major weirdness in the "special effects", but I think a movie has to be judged by the cinematic technology of its time. Thus The Day the Earth Stood Still is on my "best" list. But the ideas in the movie weren't really stupid. It was actually a pretty good exposition of a set of fairly common tropes in decent literary SF.

 

[Urwumpe]

My personal favorite for science fiction, though actually more a fantasy movie, will sure not survive the critical review in this forum, I am sure... The fifth element. While having more fiction than science, there had been quite some ideas inside it, which had been included in such a innocent way, that you would notice them only hours later.

Some what like a Star Trek NG episode where Geordi la Forge would not talk about the many technical stuff like it is the holy grail, but just uses it as something everyday..."We have squeezed some power more out of the warp core captain" instead of "We reconfigured the photronic power relays of the ship and did a small change to the Dilithium matrix, captain, you should now be able to use the subspacetachyon minkovsky field sensors to detect the klingon warbird"...what?

If you would remove all technobabble from a TNG episode, it would only take 30% of the time.

 

[jedidia]

If you would remove all technobabble from a TNG episode, it would only take 30% of the time.

And it would have produced only 1% the amount of nerds as it did this way...

I think it would have been a good trade-of :rofl:

Allthough I wouldn't rate fifth element among the best, I too cannot share in the devastating criticism it got a bit earlier. The movie is just too much fun to not like it (and I don't usualy pick up physical flaws in a movie that is so tongue-in-cheeck, because you're not taking things too serious anyways.)

 

[ar81]

A good employee should bring solutions, not problems.
Scifi shows teach geeks about bringing problems and this is why they could get fired.
Look at typical technobabble of scifi shows, Orbiter version...

-Shields up!!
-Captain, this vessel has no shields. Thay have not been invented...
-Ok, full reverse.
-Retro doors opening...
-Ok, then move up.
-Opening hover doors...
-Captain, we've been hit...
-Go prograde and let's the hell out of here!!
-Main engines not responding sir, RCS not responding either.
-Prepare for evacuation
-Outer airlock doors not responding captain...
-Open hatch then...
-Open hatch not responding captain...
-Fire torpedoes...
-Orbiter is not a shooter, we do not have torpedoes onboard...

 

[GregBurch]

Allthough I wouldn't rate fifth element among the best, I too cannot share in the devastating criticism it got a bit earlier. The movie is just too much fun to not like it (and I don't usualy pick up physical flaws in a movie that is so tongue-in-cheeck, because you're not taking things too serious anyways.)

I have to agree with that -- it was so cartoonish that you can't judge it with any scientific or technical rigor at all. It's a movie comic book, and, as such, not bad at all.

 

[eveningsky339]

My favorite Sci-Fi would probably have to the The Chronicles of Riddick. The screenplay could have been better written, but I think the "macho" factor helps fill the gaps. Not very realistic though.

 

[JamesG]

Worst SF Movies:All versions of the "Stargate" series. I didn't see the original movie so can't comment on that, but if it was like the TV shows, it should be in the list above, too.

Really? I liked it. At least early before it kinda jumped the shark and became "Star Trek lite".
They at least paid lip service to physics, had a sprinkling of technobabble, and tried to make it as militarily realistic as possible.
They also didn't take themselves to seriously. There were whole episodes devoted to spoofing themselves and the sci-fi genre.

 

[Kyle]

Worst ones I can Think of.
10. Independence Day; Alright movie, just not Realistic.
9. Men In Black II; I liked the First one Better.
8. Star Wars Episode II; Jar Jar should kill himself.
7. Star Wars Episode I; Again, Jar Jar Should be shot.
6. Armageddon; Unrealistic and C- Acting.
5. Deep Impact; Also Unrealistic and C- Acting.
4. And Disney Space movie/ TV Show.
3. The newer Startrek Shows; Just not into startrek
2. No idea.
1. Eartstorm; Worst of all time.


Now, if you were to talk about Better movies, Scifi and non-Scifi heres what I'd say.
10. Space Cowboys.
9. Star Wars; Episode VI
8. Ice (Book, but still interesting.)
7. Maybe the old Star Trek.
6. Star Wars; Episode III; Best of the new Star Wars Movies.
5. Star Wars Episode IV; Great movie.
4. From the Earth to the Moon (Miniseries)
3. Star Wars Episode V; Really Good Movie.
2. The Right Stuff
1. Apollo 13.

 

[Urwumpe]

My favorite Sci-Fi would probably have to the The Chronicles of Riddick. The screenplay could have been better written, but I think the "macho" factor helps fill the gaps. Not very realistic though.

At least the two Riddick movies had been better in many aspects as Starwars.

 

[simonpro]

Worst ones I can Think of.
(cut)

Now, if you were to talk about Better movies, Scifi and non-Scifi heres what I'd say.
(cut)

So how come some movies get your bad vote for being "unrealistic", yet you list space cowboys (a movie in which someone managed to crash in-tact into the moon) and star wars (a movie full of antigravity and laser swords) as good?:blink:

Ah Simon, did you read the book? If not, it might change your opinion. Heinlein despised what Hollywood did to it, hence no other Heinlein story has appeared in film (see "Grumbles From the Grave").

A further addition to the worst scifi: Dune (the movie not either of the miniseries. You had to be a hardcore fan of the books to get anything out of the movie (besides Kyle McLaughlin has the same lack of acting ability as Di Caprio).

Don't read sci-fi books I'm afraid, not really a big fan of sci-fi in general. But I can tolerate it in movies, same doesn't go for books though.

(this is probably why I like 'hollywood' sci-fi movies )