Hours I Will Never Get Back in My Life- Movie Edition

I've seen some movies that I thought were G-d-awful. Here's a list in no particular order, and yes, I saw all but one of them in movie theaters:

Hard Times. Why I chose to plunk down good money to watch a movie about how hard life was in the Depression was beyond me. I got enough of those stories when I was a kid. If I wanted more, all I had to do was ask my dad or my uncles or my aunts. I walked out after fifteen minutes.

Star Trek- the Motion Picture. If the ST fans were not so loyal, this movie should have killed the franchise off. It was over two hours long; it felt as though it was four hours long. What they did was take the script from the ST episode The Changling, stretched the hell out of it, put in some special effects and put the crew in uniforms that looked like onesies. This movie sucked so bad that Gene Roddenberry was not allowed to produce the Wrath of Khan, which was a far better movie.

If You Could See What I Hear. It was supposed to be a "light comedy". Anyone who watched this movie more than once was at risk for type 2 diabetes. At the time, I was in a relationship where we traded off choosing movies to go see. I hated this movie so much that my next pick was Conan the Barbarian. Speaking of which....

Conan the Destroyer. Conan the Barbarian was actually pretty decent. It had some tangential relationship to the Robert E. Howard stories. This one, however, did not and there was not a single person in the movie who could act worth a damn. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Grace Jones and Wilt Chamberlain were the leads, which should have told me that the movie was going to be a real celluloid catastrophe. And it was.

Return of the Jedi, or "Cute Little Stone-Age Teddy Bears Take Down the Evil Empire". This movie should have been the first real clue for me that George Lucas had become convinced that he was a god of the cinema. It was one of the first movies that I saw where I was wishing for more casualties in the combat scenes, like 100% or better.

Naked Gun 33-1/3: The Final Insult. This one should have been called "Stretching a Comedic Gag Too Far." The co-stars included O.J. Simpson and Anna Nicole Smith. Enough said.

The English Patient. This one was touted as "the Casablanca of the `90s". Yes, it would have been, but only if if all of the leads in Casablanca were played by venal characters who made the Nazis look sympathetic in comparison. Besides that, the movie was so long that even if I had any sympathy for the characters at the beginning, I wanted them all to die 30 minutes before the credits rolled.

The Mummy Returns. The 1999 Mummy movie was one of my favorites. This one, however, was the epitome of sequel suckitude. My rule is now that all sequels suck until proven otherwise.

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. "Confessions of an egomanical retard" was more like it. This was another "get up and walk out" flick.

Burn After Reading. That is what the studio bosses should have done when they were given the script. This movie probably was one of the "these guys are really good, it can't be too bad" greenlight decisions. It's sort of the same way that a lot of Robert Parker and Patricia Cornwall novels got published. When I saw this movie, over 3/4ths of the audience walked out on it. I should have gone with them.

Jin-Roh. When I once remarked to an acquaintance that I had never seen an anime movie, he gave me the DVD and insisted that I watch it. It was dumber than dogshit. It convinced me that a good rule of thumb was "anime fans = male virgins". (And why those assassins were so in love with the "broomhandle Mauser", a weapon that was obsolete when the Luger went into production in 1900, is beyond me.)

There is another list I could do, of movies that I have seen parts of on the tube and would never ever watch from start to finish, but that's a post for another time.