RiffTrax conducted a poll, asking people to submit their choices for the worst movies of the 1990s. Many were voted on, most were well-deserving of their place on the Pedestals of Ignominy, but I might disagree with the placement of several of them.
Here are the Top 5 “winners”:
1. Batman and Robin
2. Battlefield: Earth
3. Super Mario Brothers
4. Star Wars: The Phantom Menace
5. Godzilla
Now, I’ve seen 4 out of these 5 movies, and I definitely think Battlefield: Earth deserves the Number 1 spot. I still have mental scars from seeing that in the theater, and the friend who talked me into seeing it with him might actually still have a bruise on his shoulder.
I don’t know that I would have put Phantom Menace in my own personal Top 20 Worst, simply because if you edit out the midichlorians, and the pod racing, and Jar-Jar, it’s actually an interesting study into the Machiavellian machinations of Palpatine, and how he selects his next student decades before he knows he’ll need one. Then again, that cuts the movie down to about 45 minutes, and not even Shakespeare could add 90 more minutes of padding and not have some of it suck.
Check out their full list, which also include links to the MP3s of the ones they’ve riffed in the past. It’s well worth the trip down memory lane, because it reminds us that even the bad movies can be so much worse!
The Doom Generation isn’t on the list at all, so 0/10 stars. 😉
There are so so many awful movies that didn’t make this list… my guess is most of the voters either blocked the memory of them out, or they weren’t old enough to have suffered through them 🙂
Lawnmower Man 2, The Hidden 2, Galaxis (w Brigitte Nielsen), Abraxas (w Jesse Ventura), Barb Wire (Pam Anderson, tolerable but bad), and so many more. Had to double check… Solarbabies was 80s, LOL
iirc there was a Delta Force movie so bad not even Chuck Norris would appear in it (even his superpowers can only do so much). And take your pick of dozens of movies featuring ninjas or dinosaurs (hm, but never together… strange, that).
The result of what happens when you get so many “sequels” and multiples in a series based on 80s movies, just piling on to see if one of them will make enough money to justify yet another one to make… too many to list! Seriously, how many versions of Iron Eagle and Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Killer Tomatoes and Police Academy did we need back then? 🙂
In general, 90s movies don’t seem to be aging as well as 80s movies – especially the bad ones! I’d have to go with Anaconda for my pick, with runners-up to Bio-dome and Highlander 2
Oh geez, completely forgot about Bio-dome (or maybe blocked it out). And yeah, it does seem like the overall quality of less-than-stellar 90s movies is lower than their 80s counterparts… almost makes you wonder if there was a more potent crop of mind-altering substances affecting the creative processes of filmmaking in the 90s compared with the 80s. Or just a lot of bad karma coming back around?