Five irredeemable movies everyone hates for the exact same reason
Sometimes, a movie is just so bad that there is simply nothing that could make it better. Even having a star-studded cast of typically reliable actors is futile in some cases.
The thing is, when a movie has a bad script or terrible special effects, there’s little to save it from completely crashing and burning. Even worse, though, is when a movie feels like an attack on its audience – a cruel joke that feels more like a cash-grab than a piece of meaningful art.
While movies are one of the most divisive art forms – some people think Citizen Kane is the height of cinema, others think it’s a snoozefest – there are some films out there that you just can’t excuse for their terribleness. There’s always going to be someone who likes a genuinely terrible film (I’m looking at all you, Saltburn enjoyers), but the movies listed below truly have very few fans out there. If they do, I just want to know why.
From shitty spin-offs to blood-curdlingly bad CGI, these films don’t hit the mark at all. Even if you have a thing for naff cinema and can accept when a movie is not a masterpiece, some movies just go beyond bad and sit in a place of unredeemable awfulness.
Five irredeemable movies everyone hates for the same reason:
Home Alone 4
Did you love Home Alone, the Christmas classic featuring an endearing performance from Macaulay Culkin? What about the sequel, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York? You might not have loved Home Alone 3 as much, but at least it used different characters to the other films. Unfortunately, Home Alone 4 took the beloved characters from the first two films but used different actors to play them, allowing newcomer Mike Weinberg to take on Culkin’s iconic role. Unsurprisingly, the results were terrible.
Daniel Stern’s Marv is played by French Stewart in this version, with Missi Pyle playing Vera, the criminal’s wife. There is absolutely nothing redeeming about the film, which rehashes similar plot points from the previous movies with much less skill. It’s pointless. The movie is widely hated for attempting to destroy the legacy of the classic Home Alone films – it was an act of cinematic blasphemy.
Jaws 3-D
In 1975, Steven Spielberg made Jaws, an excellent foray into the depths of human fear through the ever-haunting presence of giant killer sharks. Ready to disturb your fun trip to the beach, these sharks become the ultimate horror antagonist, most terrifying because they simply exist out there in real life, swimming among the dark depths of the ocean. The film executes this sense of horror so well, but naturally, Hollywood began churning out sequels and spin-offs in the wake of its success, resulting in 1983’s Jaws 3-D.
Using gimmicky 3D technology to depict a great white shark’s reign of terror at a SeaWorld resort, the movie is unredeemable – not just because of the film’s terrible effects, script, and performances, but because it totally tarnished the reputation of Spielberg’s amazing film. Followed by the equally terrible Jaws: The Revenge, which is only slightly more watchable because Michael Caine is in it, it seems like the Jaws franchise should never have become a thing.
Battlefield Earth
What more could you possibly want out of a film than encouragement to join Scientology? For some strange reason, John Travolta decided that with his career nursed back to health following the success of Pulp Fiction, he must use it for the ultimate good. That ultimate good being to advertise the cult (sorry, religion) that he is a part of. Battlefield Earth was directed by Roger Christian and took inspiration from the book of the same name by Scientologist L Ron Hubbard, and you can only guess how that turned out.
Travolta looks absolutely ridiculous as Terl, although you could even buy action figures of the antagonist when the film came out if you so pleased. The film was bad on all fronts, winning seven Razzies, rather unsurprisingly. The movie was just propaganda with terrible special effects, and you can’t even class it as a guilty pleasure – it’s just plain awful.
Cats
I can’t imagine anything worse than a movie where every character is played by a furry. Actually, I can. It’s Cats. At least people who dress up as furries are relatively modest – in Tom Hooper’s film, the actors are adorned in bad CGI to create these half-human, half-cat hybrids, which genuinely make you feel ill. You can’t help but wish they put some clothes on, because the sights are hideous. While the ugly visuals are the main reason for people disliking the film so strongly, it’s also just plain bad because of its script, its poor performances, and general uncanny atmosphere. No one wanted this version of the musical, but sadly, it’s the one we got.
With performances from some incredibly obnoxious stars like James Corden and Taylor Swift, you have to wonder what attracted esteemed actors like Dame Judi Dench and Ian McKellen to the film. Surely they didn’t need the money that bad? Even Swifties seemingly can’t get behind this one. Cats is atrocious.
The Emoji Movie
The awful state of Hollywood can be summed up by the creation of The Emoji Movie. Why the fuck did we need a movie about the little images that we stick on the end of our text messages? Released in 2017, the movie was quickly panned, not just because it was a stupid concept, but because it was packed full of insufferable product placement. Sure, this is something that many movies do, but The Emoji Movie was absolutely loaded with mentions of different apps that formed the plot of the movie.
YouTube, Spotify, CandyCrush and more get prominent placements in the film, which makes it hard to enjoy the movie. Not that there’s much to enjoy about watching the poo emoji come to life (why Patrick Stewart, why?). Of course, James Corden was at the scene of the crime once again, shamelessly giving in to the demands of terrible movies only made to generate profit.
