The movie so bad it made Roger Ebert wish he was watching a blank screen instead
Throughout his career as one of America’s most well-established film critics, Roger Ebert wrote his fair share of reviews about movies he detested. While Hollywood is filled with many amazing, life-changing films, the truth of the matter is that there are many terrible movies out there, so bad that they make you question why you love cinema so much in the first place.
When you watch a bad movie, you’re often left wondering how you even stumbled upon it. Why am I wasting upwards of 90 minutes on a movie that will only make me miserable and angry? How did the director even get the green light to make such a hideously offensive film? Bad movies feel like insults to cinema, a medium that has thrived since the late 1800s and bloomed into a magnificent art form, where things you could only previously dream of can now be brought to life in front of your eyes.
Ebert started writing movie reviews in the 1960s until his death in 2013. During that time, he watched some movies that stuck out as being significantly worse than others. Take Freddy Got Fingered, for example. When Ebert had the joy of watching the film, this is what he had to say: “This movie doesn’t scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels.”
The beauty of Ebert’s reviews was found in the fact that he didn’t mask his thoughts with kind or agreeable words. If a movie was bad, he let readers know. Another movie he detested was Caligula, which he called “sickening, utterly worthless, shameful trash,” adding, “If it is not the worst film I have ever seen, that makes it all the more shameful: People with talent allowed themselves to participate in this travesty.”
However, there was one film that Ebert boldly declared was so bad that he called it “the first movie I have seen that does not improve on the sight of a blank screen viewed for the same length of time.” The critic was referencing Mad Dog Time, which was released in 1996.
Directed by Larry Bishop, it featured a strong cast, including Jeff Goldblum, Ellen Barkin, Diane Lane, Gabriel Byrne, Burt Reynolds, Kyle MacLachlan, and even Billy Idol – but that wasn’t enough to save the film for Ebert. The movie received terrible reviews all around, but it was Ebert who was most vocal about his hatred, even voting it the worst movie of 1996.
“Oh, I’ve seen bad movies before. But they usually made me care about how bad they were. Watching Mad Dog Time is like waiting for the bus in a city where you’re not sure they have a bus line,” he wrote.
Concluding his review, in which he stated that he wasn’t even sure what the movie was about, he declared: “The actors perform their lines like condemned prisoners. The most ethical guy on the production must have been Norman Hollyn, the editor, because he didn’t cut anybody out, and there must have been people willing to do him big favours to get out of this movie. Mad Dog Time should be cut into free ukulele picks for the poor.”
