The Worst Movie I Have Ever Watched in a Theater

A couple weeks ago the staff at Defector was asked to name the worst movie they had ever watched in a theater and provide a brief explanation why. The post has since received over a thousand comments, as you might expect, and it naturally made me reflect on the question, though I wondered if it was a good idea to contribute with a post of my own. I wasn’t sure if I felt like going negative at a moment when everything already feels so negative in the first place. It sometimes feels easier to reflexively lambaste a movie you dislike than elucidate a movie you love. But the thing is, even seeing a bad movie in the movie theater can be illuminative. “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” was dreadful and made worse from my perspective because it was the last movie I saw in a theater before the pandemic, but it also provided an essential moment of clarity: what “Star Wars” meant to me when I was a kid did not matter anymore, had stopped mattering to me a long, long time ago, and I could just put the whole thing up on a figurative shelf. When I saw “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” in the theater in the spring of 1990 at the age of 12, I had the profound realization that, hey, you know what, not all movies are good. 

I stayed ‘til the end of “The Rise of Skywalker,” and even more unbelievably I stayed ‘til the end of “Reindeer Games” (and saw it at all even though the person working the box office literally laughed when I said what show I wanted to see) in the winter of 2000, but I did not stay ‘til the end of “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End” in 2007. The first one, honestly, is overrated, inflated by the immense quality of Johnny Depp’s performance, the second one sagged, but the third was at once so gluttonous and so moribund that I simply reached a point where I literally thought to myself, “I cannot take another second of this,” stood up, and walked right out of the theater. It is the only movie I can recall paying for and leaving early. I did not walk out of “The Scorpion King” in 2002 but only because I was seeing it with my friend Nicolle and her family and because we were seeing it at the late, beloved second-run West Des Moines movie house Billy Joe’s Pitcher Show, meaning I could just order another cheap light beer to power through. 

See, I worked at a movie theater in the late 90s and worked for much of it as a projectionist and/or manager, meaning I was tasked with screening virtually every movie we got after hours to ensure the film reels had been properly put together. That meant seeing a lot of dreck and so, occasionally, if there was another manager willing to endure the whole thing, there were movies I walked out of, I just didn’t pay for them. That makes leaving early a little different, a little easier to give up, like I did on “The Postman,” or on “Varsity Blues.” Once, a fellow manager and I started “My Favorite Martian,” just the two of us, and found it so affectless that we fast-forwarded the reels on the projection platter to the end so we could just go home. 

My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife reports that she has never walked out of a movie, though she has seen some bad ones in the theater, nevertheless, so many bad ones that she could not narrow it down to single title when I put this question to her. “Legal Eagles,” “Harry and the Hendersons,” much to the chagrin of Jack Donaghy, “Light of Day,” which breaks her heart because she was a Michael J. Fox stan long before the term stan even entered the cultural lexicon, and “Gung Ho,” were all movies she provided as being among the worst of the worst she has seen in a theater. They were not, as she explained, schlock, a critical designation meaning they were not low budget cheesy fun but the tedious horse latitudes of Hollywood. Those four titles she supplied all sound like part of the bad DVD shelf from The Onion. 

“Pushing Tin” was on The Onion’s figurative bad DVD shelf and was also mentioned by someone in the Defector comments as the worst movie they had ever seen in a theater. And that’s what a lot of the movies I watched in the theater during those days were like – “Pushing Tin.” They were watched but not necessarily remembered; transitory in the bad way. And it does invite a question: is the worst movie watched in movie theater one that spurs nothing more than total lack of interest, or is it one that provokes intense dislike? My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife also mentioned “Under the Skin” as one of the worst movies she has seen in a movie theater, not because it washed over her unremembered because she was disgusted by it just as I was disgusted by “The Trip to Italy” as tantamount to a three-hour Widespread Panic concert with celebrity impressions in place of guitar noodling. She and I can agree to disagree on those movies (I loved “Under the Skin”; she loved “The Trip to Italy”), but I think we would both agree those movies are doing something, they are just doing something that each of us personally rejects. I mean, I have not yet mentioned “Armageddon”, which I generally cite as the worst movie I have ever seen, and I did see it in a movie theater. But even I will admit that Michael Bay is an auteur in his way, and even if his aesthetic made me want to gouge out my own eyeballs, he did not cause my eyelids to droop, and then to ultimately close.

In 2004, on the other hand, I fell asleep watching “Van Helsing” in a theater. Why did I see that movie? Probably because of Kate Beckinsale, if I’m being honest, or maybe because back then I saw almost everything on opening weekend and there was nothing else opening that week in central Iowa. And the thing is, that’s really all I remember of the experience: falling asleep. I could not recite a line, a scene, a moment, nothing; I do not remember a single thing that happened aside from suddenly waking up from a nap I did not realize I drifted into and thinking, “Hey, when did Frankenstein’s monster get here?” I might have walked out right then except I was mired in that post-afternoon nap state of grogginess, could not really bring myself to move, surrendered, fell back in my chair, and apropos of the worst movie I have ever watched in a theater, dozed off again.