Hey, I forgot “Cassandra Crossing”. Starts by casting O.J.Simpson as a Catholic priest, and goes rapidly downhill from there. But that’s one of those films that’s so implausibly preposterous that it’s quite entertaining (and that was a big budget film with an all-star cast).

Van Helsing and Pearl Harbour don’t even come close.

Yes, they’re terrible, terrible films, but if you think they’re within screaming distance of the really awful, I think you simply haven’t seen enough films.

One of the worst films to ever see cinema release that I actually sat all the way through was a dog called Turkey Shoot.

However, at points it got so unrelentingly awful it became somewhat funny, in the same way that seeing a guy crawl out of a burning car wreck only to get stung by a hornet and then blindly fall into a sewer and die has some kind of sick humour to it. On that score, it just manages to lift itself off the mat of the worst possible film.

There are some other films that I’ve only seen a few minutes of that look like they’re probably even worse, but I have no real desire to make certain, so Turkey Shoot remains the worst film I’ve watched all of.

Of somewhat more recent films to see /major/ cinema release (Turkey Shoot’s run was, I believe, mercifully very limited in both time and geography), I would rate “The Quick and The Dead” one of the worst; I cleaned the heads on my video after that one to make sure no trace of it remained in my VCR to infect any merely bad films I might watch after. Like Turkey Shoot, it got so bad it became somewhat funny, but it doesn’t quite get as so imaginatively bad as Turkey Shoot; I can see someone making a film as bad as TQaTD all the way to the end, though I imagine large quantities of drugs must have been required to get through some days without just walking away… I can’t imagine how they managed it with Turkey Shoot – it’s just not physically possible to get stoned enough and still be conscious.

However, my vote would probably go for Invincible produced by Jet Li and Mel Gibson, and starring Billy Zane. It’s an absolutely astonishingly bad film which tries to be a cross between the matrix and crouching tiger, hidden dragon, and manages to be as good as neither. It really has to be seen to be believed, 87 minutes of complete dross, and an insult to my DVD player. I’ve still got it on DVD though, it can’t even be sold on eBay easily.

I’m going to vote for a movie called ‘Monkeybone’ though, it’s supposed to be a comedy, but when you get things that are obviously supposed to be gags (including some nice visual ones) they make no sense. After watching that to the end then watching the deleted scenes it all becomes clear, the editor has been through the movie and cut all the setups from the gags out…..if there’s a movie editing course anywhere, this should be the homework on the ‘how not to do it’ week.