The Most Scathing (But Also Kinda Funny) Movie Reviews From Critics

Giving the 2000 film only half a star, Roger Ebert thought sitting through Battlefield Earth was about as enjoyable as sitting next to someone who stinks for a few hours in a tight, enclosed space: 

Battlefield Earth is like taking a bus trip with someone who has needed a bath for a long time. It's not merely bad; it's unpleasant in a hostile way. The visuals are grubby and drab. The characters are unkempt and have rotten teeth. Breathing tubes hang from their noses like ropes of snot. The soundtrack sounds like the boom mike is being slammed against the inside of a 55-gallon drum…

Hiring Travolta and Whitaker was a waste of money, since we can't recognize them behind pounds of matted hair and gnarly makeup. Their costumes look like they were purchased from the Goodwill store on the planet Tatooine… The Psychlos can fly between galaxies, but look at their nails: Their civilization has mastered the hyperdrive but not the manicure…

Some movies run off the rails. This one is like the train crash in The Fugitive. I watched it in mounting gloom, realizing I was witnessing something historic, a film that for decades to come will be the punch line of jokes about bad movies. There is a moment here when the Psychlos' entire planet (home office and all) is blown to smithereens, without the slightest impact on any member of the audience (or, for that matter, the cast). If the film had been destroyed in a similar cataclysm, there might have been a standing ovation.

In a reference to The Godfather, the film that spawned the modern mob movie, reviewer Johnny Oleksinski claimed he would choose being threatened with an animal carcass in his bed over sitting through Gotti for a second time:

I’d rather wake up next to a severed horse head than ever watch Gotti again. The worst movie of the year so far, the long-awaited biopic about the Gambino crime boss’ rise from made man to top dog took four directors, 44 producers and eight years to make. 

It shows. The finished product belongs in a cement bucket at the bottom of the river… Travolta, who’s made a career out of Italian stereotypes, obviously thought the Dapper Don would be his Don Corleone. It’s his Chef Boy­ardee. His performance is a leather-faced freak show. And the plot is nonsensical… [It] is an excuse for ­Travolta to shmact and for his wife, Kelly Preston - playing Gotti’s wife, Victoria - to howl like Medea…

It’s the worst mob movie ever, but I see a bright future in midnight showings. “The Gotti Horror Picture Show.”

One descriptive “hate” just wouldn't suffice for Roger Ebert as he voiced his distaste for the 1994 film, North:

I have no idea why Rob Reiner, or anyone else, wanted to make this story into a movie, and close examination of the film itself is no help. North is one of the most unpleasant, contrived, artificial, cloying experiences I've had at the movies. To call it manipulative would be inaccurate; it has an ambition to manipulate, but fails.

The film stars Elijah Wood, who is a wonderful young actor… Here he is stuck in a story that no actor, however wonderful, however young, should be punished with…..

What is the point of the scenes with the auditioning parents? (The victimized actors range from Dan Aykroyd as a Texan to Kathy Bates as an Eskimo). They are all seen as broad, desperate comic caricatures. They are not funny. They are not touching. There is no truth in them. They don't even work as parodies. There is an idiocy here that seems almost intentional, as if the filmmakers plotted to leave anything of interest or entertainment value out of these episodes…

I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it.

The hate-heavy line from the review became so famous, Ebert's book collection of bad reviews is titled after it.

Chicago Tribune critic Gene Siskel thought Lorraine Gary's performance tanked 1987's Jaws: The Revenge: 

So, we need a good villain that everyone is afraid of [to carry a storyline]. Right, a great white shark. That solves the problem with the recent Jaws films in that lately the big fish has been eating nobodies. Remember Robert Shaw's old fisherman in the original Jaws? Remember the police chief Scheider and the ichthyologist played by Richard Dreyfuss? Now those were three somebodies. We didn't want them to die.

But in the just-released Jaws: The Revenge the shark's main course is intended to be Roy Scheider's widow, Ellen Brody, a frumpy middle-aged woman played by boring actress Lorraine Gary, who happens to be married to the president of MCA Universal, which finances the Jaws films and which explains her lead role. Let's put it this way: when you see and hear the nasal Lorraine Gary on screen you want the shark to eat her…

The film critic also commended a previous actor for refusing to act in the picture:

Roy Scheider wisely departed the Jaws films, having cashed enough paychecks without losing his self-respect.

Film reviewer Christy Lemire argued that Gigli was “unwatchable,” despite featuring Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck in the leading roles: 

Gigli - which spawned the phenomenon the gossip pages and celebrity magazines so lovingly refer to as “Bennifer” - is every bit as unwatchable as the deafening negative chatter would suggest… Even making a little game of it, and trying to pinpoint the exact moment when Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez fell in love, stops being fun after a while…

Perhaps it's when he says, in an attempt to seduce her, "I'm the bull, you're the cow."

Or when she beckons him into foreplay by lying back in bed and purring, “Gobble, gobble” - which could forever change the way you view your Thanksgiving turkey…

If this were a movie starring two B-list actors, or two complete unknowns, it probably would have gone straight to video. After curious masochists and J.Lo fans check it out the first weekend, Gigli probably will have a drop-off in audience that rivals The Hulk - 70 percent - then go to video… 

Cameos from Pacino, Christopher Walken as a detective and Lainie Kazan as Gigli's mother don't help, either. Did they owe someone a favor? What are they doing here? Pacino won his one and only Oscar with Brest, [the director and producer of the film], for 1992's Scent of a Woman, but couldn't he have just thanked the director instead?

Esteemed Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert thought Tom Green should consider bringing rocks into the theater to throw at the audience in case they assaulted him for making such a horrible film:

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.

Many years ago, when surrealism was new, Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali made Un Chien Andalou, a film so shocking that Bunuel filled his pockets with stones to throw at the audience if it attacked him. Green, whose film is in the surrealist tradition, may want to consider the same tactic. The day may come when Freddy Got Fingered is seen as a milestone of neo-surrealism. The day may never come when it is seen as funny. The film is a vomitorium consisting of 93 minutes of Tom Green doing things that a geek in a carnival sideshow would turn down.