You’re reading Even Better Asks, a recurring series where the head honchos at Even Better come up with an open-ended question for our extended web of pals to answer in blurb form. Last time, we talked about media that made us think of our moms. This week’s prompt is our first one all about the movies:
What's the worst movie you've ever seen in a theater (or alternatively, the worst theatergoing experience you can remember)?
Below, you’ll find a bunch of terrible movies — and nearly as many decent movies experienced under terrible conditions:
Vice (2018)
This qualifies as both the worst movie I can remember seeing in theaters, and also my worst theatergoing experience. At some point in the middle of the film, the exit door below the screen swung open and we were frantically told to evacuate. Assuming we were in danger of being mowed down by a mass shooter or consumed by a fiery blaze, my family and I bolted out of the theater, only to be quickly coaxed back in by misinformed staff who'd accidentally flipped an alarm. Somehow, that experience was less frustrating than having to sit through the remainder of Adam McKay's limp, barely satirical Dick Cheney biopic, which I found to be an impotent neoliberal portrait of a troubled master manipulator whose greatest failing is actually the disintegration of his family, not the millions killed by his own imperialist bloodlust. I should've just bailed on the movie and strolled over to the mall when I had a chance.
I can't recall any truly terrible theater-going experiences, outside of your average run-of-the-mill too-loud talkers or cell phone recorders that seem to pop up more and more recently (get a life, people). But man. The worst movie ever seen in a theater? That would be the Zach Galifianakis-Isla Fisher-Jon Hamm-Gal Gadot vehicle Keeping Up with the Joneses. Have y'all seen this turkey? It sucks so fucking bad, dude. I like some other Greg Mottola pictures but I wouldn't wish sitting through this on my worst enemy and I made my dear loving wife see it. A modern tragedy.
In 2019, I went on a date with a man to see a pre-release screening of Harmony Korine’s The Beach Bum. It was happening at the great Music Box Theatre in Chicago with a Q&A afterwards with the director himself. Now, I know myself better than to think I’ll enjoy really any Harmony Korine movie, but the guy was tall and cute. At the end of the day, if you’re not willing to see a movie you’re not that interested in seeing in the theater are you really even into men?
In reality, I believe that movie is probably mostly fine. The problem is that I didn’t watch The Beach Bum in reality. I watched it in a circus big top full of Harmony Korine stans scream laughing in my face. There was just this overwhelming dissonance in what I was watching — perfectly enjoyable movie for the most part — with this raucous laughter the audience was giving it. Those people were in those uncomfortable seats doubled over crying laughing. Every time I chuckled they laughed so hard I couldn’t hear the next few lines. It was so distracting and absurd I felt I had left a regular plane of reality. There was a lengthy standing ovation at the end of this movie. A movie with a (deserved, in my opinion) 57% on Rotten Tomatoes got a several minute standing ovation. I left feeling disoriented and with a new, perhaps undeserved disdain for Korine.
Me and my date did not stay for the Q&A. We’d break up mere months later after a tense 47 minute walk to get pressed juice.
Cody Naglich
According to some half-assed internet research, the paraphrased definition of a white elephant gift is something given for free that ends up being a burden (not a whimsical gift exchange among semi-estranged family members). In high school a friend of mine worked at our local movie theater. As a perk he got free movies for himself and a plus one. One gloomy Saturday afternoon, with nothing else to do, he and I saw Jack Black’s own Gulliver’s Travels. Prior to those painful 85 minutes, I must not have been sentient enough to qualify movies as being good or bad; simply going to the theater was enough of a thrill. No longer, GT slammed that childhood door shut. Despite not having my first job — and not paying a dime to see it — I remember leaving feeling ripped off. Like my unemployed time was worth more than whatever I just sat through, a true white elephant gift.
My parents like to keep up with cinema. Going to the local arthouse theater also serves as an opportunity to dine at the restaurant down the block with Cleveland’s best pizza. One night in 2015, they invited me to join them to see this movie they’d heard about featuring several of our favorites — Adam Scott, Taylor Schilling, Jason Schwartzman, Judith Godrèche — entitled The Overnight. None of us had read a review or synopsis. We went in fresh.
It doesn’t take long to realize that The Overnight is a sex comedy. My hat’s off to Patrick Brice; it’s a well-written, genuinely funny movie; it’s hard to find a new laugh-out-loud comedy that’s any good these days. I, however, wasn’t prepared to watch Adam Scott romp around with a prosthetic micropenis flanked on either side by my mom and dad. It felt like being strapped into a roller coaster, with embarrassment subbed in for genuine thrill. Sometimes, it’s not about the quality of the movie, it’s the audience with whom you’re trapped.
My dad never says no to anything free, so we went all in on the free refills of the giant popcorn bucket at Peter Pan 2 on St. Patrick’s Day 2002. I don’t remember anything about the movie, but I do remember both of us coming home with stomach aches to a lavish holiday dinner that my poor mom had prepared and neither of us had the stomach to eat. I’ve had a complicated relationship with popcorn ever since. Runners up include seeing Beverly Hills Chihuahua for a friend’s birthday (they made three of these movies!) and running into my high school choir teacher at Friends with Benefits.
I don’t want to be one of those millennials using the “OMG I’m so old” cliche, but I really do remember being a teenager and going to the movies because it was once a cheap thing to do. I also think about this one throwaway line from Big Mouth all the time, where they watch a movie trailer and John Mulaney’s character says something like “Of course it’ll be good. It’s a movie!” Every movie was good when you’re that age, especially if you see it in theaters. It was a movie in theaters! That facade pretty much lasted until my friends and I saw Code Name: The Cleaner starring Cedric the Entertainer and Lucy Liu in theaters. We would’ve been about 15. I’ve seen the movie exactly once — not just because it’s a horrible movie, but because now it’s tied to a happy memory of my friends and me cracking up in pure disbelief at how bad a movie could really be, quoting it to each other for years after as if it were a secret language because surely no one else had seen the movie, let alone committed lines to memory. And I don’t want to overwrite that.
“This ain’t whatcha want.”
We also saw The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard with Jeremy Piven, and that was probably actually worse because I have 0% memories of it.
My Star Wars fandom has since faded in the Disney era, but heading into The Force Awakens, I was counting down the days to see my boys again.
Some friends — including a purveyor of this Substack (editor’s note: he did not, saw it the next morning) — headed down nice and early to the shopping center-ish spot hours before the midnight showing on opening night, grabbing burgers and going to Dave and Busters. Sounds like a fun night, right?
Then came the time to enter the theater. Upon walking through the doors, one of our compatriots turned and casually asked "I wonder if there are going to be any shootings at these screenings," a sad statement on modern American affairs that freaked me out and made me insanely paranoid.
Then, we witnessed a parent scold his two children to stay quiet throughout the entire movie, which seemed strict but fair given how big of a movie this was for people.
Well, it turned out the guy wanted his kids to shut up so he could Mystery Science Theater 3000 the movie, making repeated comments before his grand finale of screaming "KILL THAT GUY" after Adam Driver stabbed Han Solo.
I told everyone I loved the movie and went to go see it again at 10 am on a Saturday.
Aidan O’Neill
Memories of the movie theater with friends in high school are peak nostalgia, the first venue of teenage freedom. One of my experiences is a reminder of how shitty teenagers can be, specifically me. Summer before freshman year of high school, I got my first cell phone (Pantech Slate) and started texting a girl. She had dated two of my friends already, one super recently, but that didn't stop 14 year-old me. We made plans as a friend group to see The Time Traveler's Wife (not good) and the girl somehow sat between me and the friend she'd just dumped a few months ago. We convinced each other it was still OK to hold hands because, like, he had to get used to it anyway right? My poor friend spent the entire movie hunched forward so we were out of his vision. And eventually, finally, at some point…later on, I felt really bad about it.
A few years ago, my boyfriend Shawn, who you may know from his hit newsletter Even Better, asked if our friends wanted to come to the movies with us to see something called The Card Counter. We all love casino culture in an Ocean’s Eleven way, but none of us looked up the premise of the movie ahead of time. I will see anything Oscar Isaac is in! Everyone but Shawn thought it would be a fun poker movie but it’s actually about military PTSD and human rights violations at Abu Ghraib. It’s like if you thought you were going to a party but you get there and it’s a shiva. The good news is that Oscar Isaac remains hot, even, and especially, under duress.
Shawn Cooke
Many contenders — Deadpool, Battle: Los Angeles, the time an old man yelled TURN OFF YOUR PHONE at the person in front of him, as Tom Cruise’s phone rang during a scene in an all-time favorite, Eyes Wide Shut — but this one goes out to Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. This was an early date with my girlfriend (our second date was The Killing of a Sacred Deer, romantic), so there was the unspoken caution about expressing my active hatred for this hollow, alien (and pretty forgiving) assessment of American decay. But as my groans became audible when Frances McDormand held an imagined conversation between her socks, we both smiled, turned to each other, and acknowledged being on the same page here. An important lesson: even if your Venn diagram of likes as a couple (late period Schrader, for instance) don’t form a perfect circle, being able to call bullshit with ferocity on a common dislike can be just as important.
Despite being legitimately addicted to watching movies, I thankfully don’t feel an urge to go to the multiplex every week just for the hell of it. So, I’ve avoided a lot of the truly pathetic work that Hollywood’s biggest brains are pumping our way. But back in the Sinemia days (remember Sinemia?) I used one of my three monthly credits to check out the mysterious disaster of early 2019, Steven Knight’s Serenity. With some distance, I respect the weird swing — and Jeremy Strong plays the role of “The Rules” quite memorably — but in the moment I remember feeling deep anger toward the screen unlike any theater experience before or since. I bet it plays okay with a group of friends, though.
I struggle to remember any truly terrible moviegoing experiences, just because I think that seeing almost any movie in theaters makes it better than watching it on a small screen. Even if I'm seeing a movie that I'm not super jazzed about, I'm still happy to be eating popcorn in a dark, air conditioned room with a bunch of other people that are watching the same thing as me at the same time, knowing that each of us is having a unique internal reaction to it. It's why I consider this tweet to be one of the greatest pieces of 21st-century film criticism and why I don't trust my own taste in movies the way I trust my taste in music. Anyway, when I tried to think of my worst moviegoing experience, nothing particularly interesting came to mind. It was some Marvel movie that I saw in high school, I don't even remember which one, it was so forgettable. Honestly it might not even have actually been a Marvel movie, but it was a Marvel movie vibes-wise. What I do remember is that we left halfway through to go see Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa, which was infinitely more enjoyable.
Elliott Duea
Worst movie? Probably some bullshit kid film like Fly Me to the Moon or Planet 51. Worst movie I've seen in a theater two days in a row? Max Payne starring Marky Mark. But my worst theater experience was having to walk out on one of the best films ever. It was my 4th cinema walk out (#1 was Like Mike because my 2nd grade tummy hurt, #2 was the Indiana Jones with Shia LaBeouf, only buying tickets so my friend and our girlfriends could sneak into The Strangers, #3 was Year One because it sucked ass.)
And #4 was Hitchcock's Vertigo in 2015, nothing to do with the flawless motion picture, everything to do with the audience surrounding my mom and I. This experience was how I learned that seeing a classic film in a theater is a risky move. Audience members inexplicably laugh at *everything*. It was freaking Vertigo and you'd think we were screening the damn Looney Tunes based on the constant guffaws. Then the woman next to me would not stop hitting her keys against her hip, and my already anxious brain couldn’t handle it. A panic attack ensued, and I started to feel like Vertigo's Scottie with the room spinning around and my vision blurred. I was at a place called Vertigo and it was everything I wish I didn't know (catorce!). I leaned over to my mom just as I did to my Grandpa in 2002 when my tummy hurt at Like Mike and said, “can we go?” We watched the rest at home :)