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Let's Talk Bad Movies: What Films Have You Walked Out On?

By Tori Preston | Miscellaneous | February 27, 2018 |

By Tori Preston | Miscellaneous | February 27, 2018 |


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Today Kristy admitted that she gave Mute two complete viewings, just trying to wrap her head around why it didn’t work. Last week I rewatched the 1998 Lost in Space movie, thinking that I could stomach its awfulness again for science (I did… barely). What I’m saying is that we’ve all seen bad movies. Sometimes we’ve seen bad movies multiple times! Sometimes there is great joy to be found in bad movies! So what does it take for a movie to be SO bad that you actually just walk out on it?

Ever since we heard that JLaw gave up on The Phantom Thread after three minutes, the Overlords have been kicking this question around — and we don’t have the answer. Overall we’re a fairly hardy bunch, choosing to get our money’s worth and stick things out to the bitter end rather than quitting. Sure, you could say that “quitting” is just another word for “valuing your time” — and we have been pushed to that point on occasion. Not often, of course, but sometimes even we’ll opt to stand awkwardly around a lobby smelling popcorn rather than finish watching something we hate. The thing is, there’s no rhyme or reason to it. Personally, I remember one sleep over when I pulled the sleeping bag over my head and gave up on Meet Joe Black after the first 45 minutes of it. That was back in the days when we rented our sleepover movies on VHS, and that pile of shit came on 2 tapes. And I was angsty AF, so you would have thought “Death Comes To Earth And Falls In Love” would have been my jam. But no.

Other movies the staff have shut off or walked out of include:

- Crazy/Beautiful

- Mallrats

- Lost in London, the live Woody Harrelson movie

- The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

- A Star Wars prequel (I refuse to do the legwork to figure out which one, because I can’t remember them anyway, but apparently it was the one where Natalie Portman fell out of spaceship)

- The Cremaster Cycle, that Matthew Barney art thing that’s so long you literally can’t watch all of it anyway

- Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them

- Batman & Robin

But for almost all of those films, someone else claimed to love them! Or tolerate them. Or maybe they just never bothered trying to watch them in the first place. Or we were being paid to review them, and walking out would be like handing TK a victory, so pride kept our butts planted in those seats.

So where do you draw the line? What will make you turn something off, or walk out, after you’ve already given it a chance? What movies drove you away?