I wanted to separate these movies from my other bad movies page because these are not absolutely horrible like those. However, these are movies with humongous budgets which nevertheless succeed in being incredibly bad when compared to even mediocre movies with similar budgets.
And no, you won't see Star Wars: The Phantom Menace in this list. I know that movie has been panned to death by most people, but I simply disagree with them: It might not be the most brilliant movie of all times, but it isn't bad either. It's not the type of badness I'm talking about.
What better start than the most horrendous big-budget movie of all time.
This movie had an astonishing 100 million dollars budget, and it's worse than most movies made with less than 1 million. Heck, I would say it's worse than most movies made with less than 100k dollars. And I'm talking about every aspect, including special effects. (The amateur movie Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning had a budget of 20k dollars and it had computer graphics at least comparable to Pluto Nash.)
I really can't understand where they managed to sink those millions because you really can't see them in the movie. I suppose the vast majority went to Eddie Murphy who, by the way, acts like this was the lowest point in his entire career. (Anyone expecting this to be a typical Eddie Murphy comedy will get completely disappointed because it isn't. Even the cover art is very deceiving in this aspect: It looks like a comedy but it isn't.)
This movie got about 7 million dollars at the box office worldwide (most of which came most probably because people were fooled by Eddie Murphy appearing on the poster), meaning that the movie lost over 90 million dollars, making it one of the least profitable movies of all times. And that really isn't a surprise after you see the movie.
There are a few (too few) places where the special effects are acceptable, but this is not used consistently: At some places the special effects simply suck really, really bad. There are also many places with obnoxious physical inaccuracies (such as dust clouds forming on the surface of the moon when the door of a vehicle hits the ground).
There are big-budget movies with disastrous box office where the reason
for that is not at all clear (only attributable to the random nature of
the collective human mind), but in this case there just isn't anything
unclear: The movie simply sucks at all possible levels.
What happens when you mix King Kong, Godzilla, The Lord of the Rings, a budget
which is way too large for their own good, and a script which was probably
drafted by a 10-years-old boy? The answer is D-war (aka. Dragon Wars): A movie
with cool CGI but with such an utterly naive plot and script that it makes
you puke.
If you have read my other bad movies page you'll know that a common complaint I have about really bad movies is that their script is just infantile rubbish, with completely braindead dialogue. Well, the script of this movie is exactly like that. The majority of the dialogue is utterly simplistic and naive, exactly what a 10yo who has seen too many cheap movies would write.
The worst part of this movie is that at parts it doesn't make any sense (too many things are completely unexplained and illogical), and it doesn't even attempt to make sense. It's like the script writers thought 5 minutes about how they could create something coherent and logical of all this, and then just said f*ck it, it doesn't really matter as long as they use cool CGI.
The ending is the worst of all. (How the heck did they end up in such a place? The movie doesn't even attempt to explain.) It had like 5 endings, one after another (each ending interrupting the previous one at the last second), each one lamer than the previous. A surprising twist ending would actually have saved this movie (and I would have probably not included it in this page if that was the case), but not surprisingly the ending was predictable, lame, infantile and rubbish.
The only redeeming thing about this movie is that it's not a Hollywood
movie. It's rare to see movies of this caliber from anyone else than
Americans, which gets one point from me. Great attempt, but next time
please hire some professional script writers, will you?