Top 5 Worst James Bond Films

The James Bond franchise is the longest-running continuous series in film history and, behind "Harry Potter," the second most successful franchise in cinema history.  James Bond is arguably cinema's defining and most enduring archetype. It's not hard to see why: the series has all the puns, gadgets, girls and ludicrous villains you could wish for.
 What people forget is that not all Bond movies are created equal. There are stinkers, even if the movies to date  have offered remarkably consistent entertainment over the past 50 or so years. This list is a celebration of the five worst movies in the series.
Note:  This list does not include the unofficial James Bond films, Never Say Never Again (a remake of Thunderball which brought Sean Connery back during the Roger Moore era) or the parody film Casino Royale starring David Niven. Never Say Never Again and Casino Royale (the first one) have been deemed “not canon" and therefore do not appear on this list.

1. Moonraker

The "Bond In Space" angle is all we need to write Moonraker off as daft, but... the whole script is a messy disaster.  It's easily one of the silliest and worse ones in the series.  It’s the film where Bond goes to space, where Jaws - who had been terrifying - is suddenly a lovestruck gentle giant, where this just happens and everyone carries on trading bons mots -

 In addition, Sir Rodger Moore made for a lousy wisecracking Bond in the series, which was now firmly planted in the cartoon world.

2. Die Another Day

Pierce Brosnan, the second to worst James Bond ever, bids farewell to Bond with a stinker that could fairly be described as his Batman & Robin of the series. There’s nothing not ridiculous about this, whatsoever. Ceaseless digital spectacle (parasailing on a tidal wave is a series nadir), barrel-scraping gadgets (an invisible car?) and quite possibly the worst Bond girl ever make this a cringingly tough sit. When Madonna is your most likable performer (she cameos as a fencing instructor), you know something is majorly off.

3. Quantum Of Solace

So often does the bad accompany the good in life, perhaps out of necessity, so that we may truly appreciate the latter. After the ravishing James Bond reboot Casino Royale – arguably the best in the series to that point – it would appear inevitable that the next film ratchet things down a few notches.

Squandered from the opening, borderline-incoherent car chase onward, this film screams not only of the screenwriters contrived methods of exposition, but the directors unimaginative approach to filmmaking. Clueless is the only way to effectively describe the compilations of shaky medium and close-up shots that pose as action scenes in this movie. It fails to establish any sense of the spatial relationship between the hunter and hunted, they instead play out as motion without progression, like a videogame with respawning opponents and an unlimited ammo count. The follow-up to Royale turned out to be one of the worst of the series.

4. Octopussy

 

Octopussy was the thirteenth of the James Bond films and the fifth one for Roger Moore as 007. It's hard to make this Bond picture more silly or absurd, as it doesn't even make the slightest effort to hold onto a bit of reality. Moore barely seems involved in the story at all and even disguises himself as a clown in one scene, thereby sucking all the dignity out of an otherwise suave and exciting series. Even the worst Bond movies can be entertaining, but OCTOPUSSY seriously pushes the envelope.

5. On Her Majesty's Secret Service

Featuring the stunning nonentity George Lazenby, there are almost no redeeming features in this flick-though there is a wonderful ski chase scene. The 'plot' (a series of glossy set pieces) is the one about 007 tracking down a loony Swiss villain (Savalas) who's (guess what?) threatening the world with some scientific thingamyjig.  Overlong, poorly edited, with loads of sloppy action, this film is the epitome of a series low.

Top 5 "So Bad It's Good" Movies

Once in a while, a work turns out to be so bad, it creates a disruption in the badness continuum, and wraps right around to good. Whatever the reason, a truly horrid piece of work can become an unintentional riot and even get it's own fandom for its lack of quality. 
A So Bad It's Good movie is one that's so bad that you can't suspend your disbelief enough to not laugh at it so you watch it just to riff on it and laugh at it. Keep in mind that even when something is So Bad, It's Good, it's still bad. For all entries on this list, there should be an almost unanimous opinion that they fail entirely at having the sort of appeal they intended. Far less unanimous will be the opinion that they have a sort of appeal that is unintentional.
Note: This list is meant to showcase my individual opinion.

1. Anaconda

Jennifer Lopez is literally being hunted by a huge, thick snake. The puns start with Sir Mix-A-Lot and it's downhill from there.  Based on an absurd premise — that Jon Voight is a professional snake hunter (what?) and he kidnaps documentarians to help him locate the world's largest anaconda (why?) by using them as live bait (sure okay?) — nothing in this movie makes sense and it is glorious.

2. Battlefield Earth

 Set in the year 3000, a millennium after the Psychlo master race invades Earth and enslaves humanity, this has Travolta as a 10-foot-tall alien who gets around in dreadlocks, nose plugs and KISS boots. Even more over-the-top is his performance, which is all mwu-ha-ha-ing and an almost Shakespearean declamation of eeeeeeevil! Barry Pepper's terrible, too, bringing Christian Bale levels of intensity to his cave warrior. What also makes this badly watchable is that director Roger Christian shoots every scene on a weird askew angle.

3.  Black Devil Doll from Hell

This is a no-budget African-American fare about a virginal, church-going woman who buys a cursed ventriloquist's dummy that wants to have sex with her. Did I mention that the doll wants to have sex with her?  Did I mention that the doll does have sex with her? And she likes it? The highlight/lowlights also include a Super Mario Bros.-esque Casio keyboard score and a 7 minute opening credit scene.  Plus, close-ups of the puppet's fully functional tongue, covered in what looks like vanilla soft-serve ice cream.

4. Peopletoys

This is exactly that movie that Tarantino, Rodriguez, Roth, Zombie, and Wright were parodying in Grindhouse. It’s that dirty, super low-budget 70s drive-in film that is so stuck in the culture of the 70s that it’s damn near lovable.  The execution is poor, the deaths are ridiculous, and you have a young Leif Garrett killing adults before he was the Justin Bieber of his generation. All attempts at being artistic are tasking and laughable. There’s a death in slow-motion that is incomprehensible and goes on forever.

5. Trolls 2

The film starred an unknown and hypnotically strange group of Utah non-actors and does not contain any “trolls” at all. No, the beasts of the perfect B-movie are actually vegetarian, shape-shifting GOBLINS whose cuisine of choice is humans who’ve been turned into plants. The joy of this movie is that neither the crew nor the cast is able to convey anything resembling real human interactions, reactions, or emotions at any time during the film.  The result is 94 minutes of aliens pretending to be humans pretending to be in a movie where they pretend to be threatened by other aliens pretending to be goblins.