Don’t get me started on Tyler Perry. He frustrates me to no end. There’s a great episode about him on the Boondocks. It satirizes him to perfection.
As much as I really dislike his movies, I respect what he’s done. Now. I wish he would sit down and produce other people’s work.
It is NOT cool to tease a mutant fish man story and then not deliver. NOT cool.
Hmmmm … I wonder if any sargassum was involved.
The weed of deceit?
Totally agree with @MisterScott. Saw someone point to Zach Snyder, but compared to Bay, Snyder is a veritable Orson Wells. Have to admit I liked Watchmen as I knew it was the only shot we’d ever get at seeing something even similar to the source material on screen, V for Vendetta as I had never seen the source material or heard of Snyder, and 300 before he tried to make every movie since resemble it. I’d like to also nominate Christopher Nolan. The only director I know who can steal a vaguely interesting idea from another director, and then dumb it down to the point where it ceases to be anything resembling intelligent or coherent for that matter, and then blame everyone else for not being seen as a visionary. I have never seen a movie by him I haven’t seen someone else do better on a lower budget. A steamer of a director if there ever was one.
*Edited due to half awake confusion between Christopher Nolan and Nolan Ryan.
To quote Monty Python, I’m sorry, I have a cold.
Amir Shervan richly deserves his place in this thread. If anyone’s interested, all five movies he made after coming to the USA are available on Tubi TV (as is much, much more glorious trash).
Samurai Cop is, as it turns out, one of his better efforts.
I think Snyder should have become a cinematographer instead of a director. He’s so visually orientated that his storytelling ends up lacking sometimes. His characters are pieces to move to get to certain shots and there can be such poor characterization. He makes some compelling shots but his characters tend not to be well crafted. I have liked some movies and hated others.
Uwe Boll is an obvious answer, but he is deservedly not that well known. And there’s the brilliant team of Jason Friedberg, Aaron Seltzer, who would probably be embarrassed if they ever made a good movie. There are major directors whose work I actively try to avoid – Michael Bay, Zack Snyder, Dennis Dugan (Adam Sandler’s partner in crime). Brett Ratner would be on this list, but I kind of liked Tower Heist.
thank you for bringing this into my life
edit - this is like a reverse Mandela Effect. i was neck-deep in z-grade dtv action movies in the '90s and i never heard of this entire Heavenerverse. it’s like i’ve skipped dimensions!
I will get disagreements on this, but I don’t think Terrence Malick is a good director. I think he’s pompous as hell and his movies are filled with a bunch of extra nonsense that just makes them longer for absolutely no good reason.
I’m also not a fan of Robert Altman for similar reasons, although I also don’t care for how meandering and plotless his movies are.
I can see where you’re coming from. At the same time, I like directors such as Tarkovsky and Godard, and I’m sure they drive some viewers spare. I’m not a huge fan of Malick or Altman either, particularly the latter, but I can see where they do possess some directorial chops. The ones I’ve put on this list I think are either functionally illiterate when it comes to cinematic structure, or they just simply didn’t bother to learn film-making and think (like every 13 year old boy) that you can just put cool junk on a screen and it equals a movie.
But I feel ya. The Altman take on Popeye makes me want to go swimming in cinderblock shoes.
WHat’s a real shame is that in interviews, Uwe Boll knows his cinema and can actually come off as a decent guy. There was an interview he did with joe Dante that was practically charming.
I haven’t seen everything Tyler Perry’s done, but I’ve seen enough that were so lazy, drawn out, quickly whipped together, to pass on the rest. He’s in the Michael Bay camp of he knows what will make money and has it down to precision.
He also has used a lot of that money for his community as well as other filmmakers, and has woken up some studios to the box office for diverse audiences, both race and faith.
That has helped get more black directors onto major tentpole releases, as well as funding for distinct voices that are finally getting more Oscar / critical attention.
So maybe BOO! A Madea Halloween was cheap drag gags, old people with potty mouths, and probably three days of filming, that doesn’t float my boat, but glad to see it happen for others.
David A. Prior has an amazing resume, but I first discovered him via the Deadly Prey series. But check it all out.
Neil Breen is fascinating, almost hypnotically bad until your brain breaks. Fateful Findings, Twisted Pair, I am Here Now…
Locally we grew up watching Don Dohler’s microbudget movies, featuring places we saw all the time. I was 30 before I realized anyone outside of Maryland knew of him.
David DeCoteau - just go to his filmography. But make sure it includes the nine different names he has directed under. Everything from Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-a-Rama to A Talking Cat?!?
He’s also the guy who directed the Bellarian sequences in Space Mutiny, which were slapped on in the eleventh hour to get it up to feature length.
I didn’t know this! But it makes sense now. The Bellarian thread didn’t exactly … go anywhere.
Lars von Trier.
For the simple reason that he abandoned the rules of the Dogme 95 “manifesto” he helped create. So he’s a traitor to his own cause.
Also, his “movies” are disgusting trash, but that’s just, like, my opinion, man.
As a Dogme fan and proponent, I feel ya.
Julien Donkey-Boy is a good filmic introduction to the school for folks who haven’t seen any yet, since it’s the first American film certified by the movement.
Don’t know how Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg haven’t been brought up yet, but I’m nominating those guys. I worked at a movie theater during the time their Date Movie/Epic Movie/Disaster Movie trilogy came out, and we had televisions screens above the concession stand that would cycle through ads and trailers. I had to listen to that friggin’trailer for Epic Movie dozens of times in a single workday, which added up to hundreds of times. I did not get paid enough.
I love bad movies but bad comedies are torture. I can make cases for some directors whose films would be considered total dreck because they had parts that I laughed at, and therefore got some enjoyment out of them. I know “enjoyable” doesn’t necessarily mean “good,” but I feel like it should count for something. But a bad comedy? That’s the worst kind of bad movie, the kind that I don’t think I could even handle. The bits and pieces I’ve seen are more than enough to put me off of anything they’ve ever done. Ew.
You are so right. I once picked Couples Retreat as a date night movie, not something I would ever watch any other time. It was abysmal. If a computer had written this script it would have failed the Turing test.