10 Groundbreaking Films That Are Actually Terrible
This is probably not what ‘bad influence’ is supposed to mean.
When something’s pioneering, hugely influential, perhaps even trailblazing, people tend to put it on a pedestal. They’re not always wrong to do so - after all, influential, gamechanging movies are bound to be classics of their genre, right?
Well, no. The only maxim in Hollywood that’s ever been proven 100% true 100% of the time is screenwriting legend William Goldman’s motto: nobody knows anything. No one in the movie industry has any clue what’s going to work and what isn’t, and they never have: so which means that when something does work, it tends to get slavishly copied until everyone’s sick of it.
So sometimes ‘hugely influential’ is just shorthand for ‘hugely commercially successful’ - and you can’t ever guarantee that a movie’s success is going to be inextricably linked to its quality.
However, in other cases these monumental films of the past simply haven't weathered well. Perhaps events since their release have coloured the way we look at them and the attitudes that gave birth to them. Perhaps they’ve lost a lot of their lustre in the intervening years - or perhaps, stripped of the weight of so much accrued cultural baggage and held up on their own, they were never especially good films to begin with.
Here are ten examples - ten influential but terrible movies that inspired, and continue to inspire the moviemakers that followed it despite their shortcomings. Time to make burgers out of those sacred cows...
10. The Blair Witch Project (1999)
There were cheapass found footage horror movies long before The Blair Witch Project, of course - the notorious Cannibal Holocaust immediately springs to mind.
However, Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick's no-budget superhit created a tsunami of imitators, some actually rather good, some DTV-terrible. As far as its influence goes, the film’s place in cinema history is inarguable.
Here’s the thing, though - take away the hype, the legacy and that innovative immersive marketing campaign, and The Blair Witch Project is not a good or even entertaining movie. For about seventy minutes, very little happens while the camera focuses - because it has no choice - on the only three actors in it.
Actually, the camera barely even does that. The found footage conceit and the dodgy production concept mean that we’re treated to some of the hammiest improvised acting ever seen - only out of shot, off-frame or out of focus, which is what happens when you get three inexperienced actors to shoot your movie themselves.
In fairness to Sanchez and Myrick, their canny marketing transformed this bug into a feature… but perhaps it would have been better as a taut, nail-biting thirty-minute short. We’ll never know, because the whole thing clocks in at a turgid eighty-one minutes of nothing at all, shot and cut like cr*p.