Worst movie, film, short, video, etc. you had to watch for school or work?

[pstokely]

For school I'm talking about from nursery school all the way through grad school (or highest level of education completed).In school, I had to watch The Buttercream Gang and other stuff produced by the Utah straight to video factory "Feature Films for Families". Someone needs to riff this. I don't really remember much more about what I was forced to watch in school but I remember they were taped off the PBS station or on Laserdisc (who bought those players and giant discs besides videophones and schools?). I'm too young to have watched Centron or Coronet public domain shorts, much less anything on a film projector except for a few filmstrips.

Here's some Buttercream Gang highlights
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOWW-r0AWr8

[ghostsofgiants]

1. Armageddon for grade 8 language arts class.

x(

[kwassa]

2. Bloodborne Pathogens

and we have to watch it every year. Made in 1990 and fascinating for hairstyles and huge glasses and shoulder pads.


http://www.safetytrainingnetwork.com/cgi/view_services.cgi?request=detail&prod_num=1534

[Solon]

3. In Highschool, we watched Sliver for a class...

I forget which one, but I will say that it was uncensored. Don't know if that qualifies as bad or not, but it was controversial at the time! :)

[philosophie_en_rose]

4. The "Miracle" of Life

:scared:

[Archae]

5. Those Driver's Ed gore flicks.

Yech.

[Love Bug]

21. Yes! "Mechanized Death" comes to mind

What did it for me was when the State Trouper pulled the dead baby out from under a car. Over 30 years later and I still remember that. Thanks for the trauma...

[onager]

22. Red Asphalt!!!

Wasn't that the one with the 2X4 driven thru a guy's head? Everybody in my class thought that was pretty cool.

BTW, Google "Educational Archives" and you can find a lot of these things hanging around the internets. Not only Driver's Ed, but Sex Ed, anti-porn flicks produced by that great humanitarian Charles Keating, etc. etc.

[foxfeet]

27. Oh, I'm not alone! The whole school had to watch "Mechanized Death" in the gym.

We had kids fainting right and left. One girl fell out of the bleachers when she fainted and a teacher was quick enough to break her fall, throwing her own back out in the process. I blame that movie for contributing to my panic disorder when driving on the freeway.

[dubeskin]

6. There have been so many I can't count

From the AIDS one starring Gandalf in Health to watching Spirit: Stallion of the Chimmeron in Spanish, to all the sports-based movies we watched on rainy days in P.E. to the poorly made geometry videos which are animated as if they were produced in the 80s and were still on VHSs, I've seen quite a few, and really, there are too many to pull one out as the worst. Although, I can say that the 70s video on Isotopes in Chemistry was pretty atrocious.

[Adsos Letter]

7. In the Army back in the early 70's....

repeated showings of a film on chemical warfare that involved the application of said chemicals to staked-down goats...with the ensuing results recorded for posterity...

:scared:

[Broken_Hero]

8. Quest for Fire, grunt, grunt, ooh...strawberries! nt

[Adsos Letter]

12. Oh man, that movie was...painful...

[Chan790]

9. Starbucks training films...

you know, the one they closed every store for 2 hours to show us. Fucking abysmal man. I have heard the voice of them most boring man alive and his name is Howard.

I now understand why his passion is coffee...the man is a verbal general anesthesia drip.

[MrCoffee]

20. First thing I thought of was a Starbucks training film

The film ended with a shot of Earth from space, the whole globe, which was then slowly taken over by the Starbucks logo...a deft piece of filmmaking, I thought.

[MountainLaurel]

33. They've got to be better than the McDonald's training films

From the one horrific summer I worked for the evil empire.

[mcctatas]

10. Night and Fog...

in 9th grade history and my asshole teacher wouldn't let me leave the room, I was physically ill. Then in college I had a Peace Studies class and we watched this movie called "The One" about South African Apartheid, at least in college I was able to just get up and leave...

freaking sadists...

[Adsos Letter]

13. I remember "Night and Fog"...

pretty eye-opening for this 9th grader in the late sixties... :scared:

[mcctatas]

23. I saw it in the late 80's...

I wonder if they still use it? My daughter just started at the same high school I attended and I will raise holy hell if they think they are going to make her watch it!

[LeftyMom]

11. Some horrible childbirth video in health class.

It was really out of step with modern practices. Nobody who isn't a complete retard encourages mothers to labor/deliver in the lithotomy position anymore. For that matter, laboring/delivering lying down isn't a good idea- upright positions open the pelvis wider, reduce tearing and get a nice little assist from our friend gravity.

[elshiva]

14. Any of the sex ed movies. Especially, the ones

that actually showed the penis growing through puberty. :evilgrin:

[Amerigo Vespucci]

15. Elliot Gould as Phillip Marlowe in "The Long Goodbye"

I had a class at San Jose State in which we'd read a novel and, in class, watch the film adaptation (VERY cool class). We then had to write a term paper comparing the two. I think we did six books total. I'm a huge Raymond Chandler fan. I told my professor "Elliot Gould plays ONE character in whatever movie he's in. ELLIOT GOULD."

He got a pained look on his face and said "Oh, come AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWNNNN..."

But that movie really bit the big one. I guess Gould has to get the obligatory props for M*A*S*H, but beyond that, he's one hell of an annoying one trick pony.

:toast:

[noonwitch]

16. The Red Balloon

Words cannot express how much I hate that movie. Kindergarten is too young to be exposed to french existentialism.

[petronius]

36. I love The Red Balloon! For kindergartners, however, it's an odd choice.

Actually, it sounds like an almost cruel choice for that age group... :shrug:

[Sequoia]

17. I remember watching a bunch of old 1950s stuff

about behaving like a lady, etc. The movies I remember that were the best were the nature type put out by the Moody Bible Institute. Their time-lapse photography were top of the line. Very well done and sometime quite clever. One I recall was about how your inner body worked and they showed little people inside you pumping your heart and doing other things like your body was a factory and they were doing all the work. One girl, who I thought was smart, actually believed it! We were in the 6th grade.

[LanternWaste]

18. The Outsiders.

The Outsiders.
I think Coppola's evil twin brother Skippy directed that particular crap-fest.

Luckily, it was my Sr. year, and I could skip classes with impunity. :)

[onager]

19. West Side Story

In a film class. I had avoided it for years, and finally seeing it only confirmed my innate good sense in avoiding it for so long.

It jumped the Sharks (and Jets) for me in the very first scene, with these two b-a-a-d-ass street gangs...dancing and singing! I know musicals require suspension of disbelief. But in this case, my suspended disbelief creaked, groaned, and finally crashed into the Yawning Chasm Of Utter Unbelievable Bullshit.

I was watching it in Los Angeles, so I amused myself by trying to imagine the Crips and Bloods dancing to settle a turf war in da 'hood.

And these are Manhattan street gangs. Give me a break! These losers couldn't afford the subway fare to Manhattan, let alone afford to live there. Speaking of realism, as the old lady of a gang leader, Natalie Wood should have been living on welfare with the 13 or so kids she would have already whelped.

Then there's the casting. Russ Tamblyn as a gang leader? I can't imagine much worse, short of casting Adam Sandler in a biopic about Socrates.

I know, I know: 10 Oscars, Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, cinema classic, yatta-yatta-yatta.

Here I'll have to steal a line from an IMDB reviewer who was skewering another sacred cow, The Sound of Music:

I don't care if millions of people saw it and liked it. Millions of people saw and liked Hitler.

On edit: First Runner-up, the envelope, please...!

Gone With The Wind

Again, I don't care that it's supposed to be an untouchable movie classic. It just sucks. From the whitewashing of slavery to Vivien Leigh chewing the scenery to Clark Gable sleepwalking thru most of the movie.

However, you should know that I grew up in the Deep South. And every few years, this thing came back to the local movie theaters, much like a Biblical plague. And naturally, every female in my extended family had to see the bastard and drag me along.

It's a damn shame that Butterfly McQueen is only remembered for playing Prissy in this horror. Google her name and you'll learn about a fine humanitarian who was an atheist. (Full disclosure: so am I.)

[charlie and algernon]

24. Awful movie showing Cats and dogs getting clubbed to death

Horrible movie in Biology showing the graphic conditions animals go through in Asia, specifically the ones about to be eaten. :puke:

[mainegreen]

25. That black and white 1950s sex ed movie with the 'professor' and his diagrams.

Dear lord, why they thought a bunch of 5th graders would be able to watch that without herniating a disk laughing is beyond me.

We had to sit there and *not* laugh or we'd get detentions. I think I pulled a muscle trying not to laugh.

That was a loooooong film.

[insanity]

26. Timmy the Tooth

[Lydia Leftcoast]

28. An anti-drug film that started with a girl in a jail cell

writhing on her cot in full withdrawal from heroin--all because she took up (cigarette) smoking in high school, which led to marijuana smoking, and we all know what that leads to. :sarcasm: Along the way, she became a call girl to support her habit. This was symbolized by a man in an expensive suit leering as he placed a mink stole on her shoulders. Then she became a streetwalker, which was symbolized by having her staggering down the street looking as if she'd just been exhumed, grabbing random men, and whispering suggestions in their ears.

This was in the early 1960s. Even as a rather sheltered eighth grader I knew it was ridiculous.

In the realm of entertainment, my junior high music teachers liked to show us a film of Naughty Marietta with Nelson Eddy and Jeanette McDonald, which would be bad enough by itself, but it was cut to fit a 50-minute class period, so not only was it unbearably campy to a bunch of seventh and eighth graders, but the plot made no sense.

[unpossibles]

30. "LSD: Trip or TRAP!?" nt

[bamacrat]

29. I loved the Buttercream Gang.

Theres something that sounds dirty but isnt. It was corny and I wouldnt want to watch it today so as not to ruin it. We had to watch a testicular cancer video my senior year of highschool that demonstrated how to do a self check.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

31. Worker safety film.

Lift with your knees, not with your back. Don't fall off of ladders. That sort of thing.

The woman who narrated the film, and I'm pretty sure she was a washed up actress from the porn industry, kept talking about not injuring your "skuh-leet-ul" system. I had no idea what this "skuh-leet-ul" system she kept talking about was. Finally, after ten minutes or so I figured she meant skeletal system.

[noonwitch]

32. a sex education movie from college (very politically incorrect inside)

It was a british movie and it was about handicapped people and their sex lives. The people all had CP and speech problems, coupled with british accents. It was an old enough movie that the narrator referred to the people with CP as "spastics", but new enough that it was in color (or should I say colour).

I know it is bad of me to say this, but it was horrible to watch without laughing. We were told we'd get an F if we laughed, so I left.

[XemaSab]

34. I've taken HAZWOPER

about 15 films of people falling, getting electrocuted, having trenches collapse, getting mangled, and so forth....

Good times. :)

[dawgmom]

35. Ohio State Police Auto Accident Footage -- Driver's Ed

In the 70s, the Ohio State Police had this horrific film that they showed you when you took Drivers Education in the Midwest. It was designed to scare the be-jeezus out of teenagers, and inspire them to drive safely. Truly grisly stuff, and the climax was a shot of kid with no head. People would actually pass out and throw up when they watched it.