Quotes from Roger Ebert trashing dumb movies

I think the best Roger Ebert reviews are for the worst movies, at least in terms of fun quotes. Fortunately, Ebert's official home page lets you search by movie rating, so you can get all the bad movie reviews in one listing.


"The movie is being revived around the country for midnight cult showings. Midnight is not late enough."
             -Review of The Beyond

"That makes Hellbound: Hellraiser II an ideal movie for audiences with little taste and atrophied attention spans who want to glance at the screen occasionally and ascertain that something is still happening up there. If you fit that description, you have probably not read this far, but what the heck, we believe in full-service reviews around here. You're welcome."

"Maybe another 200 cigarettes would have helped; coughing would be better than some of this dialogue."

"'It will obliterate your senses!' reports David Gillin, who obviously writes autobiographically."
"No matter what they're charging to get in, it's worth more to get out."
             -Review of Armageddon

"Mr. Magoo is transcendently bad. It soars above ordinary badness as the eagle outreaches the fly."

"According to the press kit, Straight to Hell was "filmed in three weeks on a shoestring budget of $1 million," but looks more as if it were filmed in one week on Cox's MasterCard."

"Did you know that if a certain kind of worm learns how to solve a maze, and then you grind it up and feed it to other worms, the other worms will then be able to negotiate the maze on their first try? That's one of the scientific nuggets supplied in Phantoms, a movie, based on the popular Dean Koontz novel, that seems to have been made by grinding up other films and feeding them to this one."

"You know that a lot of critics praised Steve Martin in The Jerk, but you liked him better after he started acting more normal. You are not a promising candidate to see Ace Ventura: Pet Detective."

"A sullen lout who lurks about looking like a charade with the answer, 'Leonardo DiCaprio.'"
             -describing a character in Marie Baie des Anges

"I am informed that 5,000 cockroaches were used in the filming of Joe's Apartment. That depresses me, but not as much as the news that none of them were harmed during the production."

"Through a stroke of good luck, the entire third reel of the film was missing the day I saw it. I went back to the screening room two days later, to view the missing reel. It was as bad as the rest, but nothing could have saved this film. As my colleague Gene Siskel observed, 'If the third reel had been the missing footage from Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons, this movie still would have sucked.'"
             -Review of Little Indian, Big City

"Last week I hosted the first Overlooked Film Festival at the University of Illinois, for films that have been unfairly overlooked. If I ever do a festival of films that deserve to be overlooked, Friends & Lovers is my opening night selection."

"I stopped taking notes on my Palm Pilot and started playing the little chess game.
             -Review of Masterminds

"John Waters' Pink Flamingos has been restored for its 25th anniversary revival, and with any luck at all that means I won't have to see it again for another 25 years. If I haven't retired by then, I will."
             (Note: This movie is listed in the Ebert database as having a "zero stars" rating, but Ebert explains at the end of the review: "I am not giving a star rating to "Pink Flamingos", because stars simply seem not to apply. It should be considered not as a film but as a fact, or perhaps as an object.")

"They arrive on this mortal coil (Shakespeare) from that level 'higher than the sphery chime' (Milton), and we expect their speech to flow in 'heavenly eloquence' (Dryden). But when they open their little mouths, what do they say? 'Diaper gravy'--a term used four times in the movie, according to a friend who counted (Cleland)."
             -Review of Baby Geniuses

"Going to see Godzilla at the Palais of the Cannes Film Festival is like attending a satanic ritual in St. Peter's Basilica."
             ("Godzilla" included a "Mayor Ebert" character with an advisor named "Gene", of which Ebert wrote: "These characters are a reaction by Emmerich and Devlin to negative Siskel and Ebert reviews of their earlier movies ('Stargate', 'Independence Day'), but they let us off lightly; I fully expected to be squished like a bug by Godzilla.")


Other stuff I've posted here:

AutoDave: the automated Dave Barry column generator
Re-usable love poems



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