Worst WW2 movies ever made?

One of the worse WW2 movies was a movie about a squadron of riflemen that fought in the western front in 1944 tasked with the mission of finding and rescuing a single soldier because his mom would like that. I don't remember it's name thought.

 

I smell the movie saving pvt ryan--in that post :lol::lol:

 

Must say I agree with most peoples opinions here and is happy to see more people see those movies as bad and inaccurate.
One movie I bought and was very disappointed of:
The mosquito division.

What a crap it was, the air combat looks awful and the story is crap. It takes place in 1944 and the Germans attacks their airfield in England with some unrealistic looking Me BF 109s! I couldn't believe my eyes then, by then Lufftwaffe couldn't get anywhere near England and yet drop bombs and strafe the airfield. A story about Germans taking prisoners to a castle and a secret weapon and they shall bomb it and release the prisoners. The tank at the end looks awful and does not look anywhere near as a tiger does. The barrel bumbs up and down as it was made of plastic when it moves. Ugh. Crap. Stay away from it.

 

As a service to my esteemed rouges of WW2Forums I Belasar, your humble servant, have spent whole minutes scanning the pages of this thread to determine what are the worst WWII movies ever made. Employing highly suspect accounting techniques and deeply flawed logic, I believe I have compiled the most accurate list possible* Enjoy!

No. 1 Pearl Harbor 30 votes. You guys have some taste afterall!

No. 2 The Thin Red Line 13 votes Everyone should have a copy of this film, cheaper and safer than sleeping pills

No. 3 Windtalkers 11 votes Rooting for the Japanese!

No. 4 Battle of the Bulge 10 votes They just don't make German tanks the way they used to, but then if you don't have the urge to invade a small country after the tankers start singing, your just not a man's man!

No. 5 U-571 9 votes It could have been worse, Bon Jovi might have pulled out a guitar and started singing during the depth charge attack.

No. 6 Inglorious Bastards 7 votes When you make an homage film to a bad rip-off of the Dirty Dozen, what can you hope for really? ( I confess i did like the SS Col.)

No. 7 Battle for the Last Panzer 6 votes Never saw it, so nothing pithy to say.

No. 8 SS Doomtrooper 5 votes Same as above.

No. 9 Wheels of Terror 4 votes All I can say is that I must have better taste as I havn't seen these three turkey's

No. 10 A tie Memphis Belle, The Dirty Dozen Midway and The Last Drop 3 votes Mixed bag, 1 I liked, 2 were OK and one I haven't seen.

There you have it my fellow rouges!

* The Pearl Harbor count may be off, I think took off the 23 extra 'I hate Pearl Harbor' Votes from Carl, but one or two extra might have got in any way.

 

Quoted from page 2...

I have to agree, pointing out that the British Government had to intervene and forced the film makers to to put a disclaimer at the beginning of the film.
Insulting an entire nation has to be toppers in defining the worst of hollywood historical rewriting.

"The Enigma Encryption Machine was discovered by the British, taken from a captured German U-Boat, the U-110 and not the U-571 as the movie indicates."

 

No "Hell in the Pacific"?
(Lee Marvin gets to overact for the hundredth time in his career, bawling, yelling, gesticulating and contorting his face into a thousand different positions. At least he wasn't drawling a song as well, as in "Paint Your Wagon.")

No "Hellcats of the Navy"?
(Ronald Reagan swaggers through this tawdry drama, with the real attraction the adoring shots of Nancy worshipping her hero Ronnie in all sorts of poses. The sound-track is off the scale for flag waving dynamics, and the stock footage is possibly the grainiest ever. With two Reagans for the price of one, this is bad movie heaven for poor taste cinema buffs or fans of Ron and Nancy,( should any of them still be alive).

No "Escape to Athena"?
(Sonny Bono making us all wish he had stayed in television with Cher as he smirks his way through possibly the worst performance by an American actor playing a foriegner of all time. Mr Bono is so confident in his acting ability that he makes no attempt what-so-ever to effect a foreign accent, preferring to treat us to his native twang. Claudia Cardinali is eyewash for the background, despite having a lead credit. German soldiers run in front of the guns of the lead characters, and if anyone recalls the plot after the end of the film they were listening far too closely for comfort. Strictly for the birds)

 

Brother Belasar, you have way too much time on your hands to make a list like that. But I like it!

 

It's so bad it is free online. Watch "The Battle of the Last Panzer" (1969) Online - Free Online Movies
Thankfully the scam survey pop-up will thwart you from wasting the bandwidth downloading it.

 

Throwing in my 2 cents worth...

I protest the No. 4 ranking of Battle of the Bulge in the hall of shame... there are plenty of WWII-themed movies a lot more crappy than this one. Granted the movie takes indecent liberties with history, however I have trouble imagining an historically faithful theatrical film with the requisite dramatic arc on the subject of Kampfgruppe Peiper that would be particularly exciting -- Peiper gets his orders and forms his battle group, which then advances into Belgium over a totally inadequate road, fights some short engagements, massacres at lot of PoWs and civilians, captures some fuel, wanders the back roads of the Ambleve valley looking for bridges which blow up before he can cross, cusses out the American combat engineers who've thwarted him, runs out of gas, hoofs it back to Kraut-land. The End.

Now a movie about Jochen Peiper and the Malmedy massacre, there's a potential blockbuster... It starts with the elderly Peiper fighting it out with avenging French assassins who decide to settle the Malmedy account on Bastille Day, 1976. The next morning investigating detectives look over the burned wreckage of Peiper's home finding his body. "Who was he?" asks the young cop. "You don't know about Peiper?" replies the seasoned veteran, then cut to 1944 -- a stunningly handsome Waffen-SS light colonel mounts his tank near the head of a single-file column of 100 panzers. He consults his watch angrily. "16 hours late! Damn!" he snaps. "Get moving!" Then a little exposition to fill in the background. Next we see the U.S. 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion encounter Kampfgruppe Peiper nearly head-on. A listless small arms firefight ensues followed by a mass surrender of the helpless Americans... dissolve to the discovery of the frozen corpses, the capture of Peiper, interrogation, trial, sentencing, appeals and politics in Washington, Joe McCarthy weighs in with some anti-Semitic demagoguery, Peiper's death sentence is commuted. He's released, but still an unrepentant SS officer underneath... Now that's a movie.

I can see Christian Bale testing for the role of Peiper, though he's not quite good-looking enough. An ideal Peiper would have those big, innocent-looking blue eyes which can charm or terrify depending on his mood. Bale always looks a little menacing, which is wrong for Peiper. Incidently, I think the choice of Robert Shaw for the role of Oberst Hessler is one of the weakness of Battle of the Bulge because he lacks the attractiveness of a classic villain. He starts out cynical and finishes fanatical, not a formula for empathy. (That's the secret of writing a good villain, btw, make the reader empathize with the bad guy). The historic "Jake" Peiper is just that, a classic villain -- a compelling and seductive exterior disguising a core of Evil.

Anybody care to collaborate with me on the screenplay?

 

I personally like Battle of the Bulge, despite its flaws hence my comment. Peiper would make an interesting subject for a film, but I dobt it could be made considering the subject matter.

 

I believe 'Hell in the Pacific' got a couple of votes, and 'Escape to Athena' one, but I think "Hellcats' got a pass. Then again after about 10 pages all the letters started to jumble up on me

 

Battle of the Bulge 4th!?!
It may be not a realistic movie about World War 2, but it is definitely one of my all time WW2 classics!

The same for the Dirty Dozen and Memphis Belle. They don't make films like that anymore...
But SS Doomtrooper, The Last Drop, Pearl Harbor... come on, those movies are really bad.

PS: if you want to see a really good movie about the attack on Pearl Harbor, watch the movie: Tora! Tora! Tora!

 

If you really want to watch a disgusting WW2 movie, rent "Miracle at St. Anna". Possibly edges out Pearl Harbor for worst WW2 movie on my list. Although it did have a rather nice set of boobs....the only redeeming feature of the entire movie.

 

you nitpicked it to death and still missed the fact that alec baldwin is 6ft tall and gen. doolittle was only 5ft 5in

 

I would have to disagree on those two movies.

- The Thin red line is, although boring, very nice movie, and I consider it more realistic than average war movie. Some of the scenes are really memorable, such as soldier letting water drops to run down on leaf - showing strange flora found on tropical islands. Scene with Nick Nolte shouting to attack MG post is also very good - first you think he is insane, later on you see he was right from the beginning. It is certainly not a action movie, but different and good war movie.

- On the other hand, Inglorious basterds is not classical war movie. It is more parody on bad war movies, and entire ww2 genre - incl. mentioned Dirty dozen. It is very nicely shown why "lets dress like germans and walk into their command post" is not going to work, ever. Therefore, I like they killed Hitler at the end (and not some other high level Nazi), just to show it is not ment to be realistic movie.
I liked very much Kristoph Waltz's role - Tarantino is excellent at dialogues, and he uses it to make SS colonel as one of the best ww2 move villains ever. And I must say, pretty realistic too.

 

Vathra...I saw "Thin Red Line" for the first time at the Cinema. Having paid to see this, I eagerly anticipated this all star cast pulling me into an engrossing film. My excitement knew no bounds....

When I woke up, the surviving cast members were boarding a higgins boat and looking sullenly back at 'The Canal', with Sean Penn saying something equally unmemorable.

Belasar was utterly correct. It was the best night's sleep I got in a long while.

And, when I tried to watch it a second time, a similar thing happened. So you see, judging this movie was not difficult. For all it's promise of beautiful photography and sterling performances, it was a turkey worthy of Thanksgiving.

 

I fully agree Volga Boatman. And as for it being a realistic war movie, it's not.

 

Just for the buffs...

Harry and Micheal Medved rate the worst WW2 movie of all time as....(wait for it....)

Edward G. Robinson's "First Yank Over Tokyo"....(music, applause)

Full of racial stereotypes, and concieved as a propaganda piece to whip up public enthusiasm for a war that, so far, had only the Doolittle Raid as 'good news', it recieved the Medved 'Golden Turkey' by a long way.

I'm not sure it was mentioned here, and this late at night, I simply can't be bothered searching through 16 pages to find a reference to it. But, there it is, for the discerning viewer who has seen it all.

 

I just tried to watch Pathfinders: In the Company of Strangers (2011) - IMDb. I don't think I made it 30 minutes into the movie before I stopped it, and started playing Lego Pirates of the Caribbean. The acting was bad (the Legos put on a stellar performance, as usual), the dialog was horrific, and I had to give it up when a Pathfinder decides to use the base phone to call and tell his English girlfriend that he would have to stop by for dinner that night, as he wasn't going to be able to make it after that (hmmm...OpSec, anyone?) and then PARACHUTES into her front yard in order to be there in time for dinner. Cuz any 'trooper had full access to a prepped and fueled C-47 just two days before Normandy...

 

RabidAlien, Lego Pirates are cool! The Fort Legorado and Knight stuff are cool too. Played many a Lego adventure when my boys were little. Have boxes and boxes of the things, can't wait for grandkids so I can break them back out!