Science fiction writers love black holes. The classic struggle between man and nature takes the form of a faceless antagonist, a terrifying void where anything that crosses its event horizon is never seen or heard from again. At GeekDad, we share some of this love by choosing 10 of the worst science fiction, fantasy and superhero movies that should consider this post their event horizon.

So what are the criteria for entries to this list? Inspired by the efforts to get rid of things that suck by our friends at Underwire, Autopia, Wired Science, Gadget Lab, Game | Life and Webmonkey, the GeekDad writers considered over 50 titles from Alien 4 to X-Men: The Last Stand. Many movies were horrible translations of beloved novels or comic books while others were riddled with bad acting, bad science and plot holes too numerous to count. Oftentimes, these movies combined all of those attributes with aplomb.

Don't agree with an entry? Are there more egregious offenders than these? Submit your own and vote on the worst movies at the end of this post.

And with that, on with the list!

10. Battlefield Earth: Based on the novel by L. Ron Hubbard, set in the year 3000, the movie tells the story of the enslavement of mankind by a race of aliens called Psychlos. A pair of humans living on the outskirts of civilization are captured and, after being sent to perform hard labor, they begin plotting a revolution to destroy the Psychlos. At face value, the plot seems fairly straightforward, but in reality it is much more tiresome.

In addition to various sub-plots that fail to advance the story, we viewers are subjected to ridiculously convenient plot devices. Spoiler alert: The Psychlos' air explodes when exposed to radioactivity. The humans are unsupervised as they are sent out to perform hard labor. They stumble upon an old military base — complete with aircraft, training simulators and nuclear weapons. And there is a teleportation device that enables the humans to transport a nuclear warhead to the Psychlos' home world.

Topping things off are doses of bad special effects, campy acting and strange cinematography decisions by filming every shot at an angle and a color palette best described by the Providence Journal this way: "Battlefield Earth's primary colors are blue and gray, adding to the misery. Whenever we glimpse sunlight, the screen goes all stale yellow, as though someone had urinated on the print. This, by the way, is not such a bad idea."

Battlefield Earth leads the record for the number of Razzies "won" with a total of 8, one of the many reasons why this movie starts our list.

9. Dungeons and Dragons: The year was 2000, and in exactly one year, Peter Jackson would take fantasy movies mainstream with the Lord of the Rings trilogy. To the public — especially those of us following LotR closely — it appeared the producers and studios responsible for Dungeons and Dragons were only trying to cash in early on the fantasy buzz. Armed with $35 million and cast of fairly decent actors including Jeremy Irons and Thora Birch, the film sought to bring the venerable role-playing game alive.

The plot, if you could call it that, centers around an evil wizard who seeks to control red dragons, and the party dispatched by the Empress of Izmer to stop him. It just wouldn't be a D&D movie without plenty of D&D references, so they've thoughtfully provided characters with various classes including a wizard, thieves, a dwarf and a ranger and ... that's about it. Include plenty of cringe-worthy dialog such as, "Just like a thief to go around taking other people's things," and it's no wonder why this film wasn't a box-office smash.

While fantasy fans have had to suffer through their fair share of bad interpretations of the genre, as well as films shot with underwhelming budgets for the stories at hand, what gets us is how this film tramples on such a beloved property just for the sake of making a buck. And for that, we cast Plane Shift on this film and send it to the Negative Energy Plane (as opposed to the Infinite Layers of the Abyss, which I'm sure is where this movie emerged from).

8. Event Horizon: No one will deny that space flight is dangerous. In fact, any time mankind ventures into the unknown we can think of an infinite number of possible things that can go wrong, whether it be mechanical or psychological. At Hollywood's best, we have HAL from 2001: a Space Odyssey, who turns on the human crew, perceiving them to be a threat to the mission. Or the film Alien, where a deep space crew responding to a distress beacon discovers a horrific alien species.

At Hollywood's worst, we have this movie.

Event Horizon (a fitting entry into Wired.com's series, no?) is the name of a prototype ship on its maiden voyage with an experimental propulsion system that allows it to travel great distances in a short amount of time by creating a black hole to bridge the two points in space. Sounds like a fantastically safe idea. Unfortunately for the crew of the Event Horizon, the system doesn't work as expected, and actually creates a bridge between themselves — AND HELL! Or something like that. One thing leads to another and soon some of the crew are trying to kill each other in various grotesque ways, others are trying to escape, and one tries to fire up the propulsion system again to return to that place of chaos.

Some claim it's entertaining. Others enjoy the soundtrack. But for us, cult-following or not, there's too much bad science and ridiculous horror to think this film deserves anything other than collapsing in on itself.

7. Lost in Space: The late '90s saw the beginning of Hollywood's obsession with remaking old movies and TV shows. And in 1998, New Line Cinema brought an all-star cast together to re-envision the classic 1965 television series, Lost In Space. What they didn't bring were good writers. The screenplay doesn't amount to much more than a stream-of-consciousness single draft that tries to have plenty of action and suspense, but little of what made the television series endearing: family values, sticking together and surviving through ingenuity.

Lost in Space, the movie, is full of predictable action, predictable character arcs, robots, metallic spiders, time travel (and subsequent time paradoxes if you think about it for more than one second), and a cute alien pet — you know, for the kids. Oh, and the antagonist, Dr. Zachary Smith, becomes a human/metallic spider hybrid thing. (I'm sorry, Gary Oldman.)

The most satisfying part of researching for this post was turning up Roger Ebert's verdict on Lost in Space: "This is the kind of movie that, if it fell into a black hole, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference." We couldn't agree more, Roger.

6. Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes: Good science fiction challenges us to think critically about an aspect of our current society. It's easier to examine a complex issue if we separate it contextually from everyday life. These works are often called science fiction only because they take place in the future with advances in society and technology serving as a backdrop, rather than an integral part, of the story.

In the original Planet of the Apes movie, we examine issues of prejudice, creationism and nuclear war. The famous twist at the end is where we confront those issues head-on. We see the relationship between the world created for us in the film and the world we live in, and what about our world that needs changing.

Unfortunately, Tim Burton shows us none of that. His remake is just spectacle, frequently relying on action over storytelling. Rather than the twist being the fate of mankind due to our past actions, his twist has the main antagonist traveling back in time to change the present. There are no lessons to be learned, nothing to think critically about. So we ask ourselves, what was the point?

But I guess we shouldn't be surprised, as the remake premiered during the summer blockbuster season. And the film doesn't try to be anything more than that. For fans of the 1968 version, though, it felt especially hollow. It's just another example of a remake that didn't need to be made at all.

5. Star Trek V: William Shatner likely had big ideas he wanted to explore with his directorial debut of a Star Trek movie. Consider the overall plot: The Enterprise voyages into the great unknown, to a region of space called the Great Barrier where they are told God exists. But once they cross the Great Barrier, the film is a great letdown. In addition to the ridiculously slow start and awkward light-hearted moments with the crew, there is an emotionally driven Vulcan half-brother of Spock, and a Klingon kidnapping plot that defies understanding in its resolution. There were also budget and production problems, which resulted in Industrial Light and Magic not doing the special effects. The film suffered there, too.

Overall, this is considered the worst of all of the Star Trek movies and, until the release of Star Trek Nemesis, the worst box-office performer of the series. It also won the awards for Worst Picture of 1989, Worst Director and Worst Actor for William Shatner at the Golden Raspberry Awards.

All of this is unfortunate for what the film could have been — a journey to strange new worlds exploring big ideas. But the failed execution of whatever vision Shatner had for this entry into GeekDad's beloved Star Trek universe lands it on our list of films to boldly go to the real final frontier: the nearest black hole.

4. Batman Forever: I gave Tim Burton considerable flack in the Planet of the Apes banishment, but he got a lot of things right with the first two Batman movies in the late '80s and early '90s. His films were allowed to be dark, due to the success of Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore/Brian Bolland's The Killing Joke. And it was also easily accessible by people who had never read the comics.

Unfortunately for fans of the series, Warner Brothers decided to camp up the next installment when it green-lighted Batman Forever. The film is wrought with silliness, plenty of bad dialog and poor casting decisions. (We'd rather see Billy Dee Williams as Two Face, Jim Carrey's bit was getting pretty old by this point, and Val Kilmer ... seriously?)

What's worse, however, is that the film was successful at the box office, which led to the even more egregious Batman and Robin to be made. But following the laws of causality, it wouldn't have been possible were it not for the success of Batman Forever.

These films are made all the worse when you consider that they required a reboot of the franchise to give us Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. Of course, with ending what Tim Burton started on such a sour note, maybe we shouldn't be so quick to judge. By those same laws of causality, Christopher Nolan likely owes something to the legacy of Batman Forever, too.

3. Movies by Uwe Boll: The GeekDad writers submitted several movies by Uwe Boll to the list of movies to be thrown into a black hole, and there was no clear winner. Mr. Boll has been responsible for many video-game-to-film adaptations that alienate fans, and often the results are mind-numbingly bad. Instead of asking yourself, "Who made this film?" you often are instead asking, "Who approved and financed this film?" At a certain point, you'd think his reputation as a filmmaker would begin to preclude him from making these movies.

In Wired.com writer Chris Kohler's review of Postal, he writes, "Boll seems out to shock his audience into stunned disbelief rather than actually entertain them." This famously led to an exchange between Kohler and Boll over the internet. And don't forget about his successful campaign to box all of his critics, as chronicled by Wired's Chris Baker. But after his biggest flop, In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, Boll says he will be focusing on smaller films: "These are films that represent my true passion, and they can be done with small budgets." In the Name of the King cost $70 million to make and raked in a paltry $3 million at the box office.

Through all of this, it's clear that Uwe Boll has a vision that he believes in. It's unfortunate that it's so far removed from critics and viewers alike.

2. The Matrix sequels: Just as Planet of the Apes was a movie that didn't need to be remade, neither was the The Matrix. The two sequels that followed hurt more than they helped. Perhaps it's just a case of a sequel not living up to the expectations of its predecessor; The Matrix is one of the best science fiction films ever made, period. The first 40 minutes of the original leaves you scratching your head, trying to figure out exactly what's going on. During the rest of the film, the pacing, the action and the story are beautiful in their execution. The film ends with enough questions to keep the audience talking, speculating and watching again for new clues.

What we didn't need, however, were answers. The answers are a letdown. They were full of quasi-mysticism about the nature of man and machine. They over-explain to the point of confusion what the "programs" in the matrix are for, and the iterative nature of the matrix, but fail to explain how The One's powers extend into the real world. On the surface it feels like lazy writing, and in that we begin to think more critically about the writing in the rest of the films.

The sequels also feel bloated by the special effects in a way the first film didn't. At various points, the story just stops so we can see our protagonists fight the bad guys in various unbelievable ways. What began as a compelling story moves steadfastly into mind-numbing, summer-blockbuster territory. And as such, we are left with less wonder and awe, which only taint subsequent viewings of the first film. And for that reason alone, we'd like to forget that Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions were ever made.

1. The Star Wars prequels: I wonder how much this entry needs explaining. The first 15 minutes of Star Wars Episode I felt genuine, as if George Lucas was saying to the fans, "I know you've waited a long time," and was about to give us something special. But once that was over a realization began to set in. We'd been duped. Fans who had grown up with the original trilogy sat for the remainder of the film, mouths agape, staring dumbfounded at the screen. What happened?

Some say merchandising. Others cite a heavy reliance on special effects and green-screens. There's a case for wooden acting and bad writing. And the ridiculous pacing, apparently because no one thought viewers had an attention span of over a minute. There was all the stereotyping, and of course, there was Jar Jar. The only film in the series that started to live up to the potential of those first 15 minutes was Episode III, due in part to some great action sequences. But even then, it wasn't enough to save the series. (Quoting Darth Vader: "Noooooo!")

Some may argue these films aren't meant for us, that they're meant for the new generation of fans who had yet to see the original trilogy. If that's the case, I feel sorry for them, because they won't be able to separate the merits of the original trilogy from what came after ... er ... before.

Special thanks to all of the GeekDad writers who contributed to this list and for the editing powers of Jason B. Jones and Jonathan Liu.

All images: wikipedia.com

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