The 20 Worst Lines In Movie History

Content warning: sexual material and language

What pushes a line in a film above and beyond (or below) being merely bad dialogue and instead becoming one of the worst of all time? Maybe it's an attempt at serious drama that ends up being hilarious by accident, or alternately an attempt at humor that falls so flat it inspires cringe. Sometimes poor acting is responsible for turning ordinary bad dialogue into a historic atrocity, but then there are other circumstances where even the world's greatest thespians can't save the most incompetent writing.

Whatever the cause of these assaults on our ears, the results are painful to experience — but some people find pleasure in pain, so for all you perverts and sickos, we've collected clips from the absolute worst of the worst. Looper has spotlighted terrible lines in movies before, but there are many more where those came from. This list will avoid specific lines highlighted on the previous one, though a couple of other awful lines from films on the previous list will be included (alas, we can't include anything from Tommy Wiseau's "The Room" because the old list counted the entire movie).

"I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse." "Leave the gun. Take the cannoli." "I love the smell of napalm in the morning." Francis Ford Coppola wrote some of the most iconic lines in cinema history. He also wrote the line "What do you think of this b**** I got?" in his misbegotten 2024 passion project "Megalopolis." 

The scene featuring that line, which ends with Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza) dead and Clodio Pulcher (Shia LeBeouf) shot in the butt with a crossbow, is the most entertaining "so bad it's good" part of this pretentious "so bad it's terrible" box office bomb. The way Jon Voight appears to lack any awareness of what he's saying (is he even acting while playing Hamilton Crassus III or is this just how he talks?) is icing on the cake of cringe.

"Man, that was a good movie." To be fair, "An Inconvenient Truth" is a good movie, and it probably did inspire some people to buy more environmentally-friendly cars. But no real human beings ever talked about it the way that Rod (Alan Bagh) and his friends in "Birdemic: Shock and Terror" did — and it's hard to imagine any conversations about Al Gore's climate change PowerPoint presentation ever leading into "sensual work." 

For those unfamiliar with James Nguyen's 2010 no-budget "The Birds" ripoff, "Birdemic: Shock and Terror," apologies for exposing you to some of the worst acting and possibly the most painful-to-listen-to sound mixing ever heard in a commercial release.

There are a lot of bad Christian films out there, but "Assassin 33 A.D." (later re-released with a "director's cut" under the alternate title "Black Easter") is the only one where Jesus gets gunned down by time-traveling Muslim terrorists (writer-director Jim Carroll must have missed the memo that Jesus is also a prophet in Islam). 

The script for this bizarre, convoluted, and extremely racist faith-based sci-fi mess contains many unintentionally hilarious moments, but the line from the oddly named Ram (Morgan Roberts) — "Use your Bible app to read to me what happened when they captured Jesus" — is one that stands out the most for the sheer earnestness of its nonsense. It sounds silly out of context — and in context, it's even sillier.

George Lucas is a man of many talents. Writing convincing romantic dialogue without Irvin Kirshner and Harrison Ford offering suggestions is not one of them. Indeed, you could describe his ear for such lines as "coarse and rough and irritating" — which is much like how Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) describes sand in contrast to how Padmé Amidala (Natalie Portman) is "soft and smooth" in "Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones." 

Attitudes towards the "Star Wars" prequels might be less negative than they used to be due to people who watched them as kids growing up and feeling nostalgic, but no amount of semi-ironic memeing can turn Anakin's sand monologue into good writing.

"Somehow Palpatine returned" might be the most mocked line in "Star Wars: Episode IX — The Rise of Skywalker," due to the lack of any clear explanation for the villain's return and Oscar Isaac's sheer exhaustion in reading it. Yet as real-world politics grows ever more inexplicable and exhausting, there's something relatable and almost good about that (still very silly) line. 

Not so with the "They fly now" back-and-forth regarding the First Order's tricked-out stormtroopers, which strains for the texture of a joke but fails to find any actual humor beyond just lazily going "So that just happened." It's a particularly bad example of what many critics have dubbed "Whedonspeak" — copying the snarky, winking texture of Joss Whedon's style regardless of whether it makes sense for the material.

A near-unwatchable mess of gratuitous product placement, offensive stereotypes, and uncanny CG imagery that somehow took 12 years to make, the 2012 direct-to-video release "Foodfight!" ranks among the worst disasters in animated film history. 

You can take your pick of any of the terrible food puns in this grocery store adventure, but this one from Dex Dogtective (Charlie Sheen) — "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a Spam" — stands out as a groan-worthy reference to one of the most important and memorable quotes in movie history ("Gone with the Wind" is not the only cinematic classic "Foodfight!" poorly parodies — a musical sequence ripping off "Casablanca" equates generic brand products with Nazis).

2022 saw the release of at least three different "Pinocchio" movies. The stop-motion Guillermo del Toro/Netflix one was amazing. The live-action Robert Zemeckis/Disney+ one was awful. And then there was "Pinocchio: A True Story," a low-budget direct-to-video Russian cartoon with an English dub so lazy it became comedy gold. 

Pauly Shore's fabulously bored delivery of the line, "Father, when can I leave to be on my own?" became an instant sensation on TikTok after it appeared in the film's trailer. The internet couldn't get enough of this yassified wooden twink, who offered amusement for reasons the filmmakers surely did not intend.

Including "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice" on a worst list means risking the wrath of the #RestoreTheSnyderverse army, but even the most diehard stans of Zack Snyder's take on the classic DC superheroes have to admit that the infamous "Martha" scene earned all of its widespread mockery. 

Screenwriters Chris Terrio and David S. Goyer must have felt so clever when they decided to have Batman (Ben Affleck) end his fight with Superman (Henry Cavill) after learning their mothers have the same name, and maybe this idea could have worked with better execution. In practice, alas, Affleck screaming "WHY DID YOU SAY THAT NAME?" is one of the silliest parts of a movie too desperate to be taken seriously.

"This is Katana ... She could cut all you in half with one sword stroke just like mowing the lawn. I would advise not getting killed by her. Her sword traps the souls of its victims." So says Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman) in David Ayer's "Suicide Squad" about the team's blade-wielding assassin. And that awkward exposition is the only memorable thing involving Katana (Karen Fukuhara) in the whole film, so it's a ridiculous introduction to a superfluous character in a terrible movie.

Maybe Ayer's unreleased "Suicide Squad" director's cut is more coherent — maybe it even gives Katana something to do — but the theatrical cut was yet another embarrassment for the DC Extended Universe.

"Plan 9 From Outer Space" is the classic answer to the question of what is the worst movie ever made. Ed Wood's 1957 Z-grade alien/zombie picture frames itself as a "prediction" by the psychic The Amazing Criswell. "We are all interested in the future," he tells the audience in  the opening, "for that it where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. Future events such as these will affect you in the future." 

Thanks, Department of Redundancy Department. Halfway through his introduction, Criswell switches from future to past tense — preparing you for the incoherence of a movie where shots switch between day and night at random within the same scene. Criswell returns at the film's conclusion, once again unclear if he's discussing the past or the future, to ask us, "Can you prove that it didn't happen?"

Watching the 1966 horror film "Manos: The Hands of Fate" in its original form is an experience best left for only the most hardcore bad movie masochists. Everyone else is better off watching the "Mystery Science Theatre 3000" or "RiffTrax" commentaries that pepper its long sequences of nothing happening with jokes. 

Still, when it's not boring you to death, "Manos" on its own does offer some choice material for laughing at. This bit where one of The Master's wives changes her mind about what she wants within the space of four sentences ("The woman is all we want ... we do not even want the woman") is either the "best" or worst, depending on your perspective.

World War II started in Europe in September 1939 with the German invasion of Poland, over two years before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Reporters had already begun calling the war in Europe a "Second World War" within weeks of the invasion. The United Kingdom, France, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Greece, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union were alll fighting the Axis Powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan well before the United States got involved, while China had its own war with Japan since 1937. 

All this is to say that Josh Hartnett's First Lieutenant Danny Walker appears to have been living under a rock when he declares "I think World War II just started!" in "Pearl Harbor," and that director Michael Bay should stick to mindless robot movies and avoid writing about real history.

Not that Michael Bay's mindless robot movies are any better on the screenplay front much of the time than "Pearl Harbor," but the writing in the "Transformers" series gets especially execrable, with the second film, "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen," turning out particularly bad as a result of being rushed through production during the 2007-2008 Writers Guild of America strike. 

"I am standing directly below the enemy's scrotum" is among the most painfully unfunny and wildly inappropriate lines one could put in a movie based on children's toys. What an embarrassing waste of a great character actor like John Turturro.

Let's take "least sexy seduction lines" for $200, Alex! With a script filled with cringe-worthy lines like Jennifer Lopez uttering "It's turkey time — gobble, gobble" to a befuddled Ben Affleck, and bad acting further ruining the love scenes, it's no wonder that the gangster romcom "Gigli" became one of the most infamous bombs of the 21st century and a complete embarrassment for Affleck and Lopez.

Their careers eventually recovered — if not their on-again, off-again real-life romance — but it was a closer call than either would have wanted.

"Least sexy seduction lines" for $600! Fun fact: this randomly vulgar pick-up line wasn't in the script for the possibly plagiarized direct-to-video schlockfest "Shark Attack 3: Megalodon." 

John Barrowman ad-libbed the line — "What do you say I take you home and eat your p****?" — as a joke to get a laugh out of his co-star Jenny McShane, expecting it to be cut, but somehow it got left in the film. His intention to watch the movie with his nieces and nephews suddenly became a lot more awkward.

"Least sexy seduction lines" for $1000! Every single second of this 90-second clip from the 1991 cult action film "Samurai Cop" just gets worse and worse as it goes on. From the "Thanks, nurse" to the "Bingo" to the way the subject of circumcision comes up, each individual line in this scene could warrant a list entry of its own. 

Not even the best actors could make dialogue so turgid work, but the cast's stilted delivery pushes this sequence of seduction and subsequent rejection — "Would you like to touch what you see?" "Yes, yes I would" — into the stratosphere of astonishment and unintentional comedy.

Akiva Goldsman's screenplay for Joel Schumacher's "Batman and Robin" is packed with awful puns — but to play devil's advocate and challenge the conventional nerd wisdom, do these puns necessarily count as bad writing if the film's campiness is intentional? Furthermore, don't all of these puns get elevated when spoken by Arnold Schwarzenegger, a legend who spent his acting career specializing in hamming up cheesy one-liners? 

Perhaps ... but Mr. Freeze exclaiming, "What killed the dinosaurs? The Ice Age!" makes no sense because the dinosaurs went extinct most likely due to a meteor impact millions of years before the Cenozoic Ice Age (and dinosaurs were in fact well-adapted to cold climates), so negative points for scientific literacy. The fanboy hatred is justified for this one.

"Troll 2" — a film which is neither about trolls nor a sequel to the movie "Troll," to point out just two of many things wrong with it — is probably "best" known on the internet for the line "They're eating her ... and then they're going to eat me ... OH MY GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD!" But there's plenty more awesomely terrible lines to enjoy and/or cringe through in the "best worst movie." 

In this particular highlight/lowlight, we learn that writing people's names on construction paper is "hospitality," and it is wrong to urinate on it. For further context, the kid Joshua (Michael Stephenson) has just relieved himself on the gross food the vegetarian goblins from the town of Nilbog ("Goblin" spelled backwards) are feeding his family to turn them into plants. And yes, knowing the context causes it to make even less sense.

Remember when disgraced screenwriter Max Landis thought the 2017 Netflix urban fantasy film "Bright" would be his "Star Wars"? He was only right in as much as a lot of "Star Wars" films have terrible dialogue, and so does "Bright." The awfulness starts right at the beginning of the film when, before killing a fairy, LAPD officer Daryl Ward (Will Smith) declares, "Fairy lives don't matter today." 

This offensive and unfunny evocation of the "Black Lives Matter" slogan is an early sign that the movie's forced attempts at using fantasy creatures for metaphorical explorations of racism won't pay off in any positive meaningful way.

When the trailer for the Spider-Man spinoff movie "Madame Web" hit the internet, everyone was puzzled by the strangeness in both sentence structure and delivery of Dakota Johnson's line, "He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died." What was it that made this feel just so off? It turns out it felt off because it wasn't an actual line in the movie at all, but rather a combination of multiple separate lines. 

The actual writing and acting in "Madame Web" isn't any good either, and likely made worse due to drastic changes to the script during production, but it's that Frankenstein-ed line from the trailer that remains emblematic of the movie's legacy.