Lovesusti The Worst Film Ever

Protraph Lack of good storyline.

Helllins It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

FlashCallahan Glendon Wasey is a fortune hunter looking for a fast track out of China. Gloria Tatlock is a missionary nurse seeking the curing powers of opium for her patients. Fate sets them on a hectic, exotic, and even romantic quest for stolen drugs. But they are up against every thug and smuggler in Shanghai.....If you ever want to see a film starring a married couple who have zero chemistry in a movie, then this is a must.It's labelled as an adventure romance, so you'd be forgiven to think your about to watch a homage to Indiana Jone ps by way of romancing the stone. Instead you get a film that is more like a homage to Firewalker, by way of Allan Quartemain in the eighties, and every bit as bad as it sounds.We have Paul Freeman pretending to be an old Oirish clergyman, and the big reveal at the end is wasted, because we see him without his contacts in for at least five minutes before he goes 'ta da'.There's a man with porcelain hands, Penn looks like he's been taking some sort if narcotic throughout filing, and Madonna, is supposed to be a virginal missionary.......Isn't it all hilarious.It's dreck of the highest order, and no wonder they broke up after this, I hated everybody after sitting through it.Devoid of almost anything, it's a surprise it didn't sink Handmade pictures....

tonyblass There is no reason to struggle with justifications, nor to reach for words to describe such an amateurish, hackneyed, stilted, banal ... well, there I go. Just suffice to it say that it is completely understandable why the talented Mr. Penn reportedly chose to stay drunk for every shooting day of this miserable, limp, pointless ... you see where I'm going. However bad you remember it to be, you must re-see it to believe it. Madonna is the worst American actress of all time without peer. The only thing she's done on film that is worth seeing is Evita (a music video) and "Desperately Seeking Susan" (in which she has little dialog and rolls her eyes a lot).

boingo_the_clown The IMDb advises that I should say ...*Warning Spoilers Follow*.... but there is no way to spoil this movie, because it is already spoiled to the point of being compost, and is ready to be spread out on the fields.It has been almost 20 years since my girlfriend of the time, an obsessive Madonna fan, talked me into seeing this piece of trash, and I still go to bed at night praying to God that I can somehow get that two hours of my life back. This is not one of those movies that is so bad it is good. This is one of those movies that is so bad it actually slingshots right around past good and right back to bad again.Madonna stars as a missionary (I know this is a leap of faith folks, but I am *not* kidding!), who teams up with Sean Penn (her then husband) to search for "Faraday's Flowers", a cache of opium balls she hopes can be used as a pain killer for wounded troops. From about this point on, the movie takes on a rhythm that more or less goes "1, 2, 3, plot twist, 1, 2, 3, plot twist, 1, 2, 3, plot twist, and so on", as the duo of Penn and Penn bounce around randomly from one ridiculous situation to another with plenty of plot twists, but absolutely no plot evident to be twisted. In the mean time, they are being chased by a corrupt official with prosthetic hands (He lost his real hands from opening a booby trapped money belt called a "shanghai surprise", which is what the movie is supposedly named after. This seems appropriate to me, seeing how I had lost my money from watching this booby trapped movie.).You may wonder why it is that I am able to remember so much about a movie I haven't seen in almost 20 years. To that I can only say one thing ...... emotional scarring.This movie is that bad folks! I have seen a lot of bad movies in my time, but this one rules as the unchallenged chief god in my pantheon of stinkers. It makes Ed Wood's movies look like Academy Award winning material. It even makes the worst of the worst of the flash animation that I have seen over the last six years on the net look good. I would eagerly gnaw my foot off to escape from this movie.If, for some reason, you are ever unfortunate enough to find a copy of this little "gem" on the shelf of your local video store, the only thing I can recommend is that you slowly and carefully turn yourself around, then run, run! RUN!!!!!, and immediately seek psychiatric counseling so as to avoid any possible post traumatic stress syndrome you may suffer from exposure to this movie.I give this movie a 1, but that is only because IMDb will not let me input negative numbers.

CTS-1 OK. So someone took an A-list actor and his famous singer/ part time kind of-sort of actress wife and decided that the movie would be carried on the weight of the names alone. Substitute "fiancee" for wife and one has Gigli.But it is not- it is Shanghai Surprise, possibly the most ill-conceived movie of the 1980's (and yes, I have seen "Hobgoblins.")This movie has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Ridiculous plot, painfully bad acting (Madonna as a missionary? She didn't buy it either, so she says her lines in a flat tone which just screams "get me out of this costume and get me my check"), cinematography worthy of an old episode of "Fantasy Island," lame ending.If, by some chance, you stumble across a copy of this in an unused corner of your local video rental store, call your local hazardous waste disposal hotline- do not rent it.But do not forget that this horror exists. Some people forgot- and thus "Gigli" was born.