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Others will wonder about the exclusion of panned movies like Mamma Mia! I quite enjoy ABBA’s music and I adore Meryl Streep. Yeah, the singing was pretty bad, but the movie was all around fun and silly. I would place it as a perfectly mediocre entertaining musical, not worthy of mention beyond this paragraph.

By contrast, these five deserve to live in ignominy. As a musicals lover, I am offended these movies somehow got made.

5. Glitter

I can hear you now: I deserve it for watching this movie. But, in my defense, Mariah was popular in the 1990s and she had produced some great songs. But the movie was beyond horrendous. Mariah’s acting was predictably atrocious - I’m not sure if she was trying to express constipation or consternation. And the plot was truly bizarre. (Spoilers ahead.) The murdered boyfriend? Not only did it make little sense, it left you feeling like instead of a fun, Mariah musical - the title is Glitter after all - you had somehow been tricked into watching something called “Diarrhea.”

Expecting a fun ride, the viewer is left with a depressing, poorly acted, and incongruous film. Mariah’s poor victim lead character was deserving of a Cinderella ending and is instead left devastated. How ironic: the makers probably thought they would go outside the mainstream and not give us the happy ending, but instead made the experience even worse. The girl is supposed to get the guy at the end of a silly rom-com. That’s how it works.

In sum, even Britney Spears’ musical (Crossroads) was better than that. Heck, even Spice World surpassed Glitter (but don’t get me wrong, all three of these deserve a special place in the dustbin of 1990s pop star musical history).

Oh, but the worst part of Glitter was how poorly the filmmakers integrated the songs into the movie. They were almost an afterthought, woven in like torn-up rugs as the writers insisted on focusing on Mariah’s tragic close-to-but-not-really Cinderella story. I am left to assume that the people behind this movie tried to play a practical role on all of us - but failed.

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