Adam Sandler Stars In The Official Worst ’80s Movie Ever
Adam Sandler is one of the most complex actors in Hollywood. Just when you think he’s capable of nothing but making bad comedies with his friends, he’ll dazzle the entire world with performances in movies like Uncut Gems. Unfortunately, Sandler’s cinematic debut goes beyond being one of the worst performances he has ever given. According to users of the Letterboxd app, Sandler’s film Going Overboard is the worst ‘80s movie ever made.
If you’ve never seen it, this is another movie where Adam Sandler plays a character who is more or less a stand-in for himself. In Going Overboard, he plays an aspiring comedian working on a cruise ship who sees the disappearance of the regular comedian as a chance to make his big break.
His character discovering the transformative power of comedy and laughter comprises most of the plot, but if you needed a reminder the movie was from the ‘80s, the film’s climax involves the character dealing with an unexpected attack from some scary terrorists.
Even for superfans of Adam Sandler, the sad truth is that it only takes a few minutes of Going Overboard to make you consider plunging yourself into the ocean so you never have to see it again.
While the movie has the dubious honor of being Adam Sandler’s first film, Going Overboard also has some great performances from some of our favorite Hollywood veterans. Billy Zane, for example, plays a substantial supporting role, and Billy Bob Thornton has a brief (but quite memorable) role. On top of that, comedy legend Milton Berle plays himself in the film, and his scenes are some of the few that didn’t have us reaching for the remote control to turn this shlock off.
Incidentally, if you are surprised that this film came out in 1989, you can most likely blame the confusion on the distributor, Vidmark Entertainment. When it first came out, the movie had a limited release and different names.
It was first released as The Unsinkable Shecky Moskowitz and later renamed Babes Ahoy for its 1990 television debut. Only after Adam Sandler became a big name thanks to his time on Saturday Night Live and the success of Billy Madison did Vidmark re-release the film in 1995 with the (much improved, in our opinion) title Going Overboard.
Going Overboard is not only one of Adam Sandler’s worst projects, it’s also considered the worst ’80s film.
Despite all the re-releases and the fairly generic charm of Adam Sandler, Going Overboard was considered a cinematic flop, then and now, which is how it ended up with a rating of 1.45 out of 6 stars on Letterboxd. What makes the movie so particularly bad is that it has a barebones plot tucked into a 97-minute runtime, and that makes the pacing feel impossibly slow.
Sandler’s later flops like the Netflix film Hubie Halloween are awful in their own right, but they mostly keep the plot going. Here, we are forced to watch talented actors do their best with a lackluster script for a movie concept that should have been a short film rather than a feature.
Even for superfans of Adam Sandler, the sad truth is that it only takes a few minutes of Going Overboard to make you consider plunging yourself into the ocean so you never have to see it again.
Maybe you like to watch bad films with your friends, or maybe you’ve just been wanting to torture yourself for the better part of two hours. Either way, Going Overboard is now available to watch completely for free on the streaming platform Tubi. It’s free in the sense that you don’t have to take out your debit or credit card to watch it, but by the time the credits roll on this Adam Sandler stinker, you may learn that some free films still have a high price: namely, your sanity.
