Roger Ebert Hated This '70s Comedy So Much He Walked Out Of The Theater

In his nearly 50-year career writing for the Chicago Sun-Times, film critic Roger Ebert sat through more bad movies than most people will hopefully see in their lifetimes. Confronted again and again with the worst films ever made, Ebert was never afraid to lob verbal bullets at box office bombs. Movies like Sylvester Stallone's "Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot" or the Rob Schneider stinker "The Hot Chick," a film so bad that Ebert admitted it took a "superhuman effort of the will" for him not to walk out of the theater.

Keeping that in mind, it would take a truly atrocious film to make the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic actually walk out — which was what happened in 1971, when Ebert abandoned a screening of the so-called sex comedy "The Statue." Virtually forgotten today, "The Statue" starred Academy Award-winner David Niven and John Cleese (at the height of his "Monty Python's Flying Circus" fame) and was based on a play by "Vertigo" screenwriter Alec Coppel. With this pedigree, how could "The Statue" be one of, in Ebert's words, "the worst movies ever perpetrated"?

Well, there's the plot. "The Statue" concerns Nobel Prize-winning linguist Alex Bolt (Niven). His sculptor wife (Virna Lisi) has immortalized him in the form of an enormous nude Greco-Roman statue set to be unveiled in London; to Bolt's horror, the sculpture's genitals are modeled after someone else's. Thinking his wife has been unfaithful, Bolt searches for the offending phallus. "And then ... I walked out," said Ebert (via RogerEbert.com).

Over his long career, Roger Ebert claimed to have walked out on just five feature films. This criminal clique includes "Caligula", an exploitation flick about the infamous Roman emperor; "Jonathan Livingston Seagull," a drama chronicling the spiritual journey of an actual seagull; and "Mediterraneo," a best foreign film Oscar winner accused of whitewashing war crimes committed by the Axis powers during World War II. Thanks to modern technology, Ebert didn't technically walk out on the coming-of-age film "Tru Loved" — he stopped the DVD after watching only eight minutes. (Ebert later watched the entire movie and reviewed it accordingly.)

"The Statue" is arguably the most obscure member of the lot — it is unavailable for streaming, and of this writing, less than 250 people have watched it on Letterboxd. Ebert despised the plot, calling it "one of the two or three worst ideas ever conceived for a movie." It sends Hollywood Golden Age star David Niven on misadventures — such as spying on men in a Turkish bath — that seem more like criminal offenses today than comedic antics. Ebert thought Niven looked "uncomfortable," wishing instead that "he were in another movie, or even unemployed."

While "The Statue" stands as one of Roger Ebert's most hated films, it is surprisingly not the most negatively-reviewed film made by director Rod Amateau — that dishonor belongs to one of the biggest bombs of the 1980s: "The Garbage Pail Kids Movie."