Val Kilmer can put as many masks on as Simon Templar from The Saint, including one special mask made famous by a comic book superhero. Kilmer may have only played Batman once, but his portrayal of the Caped Crusader was better than others. Batman is hardly Kilmer’s most famous role, though, and hardly the most intense mask he’s put on.
Back in the ’80s, he shot to fame starring as Iceman in Top Gun, opposite Tom Cruise, and later in the ’90s, he played Templar in The Saint and Jim Morrison in the biopic The Doors. Now that he’s on the mend after beating throat cancer, we can assume that he’ll be back putting on more of those masks when the time comes.
But like most celebrities, Kilmer has made some doozies over the years. We doubt many people have seen all of the 100 credits he has to his name on his IMDb page. So it’s safe to assume he’s done a lot of films that no one has even heard of, much less seen. But where do you start looking for his absolute worst film? Here’s what people think.
His Worst Film Had To Be A Direct-To-DVD
Looking through the various rankings of Kilmer’s work online, it’s obvious that they’d all unanimously agree that 2006’s Moscow Zero is Kilmer’s worst film.
Even Wikipedia can’t offer much on the film’s plot because it’s so bad. But from what we can gather, it seems to follow a group of guys trying to find their friend, Sergei, an anthropologist who goes missing after studying demons near a Hellmouth under Russia.
Kilmer plays Andrey, Vincent Gallo plays Owen, Rade Šerbedžija plays Sergei, and even Sylvester Stallone’s oldest son Sage Stallone, plays Vassily, six years before his untimely death in 2012.
The film’s poster looks like a botched attempt at Photoshop, and it only made about $85,000 at the box office, which is a surprise. On IMDb, it has a score of 3, and on Rotten Tomatoes, it has a 6% audience score.
Fans on the latter wrote, “Looking to experience poo at its stinkiest? Look no further than Moscow Zero,” and “…it’s ultimately difficult to recall a more objectionable direct-to-video endeavor in recent memory.”
Most people gave it half a star and commented similar things to: “Horrible horror film that is just awful in every single aspect, does however feature a good cast too bad they left their talent at home. The film is about a group searching underground tunnels in Russia for a lost friend that is researching some sort of ancient evil. The plot makes minimal sense and the fear elements are laughable, eww shadows are so scary. Contender for the worst film ever!”
Meanwhile, Screen Rant put it at the top of their list of Kilmer’s worst films. “You know it’s a bad sign of a film’s quality (or lack thereof) when it’s released direct to DVD rather than being pushed out to theaters,” they wrote.
“That is definitely the case with Moscow Zero, a film about, no joke, a group of men who attempt to rescue someone from the bowels of Moscow, all while battling demons. The production values are about as awful as you might expect, and Val Kilmer really seems to be phoning in his performance. Given how sublimely awful the screenplay is, you can’t really blame him.”
We can’t even believe that Kilmer would take on such a film. But by then, his career had sunk into the abyss.
Why Did His Career Sink?
Even during the peak of his career, around the time he did Batman Forever, Kilmer was in deep water. Entertainment Weekly wrote in 1996, “When it was announced last February that Kilmer, 36, would not return as the Caped Crusader in Batman and Robin, the forthcoming fourth installment of Hollywood’s billion-dollar-plus movie franchise, the utter lack of public distress on the part of Warner Bros. was a sure sign that something had gone amiss for Kilmer.”
Why was that? Because Hollywood had already blacklisted him as hard to work with. He proved his “viability” in Batman Forever, which allowed for him to spin “into four other projects: the cop thriller Heat, this August’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, this fall’s turn-of-the-century African adventure The Ghost and the Darkness with Michael Douglas, and a now-filming remake of the 1960s television series The Saint with Elisabeth Shue,” but that wasn’t enough to save his career.
“His prolific schedule notwithstanding, many in Hollywood are loath to work with him, no matter how big the box office payback,” they continued. “It’s no special feat to be voted Mr. Unpopularity in an industry that seems to create a new contender every month, but it’s virtually unheard-of for the griping to become public.”
“Richard Stanley, who directed Kilmer for three days in The Island of Dr. Moreau before being fired, recalls, ‘Val would arrive, and an argument would happen.’ Says John Frankenheimer, who replaced Stanley: ‘I don’t like Val Kilmer, I don’t like his work ethic, and I don’t want to be associated with him ever again.’ And Batman Forever director Joel Schumacher calls his onetime star ‘childish and impossible.'”
The shock value in that Entertainment Weekly article, though, came when Kilmer’s own brother, Mark, called his brother a narcissist who couldn’t be helped. This was enough to push Kilmer into films like Moscow Zero in the blink of an eye. But after all this, his retreat into homemade films, and even multiple tracheotomies, Kilmer isn’t stopping. He reprised Iceman in Top Gun: Maverick, which he begged to take on, and he has a couple of other upcoming films. So it seems like more than a couple of bad films and severe health problems won’t stop Kilmer from putting on his masks. In his most recent Instagram post, he says it himself, “We all wear masks.”