The Worst 15 Hollywood Movies Shot in Prague

Last year, I gave you The 15 Best Hollywood Movies Shot in Prague, which included Amadeus, Mission: Impossible, and Casino Royale. If you haven’t seen some of those films – and there are some lesser-known items on that list – I highly recommend checking them out. (Note: the excellent Snowpiercer, which I caught at last year’s Karlovy Vary fest, would crack that article’s top ten.)

Here, however, are some movies I don’t recommend seeing. For conventional reasons, anyway; many of the below films are still good for some Czech sightseeing. There have been a lot of Prague-shot mediocrities over the past 25 years, but these are the worst. 

1. Film must have been financed by a US studio
2. Principal photography (roughly 50% or more) must have taken place in the Czech Republic
3. Film must have been theatrically released in the USA

(Dis)honorable exclusions: The English-language but German-produced slasher film The Pool, the Ústí-shot Die Hard Dracula and all the other direct-to-video dreck that has been produced in the Czech Republic (some films of this type may have garnered very limited theatrical release, but have been excluded from this list anyway).

15. Red Tails (2012)

14. Babylon A.D. (2008) 

This $70 million Vin Diesel bomb from Mathieu Kassovitz became an incoherent mess when the French director clashed with producers, who wanted to make a more action-centric film. Kassovitz himself spoke out against the film, while a 101-minute ‘director’s cut’ purportedly makes more sense. But I’m not sitting through it again to find out. 

Babylon A.D. was the first feature film to shoot on a new $9.5 million, 4,000 square-meter soundstage at Barrandov Studios back in 2006. Exterior shooting around the Czech Republic also included locations in and around Brno, Milovice, and Ostrava, including the old Vitkovice factory which is now home to the Colours of Ostrava music festival. The snow-covered scenes were shot at locations in Norway and Sweden. 

13. Bad Company (2002)

Along with Vin Diesel’s xXx, this is one of the Hollywood actioners that made best use of Prague landmarks and locations. While the city doubles for New York and New Jersey in early scenes – the brother of Chris Rock’s character is buried at Olšany Cemetery – the action is literally brought to Prague for much of the film’s midsection; those familiar with the Czech capital will be able to spot a wealth of locations throughout Malá Strana and Old Town. One sequence was shot at Chotěšov Abbey in the Plzeň Region.

The location work didn’t help the overall quality of Joel Schumacher’s film, however, which scored a 10% at Rotten Tomatoes and is cited as a low point for the both the director and stars Anthony Hopkins and Chris Rock. It isn’t that bad though, and remains watchable throughout – particularly for some Prague sightseeing. 

12. The Brothers Grimm (2005) 

Poor Terry Gilliam. No stranger to production troubles – see the behind-the-scenes stories from Brazil and the unfilmed Man of La Mancha – his Brothers Grimm movie, starring Matt Damon and Heath Ledger, was no exception: Gilliam clashed with producers Bob and Harvey Weinstein so violently that shooting was shut down for two weeks at one point. The resulting film is, to put it kindly, a mess; ten years later, the director has yet to work with another major studio. 

11. Hannibal Rising (2007) 

This prequel to Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal was a significant disappointment, however, notable only for Gaspard Ulliel’s intense performance in the lead role. 

10. Hostel: Part II (2007)

The first Hostel was also shot in Prague (standing in for Bratislava), but this one is a real blood-drenched stinker. Czech locations include interiors at Barrandov, along with location shooting in Prague, Český Krumlov (where the heroines visit a medieval fair early in the film), and Karlovy Vary.

9. Howling II: … Your Sister Is a Werewolf (1985)

After Amadeus paved the way for US films shooting in Prague in the early 1980s, this cheap, chintzy Howling sequel limped into the city the following year. “I suspected my assistant director was KGB,” director Philippe Mora told Michael Adams in his book Showgirls, Teen Wolves, and Astro Zombies. But my favorite bit of trivia from Adams’ book: “Mora had to literally import trash from America to clutter the clean communist streets.”

Howling II is good for a laugh, however, and has garnered a cult reputation due to the participation of stars Christopher Lee, Reb Brown, and Sybil Danning, whose topless scene is repeated seventeen times over the closing credits. 

8. AVP: Alien vs. Predator (2004)

Additional filming took place at locations in France and Italy, along with the old CKD factory in Vysočany.

7. Delta of Venus (1995)

This little-seen film from Nine ½ Weeks director Zalman King, adapted from the Anaïs Nin novel, gained some notoriety in the US as one of the earlier films to earn an NC-17 rating, but anyone watching it today will find it pretty tame – and thunderously dull. 

6. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003) 

This elegantly-produced dud is never overtly awful, but boy is it dull. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which cost $80 million to make and failed to recoup its budget at the US box office, killed the career of director Stephen Norrington (Blade), who hasn’t made another film in the past 12 years. It’s also the last on-screen appearance of Sean Connery, though his retirement is self-imposed. 

5. The Beautician and the Beast (1997)

The first – and last – attempt at a Hollywood star vehicle for nails-on-chalkboard Fran Drescher transports her character from The Nanny to the fictional Eastern European nation of Slovetzia, where she tends to the children of Timothy Dalton’s dictator. 

The Czech Republic, of course, fills in for the fictional nation, and there’s actually a lot of good location work throughout local streets here. Not that I’d recommend sitting through this insipid take on The King and I to catch it. The main residence of the dictator is the beautiful Sychrov Castle, in the Liberec region. 

4. Doom (2005) 

There’s one inventive sequence late in the film that recaptures the first-person shooter feel from the video game; otherwise, it’s a complete dud. While producers included this and other elements to please fans – including gratuitous violence to earn an R rating – the result was almost universally panned. 

Like Alien vs. Predator, this one was shot entirely in studio at Barrandov; nothing in the finished product reveals its filming location.

3. A Sound of Thunder (2005) 

There’s a reason for that. Originally slated to be filmed in mid-2002, floods in Prague completely destroyed the sets that had been built for the film. Producers – who were already in trouble after production delays and legal woes – decided on using the cheap digital backgrounds as an alternative.

2. The Omen (2006)

The Omen is supposed to take place in Florence, Italy, but the filmmakers didn’t even try to hide the fact that they shot in Prague – during most of the outdoor scenes (but especially the climactic chase, shot around Náměstí Míru) you can spot the Czech-language shop and street names. 

Out of all the films on this list, this is the one I hated the most – it’s a limp, flat scene-for-scene remake of a classic original that utterly fails as a horror movie. The film did have its defenders, though, which included Roger Ebert, of all people.

1. Dungeons & Dragons (2000)

The above locations are among the best the Czech Republic has to offer – if any director was given the opportunity to shoot at them, I doubt they could make a worse movie than Dungeons & Dragons if they tried.