Well, forget counting sheep – get these films in your DVD collection. They will have you fast asleep quicker than an overdose of sleeping pills.

Movie directors have been boring us for years. When was the last time they had an original idea? But there are some that just go too far. Whether it’s long, ponderous plots that go nowhere or three-hour snoreathons that are at least three hours too long, there are some films that are a breed apart.

Well, hecklerspray has had enough. We are going to name and shame them – that is if we actually get to the end of the list without falling asleep ourselves…

8. Elephant (2003)

We just don’t know how Gus Van Sant does it. Does he derive some kind of sick pleasure from making even the most interesting things dull? Not satisfied with turning a classic like Psycho into a pile of turd, he then manages to turn a fictional school shooting into one of the most boring films ever made. It’s pretty impressive really. He is the kind of guy that would turn even the most interesting party into a bore-fest. It’s almost worth giving him interesting stories to tell, just to see how boring he could make them. He could rewrite history. Everyone would have stopped the Second World War out of a lack of interest.

7. AI (2001)

This film was so mind-numbingly bad, we’ve spent the last 10 hours gnawing at my own hand to distract from the pain.

6. Pearl Harbor (2001)

How could Michael Bay turn one of the most defining moments in American history into a subplot? Forget the Japanese attack, what we all want to find out is whether Kate Beckinsale chooses Ben Affleck or Josh Hartnett. Just stupid.

5. Dune (1984)

OK, we are willing to accept we are in the minority here, but I almost called Childline after my dad took me to see this film when I was just 11. I honestly thought it was child cruelty. It wasn’t his fault. He though he was just filling the huge sci-fi gap left by the end of the Star Wars trilogy. It was bloody David Lynch, and we’ve never quite forgiven him for it. There were certainly promising signs from the start. Those huge worms, for example, looked cool, while we knew Sting was going to die in it (At least we think he did, we had already fallen asleep by then, and we’re not prepared to watch it again to find out). But then they started moaning on about spice. Who gives a fuck?

4. The Sheltering Sky (1990)

If The Sheltering Sky took itself any more seriously it’d buckle under its own weight and start crapping blood at the two-hour mark. It’s the kind of film that people pretend to like because they think it makes them look cleverer, when in fact ‘pretending to like The Sheltering Sky‘ is number two on our ‘Reasons to punch relative strangers in the face as hard as we can’ list. It’s dreadful, naval-gazing tripe that’d be a quarter of the length if people spoke normally in it, rather than pausing for ten minutes after each line of dialogue to let the gigantic significance of what they’ve just said sink in. Great, we’ve given ourselves a headache now.

3. Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

An erotic thriller by Stanley Kubrick starring Nicole Kidman’s boobies. Ace. Except we once watched it, fell asleep for 20 minutes during a scene about Tom Cruise staring at a fridge, and woke up to see Tom Cruise staring at exactly the same fridge. What would have livened Eyes Wide Shut up? In a word – dildos.

2. Die Another Day (2002)

It’s the first time in our long years as a Bond fan that we ended up wishing the world would end. Not even Halle Berry in a bikini could rouse us from our slumber. That’s how bad it got.

1. The Thin Red Line (1998)

We would rather watch 15 hours (or however long it was) of Rowan Atkinson’s The Thin Blue Line than sit through this again. It is probably the worst film we’ve ever seen. If we wanted to look at lots of lovely pictures of wildlife we’d watch David Attenborough, not this turd. What is Terence Malick’s problem with words? What is wrong with good dialogue? Does he want to be a filmmaker or a fucking photographer?