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- Episode 1: Russian Terminator, Ninja Vengeance, Never Too Young to Die
- The gang gets good mileage off of imitating the hilarious Accent Upon The Wrong Syllable speech of Russian Terminator's actors, particularly "That's WHAT friends ARE for?" Mike compares their phonetic pronunciation of English to "the old guy from Temple of Doom."
- At the first appearance of Russian Terminator's hero's wife:Rich: The other movie is the one with Gene Simmons in drag, right?
- The group is sent into hysterics at a Mook's supremely Dull Surprise reaction to getting shot off a rooftop in Never Too Young to Die.Josh: Excellent choice, actor.
Mike: That was the best take they had. - Jay theorizes that Russian Terminator's strangest moments derive from an extreme case of Lost in Translation where the cast and crew could not understand an English script written by people who somehow also don't speak English.
- Jack claims that Ninja Vengeance should change its title to The Worst Ninja. Mike recommends Somewhat Competent Yellow Belt.
- The group agrees that the only explanation for the two obvious dummy shots being in Never Too Young to Die is that the editor looked at the footage and thought they were too funny to cut out.
- Episode 2: The New Gladiators, Exterminator 2, Aftermath
- In response to a strangely angled close-up on a face in intense concentration in The New Gladiators:Jack: What is happening in this scene?
Mike: He's furiously masturbating. - After the hero of New Gladiators is surprised by a man making exaggerated martial arts moves and noises:Mike: "Ah, you must be Asian..."
- While reading the back of Exterminator 2, Josh and Jack laugh at a misplaced comma but truly go into hysterics when the next sentence of the summary is "It's a mistake they quickly regret."
- After a scene featuring excessive nunchucks, Josh predicts that the next 80s trope will be random breakdancing. The film immediately cuts to an establishing shot featuring breakdancers.
- In response to a strangely angled close-up on a face in intense concentration in The New Gladiators:
- Episode 3: The Killer Eye, They Bite!, Xtro
- After being mocked for repeatedly stumbling over the pronunciation of "ophthalmologist", Rich says it as "optimahowajist" out of defiant spite.
- Mike calls a toll-free number for Puppet Master action figures advertised before The Killer Eye. It's now a sex line.
- In the middle of watching Xtro, Jay lets out a heavy sigh.Jay: We've got a problem: this movie's kind of interesting.
- The entire crew absolutely loses it (understandably!) at that scene from Xtro. Between Jessi's Rapid-Fire "No!", Rich's high-pitched hysterical laughter, a horrified Jay loudly shouting "WHAT THE HELLLLLL?" and even Mike cringing away from the screen in open-mouthed disbelief, it's hard to know who has the funniest reaction. (For those who really want to know, the scene in question involves a woman giving birth to a fully-grown man.)
- While the guys are visibly squeamish at the scene from They Bite! showing a woman with Vagina Dentata getting ready to have sex with a guy (Jack in particular is turned completely away from the screen), Jessi just snarks as a bloody Groin Attack happens:Jessi: She's got her period!
- Episode 4: Deadly Prey, Hard Ticket to Hawaii, Miami Connection
- In previous episodes of Best of the Worst and Half in the Bag, commenters said Jay looked sloppy and unkempt. So, throughout the discussion in Episode 4, he's wearing a tuxedo (that's clearly too big for him).
- The group being absolutely delighted with Cameron Mitchell's character from Deadly Prey.Grandpa: Are you a friend or an enemy?
Soldier: I'm a friend!
Grandpa: You're a liar! [Shoots Soldier]
Jay: "Why'd you even bother asking me?!" - At the end of Deadly Prey, Denton tells Hogan to strip.Denton: Your shirt. Take it off.
Jay: Oh, I didn't think this is where it was headed.
Rich: "You're gonna have to take my wife's place." - One of the first lines in Deadly Prey is Denton telling The Dragon "You're gonna die". Everyone in the group is amazed, since that was the fourth time in a row since Russian Terminator that a main character had said that line.Jay: Are we going to hear "You're gonna die" in every movie we ever watch?
- The montage of the most innocent "Saved by the Bell"-style scenes of Miami Connection juxtaposed against its graphically violent fight scenes, all set to the film's famously saccharine song "Friends Forever".
- Episode 5: Wheel of the Worst #1note
- The Dance of Birth, a seriously out-there "instructional" video about dance exercises for pregnant women with inane voice-over from a middle-aged hippy, provides plenty of laughs due to its moments of subdued insanity.
- The collective Oh, Crap! reaction to the opening shot of women in leotards awkwardly shuffling around a blank room.Narrator: The time has come for us to dance.
Mike: The time has come for me to turn this off. - Jessi's emphatically annoyed/horrified reactions to everything in Dance of Birth from the moment it is selected, culminating in her sarcastically asking if the movie wants "to slap her in the face with any more feminist bullshit." Right on cue, a pregnant woman turns and lifts her arms to show her very hairy armpits to the camera, sending the crew into hysterics.Jessi: I am offended.
- Jay describes Dance as "the best movie David Lynch never made."Jay: It was shocking, it was hypnotic, and I hated it.
- The narrator's description of some of the obviously unstructured wiggling as "oxygenating your wombspace" sends the room into hysterics and leads Rich to ponder how actual doctors would react to the New Age teacher's medically questionable advice.
- Their observation that the parents looked way more into the instructor's dances than the babies they dragged to the classes, who often look visibly upset and haggard from being tossed around and kept awake to be in the video.
- Rich's reaction to a particularly egregious Ice-Cream Koan:Narrator: Even when you are pregnant, there is room!
Rich: For what!? Another one!?
- The collective Oh, Crap! reaction to the opening shot of women in leotards awkwardly shuffling around a blank room.
- Rich's revelation that Let's Rap Fire Safety would have been useful for him in childhood due to an incident where he almost burned down his grandmother's house making French fries, which leads the rest of the crew to claim the video is actually about Rich and spawns a Running Gag that Rich is "cool about fire safety."
- Rich proclaiming that the only fun part of watching Let's Rap Fire Safety was guessing if Jason Alexander got a DUI at some point, because the gang immediately recognized his voice in said video as "Seymour Smoke", a computer-animated smoke detector.
- Mike asks Rich what his favorite part of the video was:Rich: Probably the fire alarms eyes shaking...
Mike: That was your favorite part?
Rich: ...back and forth.
Jessi: (laughs)
Rich: I have no favorite part!
- Rich's summation of the problems with Candid Candid Camera:Rich: Can you imagine this without a laugh track? It would be a snuff film!
- Mike is the lone voice of dissent when it comes to destroying Candid Candid Camera for obviously exploiting homeless people, objectifying women, and placing everyone involved in increasingly uncomfortable positions. He reasons that, unlike Dance of Birth, Candid Camera at least provides a service: giving old men something to masturbate to.
- The Dance of Birth, a seriously out-there "instructional" video about dance exercises for pregnant women with inane voice-over from a middle-aged hippy, provides plenty of laughs due to its moments of subdued insanity.
- Episode 6: The Vindicator, Cyber Tracker, Robot Jox, R.O.T.O.R.
- Jay sums up what happened when they tried to make Episode 6Jay: So, what started out as an innocent attempt to watch some bad movies with robots in them has turned out to be the most miserable experience in any of our lives.
- Jack and Rich mock Robot Jox for proposing abandoning wars in favor of giant robot fights.Jack: And so, the people of the world gathered together and said "Hey, we shouldn't fight for territory. We should just fight 'cause it's awesome!"
Rich: After this, they're gonna be like "Fuck this, we're going back to wars".- They also mock the idea that war has been made "illegal" and picture a single cop "pulling over" and trying to arrest a country's entire army.
- Rich Evans describes his reaction to R.O.T.O.R.
- Their reaction to the irrelevant and egregious Padding at the opening of R.O.T.O.R, a.k.a. Establishing Shot: The Movie.Rich: They had to establish the prairie so they could establish the farm so they could establish the farmhouse so they could establish the kitchen counter...
- Their response to Shoeboogie.Jay: I don't know who should be offended by this character.
Josh: Everyone.
- Their reaction to the irrelevant and egregious Padding at the opening of R.O.T.O.R, a.k.a. Establishing Shot: The Movie.
- Jay sums up what happened when they tried to make Episode 6
- Episode 7: Playing Dangerous, Shapeshifter, Thunderpants
- The crew's baffled reactions at the incredibly dark tone of Playing Dangerous, which was packaged as a kids movie but is rated PG-13 and features a man being shot to death while pleading for his life in the opening scene.
- Mike reading the plot synopsis:Mike: Meet Stuart, an eleven-year-old computer genius who plots to outsmart a group of thugs and singlehandedly save his family from run-on sentences.
- Everyone gets incredibly excited when it looks like the Kid Hero is going to burn a man alive by shooting his cigarette with gasoline from his Super Soaker. The film cuts hard around showing any of the violence, rapidly deflating the room.
- Mike reading the plot synopsis:
- Jessi's reaction of pure child-like mirth at the revelation that Thunderpants was a film all about farts.Jay: This is madness. His farts turned his mom into an alcoholic!
Jessi: I love this movie.- The group keeps a running tally of every fart in Thunderpants and treat the list as Serious Business for the length of the movie, even arguing over how to record minutiae like changes in fart pitch and the release of gases after the initial fart.
- The crew's baffled reactions at the incredibly dark tone of Playing Dangerous, which was packaged as a kids movie but is rated PG-13 and features a man being shot to death while pleading for his life in the opening scene.
- Episode 8: Wheel of the Worst #2note
- The use of the token Hispanic father from Key Matters saying "Excelente" as a reaction to the increasingly non-excellent things about the video, peaking with Jack's description of Mike being kidnapped, raped, and murdered as a child because of his lack of survival instincts.
- At the sight of a burning home, Mike comments that Rich was trying to cook French fries again. Cue music sting.Jessi: Oh my god! ...Rich, did you live there?
- At the sight of a burning home, Mike comments that Rich was trying to cook French fries again. Cue music sting.
- The group characterizes Gary Coleman as a malevolent god playing with mortals' lives from his "Safety Control Zone", which isn't too far off. Beyond making kids nearly choke to death, slip and fall over, and receive minor lacerations, Coleman apparently sends a murderous pedophile to a child's door to test how they would respond, all while keeping his usual friendly tone.
- The fact that the kids that Gary Coleman is torturing are named Jack and Jill Example.Jack: There's a man trying to break in the front door of my apartment. My name is Jack Example, and I live at-
(Jay and Josh burst into laughter)
Rich: JACK EXAMPLE!? (Laughs)
Mike: What an unfortunate last name, Jack. - The crew is equally amused and frustrated at the lack of common sense given to the actors in The Family Guide to the Internet, beyond even what one would expect from an early 90s family.Daughter: An internet service provider? What's that?
Jay: It's... an internet service provider...- Jay notices the actors' staging marks are made of masking tape and clearly visible to the camera.
- The use of the token Hispanic father from Key Matters saying "Excelente" as a reaction to the increasingly non-excellent things about the video, peaking with Jack's description of Mike being kidnapped, raped, and murdered as a child because of his lack of survival instincts.
- Episode 9: V-World Matrix, The Amazing Bulk, and ????note :
- Mike guesses that the creators of The Amazing Bulk used Comic Sans as the font for their logo solely because it had the word "comic" in its name.
- At the request of Colin, they decide to give the "Low Budget Special-Effect Driven Movie" theme a rest after the first two films and spin the Wheel of the Worst (this time loaded with actual movies) to pick the last one. Out of all the films on the Wheel, Colin hopes to land on Gymkata. As the Wheel slows down, it is clearly going to land on the film right before that, so Mike reaches up and manually spins the Wheel to make it land on Gymkata instead. Nobody questions the legitimacy of the spin (at least, not on camera; Jay can be heard asking "Should we go with that?" from off-screen).
- Episode 10: Bloody Birthday, Crazy Fat Ethel II, Psycho from Texas
- Regarding Bloody Birthday:
- Jay claims that there's "an extended subplot involving cake." Cut to a longer-than-expected montage of various characters eating birthday cake.
- The panelists are equally horrified and fascinated by the brief and irrelevant background appearance of a strange, sad-looking party clown wearing a t-shirt that says "I Can't Say No." Mike calls it Bagul.
- Jay sarcastically asks Gillian what her favorite Ed Hunt film is. Mike drunkenly interjects, "Ed Hunt for Red October."
- Regarding Crazy Fat Ethel II:
- Everyone on the panel struggling to read the titles of the (mostly pornographic) films made by the director of Crazy Fat Ethel II without bursting into uncontrollable laughter.
- Rich frequently runs into the room with a memo containing Crazy Fat Ethel II trivia during the Psycho from Texas discussion, complete with the Muppet News music playing every time and everyone treating the new info about the movie like breaking news. While talking about the trivia, a "live feed" of the overly long chase scene from the movie they're supposed to be talking about plays in the corner.
- Jack is personally offended and angered by the Psycho from Texas's heavily racist, misogynistic, and perverse themes and challenges the director to a fight ("Come at me, Jim!"). When Jay points out the man is likely to be in his nineties, Jack replies, "Good, I can beat your [the director's] ass then!"
- Regarding Bloody Birthday:
- Episode 11: Night Beast, Trick or Treat, Skull Forest
- Since they were filming this Halloween special around Rich Evans's birthday, they gave him a present based on a very special photo
◊ of him on his fifth birthday: An adult-sized version of the shirt he's wearing in the photo. He wears it as his "costume" for the rest of the episode.- In a case of what could only be called a massive coincidence, the Showbiz Pizza Bear actually makes an appearance, thirty years to the day after that birthday, in their screening of Trick or Treat... dead. The panel speculates that the tape must be haunted and that the bear would not appear if they went back and watched the tape again. Rich's reaction is part of the thumbnail◊ for the video.Rich: So after Mike saved my precious heirloom, and it had a picture of me with this birthday boy shirt, in the Showbiz Pizza next to the Showbiz Pizza Bear... Here, thirty years to the day later... Not only am I wearing the same shirt... But we're watching this movie, (cut to clip from the movie) and there he is.
Mike: (talking over Rich) Yes, being carried out on a stretcher is the Showbiz Pizza Bear.
Rich: (talking over Mike) The Showbiz Pizza Bear, dead.
- In a case of what could only be called a massive coincidence, the Showbiz Pizza Bear actually makes an appearance, thirty years to the day after that birthday, in their screening of Trick or Treat... dead. The panel speculates that the tape must be haunted and that the bear would not appear if they went back and watched the tape again. Rich's reaction is part of the thumbnail
- In the footage of an awkward sex scene from Night Beast, which Jack aptly describes as "the most erotic two pieces of wet turkeys slapping against each other that I could ever imagine," the editor censors the nipples on both the woman and her male partner.
- Skull Forest marks the crew's first on-screen discussion of the works of Len Kabasinski.
- Dutch angles are used so regularly in Skull Forest that everyone just starts watching the movie with their heads tilted to the side.
- Jessi notes that the only shots that aren't uncomfortably close to the actors are the ones that Len is physically in and thus not in contact with the camera.
- Jack's takeaway: "Len Kabasinski got his films distributed. You can do anything, kids."
- Since they were filming this Halloween special around Rich Evans's birthday, they gave him a present based on a very special photo
- Episode 12: Wheel of the Worst #3note
- One of the considered tapes is titled Diabetes: A Positive Approach. Rich jokes that it's lucky the tape isn't part of a series that could one day include AIDS. Cue a perfect silent Dude, Not Funny! reaction from Jay
- Jay and Rich finally land on Tree Stand Safety and their overjoyed reaction being intercut with them, Mike and Jessi asleep.
- Mike refers to Tree Stand Safety as Fat Ethel 3.
- Rich Evans' trademark inability to pay attention to the rest of the panelists leads to a great Mike quote:Mike: ...Margaret wanted a hunt in her c*nt.
Rich: It's disturbing to watch, but if you're eating a cheeseburger...
Jessi: HOW?! AGAIN?!
Mike: You're talking about cheeseburgers while I'm talking about c*nts! - Jay makes a joke about fire safety at the sight of a cake with dozens of candles. The moment of silence before the music cue and Rich's dead-eyed expression really sells it.
- Mike questions the purpose of wearing camouflage at all when hunters have to wear florescent vests to avoid being accidentally shot.
- The crew's response to when a female hunter holds up the head of a deer she's shot:Rich: (with Southern accent) "He's like a puppet now!"
(Jay laughs)
Rich: "I'mma make it talk!"
- After watching an incredibly awkward sex-ed video for small children, Jessi and Mike are unable to speak or even look at each other at the next wheel spin. When it lands on Instant Adoring Boyfriend, Jessi reaches for the nearest beer.
- Jessi's reaction to the "Instant Adoring Boyfriend"'s transparent efforts at emotional support wish fulfillment (i.e., talking about how lovely and smart she is in comparison to his exes) is to crudely yell at him to take off his clothes.
- Episode 13: Playing Dangerous 2, The Exterminator, Deadliest Prey
- Jay attempts to make a joke about the video game scene in Playing Dangerous 2, rhetorically asking whether there would ever be a shooter game so poorly designed that the player couldn't see any of the enemies. Rich immediately mentions Doom³.
- The gang theorizes that Playing Dangerous 2 was an elaborate attempt on the cast and crew's part to kill themselves through sheer boredom.
- The panel acknowledges that the actors playing the Totally Radical hackers in Deadliest Prey (particularly "Tru Dat" girl) likely agreed to deliver their terribly written "youth" dialogue exactly as it was written for the same reason they would have.
- In a tangential scene cut from the full episode, the crew discuss Syfy Channel-style shark movies and why they don't consider them entertainingly bad movies because they were made with little-to-no real passion or effort and are intentionally made to be terrible. To demonstrate, they pitch a few shark movie plots of their own off the top of their heads, including Shark Forest (a forest full of sharks), Sharkageddon (a space shark tries to eat Earth), Sharkano (a volcano spews sharks that in turn spew lava), and The Sharkening (either sharks make humans kill themselves as nature intended or a lonely hotelkeeper is driven to madness by sharks).
- Rich finds one of Jack's jokes so funny that he spits his drink everywhere, bringing on a panel-wide laughing fit.
- Episode 14: Elves, Santa Claus (1959), National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation 2: Cousin Eddie's Island Adventure
- The panel is completely bewildered by the Random Events Plot of Elves (or, as Jack calls it, Everything: The Movie), a horror film that features a supernatural Nazi elf as an antagonist, a wild enough premise on its own without the addition of a washed up Dan Haggerty as a detective-turned-mall Santa, the elf's goal to rape a young virgin (who also turns out to be the result of a Surprise Incest plot), and a group of witches called "The Coven of Anti-Christmas." Just reading the back of the box is enough to drive everyone to hysterics and convince Rich that the movie will win.
- The extremely low quality of the elf, which shows no articulation at any point, leads the panel to conclude that it was just a statue that someone occasionally moved around by hand.
- The group's look of shock and horror at a horribly out-of-place (for a normal movie) scene of a little boy in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pajamas ogling his sister.Sister: You pervert!
Brother: I'm not a pervert, I like seeing naked girls
Sister: I'm your fucking sister!
Brother: Yeah, and you've got fucking big tits, and I'm gonna tell everyone I saw them!
Jessi: ...Holy... moly!
Mike: "Here's the line we'd like your son to say, ma'am!" - The over-the-top "Dr. Scientist", a Mr. Exposition that is only in the movie to offer an explanation of the elf that was already told elsewhere in the movie by another Mr. Exposition (named "Professor Physics"), making his appearance entirely pointless. To add to that, as the panel points out, his explanation is completely useless."Grizzly Adams": Doc, do me a favor: What is the bottom line?
"Dr. Scientist": Well, I'm telling you: The bottom line is the little creepy things are the little creatures that creep on two legs. Idiomatically, we call them elves. - The group laughs at the detective's out-there request for a book on ancient spells and runes from the local library, and laughs even harder when the librarian knows the exact book he was requesting and brings it back to him in mere moments.
- The car-bombing scene, in which Dan Haggerty discovers a bomb and leaps out of his moving car instead of just throwing out the explosive. Surviving this, he immediately gets up, punches the nearest person in the face, and yells at them some of the greatest lines in the history of cinema."Grizzly Adams": What are you, a goddamn Nazi or something? Is that elf yours?
- The panel is driven into one of their most intense bouts of laughter-driven hysteria ever by Santa Claus (1959), especially when they start coming up with ideas of how it could have been made.
- The film is found on a DVD compilation of Christmas "classics", a word that Mike claims should have had "at least sixteen quotation marks around it."
- The group, particularly Mike, lean into the Alternative Character Interpretation that Santa has been enslaving missing children in his strange dimension and is a Bad Boss who won't let them play or go home.
- The panel gather a surprising amount of textual evidence from the film to support Mike's claim that Santa has a huge Gag Penis, from the huge lips on one of his machines (which they argue is a fleshlight), the repeated references to his "giving nature", and Merlin the Magician's awkward waddling walk.
- The panel speculates that the movie may have just been one massive effort to get rid of all the dry ice in Mexico.
- The group loses it telling the story of how the movie was made in one night after too many shots of tequila, ending with the crew waking up on the beach in Mexico dressed as Santa, Merlin, and the devil and surrounded by strange props and unconscious and dead children.Rich: (laughing uncontrollably) It hurts! It hurts! IT HURTS!
- Rich's gradual Sanity Slippage from being subjugated to terrible movies at Christmas-time culminates in his snapping when Jack reads the plot to Christmas Vacation 2 in his usual chipper delivery. Cue Trash the Set (set to the Horror of Dracula theme, no less).
- The panel can't even bring themselves to talk about Christmas Vacation 2 and instead spend some time talking and laughing about how great the original is, all set to cheerful upbeat music.
- The panel is completely bewildered by the Random Events Plot of Elves (or, as Jack calls it, Everything: The Movie), a horror film that features a supernatural Nazi elf as an antagonist, a wild enough premise on its own without the addition of a washed up Dan Haggerty as a detective-turned-mall Santa, the elf's goal to rape a young virgin (who also turns out to be the result of a Surprise Incest plot), and a group of witches called "The Coven of Anti-Christmas." Just reading the back of the box is enough to drive everyone to hysterics and convince Rich that the movie will win.
