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"Oh my God... this movie exists."
Can you believe that somebody paid the equivalent of $10 U.S. to see these movies in theaters (or paid about $30 U.S. to watch them at home)? Yeah, we couldn't either. Somebody made these films which, to put it kindly, didn't turn out so well.
Important Note: Merely being offensive in its subject matter, a Box Office Bomb, or a film you don't plain like is not sufficient. Hard as it is to imagine at times, there is a market for all types of deviancy, no matter how small a niche it is. It has to fail to appeal even to that niche to qualify as this. (If you're unsure whether it belongs here or not, visit the discussion page and give us your input. Otherwise, if it's something you just plain don't like, please don't shoehorn it in, this isn't a page for complaining about things that fail to you.)
Second Important Note: It isn't a Horrible film just because anyone from That Guy With The Glasses and/or any other Caustic Critic reviewed it. There needs to be independent evidence, such as actual critics (emphasis on plural) for example, to list it. (Though once it is listed, they can provide the detailed review.)
Examples (more-or-less in alphabetical order):
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Repeat Offenders
Listed by last name or company, in alphabetical order.
- Asylum, The: Low-end production company infamous for familiar-sounding Mockbusters — low-budget "remakes" of popular films with suspiciously similar titles. Most of their films end up going direct to SyFy; they still qualify for their rare theatrical releases. They specialize in making cheap Follow the Leader films; apparently, the only way they can get people to watch their films is to trick them into it and throw in a few moments of gratuitous nudity. They have a habit of failing to provide sources for the gushing quotes on the DVD cases. And do not get us started with their arrogant behavior. Examples:
- Mega Piranha: A knock-off of Piranha 3D that's painfully boring with special effects akin to early PS2 graphics, a terrible script, and horrible acting.
- Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus: From the title, one would expect a hilarious sci-fi B-movie where two giant polystyrene monsters fight, taking half the world's population with them. In reality...it's just dull. The acting's predictably terrible, the script's weak, the titular "fight" only lasts for two minutes at the end, and the one hilariously brilliant scene (the one where the shark manages to jump up to airline-cruising altitude and takes a bite out of a jet) isn't brilliant enough to redeem it.
- It has a sequel, Mega Shark vs Crocosaurus. At least that film featured a little more giant-monsters-smashing-stuff-and-whaling-on-each-other this time.
- Snakes on a Train. The film is boring, extremely dull, the dialogue is extremely clunky (especially the racist remarks from the redneck at the very beginning), which is especially a total annoyance since the film is just essentially boring conversation scene after boring conversation scene on the train. Not even the few minutes of topless women in the middle was enough to save it. As for the titular snakes, there's one that appears in a very dark lit shot about 20 minutes into the movie (you have to essentially squint to see it), a few garter snakes coming out of a woman's arm, and there's about maybe 17 small pythons or corn snakes in the last 5 minutes, and they don't attack anyone (thus proving the "1000 venomous vipers" claim on the cover to be a complete lie). The closest the film gets to snakes fucking shit up is when the people get off the train, and the female protagonist turns into some fake CG viper and devours the train, then suddenly mysteriously vanishes into a weird lightning flashing sky or whatever. Never has 80 minutes felt so much like 3 hours.
- Transmorphers: No, not Transformers — Transmorphers. It's painfully boring and the writing is bad, but the worst things about it by far are the special effects and audio. The robots start out like something out of a PS1 cutscene and only get worse as the movie goes on. There's missing sound effects, which lead to sensory-screwing scenes where things explode silently. Also, the first round of DVDs had the audio sync slowly get worse as the movie went on to the point where it was off by over a second. They Just Didn't Care.
- Despite the misleading title, Transmorphers isn't a Transformers knockoff...but a Terminator knockoff. Making things just that little bit more bizarre, when The Asylum eventually produced an actual Terminator knockoff (The Terminators, released at the same time as Terminator Salvation), it actually owed more to Battlestar Galactica than it did any of the Terminator films.
- Boll, Uwe: While otherwise a competent, if polarizing filmmaker, he has one hell of a track record when it comes to Video Game Movies Suck, to the point where petitions were called to put him out of business. He's on at least one company's blacklist, and another guy's list of things to never discuss within earshot. His adaptations include:
- Alone in the Dark has almost nothing to do with the video game series it's based on beyond a few names and basic plot elements. It features an impenetrable plot, Captain Ersatz computer-generated monsters called "Xenos", Tara Reid as an archaeologist/museum curator, a sex scene that comes from nowhere accompanied by a song the director apparently didn't know is about racism, and most comical of all, a looooong Opening Scroll which is read aloud to the viewer (by Boll himself) and is likely to kill interest in the film before it truly begins, initially added to the film because test audiences were confused about the film's plot (as you can imagine, it didn't help much). See the Nostalgia Critic crossover review here.
- BloodRayne. The plot's boring and confusing, with no character development and no explanation for anything. The acting includes some of the most wooden performances ever filmed, and the only person who seems to be trying is a woman who plays a fortune teller early in the film. The action sequences are so poorly choreographed, performed, and shot that they're almost laughable; they don't even look rehearsed, as if the actors and stuntpeople made it up as they went. The Gorn is so simultaneously fake-looking and disgusting that it'd make even Eli Roth cringe. Then there's the nauseating Big Lipped Alligator Moment with Meat Loaf. Not helping anything is that much of the cast was picked up off the street and had no prior acting history—and Boll was rather proud of this.
- House of the Dead. Rotten Tomatoes ranked the film #41 in the 100 worst reviewed films of the 2000s, with a rating of 4% based on 54 reviews. This alleged adaptation (the original was a set of light gun arcade games) follows the story of some random youngsters that want to party in a tropic island casually covered with unexplained Sega banners. Things get serious when guys covered in toilet paper wearing bicycle LEDs in their eyes start attacking people. Captain Ahab then gives them a crateful of weapons the kids use in combination with their totally uncalled-for martial arts skills to kill the zombies in fights that are equal parts Bullet Time, shaky camera recording, and screenshots ganked from the game proper. But don't worry, in the end it's all about Spanish conquerors.
- Francis, Coleman: Author of Mystery Science Theater 3000 classics The Beast of Yucca Flats (which for a few enters So Bad, It's Good territory), The Skydivers, and Red Zone Cuba (unanimously considered unwatchable without riffing). As the Agony Booth said about him:
"Probability dictates that every now and then, a totally clueless director like Hal Warren or Tony Malanowski might punch through and end up making one of the worst movies ever just by pure chance, but to make three of them clearly requires active hatred towards paying audiences."
- Lommel, Ulli: German director whose career dates back to the early 1970s, gaining mainstream attention in 1980 with The Boogeyman (the second sequel to which, Return of the Boogeyman, also falls under this) which they mention on the cover of all his DVDs, apparently hoping people confuse it with the Sam Raimi produced one. Though most of his stuff was never well-recieved critically, it seems that it didn't turn full-on Horrible until about 2004, when he began churning out a long line of Direct-to-Video, No Budget, shameless Mockbuster horror flicks and true crime films that rated less than Boll even when the latter was at his worst. They include:
- Daniel: Der Zauberer, starring Daniel Küblböck (he finished 5th in the German version of American Idol). There's No Budget, and the plot's incomprehensible — for instance, the protagonist's dead grandfather (played by Lommel himself) is the "Zauberer", not Daniel, and is running around in the world of the living for no clear reason. The German mafia wants to kill Daniel, also for no clear reason. Neither of the major characters are likable, and Küblböck as Daniel is spectacularly bad; he shows here why he was voted "Germany's Most Annoying Man" two years in a row. Apparently, when a theatre decided to show a large portion of it as an unannounced special preview, the audience rioted. The film has regularly been in the "top" five or so on IMDB's Bottom 100 since it was released, and has occupied the number one spot on more than a few occasions.
- The Tomb. It claims to be an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's short story The Tomb, but it's a ripoff of Saw. The story's about some people wandering around in a tomb where they were trapped by some guy and have been tortured. They keep finding other torture victims, who all die. Excited yet? That's an educated guess of the plot. The sound recording's inexcusable, obscuring the dialogue and often slipping out of sync. It has wooden acting, a nauseating Jitter Cam, dollar-store props, and one scene with a man who is supposed to be jogging but doesn't even try to look like it. This is probably the worst "adaptation" of Lovecraft ever filmed. Oh, and the ending makes no sense.
- Zodiac Killer, the first of Lommel's modern true crime films, is a Mockbuster of The Zodiac, which was also re-released around the same time as the cinematic release of David Fincher's Zodiac. In other words, a Mockbuster of a Mockbuster. Poor production values and performances abound, as does Critical Research Failure (DSM IV is a book about psychiatric disorders, not a disorder itself) and gratuitous stock footage, gratuitous scenes, and obviously-improvised dialogue, all of which drag on. There's pretense in spades, with Unfortunate Implications such as the killer comparing serial killers to all members of the armed forces, and ranting about wanting to join the military so he can kill who he wants when he wants without fear of repercussions. It later had a pseudo-prequel known as Curse of the Zodiac, which somehow garnered even worse reviews, with one stating it seemed like it was made "by an epileptic with tourettes".
- Millard, Nick (aka Nick Philips): Specifically, his films Criminally Insane, Crazy Fat Ethel, Death Nurse and Death Nurse 2. Criminally Insane is the original movie and is not in itself Horrible — if you like 1970s exploitation films, it might be okay. The sequels, Crazy Fat Ethel and the Death Nurse movies, come a decade later, are Horrible, and for the most part mix footage from the first film and Stock Footage. Only Crazy Fat Ethel is a direct sequel. The four films together are four hours worth of one film with, according to The Cinema Snob, 3 hours total footage; Crazy Fat Ethel is half stock footage from the original film, and the Death Nurse films are each one-quarter from Criminally Insane. One scene is used in all four, and there's one scene of stock footage flashbacking composed, itself, of stock footage... They all use the same five or six actors, and each film has the same credits sequences.
- The movies still collapse on their own (de)merits. The first one might be a guilty pleasure if you're in a forgiving mood, but the other films are just plain bad. They're shot on bad video with terrible quality, the actors are awful, and the scripts are so stock and so linear that the stories (story?) are like 10-minute skits stretched out to an hour in a way that makes Star Trek: The Motion Picture look fast-paced. Both Death Nurse films end the same way. The editing is so bad it defies description. The "star" actress that played Crazy Fat Ethel, Priscilla Alden, is not good at acting and plays the same character in every picture, a crazy fat broad who gently taps people with a plastic fake knife about the chest and back.
- See the Cinema Snob's reviews of the Death Nurse films here and here.
- Along with the post-Criminally Insane Priscilla Alden films, he also made a number of other poorly received flicks, such as Doctor Bloodbath, .357 Magnum, a loose adaptation of The Turn of the Screw and the admittedly awesomely titled Dracula in Vegas.
- Turner, Chester Novell: there are two films by him. Both of them are poorly produced, both of them have much of the dialogue drowned out by ambient noise or the synthesized soundtrack, and one of them involves dollfucking. The other is a terrible anthology.
- Black Devil Doll was so horrifyingly bad that The Cinema Snob still refers to it (and Novell Turner) with terror.
Films
- 3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain, directed by Sean McNamara. The previous 3 Ninjas films were Guilty Pleasures; this, starring Hulk Hogan as a TV hero, falls flat with a family-friendly Die Hard on an X plot. Other flaws the film had were the plot's Fridge Logic, the Special Effects Failure, and much worse acting than the first three films (which were decent). The film was a flop — it grossed only $375,805, scored 2.3 on the IMDb scale, and was an Ink Stain Adaptation. McNamara single-handedly torpedoed the possibility of any sequel or remake to be made in the near future.
- 88 Minutes. It's as if Al Pacino said to himself one day, "I've done so many absolutely brilliant movies considered to be among the greatest of all time; I need to do a bad one, otherwise I won't be a real celebrity." The plot gives Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever (see below) a run for its money. Richard Roeper said that it was as though someone had dropped the script on the ground, mixing all the papers up, and then just picked it up and said "Eh, never mind, let's just film it like this."
- One day, Eddie Murphy will look back on his career and ask what the hell he was thinking when he and the producers of The Adventures of Pluto Nash decided to pull that film out of Development Hell. Bad acting, dull humor, worse special effects...yeah, this one takes the cake. Here's Film Brain taking a look at it.
- In a Robot Chicken sketch, 50+ studio employees killed themselves the Monday after its weekend box office numbers came in.
- Over $100,000,000 had been invested in Pluto Nash; they had to try and get some money out of it sooner or later. Then again, considering that the film made a grand total of $5,000,000 (which film prints and advertising materials alone would have gobbled up) at the box office, maybe they would've been better off leaving it on the shelf. According to some, they could've actually saved money by filming a documentary of the entire cast and crew eating $50 bills for two straight years.
- Eddie Murphy later admitted that the film was terrible, but he also stated that it was hard to regret making it because of the paycheck.
- After Last Season is a 2009 indie film with no discernible subject which reaches levels of Porn Without Plot so high you're left enraged and confused. Despite being made in 2009, it looks like it was made in the 1980s and EVERYTHING looks cheap. The props are absolutely ridiculous (including, but not limited to, an MRI machine made out of cardboard and covered with flimsy printer paper, featured in the very first scene of the movie), every single scene is shot in either someone's bedroom or an abandoned warehouse, and the CGI makes the "Money for Nothing" video look like Terminator 2. There's a 30-minute scene of two people sitting around looking at horrible CG images that would've looked realistic in the 1980s; it makes the DEEP HURTING sequences in Hercules Against the Moon Men look fast-paced. Carlyle of Spill called it the worst movie of 2009 and the decade, if not the last two decades. Almost everyone would be blissfully unaware of it if it hadn't been briefly featured on The Spoony Experiment. (It was taken down, officially for copyright reasons.)
- Even fans of Steven Seagal films in general dislike Attack Force, in which Seagal battles violent berserker types created from a drug emptied into the water supply of Paris after one of the team he leads gets murdered by one of them. It opens with credits superimposed over blurred images of what appear to be strippers dancing, then proceeds to a shootout that has nothing to do with the rest of the film before it gets to the main plot. Includes this line:
"We must find that titty-bar!"
- Ax 'Em (released theatrically as The Weekend It Lives) is one of the cheapest, most amateurish films ever made. Made by director Michael Mfume, son of a former Congressman/head of the NAACP, this film could be one of the worst released in modern times. It looks like it was filmed with a webcam, and the sound is such that anything in front of the camera can barely be heard and anything to either side of it is impossible to hear; thus, the actors scream off-screen constantly to be heard...and so the volume spikes randomly. There are parts of the film—plot-relevant parts—where the sound cuts out altogether. Even then, the lighting and framing are so terrible that you sometimes can't see what's happening because it's off-screen when it's not supposed to be off-screen! All of this would not necessarily be fatally bad, except the plot is so stock, so poorly written, and so filled with typos (including the opening info-scrawl!) that it's virtually impossible to describe. The actors are possibly even worse, but it's hard to tell. The sound and (lack of) lighting make it all but impossible to hear or see the actors, except for one woman at the beginning who seems to howl "I'm HUN-GRY" every five seconds for a solid hour and a half.
- To give you some idea of how bad this film is, it starts at a party where the dialogue's mixed in with the crowd — there's no way to hear what anyone is saying, and it doesn't help that everybody's talking in slang. The film then cuts to a man walking into a house with an axe and assaulting an elderly gentleman who's looking for his medicine. The gentleman, when confronted by the ax-wielding intruder, matter-of-factly says "Oh, shit." Inexplicably, the film cuts to public domain footage of a step-dancing show at an university for the opening credits, interspersed with an African-American DJ busting out "yo' mama" jokes at a crowd of onlookers. If you make it that far, you won't believe what happens next. But you don't have to take our word for it. Take his.
- Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever: Stuff Blowing Up and nothing else, but somehow manages to screw that up. Calling it an Idiot Plot would be a disservice to idiots everywhere. It's currently rated as the worst movie on the meta-review site Rotten Tomatoes, with 107 "rotten" (negative) professional reviews and absolutely zero "fresh" (positive) ones. It was called the "Worst Movie of the Decade" by Rotten Tomatoes, outclassing such atrocities as Gigli, Disaster Movie, and Alone in the Dark (all of which are listed here). When a movie's outclassed by its Game Boy Advance tie-in game *
(based on an earlier {and far better} version of the script, getting very high praise from even Nintendo Power) - Just read Roger Ebert's review of the movie, or watch the Ebert and Roeper review; it's some of his finest work.
- The DVD has no blurbs of positive reviews, meaning that there were neither positive reviews nor phrases in the reviews that could be twisted to look positive. The distributors resorted to describing one of the scenes in the movie to make it seem interesting.
- A leaked trailer for Basic Instinct 2 promised the same level of sleazy entertainment as the first, with images of lurid and deviant sexual encounters. Not only did the final print not have these scenes, but it was also boring with painful acting and an ending that boggled the mind. Oh, and you don't get to see Sharon Stone's snatch, in case you were wondering.
- Battlefield Earth is perhaps the least Pragmatic Adaptation of a book ever, and the book was a pulp Sci Fi Doorstopper written by the founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard. The film could have also been So Bad, It's Good if you unintentionally giggled at hilariously bad performances like this one. Another movie whose reviews are better than the movie itself. Want proof?
The Rhode Island Providence Journal: Battlefield Earth's primary colors are blue and gray, adding to the misery. Whenever we glimpse sunlight, the screen goes all stale yellow, as though someone had urinated on the print. This, by the way, is not such a bad idea.
I'd like to end with three quotes about Battlefield Earth that touched me very deeply:
The critic for The New York Times said, "Battlefield Earth'' is about the extinction of the human race. And after seeing this movie— I'm all for it!" The Banana Daily wrote; "I'd like to call the movie a train wreck, but that's not really fair to train wrecks, because people actually want to watch a train wreck." And my favorite quote of all: "This is worst fucking piece of shit movie I've ever seen in my entire fucking life." That quote was from my mother.
- Bear... where do we start? Oh, right — the characters are unlikable assholes, the acting sucks, the plot's poorly explained (they don't even explain where they were going until after the titular bear attacks). The special effects are also shit (there are several shots where you can clearly see the lights, film crew, and stuntmen...and when the bear's obviously a guy in a suit). And the behavior of the bear and why it's attacking result in massive Wall Bangers. Watch Film Brain tackle this turd pile here.
- The ultimate low point: when they're crawling out of a pipe, you can see a man wearing a bear glove standing on top, ready to reach through for a Jump Scare. This is after the tunnel scene is finished; as Film Brain points out, he's waiting for a non-existent cue and therefore has no reason to be in the shot.
- The most surprising thing about this film is that it was produced by (of all people) Freddie Wong, who is usually praised for his great special effects on his Youtube channel.
- Ben and Arthur was directed, produced, executive produced, written by, edited by, cast by, scored by, and generally crapped out by one Sam Mraovich. He stars as Arthur, a pudgy, whiny gay guy trying to get married to the hunky Ben despite the wishes of his closet case fundamentalist brother and a priest with apparent mob connections. The production values are so poor they make Plan 9 from Outer Space look like Titanic, the acting's hilariously wooden, and Mraovich apparently doesn't know the first thing about film-making because the script's Anvilicious, offensive to gays and Christians alike, and tripe. Hell, you need only see the trailer to get an idea of how bad this is. While the entire movie's on YouTube, you probably shouldn't watch it.
- The Bratz movie (based on the popular toyline) became notorious for being filled with idiotic dialogue, plot holes, and countless Unfortunate Implications. It bombed in the box office and earned Razzie nominations. Nathan Rabin of The AV Club declared that it "is why terrorists hate [America]". See the Nostalgia Chick review here.
- The 2003 Cannes Film Festival cut of The Brown Bunny. The official cut was well-received, but the Cannes version, which Gallo admitted wasn't completely edited (about 26 minutes had yet to be cut out), had even more trouble with pacing. Many scenes were either pointlessly long or merely pointless, which, alongside the stuff present in the final cut — such as Gallo's role as the protagonist (and the countless shots of his face) and the notorious closing scene with Chloe Sevigny — resulted in a freak hybrid of Gerry's absence of pacing and Ctrl+Alt+Del's lack of humility. Ebert, who would later give the final cut a good review, claimed the Cannes cut to be the worst Cannes film he'd ever seen.
- Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star, quite possibly the worst film to ever come out of Happy Madison Productions. Even the trailer's completely puerile and obnoxious. The plot (about a farm boy who finds out that his conservative, uptight parents were once porn stars) feels like a bad Saturday Night Live sketch drawn out to feature length; seemingly every joke's about sex and/or penises (specifically, Bucky's small one), and the acting rivals such greats as The Room and Plan 9 from Outer Space. Currently holds a 2.4 on IMDb and 0% at Rotten Tomatoes. At no point did it recover a full fifth of its budget, or even break the box office top ten. Advertising was stopped within a weekend.
- Children Of The Living Dead presents itself as a sequel to George A. Romero's classic Night of the Living Dead. In reality, all it has in common are the words "Living Dead" in the title, one of the producers on Night (John A. Russo) filling the same role in Children, and the fact that it features zombies. What would otherwise have been an unremarkable zombie exploitation flick got turned into an absolute trainwreck by the egotism of writer-producer Karen Lee Wolf, who took the film away from the director (he unsurprisingly disowned it afterwards), re-edited it into a total mess, and then hired a bunch of talentless voice-over "artists" to redub all the dialogue in order to make some sense out of the butchered storyline. Add some horrendous cinematography and mediocre zombie/gore effects, and you have a film every bit as bad as the cheap Italian zombie movies of The Seventies.
- Christmas In Wonderland is a 2007 Christmas movie with an all-star cast, apparently zero script, and exists solely to piss off every Edmontonian and Canuck in its sight. Its main selling point is that 90% of it was shot in West Edmonton Mall in Edmonton, Canada, yet when it's not being a 100-minute commercial for West Edmonton Mall, it's trying to justify its plot by relying on the seminal characters being ten times as moronic as families in average family Christmas films. To make a list of all its inconsistencies would be writing a list as long as the script itself — for example, the opening credits are supposed to be in Los Angeles, yet it's obviously shot on Whyte Avenue. The two boys apparently hate Canada, yet they have strong Canadian accents. Furthermore, the mall itself is made to look like a magical palace on the exterior, with puke-worthy results. That's only the beginning. The film's an insult to Edmonton and Canada, and the one cinema in the mall that showed it in 2007 dropped it after a week because it's so bad. And boy, Patrick Swayze looked horrible; not a film you'd want to remember him by.
- Daddy Day Camp, the sequel to Daddy Day Care, replaces all of the cast, including Eddie Murphy, whose role was taken by Cuba Gooding Jr. It relies too much on Toilet Humor and stale, humorless gags. It got a Razzie for "Worst Prequel or Sequel", and Richard Roeper said he had "a finger [he] could use" to review this movie. It's also frequently referred to in Mike Nelson's Rifftrax commentaries when compared to horrifying experiences.
- Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo is a sequel to a film that was simply bad, but sometimes amusingly so. One joke involves a woman with a penis for a nose who ejaculates when she sneezes, which should tell you everything you need to know. Its star, Rob Schneider, has taken a leaf from Uwe Boll and thinks the film's brilliant, viciously attacking anyone who dares criticize it. One such person was Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times. Schneider wrote a letter to him in which he said that Patrick hadn't won the Pulitzer Prize and therefore wasn't qualified to criticize the film. Roger Ebert, who had called the film "aggressively bad, as if it wants to cause suffering to the audience" then mentioned that he had won the Pulitzer Prize and therefore was qualified to criticize it...then stated simply:
"Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks."
- The Devil Of Blue Mountain is a "horror" film with zero scare value. What little plot there is relies on the two main characters being ten times as moronic as the (non-villain) protagonists of most horror films. Approximately an hour's worth is nothing but silent footage of the characters walking through the woods. The film's main selling point was that it was shot during Hurricane Ivan, but the hurricane weather is only seen in the first four minutes of the film and serves little purpose but to drown out the dialogue. Oh, and the "Devil" of the title, supposedly the point of the film, was a guy in an obvious fursuit who shows up in the last ten minutes and does nothing but run around, roar a bit, and get shot. Something Awful, as always, says it best.
- Dirty Love, starring ex-Playboy Playmate Jenny McCarthy. A gross-out sex comedy with a female viewpoint may be unusual (and Bridesmaids proved that it can be done well)...but the novelty of the movie's premise quickly foundered under a bad script (by McCarthy herself), bad acting, and wretched cinematography. McCarthy's tasteless turns, such as dancing topless with her breasts covered in vomit and carpeting a store with her menstrual blood, made the movie seem misogynistic. Carmen Electra played her Black Best Friend as an Ethnic Scrappy, even though she isn't...ah...right.
- Like the other films in Seltzer and Friedberg's catalog, Disaster Movie displays both a total lack of awareness of the distinction between referencing something and parodying it, a lack of research beyond watching the previews, and wave after wave of of painfully-dated pop-culture references. The rest consists of long Running Gags that were never funny to begin with and Refuge In Vulgarity. What makes Disaster Movie "special" is that it goes even further on all of this, managing to be more aggressively unfunny, more pandering, more vapid, and even cheaper-looking than the films before it. The film shot up (down?) to the #1 spot on IMDb's worst film list in less than a day and bombed in theaters.
- The Dork Of The Rings, a Godawful retelling of The Lord of the Rings, consists primarily of fart and pedophilia jokes. That is, when it wasn't falling prey to some serious pacing issues.
- Dracula 3000. What stands out is all the ways it could have been So Bad, It's Good:
- The intro speech mentions Energy Weapons; not one is present in the movie.
- The rampant use of familiar names can lead one to believe it's Bram Stoker's Dracula IN SPACE!; it isn't. The vampire isn't even Dracula; his name is Orlock. (And yes, that's a Mythology Gag attempting to use the vampire from Nosferatu.)
- The room full of coffins can fool you into thinking that the protagonists are going to face down a vampire army like that in From Dusk Till Dawn; there are at most three vampires in the whole movie.
- You might be expecting space vampires to be some kind of grotesque alien evil (hell, even the box cover tries to deceive you with this); instead you'll find a silly old man in a vampire costume that was probably bought at Wal-Mart and looks it.◊
- You might expect a decent final showdown; instead, the protagonists slam a door shut on Orlock's arm, cutting it off, and he breaks down crying and screaming.
- You'll be expecting a sex scene after the last human carries the sex-droid towards the bedroom; instead, the ship explodes from getting too close to the sun in order to kill Orlock.
- Exit to Eden. Will the producers of this please offer an explanation for why they thought a film adaptation of a book about a BDSM resort needed a cliche-ridden buddy cop comedy subplot involving stolen diamonds, which wasn't in the book? And did we mention it features Rosie O'Donnell as a dominatrix? It also has Dana Delany as a dominatrix, but unfortunately this isn't the Dana of China Beach or even Desperate Housewives; no, this is a Dana who had inexplicably let herself go and didn't make much effort to get in shape for the role, and whose screen time was split between phoning-it-in and Narm. She didn't look bad, but wasn't at her best.
- In 2004, what could charitably be called an adaptation of English comic strip Fat Slags was released. Not long after seeing it, the strip's creator allegedly underwent Creator Breakdown and discontinued the strip. Viz had no executive control, which might not have been as bad...were it clear anyone involved had read the strip, or that those who did gave a shit. The film relies mainly on Refuge In Vulgarity and Toilet Humor, which falls flat. Barring that, there's the many crude parodies, the desperate attempts to appeal to the Rule of Funny, the clear lack of budget (Sandra and Tracy's fatsuits are blatantly padded body-stockings), the ridiculous stereotypes, the clichéd, disjointed plot, and the ham-fisted Character Development. It holds an average score of 1.8 on IMDB and 27% on Rotten Tomatoes.
- Troma's The First Turn-On!, a low-rent gross-out sex comedy from the 1980s that gives low-rent gross-out sex comedies a bad name. The "plot" concerns the sexual hijinks of a group of kids at a summer camp...and it's all told in the most vile, juvenile, disgusting way possible, flip-flopping between icky toilet humor and icky softcore porn. Notable only for being the film debut of a young and mortified Vincent D'Onofrio, who most certainly got better.
- From Justin To Kelly features Kelly Clarkson and Justin Guarini, the winner and runner-up of American Idol Season 1. Texan singing waitress Kelly Taylor meets Pennsylvania college student Justin Bell; they fall in love and spend the rest of the movie being annoying. And there's musical numbers in this fiasco, which are instantly forgettable. Clarkson has publicly apologized for the movie, saying that as the winner of American Idol she was contractually obligated to do it. Notice that no other American Idol winner has done a movie, entirely because of how much this one bombed. It won the Golden Raspberry Award in 2005 for "Worst 'Musical' of Our First 25 Years".
- Fun fact — this movie was written by Kim Fuller, whose brother (Simon Fuller) created American Idol. Kim Fuller also wrote Spice World and S Club: Seeing Double *
(which you probably won't have heard of given that S Club were only ever popular in the UK and had actually disbanded by the time of the film's release) , but it's every bit as bad as Fuller's other flicks. It's quite an artistic legacy.
- The dialogue's just as bad as the musical numbers. It wouldn't even have been passable in old cheap 1950s-vintage flicks.
- Gamera: Super Monster, released in 1980. Whether you love the Showa series, warts and all, or think Gamera is hard to take even with the aid of Joel, Mike, and the Bots...you'll be astounded by how bad this film is. The enemy ship is a blatant Star Destroyer rip-off. The three-girl alien hero team sits and plays a magical music organ with a kid more annoying than all other Kaiju kids combined. In the end, Gamera sacrifices himself to blow up the enemy ship after re-fighting all his foes in footage from prior films which wasn't even edited and didn't have the Godzilla's Revenge excuse of taking place in a dream. When Gamera dies, you feel good for him even though the sequence is lame because he's out of the picture!
- The Garbage Pail Kids Movie. Based on a brand of trading cards and stickers, the film features cheaply-made and scary-looking puppets (what's with the mouths on these kids?), a Running Gag of a zit-covered geek wetting his pants, a romance between someone who looks twelve and someone who looks in her twenties, and a climax where everyone farts and vomits. There's a government agency that kidnaps ugly people and kills them. This aspect, the "State Home For The Ugly", is perhaps the biggest Plot Hole as it brings about a dozen questions the story never attempts to answer. The "heroes" want to catch the Garbage Pail Kids to put them back in their tiny little pail, but they're heartbroken to hear that they'd be imprisoned in the State Home. The Obi-Wan says that they're equivalent to the horrors unleashed by Pandora's Box, yet wishes to save them from the State Home. Why? And the "plot" only goes downhill from there. The movie is so bad that Doug Walker himself, during the 2009 donation drive, named this movie as the worst he ever reviewed. Walker was so visibly suffering by having to watch the movie in his review that watching the review is painful.
- The movie's so bad that not even the review blurbs on the back of the DVD cover have anything nice to say, instead using words like, "vile", "rude", "smelly", "ugly", and "gross".
- If the review didn't make it clear how much Doug Walker hated it, then Doug and Rob's commentary definitely does. In the commentary, Doug says that the movie is so bad it doesn't deserve the right to be considered worst film but rather the film he outright despises.
- Gigli was made for one reason — to sap money out of teenage girls who wanted to see Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez necking. Unfortunately, when the film came out, that was being shown on television for free. The film concerns a mentally-retarded man being held for ransom by two mobsters (Affleck and Lopez). Not much happens beyond the three languishing in an apartment and coexisting. There's a feature-length Romantic Plot Tumor between the two stars which is long on awkward sex talk but devoid of chemistry. Oh, and apparently Ben Affleck's character can cure lesbianism. Not even the stars could defend it.
- Godzilla's Revenge (aka All Monsters Attack) is considered by fans to be the worst Godzilla film within the original Japanese franchise. The sad thing? Ishiro Honda, the director of what are considered the best Godzilla films (Gojira, Godzilla VS Mothra, King Kong VS Godzilla, and Destroy All Monsters), also directed this mess. The film's panned for its insanely-childish storyline, for Minya sounding like a drunken Goofy, and for 90% of the film being poorly-edited stock footage.
- Going Overboard, the first starring role for Adam Sandler, is a cheap No Budget comedy flick that was shot with poor quality on a cruise ship. It has very unfunny jokes that are either stupid or disgusting, a very degrading story about a struggling comedian taking on another comedian, actors doing very annoying stuff, and even the main character addressing the camera like it's more of a fake reality show than a movie. It's a wonder that Sandler's career wasn't killed in its cradle by this flop.
- For a long time, Highlander 2: The Quickening has been the #1 go-to example of a sequel that completely and utterly betrays the original source material. The immortals are suddenly all ancient space aliens from the planet Zeist (something never even alluded to in the first film), continuity is thrown right out of the window, as characters, who very clearly died in the first film, are resurrected for no reason and gain previously unexplained skills out of nowhere, and the film's plot and visual aesthetics very blatantly imitate cyberpunk films like Blade Runner...and that's just the tip of the iceberg. It's so reviled that the original version was pretty much buried and forgotten, with every significant re-release being severely recut to remove the more controversial elements, such as the whole Zeist thing...and they're still not particularly good. Even The Spoony One couldn't detail every flaw, but he came close. Strangely enough, even though it's one of the most notorious goofs in cinema history, it's not even the worst film in its franchise: That honor belongs to Highlander: The Source (see Horrible.Live Action TV).
- Hobgoblins was a very 1980s "horror" movie about "hobgoblins" (in truth, nothing like hobgoblins but suspiciously like Gremlins) who lived in a vault at an old film studio. They're meant to kill people by causing hallucinations of their greatest fantasies, but only manage this once on-screen. The film features delights like gratuitous sex; a fight scene involving rakes and little Casio noises; terrible puppetry; hair, makeup, and clothing that were hideous even by 1980s standards; and unfunny jokes that mostly revolve around Daphne's promiscuity. So bad, the director offered it to Mystery Science Theater 3000...and even their version is painful to watch despite containing some of the show's best riffs.
- Aaaand there's a sequel which is equally bad, but was probably aiming for So Bad, It's Good. The special effects are even worse than the original; neither the clothes nor the puppets have changed; and Daphne is still a slut. The whole thing can be summed up with a bonus feature on the DVD titled "Hobgoblins 2: What Were They Thinking?" in which the actors from the first film wonder why anyone would want to reprise their old roles or want anything to do with this monstrosity.
- The Hottie and the Nottie is a blatant Paris Hilton fame engine with horrid acting, bad special effects, a stockade of clichés, jokes built around insulting people Paris thinks are uglier than her, and the touching moral that only the pretty deserve love. Speaking of which, here's an Ebert & Roeper segment ruthlessly bashing this shameless piece of crap.
- The Howling: New Moon Rising had little werewolf activity. The only werewolf seen is an actress with a laughably-obvious Halloween mask. The rest of the film consists of bar conversations between director/screenwriter/actor Clive Turner (who cameoed in two previous Howling films and is apparently the same character{s} here to tie up the loose ends in a silly fashion) and the real-life residents of a small town originally built as a backdrop for Westerns. In the end, the film ends up being about 40% country music, 30% exposition, 20% dick and fart jokes, and 10% werewolf-related stuff.
- I Know Who Killed Me. Lindsay Lohan plays a double role as good girl Aubrey and foul-mouthed stripper Dakota. Throw in a incomprehensible plot, laughable dialogue, the two most inept FBI agents in the history of film, and symbolism that is as subtle as a sledgehammer to the skull...and you've got not only the worst film of 2007, but the one that effectively ended Lohan's career and "it girl" popularity; As of 2010, it holds the record for most Razzie Award "wins" with eight, including one for each of Lohan's roles.
- Following the success of Wayne's World, the producers of Saturday Night Live greenlit an interminable series of sketch-based movies of questionable quality. It's Pat stood out as particularly terrible. It, like the skits it's based on, consists primarily of scenes in which the revelation of Pat's gender is set up and then avoided, with a few scenes of Pat just being irritating to pad the movie to feature-length. It grossed only $60,822, among the lowest totals of any major-studio release. The worst part about It's Pat (spoilers ahead; you're welcome) is that the movie never reveals Pat's gender, nor does it even hint at it, thereby negating the entire purpose of a movie based on a skit whose only purpose is to raise speculation about the character's gender! Without that, it's just a feature-film version of a skit which isn't even all that funny in its short forms. Imagine a locked-room murder mystery where neither the killer or the method is ever revealed, and the story just...stops in its tracks at some undefined point after about the sixty-minute mark. If Monster A Go-Go is a dadaist anti-movie, It's Pat is the cinematic equivalent of nihilism.
- Jaws: The Revenge takes Sequelitis to unfathomable levels. It doesn't so much have plot holes as it has plot canyons and is over-the-top ridiculous in its execution. This is the premise, to quote Arnold Furious:
"The plot is that the shark (yanno, the one that Chief Brody killed in Jaws) now has a hatred of the Brody family and wants to kill them all as revenge for Brody's actions in Jaws. Yanno, the shark that's dead. That shark. That shark that's dead, wants revenge."
- Its badness also inspired an entire stand-up routine by the late Richard Jeni.
- Astoundingly, the Novelization is a decent book. Writer Hank Searls must have realized how ridiculous much of the movie was; he tweaked the shark's death so it was more realistic (though almost anything would've been) and added an interesting subplot about drug trafficking. The novel was based on an earlier screenplay of the movie. It also explained the shark's motives, even if it did end up being the Trope Namer for Voodoo Shark — it was the spirit beast of a Bahamian witch doctor who places a curse on Michael Brody for a slight he made against him. In the film's final version, the voodoo and the drug trafficking were taken out...leaving a Plot Hole about Hoagie's character (an undercover officer investigating the drug trafficking in the earlier draft).
- The version just before the final theatrical version has the shark killed by being impaled in the boat's prow and sinking into the deep, taking the boat with it. The ending was then changed, but no money was given to do it, leading to one of the worst effects shots in a major motion picture EVER.
- The Last Airbender, M. Night Shyamalan's adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender. Shyamalan is a self-described fan of the show, which got the fans' hopes up of seeing a faithful treatment. Instead, they got what another famous fan called "an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented". The movie came under fire almost right after its conception, with every character's race inverted. Character was completely and totally disregarded *, the acting's hopelessly wooden, the fight scenes are poorly shot, and the choreography looks absolutely nothing like the series' martial-art roots. The plot reads like a clip show of various Season 1 episodes, except less coherent and made of Swiss cheese *
(the Fire Nation's Earthbender camp is on land in this one, and yet Aang has to remind them years later that they can escape) (such as Sokka falling for Yue) or rendered through utterly-blatant exposition * (such as Zuko asking a random Fire Nation citizen about his own backstory) . It's one of the first movies on Rotten Tomatoes to get ten rotten reviews in a row right at the starting bell, and markedly outdid pretty much all other nominees for "worst picture". Here's a four-person review courtesy of That Guy With The Glasses.
- Ladies, gentlemen, members of the press... Your Holiness... Las Vegas Bloodbath. The worst movie Brad Jones has ever seen, this film has a baby shower scene that drags on for a half-hour, a strangely misogynistic Nicolas Cage clone who kills women and a few guys, a lack of flash on his gun, and an obviously overdubbed line that shows just how much They Just Didn't Care.
- Bill Cosby co-wrote, produced, and starred in Leonard Part 6. During a TV interview prior to its release, he asked people to stay away from it. The video box cover, showing Bill Cosby riding an ostrich, may well be the best thing about the movie. Siskel and Ebert's beatdown, plus the Agony Booth's recap, are worth a look...if only For the Lulz.
- Lost Continent. Cesar Romero and rock climbing. The movie concerns a group of rock climbers who are rock climbing to find rock climbing. On the way, we see them rock climbing for a good half of the rock-climbing movie. They stop rock climbing. Then they start rock climbing. They make it to the top of the rock (climbing) and find poorly-done dinosaurs...uh...being dinosaurs, but then they remember rock climbing, almost immediately turn around, and mountain traverse back down. Mystery Science Theater 3000 covered it:
"Rock climbing, Joel."
- Lower Learning, starring Jason Biggs, Eva Longoria, and Rob Corddry. It takes badness to uncharted levels, takes Refuge In Vulgarity with offensive "jokes", and includes tasteless scenes involving elementary school teachers explaining and demonstrating sex acts in front of children. The filmmakers managed to make 88 minutes seem like three hours. The only redeeming aspect is the behind-the-scenes featurette, in which Rob Corddry talks about how the best part was getting paid. Unfortunately, that's Paratext.
- The 1965 film Monster A-Go Go. Its original director, Bill Rebane, ran out of money while making the film and left it half-finished in 1961. Four years later, Herschell Gordon Lewis was looking for a B-movie to release with Moonshine Mountain; he found this, shot new footage of sitting around and talking, and released it. This led to an awkward movie that even fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000 found hard to sit through, riffing included. The film's filled with replacement actors, Take Our Word for It moments, scenes with a taller-than-average man with an acne problem as the monster, and one of the strangest twist endings ever. The heroes are hunting for some vague spaceman monster thing in some subway tunnels, and then this:
- ...So there was no monster after all. False alarm, sorry to make you sit through the movie, have a nice day. Please stop asking what happened to all the people the monster killed, there was no monster! It's like a dadaist anti-movie...except instead of making us question our conceptions about beauty and what makes a good movie, it sucks.
- The team of the MST3K has stated that, yes, they believe this to be the worst film they ever featured.
- The Neverending Story III: Escape from Fantasia, yet another property In Name Only. Neither the most basic aspects of continuity *
(the Childlike Empress' castle isn't the highest point; it's possible to intentionally find the Wandering Mountains; Bastian's dad knows nothing about Fantasia...) nor characterization * nor much else * (the villain, in stark contrast to the Eldritch Abominations of the first two, is a bunch of school bullies; at no point in the film is the theme song played; Atreyu is completely absent, the animatronics look like ass...) - Night Junkies is attempting too much with too little. A first-time director with no budget makes a movie that can't decide whether it's an attempt to cash in on post-Twilight vampire-romance enthusiasm, a skeezy softcore skin flick, or a deep and meaningful investigation of the damage that drug addiction causes (like Requiem for a Dream). The film has terrible acting — it's unclear from his accent where the lead actor is supposed to be from, and the villain is supposed to be Axe Crazy but just looks like he's having seizures. The script's awful, and the pacing's terrible. The nature of vampirism in The Verse is undecided — does it make you tougher than a human, or is it just a lamer version of mundane drug addiction? Who knows? Who cares? The only redeeming factor is the nudity, and there are works that do that better than this.
- Night of Horror, like most shitty horror films, has a nice, Tim Burton-esque VHS cover, and a fake R rating on the back, being a double case of Covers Always Lie. The film's "plot" is as follows: a bunch of ugly oldfarts and a rather pretty girl go on a road trip to the Virginia Mountain Country, 30 minutes of driving can be seen. They then arrive at the site, and at night are haunted by an old ghost. They then bury a fake looking skull. Bam, movie over. But that not it just yet: there's a disclaimer at the start of the film warning people that it's "a depiction of an actual event", which is hilarious seeing as at the very end there's a warning stating that the characters and stories are fictitious and any resemlance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. There is also a smudge on the lens for 10 minutes of the film. It would be on the other end of the spectrum if it wasn't so DULL. Agony Booth, as usual, says it best here.
- North is considered Rob Reiner's worst movie, hopefully ever. A child prodigy feels that he's unappreciated by his parents and decides to go look for new ones around the globe. Unfortunate Implications abound, with stereotypical Texans, Hawaiians, Eskimos, Amish, Africans, Chinese, and French. The jokes that don't involve terrible stereotypes aren't funny at all. The moral is sadly broken when North is supposed to accept his parents despite their flaws. The movie bombed at the box office and received a very scathing zero-star review from Roger Ebert (and an equally scathing review by him and Gene Siskel) that only one person thinks is too nice. Reiner's hitherto awesome career never recovered.
- Nukie was intended as a children's movie (specifically, a South African E.T. ripoff), but what sort of sick monster would show it to a child?! This review sums up the film's failures in this paragraph:
"Talking animals with no explanation, poor acting, twins characters that the filmmakers couldn't keep track of, poor science, scenes that add nothing to the rest of the movie, poor writing, comedy that isn't funny, poor special effects, annoying repetitious use of documentary technique for scene transitions, and alien protagonists that unintentionally resemble giant pieces of fecal matter."
- The Omega Code, a film about the End Times. Casper Van Dien, Michael York, and Michael Ironside become involved in a plot where a code is found in The Bible that allows the UN to be replaced with a Nazi-esque One World Government that nobody seems to object to. It brings about the end of the world, but only after York (the Anti-Christ) becomes stronger because he was shot in the head and Van Dien's chased by a demon truck. The effects and sets look like something out of a bad Twilight Zone episode.
- The American remake of One Missed Call, which took everything good about Takashi Miike's J-horror classic and bungled it. For one thing, it simply isn't scary. (The poster is terrifying, but it's paratext, not part of the film.) The story's lazily plotted, and the acting's poor. The filmmakers did transfer some scenes directly over from the Japanese version, but the transfers fail. Its failure at the box office seems to have killed any further interest in remaking Japanese horror films. As of this writing, it has a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
- Pocket Ninjas, a 3 Ninjas ripoff that manages to look like someone took discarded storyboards from the worst season of Power Rangers ever and decided to film them on $30 and whatever kids they could pick up from the playground. Plot elements happen in almost reverse order, the main villain (played by Z-movie veteran Robert Z'Dar) makes maybe two appearances before being replaced by his kids, eco-conscious messages are shoehorned in such a blunt fashion that Ted Turner would shake his head, the voiceover outright lies about the circumstances of the film (opening with a mention of the kids saving the universe when all the stakes are entirely local), the characters are dumber than stones in remedial class, and the dialogue thinks "butt-whiff" and "fat Republican" are the height of classy insults. Something Awful takes a hatchet to it here, and if that's not enough you can watch it eat a part of Obscurus Lupa's soul here.
- Robo Vampire. The 'plot' of the movie is that a druglord's dealers keep getting shot by anti-drug agents, so he hires a Taoist to summon vampires to kill the anti-drug agents, one of whom is apparently named Tom. Tom dies and is turned into a RoboCop rip-off who wanders around shooting Chinese hopping vampires with a rifle. There is also a romantic subplot between one of the vampire beasts and a ghost, random tangents involving someone named Sophie being imprisoned somewhere near what one presumes is the Chinese-Columbian border, and an excessive amount of explosions.
- Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny is a 1972 children's film that would probably be unknown if it weren't for The Agony Booth. Ice cream never appears in the movie, and most of the film is a hideously-poor adaptation of Thumbelina; Santa and that bunny are a mind-numbing framing device to kill time. The opening frame consists of a sweaty Santa having children bring all manner of local farm animals in attempts to roust his sleigh out of a half-inch of sand. The finale's mostly the Ice Cream Bunny driving slowly while children sing without a soundtrack. The Thumbelina film has a frame story of its own with a girl wandering around an amusement park and staring at some kind of Thumbelina display, and a recap narrated by Thumbelina. The kicker? The director of this movie was the real life inspiration for the Steve McQueen character in The Great Escape. He escaped to do this? Picked up from Public Domain and run with by the RiffTrax crew.
- Santa With Muscles is a horrible Hulk Hogan movie that makes other Hogan movies seem enjoyable. The plot revolves around Blake Throne (Hogan), a fitness guru who sells health products under his name. He makes a paintball game for his employees after refusing to give a charitable donation. Their speeding and all-round roughhousing catches the attention of the local authorities. Hulk escapes into a mall, changes into a Santa outfit, hides in the trash, and gets whacked on the head. The mall elf convinces Blake that he's the real Santa Claus...and the film goes downhill from there. The Idiot Ball's passed around a lot — adults believe a famous bodybuilder is Santa, the Mooks are easily dispatched by children, police officers are armed with rocket launchers, etc. And it has almost nothing to do with Christmas besides Santa. It's a cheesy action flick. This is considered one of IMDb's top 100 worst movies of all time and barely got recognition when it hit theaters. The Spoony One has reviewed it.
- The Seeker, the film adaptation of The Dark Is Rising. It takes They Just Didn't Care to new and amazing levels — the screenwriter didn't read the whole book, and the director admitted that he hated fantasy. The result was about what you'd expect, only worse. They changed so much so badly that the movie was universally loathed not just by the fanbase, but by critics and viewers who'd never read the book. The Stantons are a large, loving British family in the book; they're now an American expy of the Weasleys, if they were dysfunctional and one-dimensional. Main character Will is a thoughtful, wise-for-his-years eleven-year-old in the book; he's now a Jerk Ass, whiny fourteen-year-old who's more interested using his powers to impress girls than accomplishing his quest. The plot was butchered almost beyond recognition, bearing very little resemblance to the source material. The writer and director took pride in throwing out the Celtic Mythology elements that gave the series its depth. The movie was so terrible, it's difficult to imagine how anyone would've thought it would do anything other than bomb horribly...which it did. It had the second-weakest debut of any movie ever, and holds the record for the largest theater-drop (the number of cinemas who dumped it from their lineup after the obligatory three weekends).
- Sex Lives Of The Potato Men is a British "comedy" about the sex lives of a group of potato delivery men in Birmingham. Throw in a terrible director, a script devoid of taste or humour, appallingly-awful performances from the two leading actors (Mackenzie Crook and Johnny Vegas) — who were both made to look as grotesque as possible just for the Squick factor of them trying to have sex — and a supporting cast with Brummie accents so thick you can't make out a word of what they're saying. The result? A movie described by critic Christopher Tookey as "enough to put you off sex, and films, for life" and in national newspaper The Times as "one of the two most nauseous films ever made". The producers even admitted it in the film's tagline:
"The search for the lowest form of life on the planet is over."
- To cap it all, the film was widely criticised because one-third of its £3,000,000 budget was public money from the National Lottery granted by the UK Film Council.
- Sextette. Mae West's final film concerns the 86-year-old's marriage to the 32-year-old Timothy Dalton, which is obsessively covered by a series of newscasters including Regis Philbin, Rona Barrett, and Gil Stratton, culminating in a huge group of bellhops dancing to "Hooray for Hollywood". Ex-husbands are played by George Hamilton (a film noir gangster), Ringo Starr (a temperamental director), and Tony Curtis doing an Anton Chekov Berlitz Annex of Russian Stereotypes; they all show up to prevent the newlyweds from having sex. Keith Moon shows up as a gay fashion designer, Alice Cooper shows up and sings the final song, Dom DeLuise does a soft-shoe number on top of a piano singing "Honey Pie", numerous Mr. Universes show up and flex...and there's a subplot about Mae and her new hubby both being secret agents. If any of this sounds even vaguely amusing, it's being told wrong. This is a black hole of comedy, failing at the box office despite the wattage of its cast. And it's probable that at least some of the Fan Disservice is Fetish Retardant...
- The Starfighters, another common candidate for "films that are almost unwatchable even on MST3K", echoes the title of a So Bad, It's Good Sci Fi film as sheep's clothing to lure in the viewer. It details the lives of US Air Force pilots as they...don't do anything. Scenes of routine flight tests, mundane conversations about corn detasseling, and a half-assed romantic angle that doesn't go anywhere are what pass for the plot of what may be one of the most boring movies ever made about the military. A popular "game" when watching the film is to defy the person next to you to name a single character by the film's halfway point.
- As one YouTube user said, "If I were in the Airforce, and it was actually this boring, I would pray for a war to break out, just so I could finally get some action—or get killed. Either would be better than this."
- Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li is a Street Fighter property In Name Only at its absolute worst, combined with horrible casting (Lana Lang as Chun-Li?), a script that would only be plausible if all involved had brain tumors, and fight scenes that redefine "why bother?" Neal McDonough's Bison is a completely Harmless Villain, channeling equal parts Hannibal Lecter, Lex Luthor, and Sho' Nuff.
- Super Babies: Baby Geniuses 2 failed in much the same way that Disaster Movie did—it took faults the audience was willing to forgive and made them much, much worse. The writing's god-awful, with ostensible plot holes and the film itself quite obviously had a much lower budget—among other things, the lip-synching looks like it was done on drugs. But the saddest part of it? It was the last thing Bob Clark (yes, the one you're thinking of) directed before his death. Let's watch an Englishman insult it.
- The 2002 remake of Swept Away with Madonna, directed by her then-husband Guy Ritchie. The first half consists of a fingernails-scratching-the-chalkboard shouting match between the two main characters (seriously; just argue with your friend, spouse, or children for 40 minutes, occasionally shoving each other, and you've pretty much seen it); the second half's a misogynist fantasy in which Madonna's character pretty much seems to fall in love with the male lead after he rapes her.
- They Saved Hitler's Brain takes B-movie badness to previously uncharted regions. The bulk of the film is confusing exposition about Hitler's brain, which doesn't appear until near the end. Not even the car chase that switches from night to day is enough to keep you entertained. The reason for this is pretty simple — the money ran out after half the film was shot, then set aside for ten years until another director acquired it and filmed enough completely unconnected footage to pad the movie to feature length. For some reason, it didn't occur to him to add more scenes with Hitler's brain, which is the only part of the movie that isn't painfully boring.
- The Undefeated is perhaps one of the biggest critical and commercial failures in the world of documentaries, with a 1.7 of IMDB as of yet. The title makes it clear from the start that this is little more than its subject's personal vanity project.*
Palin is best known as a candidate for the 2008 vice-presidency in America, losing out to Joe Biden. Not that you'd know this from watching the film, though. As a result, it blatantly and shamelessly promoted the subject while ignoring facts that reflected poorly on her. It was chock-full of yes-men, over-the-top, heavy-handed imagery and obvious falsehoods, with the odd demonization or two of left-wing ideologies. It came off as more of a lengthy campaign ad than a documentary, and with its many intelligence-insulting moments, it failed at being that, too.Here's a review... by the only person (of a single-digit crowd) still left in the theatre by the half-hour mark.
- Before Vince Offer started shilling ShamWows and Slap Chops, he made The Underground Comedy Movie, a painfully boring and unfunny attempt at Refuge In Vulgarity, with guest stars such as Slash (then of Guns N' Roses fame), Joey Buttafuoco, and Michael Clarke Duncan, of all people.
- There's a sequel currently in production that features Duncan again, as well as Michelle Rodriguez and Lindsay Lohan. Okay, so Lohan's appearance isn't so surprising, but still...her scene in the trailer looks to be the sole funny part of an otherwise awful film.
- You should know to abandon all hope when your film's actually named Violent Shit and has taglines like "Experience a lesson in real BAD taste" and "Expect the worst". It's filled with terrible sounds, blurry images, padding to a ridiculous level for a plotless 75-minute film, stuff that just doesn't make any sense at all, and the film itself thinking that it would be useful for being hired for a job. Despite that, it ended up having three sequels and having "K. The Butcher Shitter" appearing in five other films. If you don't believe us, ask the Cinema Snob how good the film is. The only advantage the later films have is that the main character's name becomes "Karl 'The Butcher' Berger".
The Cinema Snob: ...This movie is so fucking awful, that comparing it to Uwe Boll IS AN INSULT TO UWE BOLL.
- Who's Your Caddy? In spite of (or perhaps because of) an All Star Cast with Big Boi, Lil' Wayne, Terry Crews, and Andy Milonakis, this film, a poor ripoff of Caddyshack, gave in to the worst stereotypes of African-American culture. It got a 6% in Rotten Tomatoes and 1.8 rating in IMDB.
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