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Horrible / Live-Action Films

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Well, you gotta commend them for one thing: The title didn't lie.
"'Garbage Pail Kids'... does the title even sound like it's going to attempt to be a good movie?"

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. If you want to see horrible animated films, please check the Animated Films section. For horrible Made-for-TV movies, see the "TV Movies/Specials" section on Live-Action TV.

Important Notes:

  1. Merely being offensive in its subject matter, a Box Office Bomb, or a film you just plain don't 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.)

  2. It isn't a Horrible film just because any Channel Awesome alumni (including the few still on the site as of writing), Smeghead, and/or any other Caustic Critic reviewed it, or because it was either on Mystery Science Theater 3000, I Hate Everything's The Search for the Worst, or Filmento's Anatomy of a Failure series. Nor is it a Horrible film just because it earned a Razzie nomination/award for Worst Picture or any other catagory. There needs to be independent evidence, such as reputable critics like Roger Ebert and Leonard Maltin (emphasis on plural), for example, to list it. Once it is listed, they can provide the detailed review. Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic are good starting points to find those critics (and you can check Ebert’s website for his own reviews); if the rating on RT is in the single-digits and/or the Metascore below 30, it's a potential candidate for this list. In other words, universally despised by audiences and critics alike.

  3. To ensure that the work is judged with a clear mind and the hatred isn't just a knee-jerk reaction, as well as to allow opinions to properly form, examples should not be added until at least one month after release. This includes "sneaking" the entries onto the pages ahead of time by adding them and then just commenting them out.


Examples:

Repeat Offenders

Listed by last name or company, in alphabetical order.

    open/close all folders 

    A - D 
  • Armenian-Russian director Sarik Andreasyan is widely known as "the Russian Uwe Boll", and that is not entirely undeserved. Website Posmotre.li note  refers to him as "the Anti-Midas" since everything he touches turns not into gold, but into some squishy, brown-colored substance. Be it low-brow comedies, unforgivable remakes of Soviet classics, or more serious films - anything he has ever done has rarely been even decent, let alone good. (Though to be fair, his drama film Earthquake and anthology film duology, Moms have both gotten pretty positive reviews.) Andreasyan is also notoriously quick to claim any reviews of his films as copyright infringement. Many Russian YouTube-based film reviewers have had a lot of trouble with this (Evgeny "BadComedian" Bazhenov being the most notable example).
  • The Asylum is a 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, all while never providing sources for the gushing quotes on the DVD cases. Their only works that aren't Horrible are the hilariously trashy Sharknado film series and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes movie, and the passable TV series Z Nation. Examples:
    • Mega Piranha, a knock-off of Piranha 3D that is painfully boring with poor 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 actuality, the film is just dull. The acting is predictably terrible, the script is weak, the eponymous "fight" only lasts for two minutes at the end, and the one hilariously So Bad, It's Good scene (the one where the shark manages to jump up to airline-cruising altitude and takes a bite out of a jet) isn't funny enough on its own to redeem it.
    • Snakes on a Train (not to be confused with Snakes on a Plane, the film it's trying to capitalize on)note  is boring and extremely dull. The dialogue is extremely clunky (especially the racist remarks from the redneck at the very beginning), which is especially annoying 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 are enough to save it. As for the eponymous 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.
    • Monster, a Cloverfield mockbuster, is The Asylum's most obscure film, and for good reasons. It has obnoxious camera work which is inexcusable even for Found Footage Films, a garbled and focusless plot, and overacting awful characters. The titular "monster" never fully shows up: it's supposed to be a giant squid, but when it attacks, it only shows a tentacle and the camera defocuses just to (not) let you know it's there. The most pathetic part is the film was rushed (and it shows) to be released a week before Cloverfield, hoping that unattentive moviegoers would watch their film instead of the latter. For added 'quality,' the film is supposed to take place in Tokyo, Japan- but is very obviously filmed in LA's Chinatown district. And despite the premise that the city is being destroyed and everyone is evacuating, they didn't even bother to dub out the background noise, which audibly includes traffic sounds and children playing happily just off camera!
    • Transmorphers - no, not Transformers, Transmorphers. The film is 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. 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. Maybe you watch for Shaley Scott, the one actress who appears to know the movie's shit and refuses to take it seriously like everyone else, instead Chewing the Scenery like it's filet mignon, but that's it. And despite the title, Transmorphers is actually a Terminator knockoff. (Unlike The Terminators, released at the same time as Terminator Salvation, which is actually a Battlestar Galactica ripoff.)
    • Their Christian films, such as Sunday School Musical — created after a Moral Substitute to High School Musical was suggested to them at a seminar about marketing to a Christian audience — fare no better. In addition to the wooden acting and poor script, its problems are manifold. The eponymous "Sunday school" appears to be a Christian high school, as opposed to that term's usual meaning of a Christian class held before the main morning church service. The choir competition is prone to all kinds of Fridge Logic (only three schools seem to be competing) and tossing around of the Conflict Ball when the lead character is forced to move across town. The music is unmemorable, with the actual choir performances limited to uninspired arrangements of dusty old hymns and sprituals, while the few original songs are weakly-sung with stilted choreography. All of the "good" musicians are African-American, and European-style choral music is presented in a very unflattering light compared to more modern styles. The Christian content is largely limited to offhanded mentions of praying, and a choir member springing a verse from Zechariah on the judges. See Film Brain and Todd in the Shadows rip it to shreds here. The Happy Spaceman, an atheist, takes it on here. The Cinema Snob also takes a look at it as the final entry of Musical March (in September) 2019, and Musical Hell gave it a case to examine.
    • The Source, aka The Surge, a ripoff of The Craft. The movie had a 9-day shooting schedule, and their idea of clever camera work was to rock the camera back and forth like a teeter-totter. The acting and writing were horrible, and the eponymous power source was a big rock with a lens flare behind it.
    • King of the Lost World, clearly a ripoff of King Kong (2005). The plot makes no sense, the acting and writing are horrible and the CGI looks like graphics from an early PS2 game, especially the giant ape near the end of the film. See Big Jack Films give this movie the lambasting it deserves here.
    • You wouldn't expect there to be a sequel to James Cameron's Titanic (1997), but 2010 saw the release of Titanic 2 ...which, by the way, isn't really a sequel to Titanic. The acting and writing are a joke, the CGI effects are abysmal, and it kills off any and all characters that it deems unimportant. Hunter the Movie Reviewing Pony sinks this movie here.
    • Nazi Overlord tries to cash in on the buzz behind Overlord (2018), but just falls flat. To start with, the film doesn't even try to distinguish itself from the one it's ripping off, having the exact same premise of a group of soldiers on an isolated mission discovering Nazi Zombies. While that premise is indeed tried and true, the film doesn't actually do anything with it until the last 20 minutes or so, with the first hour and ten minutes focusing on the dynamics of a bunch of soldiers with no distinguishable personalities played by actors who cannot act. When we do get to the zombies, we only see them for about two minutes total, with the rest being two Nazi scientists testing things while the heroes are tied up. Add onto that a completely nonsensical Ass Pull of a Sudden Downer Ending, and you get a film that deserves its 2.0 IMDb rating.
    • Their ventures into animation, such as Trolland and Izzie's Way Home, aren't any better either. See the Animated Films subpage for more information on that.
  • While otherwise a competent, if polarizing, filmmaker, Uwe Boll has one hell of a track record when it comes to video game movies, to the point that petitions were written in an attempt to put him out of business and that his page used to be part of the Permanent Red Link Club on this very wiki. He's on at least one company's blacklist, and another guy's list of things to never discuss within earshot. He also has a sick and twisted sense of humor - for instance, BloodRayne: The Third Reich was simultaneously shot with a Self-Parody called Blubberella, where the entire joke was that instead of a Third-Person Seductress the protagonist was a fat woman. He would later leave film making behind and set up his own German restaurant in Vancouver, which has gained excellent reviews.
  • Brain Damage Films: An appropriately-named distributor and occasional producer of every conceivable type of horror film, it's gained a reputation as an egotistical Troma wannabe. Its No Budget releases (almost all of them, as impossible as that may seem) have been met with almost universal disdain, to the point that most websites that even bother to notice them immediately dismiss any film put out by it as a (to quote the now-defunct Slasherpool) "home made piece of shit" that tries to compensate for its many, many shortcomings by throwing in as much nudity, sleaze, and awful gore as possible. Take a look at just one of their zero-budget productions, and a few more for good measure.
    • Alice in Murderland had an awesome gimmick: A Slasher Movie based on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, with the Jabberwocky as the killer. Unfortunately, that's all it has to offer. The film, despite supposedly taking place in a fancy house, was very clearly filmed in a cheap warehouse. Most of the film isn't even focused on the killings, but instead the dynamics of a bunch of unlikable sorority sisters. Add in a nonsensical In the Blood angle, and the film earns its dismal 1.9 IMDb rating. See When Bad Movies Attack! tear it apart here.
    • Curse of Pirate Death takes an already-silly title and slaps it on a dreadful movie. It is a slasher film starring an undead pirate, whom the film decides to paint as intimidating by calling him "Pirate Death" as opposed to anything creative. The acting from most of the cast is so wooden that it makes former porn star Ron Jeremy look Shakespearean in comparison. The plot itself is a disjointed mess with no interesting characters and an overuse of flashbacks. All in all, the film deserves its 2.6 IMDb rating. You can see Doc Schlock discuss the film here. Longtime Something Awful reviewer Ben "Greasnin" Platt also slashes the film here with "special guest" Captain Manybeard.
  • Roger Christian note : Once known for his stellar set designs and art direction for films such as Star Wars and Alien, he has since taken a crack at being a director. Let's just say his resulting work... fell short.
  • Bob Clark was a renowned filmmaker known for classics such as Black Christmas (1974), Porky's, and A Christmas Story. While the rest of his filmography wasn't as remarkable, these two stand out as possibly the most ill-conceived movies he ever directed in his entire career.
    • Baby Geniuses has garnered an insidious reputation as one of the very worst family films to ever be made, and it makes zero effort to hide this: putting aside the rather Audience-Alienating Premise that the title gives away, the writing is beyond puerile apart from occasionally humorous banter between two side characters, gaping Plot Holes, almost nonexistent lip syncing, the grandest of Special Effect Failure all piled on top of a blithering Idiot Plot. Emer Prevost endured the film in his review here, while a dumbstruck The Nostalgia Critic reviews it through an inner-monologue here.
    • SuperBabies: 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 even more 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). The saddest part? It was the last thing Bob Clark directed before his death from a car accident. It got a very rare 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and sat on top of the IMDb's Bottom 100 for years, at least until Saving Christmas and Code Name: K.O.Z. came along. Let's just see it send The Nostalgia Critic into a coma... although interestingly enough, he considers the sequel slightly better than the first movie. I Hate Everything agrees. Emer Prevost disagrees, considering it even worse than the first.
  • David DeCoteau is one of many filmmakers who had their start through Roger Corman, but unlike some of his contemporaries, DeCoteau's track record is not exactly as polished as theirs. When watching his films, expect Padding that can sometimes not even fill up a 90-minute runtime, bad cinematography, bad costumes and special effects, and his gratuitous Author Appeal for Ho Yay and other homoerotic scenes.

    E - L 
  • Emmett/Furla/Oasis Films, also known as MoviePass Films, is the film production company of MoviePass known for their action flicks. Some of their films are So Okay, It's Average, with one film they worked on being infamously So Bad, It's Good, and End of Watch has been critically acclaimed, but other films they have created are... not as good. They are also a very shady company, with the Emmett/Furla side becoming part of MoviePass without Oasis' permission, stealing a script from a YouTuber and inducing $1 million in fraud regarding the production of the film Inconceivable.
  • Daniel Farrands' documentary work, particularly his retrospectives on the A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, and Friday the 13th series,note  is widely acclaimed among horror fans. Unfortunately, the gulf between them and his True Crime films that play fast and loose with the facts of the cases covered, with their borderline slanderous depictions of famous real-life murder victims, is so vast that one might wonder if the same filmmaker is behind both of them.
    • The Haunting of Sharon Tate immediately earns comparisons to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (which was released three months later) due to its subject matter, a revisionist history of the murder of Sharon Tate by the Manson Family. Unlike that film, however, this one is pure exploitation, tastelessly attaching the legacy of the Tate-LaBianca murders to a bottom-of-the-barrel slasher with tacked-on supernatural elements (Sharon having premonitions of the murders in various Nightmare Sequences). Large parts of the film consist of Sharon wandering around doing nothing interesting, characters have random discussions about fate and free will that the film thinks are far deeper and more foreboding than they actually are, they react with blinding ignorance and disinterest at the obvious signs that they are being stalked, and at times the film tries to go for a mockumentary feel (including incorporating real Stock Footage of Sharon, her husband Roman Polański, and Manson's followers) that it does nothing with. Sharon's sister Debranote  called it tasteless, and while Farrands attempted to defend it as a film about the victims fighting back against the killers, this falls apart in light of the ending, where it turns out that Sharon and the other surviving characters were Dead All Along. Chris Stuckmann gives it his due here, calling it an easy contender for the worst movie of 2019. Film Brain agrees, and went further in his end of year retrospective by calling it one of the worst films he's ever watched: "You'd feel cleaner swimming in sewage than you would after watching this". The Cinema Snob tears this movie a new one here and Ralph The Movie Maker gives it a panning here. It was nominated for four Razzies and won one of them (Worst actress: Hilary Duff).
    • The Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson followed it up, and was even worse. It's padded with about ten minutes' worth of newsreel footage of the O. J. Simpson trial despite being only 82 minutes long, it has scenes that are blatantly ripped off from A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), most of the cast save for Mena Suvari and Nick Stahl is terrible (especially the child actors), its portrayal of Nicole is misogynistic and suggests that she brought her murder on herself, the foreshadowing of her eventual fate is glaringly obvious and ham-fisted, and it can't seem to decide just how involved or not O.J. Simpson was with the murders. It wound up with a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, a 1.9 score on IMDb, and an even more scathing review from Stuckmann.
  • Coleman Francis was a director with the dubious distinction of having all three movies he directed featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Francis’ films are notorious for having sluggish paces, Padding to get them to barely feature-length runtimes, Random Events Plots, shoddy production values, and wooden acting. While his second film, The Skydivers is merely considered boring and unremarkable, his other two cemented him in cinematic infamy:
  • Despite making some guilty pleasures since 1999, Adam Sandler's production company Happy Madison Productions also made quite a few box office stinkers:
    • Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star: Puerile, obnoxious, and inept in all aspects, the film feels more like a Saturday Night Live sketch drawn out to feature length. The plot revolves around the eponymous Bucky Larson discovering his parents were 1970s porn stars and deciding to follow in their footsteps; it was essentially an excuse to cover the script with hackneyed sex and dick jokes (particularly those about small penises). Couple this with hopelessly wooden acting, and you've got the kind of film that gets a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, and a film so bad that the DVD doesn't even have any blurbs from critics on it, positive or negative. All of this led to the film bombing, making less than one-third of its (small) budget back in ticket sales. It was eventually pulled from theaters after just two weeks. The film was bad enough on its own, but its failure was probably further precipitated by one of the worst promotional campaigns in history, consisting primarily of ads featuring an obnoxious, overly-enthusiastic man yelling loudly at the viewer to go see the movie. Repeatedly. Cinematic Excrement did a review of the disaster. Leon and Cyrus of Spill also took a look at it, much to their regret. Despite all of that, it did not take home a single Golden Raspberry Award, thanks to...
    • Jack and Jill, a 2011 film that stars Adam Sandler as a set of estranged twins. The premise concerns Jack Sadelstein, a commercial director, who is visited by his annoying identical twin sister Jill. During the Thanksgiving holidays, Jill is wooed by Al Pacino, much to Jack's annoyance since he sought out Pacino for his Dunkin' Donuts commercial. Like Bucky Larson, the film's plot is essentially a bad SNL sketch stretched to feature length. Worse still, the gags are all lowbrow and derivative of Sandler's earlier works, there are a multitude of negative implications regarding its depiction of Mexicans, the cameos from celebrities such as Drew Carey, Shaquille O'Neal, and John McEnroe are wasted, and the direction is hopelessly careless. The film got a 3% on Rotten Tomatoes, a Metacritic score of 23, and a 3.5 on IMDb. It also won a Razzie in every category of 2011, resulting in a record of 10 awards, beating the record that had been set by Battlefield Earth for over a decade. Director Dennis Dugan's career was tarnished by this film and has only helmed Grown Ups 2, the sequel to his Grown Ups, since. If you have a lot of time to kill, Half in the Bag takes a look at it here, extensively detailing Sandler's scam-like laziness in making his films, Film Brain has his own review of it here, Smeghead gives his opinion here, and Mark Kermode shares his thoughts about it here. The Nostalgia Critic tears this movie a new one here. Even fictional review shows like the one in El Goonish Shive use it as an example of a horrible movie.
    • Joe Dirt was panned by critics, but nonetheless grew a devoted fan base over time. The same cannot be said for the Direct-to-Crackle 2015 sequel, Joe Dirt 2: Beautiful Loser, which was as reviled by fans as it was by critics and earned a 0% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes, as well as a 22% audience score. An overly long 106-minute runtime, a nonsensical plot where Joe Dirt is thrown back in time by a tornado, pop culture references that are either overly dated or shoddy attempts to stay modern, and jokes that are either mean-spirited or pathetically lowbrow and lazy, and you have one of the worst movie sequels of all time. Which is saying a lot. Read Nathan Rabin rip it apart for the A.V. Club here.
  • Donald G. Jackson was an American director who's often considered "the Ed Wood of the Video Age" due to the bizarre nature of his films and their lack of a defined storyline thanks to his improv style of filmmaking he named "Zen Filmmaking", where no scripts are used at all. While his 1988 Roddy Piper vehicle Hell Comes to Frogtown is now considered a Cult Classic, the majority of his films were utterly panned by critics.
    • Pocket Ninjas, a 3 Ninjas rip-off that manages to look like someone took discarded storyboards from the worst Power Rangers season ever and decided to film them with $30 and whatever kids they could pick up from the local playground. Jackson directed a good portion of the movie until he was kicked off the project; it was later finished by the producers of Future War. Plot elements happen in almost reverse order, the editing is incoherent, 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), all the characters are dumber than stoners in remedial class, and the dialogue treats "butt-whiff" and "fat Republican" as the height of witty dialogue and classy insults. Something Awful takes a hatchet to it here, and it also ate a part of Obscurus Lupa's soul here. RedLetterMedia also ripped the film to shreds on Best of the Worst here.
    • Rollergator is a 1996 shot-on-video movie that follows a roller blade-riding teen who seeks to help a purple, jive-talking baby alligator (who's obviously a store-bought hand puppet) return to its owner while avoiding a corrupt theme park owner and his ninja bounty hunter from kidnapping the gator to display him for cash. The movie feels similar to The Beast of Yucca Flats with its poor production values and a meandering plotline that mostly take place outside in the sticks. But while that movie was largely quiet throughout its runtime, this falls head first into constant noise with the Rollergator himself who has an ear-grating voice that never shuts up and an accoustic soundtrack that loops endlessly at full volume and drowns out all the dialogue except for the Rollergator's lines.note , in a movie that's already heavy on terrible acting, action scenes that lack action, and some really atrocious dialogue. Rollergator currently holds a 1.2 rating on IMDb and a 2-and-a-half star rating on Amazon. It was heavily panned by Rifftrax hosts Mike Nelson and Bill Corbett; who both cited it as the worst movie they ever had to cover for the site.
    • The third entry to his Roller Blade series, The Roller Blade Seven, not only marks Don's first collaboration with co-director and star Scott Shaw, but is also considered by fans to be their answer to Plan 9 from Outer Space. What should be a straight forward story about a warrior travelling through a post apocalyptic world to save a nun from an evil empire and their army of street punks is completely mangled by its blatant No Budget and the duo's unfocused improv directing style. The movie suffers in every aspect with its poor acting and dialogue, terrible fight scenes, a soundtrack made up of demo melodies that come packaged with synthesizers, random characters like the desert guru and the 50's rock n roller who add nothing to the overall story, and blatant goofs (like Donald clearly being heard reading back an actress's lines to her in one scene - one of the first scenes of the movie, making it all too clear what you're getting into) being left in. It doesn't help that when the camera isn't left running the movie pads itself with scenes that loop multiple times for no reason. It's no wonder the movie holds a 2.1 on IMDb, is frequently requested to be covered on RiffTrax, and why the guys over at Good Bad or Bad Bad struggled to even consider this an actual movie let alone talk about it.
  • Christopher Lewis directed this duology of shot-on-video horror tripe that would color the public's perception of the very concept of Direct to Video for years to come:
    • Blood Cult occupies a unique place in film history as one of the first Direct to Video horror features, and what a way to start! The film is a Slasher Movie about a maniac dismembering sorority girls, and features such lovely elements as a "hero" more concerned about his erection than the Serial Killer running around, a scene that's a few minutes of the sound of a couple arguing over a still image of their house, enough Padding to kill a horse, a canine God of Evil named Caninis, and an ending that leaves all but one of the plot threads unresolved. Needless to say, this film deserves its 12% on Rotten Tomatoes and 3.4 on IMDB. Watch Schlockmeisters tackle the film here.
    • The Ripper is shot-on-video tripe not even Tom Savini can save. Savini is here not for his special effects abilities, but for his acting, but all he gets is a glorified cameo in the last five minutes. The rest of the film is boring rambling about Jack the Ripper, an obnoxious film buff stereotype pestering his professor about Vincent Price movies, wooden acting, fuzzy camerawork, and Padding. Worse still, in an utterly shameless act of self-promotion, it features a lengthy segment where the protagonist and his girlfriend watch the aforementioned Blood Cult and talk about how good it is. All in all, it's no wonder that Savini gave a public apology for his role in this dumpster fire.
  • Ulli Lommel was a German director whose career dates back to the early 1970s, when he worked as an actor in the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and gained mainstream attention in 1980 with The Boogeyman (1980) (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-received 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 Uwe Boll even when the latter was at his worst. They include:
    • Daniel: Der Zauberer (German for Daniel: The Wizard), a fantasy musical drama starring Daniel Küblböck (he finished 5th in the German version of American Idol). There's No Budget, and the plot's incomprehensible - the protagonist's dead grandfather (played by Lommel himself) is the Wizard, not Daniel, and is wandering among the living for no clear reason. The German mafia wants to kill Daniel, also for no clear reason (aside from possible influence from the Devil. Seriously). 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 theater 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 #1 spot on more than a few occasions. Even Küblböck himself described it as "the worst movie of all-time" in an interview several years after it was released.
    • Diary of a Cannibal is apparently a fictional spin on the Armin Meiwes case, as it advertises itself. It really isn't. It mostly consists of the same footage being repeated over and over for 86 minutes of the boy and the girl staring at each other, B-Roll, second-unit and establishing shots, and the same axe-raising shot. What little writing present in the movie is terrible, the acting is cripplingly artificial and lifeless, the special effects are amateurish at best and unbelievably effortless at worst, the editing is nonsensical, the cameras are shaky or used downright pitifully (often even used to hide the effects) and make the movie look like it was shot through a jam jar, the music is minimalist and painfully discordant, and the sound is very poorly mixed (not even being edited to accommodate a phone call scene). There is a total of three minutes of dialogue, and the best part comes near the end, when she eats the boy she met over the Internet, and we're supposed to believe that potatoes are his kidneys and a steak is his heart. The film would be five minutes long if you removed the repeated footage. Watch Alex Jowski tear it apart here. Emer Prevost also gives an extensive view on what's wrong with the film here and later ranked it 3rd in his 2015 Bottom 5 films list.
    • The Tomb. It claims to be an adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft's short story The Tomb, but it's a rip-off of Saw. The story's about some people wandering around in a tomb (or, well, a warehouse) where they were trapped by some guy and have been tortured. They keep finding other torture victims, who all die. 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 plenty of blatant inaccuracies (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, 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 was mentioned in passing in The Cinema Snob's review of the 1971 independent film The Zodiac Killer, saying that while he found that film bizarre, it was still way better that Lommel's film. 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".
    • Zombie Nation is another horror film (and we use the term "horror" very loosely) made by him. The characters are dumb, the plot goes nowhere until the last third, and what happens in the last third makes absolutely no sense. Despite the DVD cover showing an actual zombie lunging right at you, this never happens in the film. Worse, the zombie women look nothing like zombies at all . The ending is stupid, too: The zombie girls agree with the voodoo mages who resurrected them to become policewomen and start a cheeseburger diet just after murdering the main protagonist.

    M - Z 
  • Barry Mahon was the real life inspiration for the character played by Steve McQueen in The Great Escape. He was also an Exploitation Film director, due to acting as a pilot for Errol Flynn, best known for a couple of strange Christmas movies.
    • Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny is a 1972 children's film in which ice cream never actually appears, and most of it is a hideously-poor adaptation of Thumbelina directed by Mahon himself;note  Santa and the bunny (an extremely cheap mascot suit) are a mind-numbing Framing Device made by another director 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 an inaudible song. 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 a minor character. The film would probably be unknown if it weren't for The Agony Booth reviewing it; it is notable mostly for being shot at the defunct amusement park Pirate's World. Even the guys on RiffTrax got stumped, admitting at one point in the film that they had nothing to say about the insanity on-screen.
    • Santa's Christmas Elf (Named Calvin) is even more painful to sit through than Ice Cream Bunny because it's a 70-minute slideshow of puppets and children poorly superimposed over backdrops that are almost impossible to distinguish because of the complete absence of lighting. The story of the mischievous and lazy elf (named Calvin, of course) is narrated by a woman who sounds like she couldn't be bothered to be there, and the few child actors with speaking parts aren't any better. None of the shots are framed properly, with many instances of characters being swapped out without changing the background, and a few unintentionally creepy-looking shots of children staring blankly at the camera. For a long time, Santa's Christmas Elf (Named Calvin) didn't even have an IMDb profile even though a promotional poster suggested the movie would run in local theaters on weekends. It also utterly broke The Cinema Snob.
  • Sean McNamara (no, not the character from Nip/Tuck): A director who is apparently so tied up in making sure his films are family-friendly, at his worst he is considered to be to family entertainment what Uwe Boll is to video game movies. While most of his TV series are well-received and some of his movies worked with audiences (such as Soul Surfer, Treehouse Hostage, and Race to Space), others...didn't.
  • Nick Millard (a.k.a. Nick Philips): Specifically, his films Criminally Insane 2, Death Nurse, and Death Nurse 2. Criminally Insane (a.k.a. Crazy Fat Ethel), the movie that started the series, is not in itself horrible - if you like 1970s exploitation films, it might be okay. Criminally Insane 2 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 Criminally Insane 2 is a direct sequel. The four films together are four hours worth of one film with, according to The Cinema Snob, three hours total footage; Criminally Insane 2 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 sequence.
    • 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, an obese madwoman 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.
    • Criminally Insane 2 a.k.a. Crazy Fat Ethel 2, the sequel to Criminally Insane, stands out compared to the Death Nurse films. When not showing stock footage from the previous film, the story consists of Ethel having to move into a halfway house due to massive budget cuts to the asylum she was staying at. The movie takes Padding to a whole new level, feeling like a three-hour movie despite its 60-minute running time. All the new footage for the film was shot on a cheap videotape camera with no semblance of any technical proficiency in both the audio and video. The only music heard in the entire film is from stock footage from the previous movie and noise from the video camera is dominant in the newly-shot footage. RedLetterMedia recalls their experiences for you to enjoy.
    • 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.
  • Craig Moss is a director that takes Seltzer and Friedberg's formula of Narrow and Shallow Parody films and somehow makes them even less funny, and he uses a lot of vulgar humor. Away from his parody efforts he's actually proven to be a somewhat capable action director, as evidenced by his Bad Ass films with Danny Trejo, but comedy is definitely not his forte.
    • The 41-Year-Old Virgin Who Knocked Up Sarah Marshall And Felt Superbad About It has jokes that are either just references, needlessly vulgar, or both (e.g., the main character's name is "McAnalovin"), the dialogue is equally as vulgar and they reuse the Verizon "Can you hear me now?" spokesman several times, all failing to be funny. Emer Prevost takes it on here.
    • Breaking Wind is filled with dirty jokes (many of them Toilet Humour, as the title is indicative) and mean-spirited jabs at the The Twilight Saga fandom. Many, such as Film Brain, in his review, say that Seltzer and Friedberg's parody of the series is bad but at least makes more effort.
    • 30 Nights of Paranormal Activity with the Devil Inside the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo attempts to be a spoof of popular 2010s horror movies. Instead, it's a rather shameful display of dated jokes, piss-poor editing, cringe-inducing acting, and a bizarre obsession over jokes involving a man's junk. The film's biggest crime is that it features a potpourri of elements from various movies without showing even an iota of understanding these films, let alone make a joke out of them (the film has a Lisbeth lookalike show up as the daughter; that's the whole joke). But we're not the only ones who spit on this movie's grave: 30 Nights of Paranormal Activity has a 2.6 rating on IMDb, and received a thrashing from We've Got This Covered. Emer Prevost returns to rip into the film here.
  • A pitchman with a cult following on the internet for his creative, humorous infomercials, Vince Offer has also made a pair of comedy anthology films, which... to put it bluntly, aren't nearly as good.
    • Before he started shilling ShamWows and Slap Chops, he directed 1999's The Underground Comedy Movie, a painfully boring and unfunny Anthology Film attempt at Vulgar Humor with guest stars such as Guns N' Roses guitarist Slash, Michael Clarke Duncan, and Joey Buttafuoco of "Long Island Lolita" infamy. A lot of the sketches have jokes that go on for way too long and are often repeats of the same sketch in what looks like an attempt to pad out the movie to feature-length. Cinematic Excrement takes a brief look at it here, considering it to have been a more deserving film for Worst Picture of 1999 over the actual winner, Wild Wild West. With an IMDb score of 2.3, this failure of a comedy left Offer waiting 14 years until he released...
    • InAPPropriate Comedy is, in short, a failed attempt at making a film in the same vein as Movie 43 (which came out the same year, even though the two started production at different times, and is also considered Horrible). This grossout comedy featured an All-Star Cast, including Adrien Brody, Michelle Rodriguez, Rob Schneider, and Lindsay Lohan. It is a perfect storm of lazy Double Entendres, cheap sets, and weak acting. Above all, the jokes are simply reprehensible, such as a coat-hanger abortion sketch and a sketch where a character tries to entice black people to get on a "one-way" boat trip to Africa with watermelons, fried chicken, and malt liquor. Making it worse is that it rehashes sketches from The Underground Comedy Movie verbatim, including (but not limited to) "Flirty Harry" and "The Porno Review." But don't take our word for it - InAPPropriate Comedy received a Metacritic score of 1 and an IMDb score of 2.8. If anything, Nathan Rabin's account is pretty comprehensive about the film's incompetence. Emer Prevost manages to endure the film here. Spill would go on to review the movie here and here; Korey Coleman himself would later declare it one of, if not the worst films of the decade, and both Emer and Corey would call it the worst movie they've ever seen. In a repeat of Offer’s previous work, Cinematic Excrement would cover this in the review for Movie 43, and again say that it was worthy of the Worst Picture Razzie.
  • Neri Parenti used to be a respected filmmaker, having directed many beloved Italian comedies including some of the Fantozzi films. Then after 1996, he turned to directing cinepanettoni, a genre of farcical comedies released during the holidays that's been stuck in the same formula since 2001: lots of gratuitous cursing, obnoxious sexual innuendo, unfunny jokes based on gender and ethnic stereotypes, exaggerated Toilet Humour, repetitive castingnote  and bad direction. As of 2018, there have been fifteen of these things, all with the exact same content — summed up by this parody trailer from Italiano Medio director Maccio Capatonda.
    • Amici Miei: Come Tutto Ebbe Inizio ("My Friends: How It All Began") is a major stinker of his that could fall in the same category of Cinepanettoni. It claims to be a prequel to the classic Amici Miei (My Friends) trilogy, but with none of the charm and wit behind it. It rehashes the plot of the first film, with the only change being that it's set in the 15th century, with lots of unnecessary farting and pissing (in the original, there is a scene where the protagonists serve urine-laced soup to an ill man, but never actually shows the act of urination; in this version, it's just an excuse to shove in a scene with a child pissing in someone's mouth). Fans of the original films were so disgusted that they staged a "funeral" for the first three films, and series creator Mario Monicelli openly expressed his hatred for the film just weeks before his suicide.
    • Natale in India is considered the worst of his Christmas films. The plot, despite trying to be episodic, instead results in a series of disjointed and unfunny gags. The "highlights" of the film include a dog pooping in a sandbox and kicking said sand over some children, two men at a circus eating tiger feces, and a rapper making references about vomit, who meets his obnoxious and shrill-voiced copycat. The films counts a miserable 3,1 score on IMDb, based on more than 900 reviews.
  • Paolo Ruffini is an Italian comedian and former TV host that mostly acts in comedies, usually lowbrow ones. After achieving popularity with his "Nido del Cuculo" gag dubs, he moved to filmmaking and directed a few movies of his own. To say the least, they're pretty bad.
    • Fuga di Cervelli, a remake of Brain Drain. God only knows how he took an already disastrous film and managed to make it even worse: in fact, it's a copy-paste of the Spanish version, with the same contrived dynamics and poor storytelling. Ruffini rummaged through the worst Italian TV comedians, YouTubers, and internet celebrities, gave them limited direction, and had them spout very trite and repetitive gags that drag on for minutes. The only review on IMDb rips it to shreds.
    • In 2014, Ruffini made another film, titled Tutto Molto Bello. Nothing is improved from Fuga, with an even blander plot (it's supposed to take inspiration from Todd Philips' Due Date but fails hard), annoying characters that expect to make the viewer laugh with girlish screams, bad slapstick, uninspired jokes, and pointless fanservice involving obscure references to old TV programs that nobody remembers anymore, including a random cameo by singer Enzo Ghinazzi (a.k.a. Pupo), and an out-of-place impersonation of radio commentator Bruno Pizzul. Ruffini openly claimed that the film is "not suitable for crybabies", mocking its haters. It has an average of 1 out of 5 on Italian review sites, and was a box office flop. Critics bashed it, some of them calling it "the death of Italian cinema), and YouTuber Victorlaszlo88 had a field day with it (you might want to lower your volume).
    • Ruffini struck again in Christmas 2017 with Super Vacanze di Natale. Cinepanettoni are already derided within Italy for their repetitive and unoriginal content, but when Neri Parenti left producer Filmauro, the studio released a couple duds before calling on Ruffini to direct something for Christmas '17. The result was a lazy clip show of random scenes from every previous Christmas film without even a framing device or a common theme to link the scenes: half of the scenes are just screaming matches and people farting, cheating on their spouses, or making insipid jokes. On an interview with the newspaper La Repubblica, even Christian De Sica, who acted in every featured film, called it unreasonable to charge admission for something that you can find on YouTube for free.
  • Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg gained infamy during the late 2000s for their parody movies. Breaking into public attention as "two of the six writers of Scary Movie", they made their directorial debut in 2006 with Date Movie. Their shtick consisted of only doing parodies of the most recent movies, a lack of research beyond watching the previews, wave after wave of painfully-dated pop-culture references, rehashing jokes from the original work (more on that later), and their penchant for Toilet and Vulgar Humor which made the movies nauseating to watch. While Meet the Spartans and Vampires Suck have some fans, and Date Movie is considered unremarkable compared to their other efforts, the same cannot be said about their other movies:
    • Epic Movie is supposed to be a parody of Hollywood blockbuster movies released during the 2000s, but even ignoring the title (not all blockbusters can be described as "epic"), the movie relies entirely on having characters from franchises with installments between 2005 and 2007 show up, announce their presence, do gross stuff, and/or die. It also established the level of "parodies" Seltzer and Friedberg would make, as it would feature Wolverine Flipping the Bird with his claw... something he actually did in the first X-Men film. For some perspective on the film's quality, Film Brain reviews Epic Movie here, and Korey Coleman of Spill and Double Toasted would go on to list Friedberg and Seltzer as his mortal enemies in his Epic Movie and review (until he watched InAPPropriate Comedy, that is).
    • Disaster Movie is considered the absolute worst of all their "movies", as it goes even further on all of the expected. It manages to be more aggressively unfunny, more pandering, more vapid, and even cheaper-looking than the films before it. The film shot up (or down?) to the #1 spot on IMDb's worst film list in less than a day (having a 1.9 rating to date) and bombed in theaters. This film was so bad that Rotten Tomatoes' critics' consensus states that "Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer have produced what is arguably their worst Movie yet" and Pajiba "[refused] to dignify [their] movie with a new review" instead composing their review of the film from bits from reviews of their previous films. USA Today film critic Louis Fehrey, in his review, said that Disaster Movie was an insult to the intelligence of him and his fellow Americans and an insult to cinema. He subsequently published an article in USA Today summing up all the reviews of the film, which were near-universally negative. It was part of I Hate Everything's trilogy Movie review alongside Date, Epic, and Disaster Movie, noting that Disaster was the worst film he's ever seen (at the time of his video), noting how disrespectful the professionals involved are over other amateur projects that might look worse on the surface, as well as how the film would be only half an hour long without the insane amount of references, and how the longest amount of time the film went without one was 4 minutes and 20 seconds. Korey and the Co Host 3000 of Spill suffered greatly after watching the movie.
    • While follow-up Vampires Suck managed to get somewhat better reviews, the duo stopped getting studio backing afterwards, and their following efforts went straight to VOD. The Starving Games and Superfast!, shallow parodies of The Hunger Games and The Fast and the Furious respectively, were more of the same.
    • Their first "original" work, Best Night Ever, was a Found Footage comedy in the vein of Project X, when the subgenre was already earning backlash, ramping up the gross-out humor to compensate for lack of references, and featuring scenes which just won't end - the A.V. Club pointed out "the movie has more awkward dead space than jokes".
  • Steamroller Productions is a production company founded by Steven Seagal that appears to have been made solely to fill up his limitless ego. While it was slightly more reputable back in the early '90s during Seagal's heyday, it has since devolved into producing direct-to-video movies and TV shows that all ostensibly star Seagal, who only does the bare minimum required to even look like he's acting — and even that's not guaranteed.
    • Attack Force is a film that even fans of Seagal dislike. Here, Seagal battles violent berserker types created from a drug emptied into the water supply of Paris after 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. It includes the line "We must find that titty-bar!". While Seagal's dialogue is often dubbed over by someone else in these DVD films [due to Creator's Apathy], this takes it to the extreme with virtually all his dialogue dubbed over as the film's plot was completely changed in post-production with disastrous results. Attack Force earned an absolutely negative 2.8 on IMDB. Shitcase Cinema also reviewed it.
    • Sniper: Special Ops is Seagal at possibly his lowest point put on film. It is a cheap cash-in on the popularity of American Sniper, even though it barely has any sniping in it. The plot involves a spec ops team having to abandon Seagal and another soldier after a rescue mission goes wrong and getting tangled up in a seemingly unrelated mission involving abandoned munitions, which eventually ties into rescuing Seagal. The production is noticeably cheap, the direction is dire and derivative, the action scenes are tensionless and horribly edited, and half the actors in the spec ops team — including a noticeably drunk Rob Van Dam — look too old to be special forces. Steven Seagal is by far the worst part of the movie, putting in so little effort that he spends most of his very short screentime sitting on a chair, mumbling lines and wearing sunglasses so he doesn't have to emote. He goes so far as to have a stunt double for his character walking up and down stairs. The movie has a 3.2 on IMDB and is ripped to shreds in the podcast Cum Town as part of its "Goatee Era Seagal" segment.
  • Nigel Tomm is an absurdist artist whose work is hated even by people interested in the style, and panned near unanimously for his lack of effort and tremendous pretension (in several media). Every movie in his filmography bills itself as an adaptation, yet it consists of a single color on-screen for 71 minutes on average. To get a good idea of the stupidity of the concept, here's an April Fool's episode of Books Vs Movies covering The Catcher in the Rye which is compared to 75 minutes and six seconds of blue-screen.
  • Chester Novell Turner has directed only two films, both of them poorly produced with 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, Tales From the Quadead Zone. Black Devil Doll From Hell was so horrifyingly bad that The Cinema Snob still refers to it (and Novell Turner) with terror, and had such enormous levels of Brown Note that Emer Prevost had nothing but hatred to express. When the people of Spanish website Cinecutre reviewed it (in Spanish), the nicest thing they could say about it was that the thing really had a disquieting atmosphere that kept them watching, but only because they expected the police to interrupt the movie at any moment and arrest everyone involved; otherwise, they call it one of the worst things they've spotted internationally, bad enough that (paraphrased) "after watching it you'll be tempted to call an exterminator to fumigate your devices". The only thing of any value is the Erry Vision Films logo which has entertained more people than either of his films ever did since it tends to appear on scary logo compilations.

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