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There are subjectives, and then there are these. While you may believe a work fits here, and you might be right, people tend to have rather vocal, differing opinions about this subject.
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Horrible / Live Action Films N-Z

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    N 

    O 
  • 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 is chased by a demon truck. The effects and sets look like something out of a bad Twilight Zone episode. The only redeeming thing about this film is its sequel, The Omega Code 2: Megiddo, that manages to be So Bad, It's Good due to York reprising his role with enormous amounts of ham, and an idea so awesome that it really should've needed its own movie - R. Lee Ermey as the President of the United States!. See it being torn apart by Indy Christian Review (with the help of Diamanda Hagan) here.
  • The American remake of One Missed Call not only bungled every last component of Takashi Miike's classic, but it also shamelessly ripped off other horror movies such as Final Destination and Gore Verbinski's rendition of The Ring. The film also failed in adapting the scenes directly ripped from the Japanese version, bewildering viewers who did not watch the original and angering the viewers who did. Even if the movie was not a remake, the film's plot is hopelessly lazy, the acting is poor, and the "shocks" were anything but scary. The remake's shortcomings were so egregious that it effectively killed any further interest in remaking Japanese horror films. The film received the "accolade" of being named by Rotten Tomatoes as the 2nd worst movie of the 2000's, with all 80 of the critics tracked by the site giving negative reviews. Audiences didn't think much better of it, giving it a user rating of about 4.0 on IMDB.
  • The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure, a children's film produced by Kenn Viselman based on a series of Public Service Announcements and a concept purchased from a No Budget Edutainment Show. It was done on $20 million, but doesn't even remotely show it, instead faithfully adhering to every negative stereotype associated with children's entertainment. It's built around Audience Participation—rare for a cinematic release (perhaps for very good reason, given the target audience)—but completely mishandles it, and what little plot there is to speak of is idiotic. The writing is infantile at best, with painfully unfunny jokes, inane and repetitive songs, and the odd jarringly transparent Parental Bonus. Not even the multitude of star actors (a good chunk of whom are completely unsuited for their roles) could save it. It made less than 2% of its budget back, underperforming Delgo in its opening week, yet the director said that "it was never about the box office". Bafflingly, the director also speculated that all of the negative feedback would result in The Oogieloves becoming a franchise. Brad Jones and his friends on Midnight Screenings tear this movie to shreds here, and he later takes it on as The Cinema Snob here. Nathan Rabin also had some harsh words in his "My World of Flops" article for this film. Cinematic Excrement talked about it here and here. I Hate Everything also talked about it here for his Search for the Worst, and considered it the worst movie he'd seen until several other films came along. Watch Bobsheaux tear it apart here and see AniMat get broken by the movie here.
  • The Open House is a huge misstep in Netflix's efforts in producing original feature films made exclusively for their streaming platform. It tries to execute a mystery premise in which a mother and her son move into a relative's house in the mountains, where they experience odd things and they suspect that someone is watching them from inside the house. The movie is very dull and boring, taking 40 minutes of content at best and padding it out to feature-length. It also wastes the talents of its cast and has them play one-note characters that barely have meaningful interactions with each other in favor of a Cliché Storm that shoves in jump scares, a fakeout dream sequence, Idiot Ball moments, and a Red Herring or two. All of this was done to build up to one of the worst executions of The Un-Reveal in recent history where basically everything that happened beforehand was retroactively made pointless. Elvis the Alien gives a good breakdown of the movie here.
  • Outtakes is an obscure and astoundingly non-funny No Budget sketch-comedy from 1987, sadly remembered as the last movie for F Troop's Forrest Tucker. A would-be satire of modern pop-culture, Outtakes fails on all possible levels, with skits ranging from the tediously lengthy to the moronically offensive. This damning assessment is far more amusing than the actual movie. Somewhat improbably, despite condemnation from all circles, the movie actually spawned an equally humor-challenged sequel (also directed by Jack M. Sell who wittily entitled it More Outtakes).
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    P 
  • Parentesi Tonde (Literally "Round Brackets" in Italian) is an Italian comedy film that has been totally forgotten for every reason conceivable. It's a 2006 No Budget film with an All-Star Cast led by popular TV personalities who were quite famous at the time, such as Raffaella Lecciso, Giucas Casella and Eva Henger. It had horrid direction, writing and image quality, the acting is so awkward that it can't be even called "acting", with dialogue that makes no sense even in context, and it doesn't help that the audio quality sounds like something recorded in a bathtub. The plot is incoherent and disjointed, jumping between uninteresting situations and confused subplots, and ending with the main character realizing that the entire film is just a dream of hers. It flopped at the box office, earning just 9,000 euros after being screened in just nine theaters in all of Italy, was trashed by critics, and got a 1.6 score on IMDB. The director and cast were so ashamed of it that they did not release it on DVD (altough it does exist on DVD, but sold by companies so desperate for money that they bought the film's rights) and did not air it on TV, except for a few local cable channels no one cared about.
  • Pimp is a 2009 mockumentary that was directed by, co-produced by, co-written by, and starring Robert Cavanah. Cavanah plays Woody, a Soho pimp who works for Stanley, a mob boss played by Danny Dyer. Through the course of the week, Woody gets caught up in involvement with Chinese triads and snuff webcasters. This perfectly interesting plot is ultimately wasted, no thanks to the film's dreadful acting, rambling and directionless story, lack of insight to the sex industry, and oblivious direction. These issues were enough to convince the critics and viewers alike to trash Pimp to kingdom come, as the film got a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 2.8 rating on IMDb. Pimp was also a disastrous Box Office Bomb in the UK that has yet to receive an international release, as it got pulled after only one screening on its opening day. Listen to the Mark Kermode review here if you're interested.
  • Piranha 3DD, the sequel to Piranha 3D, is one of those movies that could've been So Bad, It's Good in so many ways, but fails miserably. The first film merged elements of seriousness with comedy, but 3DD instead took things into a much more Denser and Wackier direction. The piranhas do incredibly outrageous crap even compared to its predecessor (for example, a piranha swims up a woman's vagina, rests there for a while-she doesn't even notice-and finally emerges to attack her boyfriend's penis). The acting is predictably terrible (save for Ving Rhames, who gives a passionate Pre Ass Kicking One Liner), its plot is inspired by (read: ripped off) Jaws 3D, of all movies, and they even managed to make David Hasselhoff lame. It ended up with a generous 12% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 3.8 on IMDB. Chris Stuckmann as well as both critics in Schmoes Know called this the worst movie of 2012.
  • Pledge This!, yet another memorable film starring Paris Hilton. Much like The Hottie & the Nottie, Paris' character is a full-on Mary Sue and all the attempts at humor fall flat. It's packed full of immature jokes and Toilet Humour even Surf School was head and shoulders above, and all of it is written (and acted) miserably. PhantomStrider calls it the 10th worst movie of all time.
  • Released in 1987, Plutonium Baby stands as a prime example of how not to make a B-Movie. Thanks to deplorable directing and editing, the film makes several sharp jumps in settings and plot points without any warning whatsoever. Speaking of plot, the story is excessively slow and filled with painful dialogue, weak special effects and pathetic acting. Oh, and what about the title character? He doesn't appear until the last few seconds of the movie! As if that wasn't enough, fans of over-the-top horror/nasty movies like films from Troma view this film unfavorably due to the lack of gore and the wasted potential of the title monster, as it currently "boasts" a 2.4 IMDb rating. You know this film is a fiasco when The Cinema Snob compares this film unfavorably to Nukie above, as he did in this review.

    R 
  • Raiders of the Lost Shark - a would-be horror Mockbuster that — even by mockbuster standards — manages to fail on every level. The plot is equal parts Jaws and Deep Blue Sea: A genetically engineered great white shark escapes its military lab into an inland lake on a private islandnote  and proceeds to devour every human in its sight. The kills are silly and repetitive: Most can be described as "Woman in bikini stands in waist-high water. Shark bigger than she is manages to sneak up, dive out of the water, swallow her whole, and disappear, the blood splatter of the kill being bigger than the splash coming into or out of the water." The writing is awful, the acting is worse and the special effects (the shark kills) seemed to have been completely and haphazardly lifted from the original Sharknado. Currently sports a 1.7 on IMDB and an audience score of 7% on Rotten Tomatoes.
  • When The Nostalgia Critic challenged The Angry Video Game Nerd to review the worst "nostalgic" movie he could find, he found Ricky 1 - a movie so obscure, he remarked that the copy he found was probably the same he saw at a video shop when he was a kid. Although the film was meant to be a parody of the Rocky franchise, Ricky 1 ends up as a flick that suffers from poor editing, cheap-looking sets and costumes, and clueless directing. What's worse, Ricky 1 takes the usual characteristics of bad parody films and somehow makes films from Seltzer and Friedberg look inspired in comparison. Unfunny sight gags? Check. Lousy, outdated puns? Yep. A juvenile, trite, and just plain annoying sense of humor? That too. Overall, it's no wonder why Ricky 1 currently has a 1.5 on IMDb and a 6% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes. In case you're interested, The Angry Video Game Nerd shares his thoughts here and you can watch the full movie here.
  • Rock: It's Your Decision is quite possibly one of the worst Christian propaganda films ever made. It concerns a Christian boy named Jeff, a rock music fanatic who concerns his mom, because she believes that all rock is evil and that he is harming himself by listening to it. He is then given a dare from a preacher to give it up for a week and research why it's "bad", and then becomes a fundamentalist, bigoted jerkass who alienates his friends by chewing them out for simply listening to the music they like. The film is utterly painful to watch as Jeff claims several things about rock (such as it being occultist) that he never backs up, and he winds up becoming an unlikable protagonist who is forced to hate something he likes, while his friends become Designated Villains who bring up several good points about why Jeff is wrong—among other things, he makes Melissa cancel her plans to go to a rock concert and forces her to listen to another station in the car, and gets pissed at Marty for simply playing (instrumental) rock at his party. The film ends with a mind-numbingly stupid speech from Jeff, who then makes up a huge list of Satanic songs that includes Santana's "Evil Ways" (even though the song begins with "You've got to change your evil ways"), Jefferson Starship's "Dance with the Dragon" (which is about the Chinese Year of the Dragon, not a Satanic dragon), The Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil" (which is written from Satan's view and has him claiming responsibility for various historical atrocities), AC/DC's "Hell Ain't a Bad Place to Be" (which is a metaphor and is about a narcissistic man tormented by the women he hooks up with), and also bashes songs by milder artists such as Barry Manilow, Rod Stewart and (get this) Captain & Tennille just for having suggestive but largely non-explicit mentions of sex or referencing magic. With poor camera quality, terrible messages, and hints of homophobia near the end, it's no wonder why the film has received such notoriety. The film has a 1.6 rating on IMDb, and was torn apart by several reviewers: Shock Cinema, Letterboxd, The Agony Booth, Brad Jones on DVD-R Hell, and Emer Prevost of Reaction & Review.
  • R.O.T.O.R., a Terminator / Robo Cop ripoff where a robot cop / leather daddy is in development for a cyberpunk nihilistic future society for the purpose of judging felonies and misdemeanors and killing the people responsible for them but is activated early. The title robot is incredibly inept and the movie is full of Padding, pretentious dialogue, Fight Scene Failures, and continuity errors. It also can't seem to make up its mind on whether it wants to be a serious movie or a parody of the movies it is ripping off from, leading to serious tonal problems. And to top it off is one of the most unnecessary Diabolus Ex Machinas ever to be in a bad movie. RedLetterMedia's Best of the Worst rips it a new one here, while Something Awful's Neil brothers honor it as their second -50 rating here.
  • The 2002 remake of 1975's Rollerball. Ostensibly an attempt to update the story to modern times, this version suffers from dropping the dystopian concept, choppy editing, shameful attempts to pander to a teenage audience, a confusing narrative, and an overabundance of violence that shows that the makers of the film had totally missed the point of the original (in which the titular Blood Sport was used as Bread and Circuses for the underclass). The film also features a sequence featuring night vision, where you can barely make out anything that was going on. The film was a huge Box Office Bomb, making just $26 million worldwide against a budget of $70 million, and it holds a 3% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a score of 2.9 on IMDb. It also derailed Chris Klein's promising career, and along with Basic the following year, director John McTiernan would never direct another movie again; what's more, it was on production of this film that McTiernan had wiretapped the film's producer Charles Roven over Creative Differences, which ultimately got him sent to prison. Here's That SciFi Guy doing a review of it, and here's The Sports Guy trashing it.
  • The film adaptation of Ray Cooney's hit West End play Run for Your Wife. The film stars Danny Dyer (making his second appearance in this folder - see Pimp above) as a bigamist taxi driver who deceives his wives (Denise Van Outen and Sarah Harding) to keep them away from each other. However, whereas the play was a well-received farce, its film adaptation ended up as yet another Awful British Sex Comedy that failed miserably. This is thanks to horrible acting, a confused plot, retrograde and misogynistic attitudes toward women, excessive and pointless cameos from celebrities such as Judi Dench and Ray Winstone,note  and a lack of timing for lazy, uninspired jokes. The horrible casting decisions such as making Danny Dyer the lead character of this movie adds insult to injury. The perfect storm of these shortcomings allowed Run for Your Wife to earn a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 2.5 on IMDb, with many critics commonly comparing this film unfavorably to Sex Lives of the Potato Men (one critic declared that thanks to this, Movie 43 was now only the second worst movie of the year). Run for Your Wife was also a Box Office Bomb in the UK, earning only £747 at the box office, and effectively finished Danny Dyer's film career. Mark Kermode shares his thoughts on the matter.

    S 
  • Santa with Muscles is a Hulk Hogan movie that makes other Hulk Hogan movies seem like cinematic masterpieces. 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. You will not be surprised to hear that Mila Kunis (whose big-screen debut this was - she plays one of the kids) would rather you didn't bring it up. The Spoony One has reviewed it, as did The Agony Booth, and Cecil defends it... but keep in mind: His show is called Good Bad Flicks.
  • Saving Christmas, a film by Growing Pains star turned evangelist Kirk Cameron that has been cited as one of the worst Christmas movies ever made. The production values are like those of a home movie, thanks in no small part to director/co-star Darren Doane being known primarily as a director of music videos, not of feature films. It also has terrible actors (Cameron stars As Himself yet still feels stilted; Doane is clearly not an actor; and nearly everyone else is actual members of Cameron's family), including one character that would fit every stereotype in the Sassy Black Woman trope if not for the fact that the character is male, who espouses conspiracy theories yet his overall attitude seems to actually make him a parody of conspiracy theorists and people who believe on the "War on Christmas" (nevermind that the latter group is probably the one target audience the movie would've had, meaning that they basically cast people of their own side as crazy people) and a plot that goes nowhere. Its greatest sin, though, is how it's built around the heartwarming message that the True Meaning of Christmas is all about crass commercialism, portraying the guy criticizing the materialism of the holiday as a strawman for Cameron to cut down with painful contortions of history and Scripture. To top it all off, Cameron tried to get his fans to flood sites like Rotten Tomatoes with positive reviews, which backfired predictably and led to a torrent of negative reviews that sent the film to the top of IMDb's Bottom 100 in a heartbeat. He still refuses to acknowledge that he made a terrible film, instead blaming the scorchingly negative publicity on "haters and atheists." The movie wound up "winning" the most Golden Raspberry Awards that year, including Worst Actor and Worst Picture. Oddity Archive has a look at the movie here. Brad Jones and the rest of Team Snob were so flabbergasted by the film's astounding awfulness that they ended up posting three separate reviews on Midnight Screenings, and a year later Brad did a Cinema Snob review of it. You can also watch the reviews by Smeghead here, I Hate Everything here, and Kyle Norty here.
  • The Seeker, very loosely adapted from The Dark Is Rising. It takes not caring 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 Jerkass, whiny fourteen-year-old who's more interested in 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 in over 3000 theaters, note  and holds the record for the largest theater-drop (the number of cinemas who dumped it from their lineup after the obligatory three weekends). It's made worse by the fact that the trailers described scenes not in the movie. Here's The Agony Booth's take on it.
  • Sex Lives of the Potato Men, a 2004 attempt at reviving the Awful British Sex Comedy genre, is about the sex lives of a group of potato delivery men in Birmingham. Throw in a terrible director, a script devoid of taste or humor, 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 criticized because one-third of its £3,000,000 budget was public money from the National Lottery granted by the UK Film Council. How bad was it? Between this film and Fat Slags, there was actually public discussion over the decline of the British film industry. While many films may make you worry about the cinematic artform, it takes a special film to make an entire country suspect their film studios are falling apart. Emer Prevost shares his thoughts here.
  • Mae West's final film, Sextette, concerns the octogenarian’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. West is coated in makeup and shot in soft focus to hide the fact that she was 85 years old at the time of filming and looked every day of it. On top of all of that, it's a musical featuring such numbers as a cast of bellboys singing "Hooray for Hollywood", and West and Dalton themselves covering the Captain and Tenille's "Love Will Keep Us Together". 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 (who died of a drug overdose six months after this film was released) shows up as a gay fashion designer, Alice Cooper shows up and sings the final song, Dom De Luise does a soft-shoe number on top of a piano singing "Honey Pie" by The Beatles, 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. Check out Diamanda Hagan's words on the matter here. Musical Hell also tore it apart.
  • The title of Shark Exorcist may make it sound like it's a fun cheeseball B-movie, but the reality is very different. The plot is disjointed and incomprehensible, coming off as more of a series of events happening with no rhyme or reason. Even taking this into account, there are multiple scenes that serve no discernible purpose. The acting is stilted, awkward, and unnatural. The special effects and production values wouldn't pass on YouTube. The cinematography is inexcusably bad, with unsteady camerawork. Even the lighting and sound mixing are horrible, and the cameraman's labored breathing is clearly audible multiple times! All in all, it's a boring, confusing, incompetent mess that barely even meets the definition of a "movie", and is a chore to sit through. Is it any wonder the movie has a rating of 1.3 on IMDb? I Hate Everything reviewed it and called it the worst movie he's ever seen; can you really blame him?
  • Show Dogs, a buddy cop dog movie that has all the makings of a crappy direct-to-video release, but somehow got a wide theatrical release. It involves a cop and a dog who are partnered up to infiltrate a crime ring that steals valuable animals and sells them to the highest bidder, all backstage behind a popular dog show. The Idiot Plot runs entirely on Fridge Logic that makes the movie fall apart if you even take two minutes to think about feasibility of the criminal's grand plan. All the actors give lifeless performances playing flat characters that spew insipid jokes mostly consisting of a Hurricane of Puns involving canines and shallow pop culture references worthy of the early 2000s (for instance, a zip-lining tiger makes a Life of Pi reference just because he's a tiger.) The production design and special effects are horrendously cheap (due to the film being made on a budget of just $5.5 million), occasionally dipping into the Uncanny Valley with the artificial animal expressions. By far the most infamous scenes in the movie of which were removed for the home release are where the cop dog has to learn how to endure the experience of getting his genitals inspected during the dog show, which he does by going to his Happy Place where he dances with his human partner in the style of Dirty Dancing. This led to the film becoming the target of accusations from parents that it was normalizing child grooming. Brad and Dave reviewed this movie for Midnight Screenings, where they unfavorably compare it to The Emoji Movie. I Hate Everything also gives it a look here, and Chris Stuckmann also takes a look at its trailer here with his dog Zeev. Mark Kermode, in his review, drew particular attention to a moment where a character remarks that no one makes talking dog movies any more, even as the film demonstrates exactly why no one makes those movies any more.
  • Shut In is a poorly-made horror movie that wastes its talented cast, including Naomi Watts (among many other top-notch actors like Charlie Heaton, Jacob Tremblay, and Oliver Platt). The film's premise revolves around Watts' character being trapped in her house with her paralyzed stepson (Heaton) due to a winter storm and having to survive when it appears that someone is in the house and wishes them harm. However, this potentially-interesting premise is ultimately wasted, as the film jams in every horror cliché from the book, including Jump Scares and dream sequence fakeouts, along with a lot of Skype scenes between Watts's and Platt's characters. The film is then completely ruined by the ridiculous twist in the third act, when it is revealed that her stepson has been faking paralysis the whole time, somehow fooling all of his doctors, and has also been drugging his stepmother the whole time, also without being noticed. It's no surprise that this film was panned by critics and audiences alike (it received a Tomatometer rating of 8% with critics on Rotten Tomatoes, with only 3 positive reviews out of 38, and 24% with audiences) and was EuropaCorp's second Box Office Bomb of 2016, only making back $8.4 million worldwide on its $10 million budget. Chris Stuckmann talks about the film here, considering it the 8th worst film he'd seen in 2016. Smeghead shared his thoughts on the movie here and later called it the 2nd worst film he'd seen in 2016.
  • Jorge Ameer's The Singing Forest note  was supposed to be an introspective, touching duet of stories but fails miserably and instead turns into a creepy, pretentious, melodramatic mess. A middle-aged widower comes out, falling for his daughter's fiancé. The tender romance is undercut with the older man believing himself and the fiancé to be reincarnated from two young men in love in 1933 Germany. All involved are just as whiny as Arthur from Ben & Arthur, with tons of slapdash nudity and badly written sex scenes that are nothing more than "insert tab A into slot B" in place of eroticism. Its cosmetic qualities and editing are unacceptable for a 2003 film, feeling like it was shot with Super 8 film and a tin can for a microphone. Considering its semi-historical setting, its true original sin rests in its inaccurate, tasteless, and completely pointless use of graphic pictures from concentration camps and executions, made all the more baffling as the 1933 setting is also pointless, as outside said aforementioned pictures, there's nothing that shows that they're at the dawn of Nazi Germany otherwise. Plus, in one of the most extreme examples of No Budget, the two young men in that setting sleep in the same bed (sheets, room, and all) as the present-day characters, only in black-and-white. Altogether, it represents the worst of arthouse drama. Unlike many of the movies on this page, its obscurity has far overshadowed its inadequacies. As of January 2018, no online video review of it exists. The only evidence of the full film existing resides on pirate MPEG sites and a very limited number of DVD's sold on Amazon. Despite that, it has earned a prestigious 1/100 on Metacritic note  and 0% from Rotten Tomatoes. Stephen Holden of The New York Times said of Forest: "exploitative, amateurish, prurient and pretentious are other adjectives that could also be applied to this film, which is swamped in badly used classical music and burdened by purple hand-wringing dialogue and crude black-and-white flashbacks." Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times gave Forest a half-star out of five, saying "if nothing else can be said of The Singing Forest, it is assuredly fearless in defying credibility at every turn and on every level." Amusingly, a review from LGBT-newspaper The Washington Blade summarized this film as "a Gay Ghost." No relation to the DC Comics Silver-Age character or The Marquess of Queensbury.
  • Skidoo was an attempt by Otto Preminger and other has-been celebs at the time, such as Groucho Marx and Jackie Gleason, to appeal to the 1960s counterculture generation. What resulted was a movie whose Totally Groovy attempts to be relevant are completely deranged (perhaps the best example is the fact that LSD plays a role in the film's climax, but since only Marx had any experience with the drug and he wasn't in that scene, they pull off a reversal of Marijuana Is LSD and the effects of the drug are portrayed more like the effects of alcohol), as well as having characters ranging from unpleasant to just sad to watch (poor Marx is pretty obviously reading off cue cards — and having trouble due to his bad eyesight). It ended up being so bad that the Preminger estate refused to release it after its three-week run in theaters, causing many people to want to watch it just to see how bad it is. For the morbidly curious, it does turn up on Turner Classic Movies from time to time, and it finally came out on Blu-ray in 2014. Its only saving grace is that Harry Nilsson did the music. He also sings the closing credits. All of them. Even the copyright notice ("Copyright M-C-M-L-X-V-I-I-I by Sigma Productions Incorporated — your seat's on fire."). See it riffed by Mister X and Alex Jowski for GeekJuiceMedia's Live Nude Geeks here.
  • The Smokers is a 2000 film that can make even the most experienced gross-out film viewers sick. Basically, the plot is about smokers who are tired of only getting one-night-stands with men. Their plan for revenge? Torturing and raping the men in a semen-filled barn. Mind you, this revolting plot is entirely Played for Laughs. Add lazy direction and unlikeable protagonists, and you got a disaster that deserves its 2.2 score on IMDb. Not surprisingly, this would prove to be the only "legit" film directed by Kat Slater (credited here under her real name Christina Peters), whose subsequent work has entirely been in pornography. A review can be found here, and here are Emer Prevost's thoughts.
  • The Snowman is a Jo Nesbø adaptation that is almost unanimously considered one of the worst movies of 2017. The basic premise of a Serial Killer who leaves snowmen as his calling card (something that the source material played for Black Comedy instead of playing it dead seriously like the film tries to do) is the least of the film's problems, the main one being the editing. Despite the contributions of famed editor Thelma Schoonmaker, the way the film is edited makes it almost completely incoherent, with multiple scenes ending on bizarre notes, frequently referencing things left out from the final cut and creating numerous plot holes, made worse by the director's own admission that they weren't able to shoot 10-15% of the script due to the film's Troubled Production. This also leads to some very strange occurrences, such as multiple secondary characters outright vanishing from the story and the music the killer plays changing without any explanation. Even leaving the incoherent editing aside, the film's handling of the source material renders it a dull Cliché Storm, with some elements (such as the killer's motivation) making no sense, and a large amount of screentime is devoted to a subplot created exclusively for the film concerning the Nordic Winter Games that ultimately adds nothing to the film and, despite boasting a very impressive cast that includes Michael Fassbender in the lead, a lot of the acting is dull and lifeless, the worst by far being the casting of a very visibly ill Val Kilmer, whose poor health they attempt to mask through blatantly obvious dubbing. The result is a gross of $6.7mil in the US, a 28 on Metacritic and an 8% on Rotten Tomatoes. Watch Matthew Buck rip it apart in his Projector review here. You can also watch Double Toasted tear it apart here, and Smeghead questioning why the Razzies didn’t nominate it here. Chris Stuckmann also talks about it here, where he considers the film's great cinematography and cast members' somewhat-decent performances to be the few redeeming aspects of the film, and he named it the tenth worst film he'd seen in 2017. The biggest cultural impact this film really had was a brief meme stemming from its hilariously bad official poster.
  • Son of the Mask is a failure of a family comedy with loose ties to The Mask at best. When the writing (complete with humongous Idiot Plot) isn't built around completely childish jokes, it's jumping between Nightmare Fuel, Stock Footage, plagiarism of said stock footage, and obvious, heavyhanded morals. The cast (and after a few minutes, setting) are completely replaced, and none of them act properly. The direction is clueless, nearly all of the characters are completely unlikable, and the CGI is consistently hackneyed. Perhaps the most baffling fault is the inclusion of Loki (Alan Cumming) who is looking for the mask, despite the original film establishing that what gave the mask its power is the fact that Loki is imprisoned inside of it. The film barely made back two-thirds of its budget, and it got a 2.1/10 on IMDb, a 6% on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 20/100 on Metacritic. It also got the most nominations of the 26th Razzies convention (including winning an award for "Worst Remake or Sequel") and the 75th ranking on Rotten Tomatoes's Worst of the Worst 2009 list. Jamie Kennedy's career nearly ended right there, and in response, he co-created a low-budget documentary built largely on decrying criticism. Here's the Nostalgia Critic's take on this shipwreck of a movie. He later considered it the second-worst sequel in existence, behind only Troll 2.
  • Although The Pink Panther film series was already on the decline, especially following star Peter Sellers' untimely death, Son of the Pink Panther, the ninth film of the series, is unanimously considered to be the series' absolute worst. Taking place ten years after the events of the prior film, Curse of the Pink Panther (which had Replacement Scrappy Clifton Sleigh in Clouseau's place, in his only appearance in the entire series), we are introduced to Inspector Clouseau's illegitimate son, Jacques Gambrelli (Roberto Benigni, in one of his first international film roles), who is sent by Chief Inspector Dreyfus to rescue Princess Yasmin of Lugash. Given that Gambrelli is supposed to have the same personality and traits as his father, you'd expect him to be just as funny as Sellers' performances as Clouseau. Alas, there's nothing to laugh at in this disaster. While Benigni's performance may be charming at times, it is muddled by a horribly-written script, overused slapstick jokes, a confusing storyline and humor so bland and tired that you've probably seen them in previous Pink Panther movies. Even the opening credits, usually a highlight of previous Pink Panther movies due to the animated Pink Panther character, is surprisingly lacking. Son of... was released to universally negative reaction, currently boasting a well-deserved 6% score on Rotten Tomatoes, the lowest of the entire series including the rebooted movies, and Benigni himself received a Razzie nomination for Worst New Star, almost destroying his overseas reputation until he bounced back with Life Is Beautiful. Adding salt to the wound, the film flopped massively, grossing just $2.4 million against a $28 million budget, joining Last Action Hero and Super Mario Bros. as one of 1993's biggest summer flops, though being released in August certainly didn't help matters. And to top it all off, not only did the original Pink Panther franchise die for good following Son of...'s failure, but Blake Edwards, who co-created the franchise and directed all films in the franchise except Inspector Clouseau, ended up retiring as soon as Son of... bombed, having grown disillusioned with film-making during the film's Troubled Production (though his continued Executive Meddling with Peter Sellers throughout the franchise's history had also played a hand in it), and acclaimed composer Henry Mancini ended up having this as his final work before dying a year after its release, a tragic close to Mancini's storied career. David Mills of The Washington Post summed up his feelings about the movie and expressed fears of further Sequelitis (which, thankfully, didn't come to pass) in his review for Son of... in 1993:
    But even more unsettling... is the inescapable feeling, by the end, that Blake Edwards has laid the groundwork for more wild, wacky film adventures with Benigni in the role of Clouseau Jr.
  • Species - The Awakening is a thoroughly awful movie featuring a normally phenomenal actor, Ben Cross, who very obviously couldn't get any other job at the time. The majority of the movie could be characterised as "Ben Cross runs from poor CGI". It has little or nothing to do with the alien-mating motif of the cult classic original and is still much, much worse than Species II or even Species III. It never comes close to the fetish nature of its predecessors, preferring to focus on a story with the depth of a grade school story about aliens with occasional hints of pre-adolescent sexuality thrown in. It was thoroughly panned by many Species fans as being nothing more than a cash-in attempt, described as a what-if? scenario of having the original film's character raise the alien hybrid as his own offspring (well, niece) rather than in a laboratory, having to make a Sadistic Choice to save her.
  • The Starfighters, another common candidate for "films that are almost unwatchable even on MST3K", is much more boring than a movie about fighter pilots has any right to be. 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 Air Force, 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."
  • Still Flowin' - The Movie by none other than rapper Raed Melki (whose music is covered here and here). It contains three songs, all of which are even more random and disorganized than his usual standards, while the rest of the movie is Raed and company just... doing things. The audio editing is awful, and the writing's even worse. Good luck watching it all the way through with more than 20 brain cells remaining by the end of it...
  • Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li is a Street Fighter property that is In Name Only at its absolute worst, combined with horrible casting, a script that caused Capcom to want to forget its existence, and no-effort fight scenes. Neal McDonough's Bison is a Smug Snake, trying to channel equal parts Hannibal Lecter, Lex Luthor, and Sho' Nuff, and failing miserably on every one. Even Kristin Kreuk as Chun-Li couldn't save it as critics have bashed it and Michael Clarke Duncan was ashamed of it.
  • 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 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 (yes, the one you're thinking of) directed before his death. 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. On the other hand, Emer Prevost disagrees, considering it even worse than the first, and he already hated that one.
  • Super Capers fails in nearly every imaginable way at being a great parody of superhero films. Ed Grubermannote , a powerless superhero, decides to join a league of superheroes to retrieve a gold bouillon and figure out his past. The actors chew the scenery at every moment to parody superhero films, but as a result, it's too corny for even the audience to stand. Add in uninteresting characters and predictable jokes and you have an unimpressive result. Worse of all is its blatant plagiarism of other movies such as Star Wars, Back to the Future and such. Not even prayer, which is the main character's power, was able to save it; the film only raked in $30,955 against its $2,000,000 budget.
  • Surf School is a 2006 film that takes a crack at the teen movie genre, which gave us cult classics such as American Pie, Road Trip, and Euro Trip. Thing is, Surf School fails to remotely understand what made its predecessors click with their audiences. Instead of giving viewers a story of relatable teenagers who grow closer as a result of the hijinks they face, Surf School gives us a lazy Cliché Storm that is loaded with stereotypical characters that would make a viewer punch his or her TV. As if that isn't enough, the jokes are painfully unfunny and excessively crude even for teen movies, relying on notions of bestiality and a running gag of an old couple talk about all the sex they have for the "laughs". Those who watch teen movies for the hijinks are going to hate this too, as the ones featured here are dull, boring, and done way better by its predecessors. The only funny thing that came from this is when Harland Williams was asked why he doesn't list this film on his film credits, he replied "You actually saw that piece of shit?!" Perhaps it also has to do with the fact that Surf School has a 2.0 on IMDb...
  • 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 misogynistic fantasy in which Madonna's character pretty much seems to fall in love with the male lead after he rapes her. The film brought in less than $600,000 at the box office, got a 5% on Rotten Tomatoes, and won five Razzie Awards, including "Worst Picture" and "Worst Remake or Sequel". It also permanently ended Madonna's career as an actress. Eegah-Taki wrote out a review of it that can be found here, as did Todd in the Shadows.

    T-Z 
  • 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 movie was originally shorter and had a different name, Madmen of Mandoras. When the television rights were acquired, the distributor wanted it to be feature length and filmed enough completely unconnected footage to pad out the movie to 91 minutes. This leads to a very weird effect concerning differences in film stock and fashion: Everybody in the older portion has that◊ clean-cut◊, Mad Men thing going, while the newer footage has folks◊ clearly◊ from the late '60s. One minute you're watching some guy with a feathered shag and Porn Stache and his go-go girl agent friend getting pursued and dispatched by a mustached guy who looks like Jake Blues. The next minute, everybody looks like Don Draper or Doris Day. You can see a review of it by Dark Corners here, and Emer Prevost shares his thoughts about it here.
  • Things is a 1989 film that can be best described as an aspiring filmmaker's worst nightmare. The meandering plot involves two guys who stay over at a brother's house, whose infertile wife was impregnated by a mad doctor and gives birth to the titular "Things", which look like clay spiders. Then they pretty much do nothing except hang lampshades about their situation until the Things attack them. The camerawork is dark and disgusting, taking aspects from other movies like Alien and The Evil Dead (1981) and executing them as if the cameraman drank an entire bottle of whiskey beforehand, and the sound design is absolutely atrocious. Almost all the sound effects were made by some guy making sounds with his mouth and nearly the entire movie is dubbed very poorly, with sound clips from the main actors, who sound wasted while recording their lines, occasionally overlapping each other. The Things don't look much better and they're killed in such an unsatisfactory manner; that is, if you can make out what's even happening with all the shaky cam, Dutch angles, and lack of lighting. And if all that wasn't enough, you get former porn star Amber Lynn as a news reporter who's clearly reading her lines off of cue cards to the side. The Neil Brothers from Something Awful gave it a -50, calling it the worst movie they've ever seen at the time. Mike from Half in the Bag shares the same sentiments while Jay calls it a movie best watched with a friend so you can enjoy their suffering and hate for you at having been subjected to such trash.
  • Turn It Up, a 2000 attempt to make rappers Pras and Ja Rule movie stars, which obtained an 8% on Rotten Tomatoes and an 18 on Metacritic. The film is an obvious attempt to ape the cult success of Belly but while that film covered up its shortcomings with an unmistakeable style that wowed its fans, this film is simply boring and has awful acting and production values to boot. Not even Jason Statham can make it watchable, and New Line Cinema essentially gave it the Invisible Advertising treatment, as it grossed only $1.2 million on a $9 million budget. Further rubbing salt in the wound is that this, of all movies, was the last movie to ever be screened at the legendary Indian Hills Theatre before it was demolished following Carmike's bankruptcy.
  • The Undefeated note  is perhaps one of the biggest critical and commercial failures in the world of documentaries, with a 1.9 on IMDb. The title makes it clear from the start that this is little more than a personal vanity project for Sarah Palin. As a result, it blatantly and shamelessly promotes her while ignoring facts that reflect poorly on her (including the fact that the John McCain/Sarah Palin ticket lost the 2008 presidential election to Barack Obama and Joe Biden). It's 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. When The Atlantic sent one of their reporters to do a review, he noted that he spent most of the movie alone. Yes, three people bought tickets, and the other two walked out after 20 minutes (keep in mind this was in arch-conservative Orange County, California), on the same day as the last Harry Potter film. It was released the same year as Jack and Jill, which set the record for most Razzies won. On both Rotten Tomatoes and the IMDb, it STILL has a lower rating than Jack and Jill.
  • In 2014, in the midst of a mounting corruption scandal concerning the 2018 Russia and 2022 Qatar World Cups, FIFA commissioned the film United Passions in an attempt to salvage its battered public image. This film, about the founding and history of FIFA and the World Cup, boasted a £20 million budget and an All-Star Cast led by Tim Roth (who later admitted that he only did it for the money), Sam Neill, and Gérard Depardieu, but they couldn't save it from an absolutely toxic reception from just about everybody who saw it, with a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, a 2.0 on IMDb, and a Metacritic score of 1note . The film is just as bad as you can expect for a film made purely for PR purposes — a sycophantic, self-congratulatory hagiography that doesn't even try to have a dramatic through line, instead giving a laughably biased history lesson (told through a mix of board meetings and archival footage of football matches) that descends into pure narm. The Guardian's review called its tone more appropriate for a film made by Scientologists or the Rev. Sun Myung Moonnote , the New York Post's review called it "The Room of sports movies", while the New York Times invoked the trope by saying it wasn't even a good bad movie watch, and the fact that the film's US release in 2015 coincided with the resignation of FIFA president Sepp Blatter (who is portrayed in the film as a valiant crusader against corruption) in the wake of several FIFA officials being arrested on corruption charges only made the snark ten times more venomous. As a result of all this the film, produced for €23,000,000 (approximately $25,910,000), made a grand total of $607 in its U.S. opening weekend, and $918 overall - the worst opening weekend gross in North America ever. Worst of all, director Frédéric Auburtin claims that he tried to balance between making a Disney propaganda film and a Michael Moore movie (ignoring that no Disney film has or would ever stoop to such depths).
  • In 1998, Andrew Wakefield published a study which made claims that the MMR vaccine was a cause of autism. After being struck off the medical register for falsifying his results for profit, Wakefield continued to lobby his findings. The result was the 2016 documentary Vaxxed: From Coverup To Catastrophe, a 90-minute Documentary of Lies directed by Wakefield himself. Instead of showing off the work in an accurate, non-biased way by experts, the "Documentary" just attempts to push its message by merely telling anecdotes that loosely tie with the topic, conveniently interviewing only anti-vax parents, doctors and personalities (one of whom is the film's producer), presenting correlation as the causenote  (which is one of the worst logical fallacies out there), pulling out random statistics and out-of-context quotes (including, for some reason, a Penn & Teller sketch) and never attempting to prove its point wrong. While emotional involvement is expected in this genre, Vaxxed pushed it way overboard by presenting babies as hostages of modern medicine, and it does so by showing them having fits or tantrums, and comparing them back to back to "normal", non-vaccinated children. The effects of vaccination are over-exaggerated to make it look like a dangerous practice. Naturally, pretty much the entire scientific community condemned the entire affair as a cynical attempt by Wakefield to further profit from his own unethical behaviour. To make matters worse, it somehow managed to get on the schedule to be shown at the Tribeca Film Festival, but was later withdrawn after public outcry.note  While it has a 33% on Rotten Tomatoes, only one of the four "fresh" reviews seems legit; one redirects to a web forum, one is a news site that merely mentions the film being canceled at Tribeca without even reviewing it, and one is larded with links to the author's own opinion pieces. Watch Brad Jones tear it apart on Midnight Screenings here. Autism Sins picks apart its awful implications in this video.
  • Werewolves of the Third Reich promises some So Bad, It's Good schlock potential, but completely squanders it. For starters, it's a British film where all the actors are putting on horrific American or German accents, which would be funny if anything happened in the movie. 70% of the piece is Josef Mengele and Ilse Koch going through the minutiae of running a concentration camp and their own marital problems (Don't ask why they're married here despite Koch's real life husband being an important part of her atrocities), along with some boring dialogue between American soldiers escaped from the brig. The film has no concept of originality, flat-out stealing lines from Inglorious Basterds and Full Metal Jacket and expecting nobody to notice. And worst of all, the werewolves don't show up before the last twenty minutes! All in all, this waste of potential deserves its 2.8 IMDB rating. Geek Legion of Doom discusses the film here.
  • In spite of (or perhaps because of) an All-Star Cast with Big Boi, Lil Wayne, Terry Crews, and Andy Milonakis, Who's Your Caddy?, which is a poor rip-off of Caddyshack, gave in to the worst stereotypes of African-American culture. It has a 6% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 1.8 rating at IMDb. What box office it did draw was bolstered by people thinking it was a film adaptation of the book of the same name by sports writer Rick Riley. In an interesting note, the film was released on July 27, 2007, the same date that fellow Horrible entry I Know Who Killed Me was released. Allison, Phelan, and Mathew air their thoughts on how awful Caddy truly is.
  • Wired (AKA "the movie Hollywood doesn't want you to see") is a notorious biopic about the late John Belushi based on the book of the same name by Bob Woodward, which was criticized for being exploitative and sensationalist and derided by John's family and friends, with good reason. The movie treats Belushi as a stereotypical drug addict, and thus treats its message like an Afterschool Special. The film also contains moments that never happened in John's life, like him being punched by a John Landis lookalike while being high on coke (which Landis refuted) or performing live in concert as The Blues Brothers; it also contained a rather mean-spirited scene of John's ghost screaming for help as his body is cut open by a coroner, while a laugh track plays. The movie's reception was overwhelmingly negative, with a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 4%, and almost derailed Michael Chiklis's career before he bounced back with The Commish. Perhaps as the result of the film's infamy, even in the age of streaming, Wired has never received a physical home video release outside of a brief life on VHS and a poor-quality, out-of-sync print on Amazon Instant Video. The Cinema Snob takes a look at it here.
  • Witless Protection, the last of a triad of films which featured Daniel Whitney's Larry the Cable Guy character As Himself. Larry's a small-town sheriff who unwittingly abducts a witness under protection by FBI agents... who it turns out are actually in the employ of a big-city gangster and are out to silence her. On top of a plot that plays every cliché straight, the film features Larry at his least likeable, a load of unfunny jokes, and a plethora of outright insulting moments, with little to redeem it in the slightest. The film, notes Leonard Maltin in his review, is full of racist remarks on the part of Larry. Unlike the films that preceded it, it made only around half of its budget and was more or less the Star-Derailing Role for Whitney as a live-action leading film actor.
  • The 2017 film adaptation of Woody Woodpecker, a cheap live-action/CGI hybrid movie ostensibly meant for children but lacks the material to even keep their attention. In a story you've probably heard a billion times, a greedy real estate lawyer is attempting to build an investment home on wooded property which happens to be Woody's habitat, and so Woody wreaks havoc upon those who try to intrude. He is also work obsessed and needs to learn the value of family. But instead of just sticking to those ideas, it gets bogged down with a myriad of subplots that add nothing. Woody, in a shocking display of cluelessness, stops bothering the construction workers after they agree to feed him peanut butter crackers every day, giving the totally acceptable moral that bribery and corruption are okay. Woody eventually burns the house down by accident, which is seen in-universe as a bad thing — despite the film earlier portraying construction of the house (justifiably) as a hindrance to the environment. Many of the jokes are also shockingly inappropriate for a kids' movie, including a Tinder reference and a Shout-Out to A Few Good Men. There is also a great deal of pandering to the character's contemporary popularity in Latin America, such as the casting of a Brazilian actress in a major role. The eponymous Woody is CGI when the rest of the movie is live-action, and there are countless animation errors, including several poorly-executed attempts at squash-and-stretch, visible clipping, and several instances where his wings aren't even flapping when he flies! There is no attempt to integrate him into the movie, as whenever characters talk to Woody, they are clearly not even trying to look at him. Eric Bauza's voice for Woody is particularly amateurish, being both heavily pitch-shifted and having a strange lo-fi quality to it.note  His characterization is downright obnoxious, including several scenes of him belching, farting, and shitting on things. He is destructive to a sadistic level in other scenes, to the point that he electrocutes construction workers, encases others in wet concrete, and even blows up an RV at one point — and other than a couple Don't Try This at Home quips, there is no attempt to portray this as ironic or cartoonish, especially given how none of the other characters display any semblance of cartoonish antics. The direction is abysmal, with several shots having a cheap zoom effect added in post-production, giving the cinematography a very cheap feel. The film also failed at the box office (grossing only $14 million box office over a $10 million budget), and the money it made was due almost entirely to strong early box office in Brazil (again trading off the character's popularity in Latin America and the casting of a Brazilian actress). Ratings were uniformly negative, with even the only "Fresh" review on Rotten Tomatoes admitting that the film would only appeal to young children. I Hate Everything offers his two cents in The Search for the Worst, and RebelTaxi named it one of the 13 worst (partially) animated movies in no particular order. Joeey Tedesco expresses his horror in his Cartoon Palooza review here.
  • Saving the worst for last, 1971's ZaAt, sometimes known as The Blood Waters of Dr Z, which was made on a budget of barely $75,000, and looks it, truly puts the "z" in zero-budget Z-movie creature feature. The plot, if one is generous enough to call it that, concerns a Mad Scientist, Dr. Leopold, who wants to take revenge on the people who (stop us if you've heard this one before) called him insane, and his plan for doing so is to (and no, this is not an exaggeration) 1: Turn himself into a fish-man, 2: kidnap a woman and turn her into a fish-woman so he can have a mate, 3: conquer the entire universe. Reading that synopsis (or even just seeing the fishman costume at work), you'd expect the movie to shoot right to the opposite end of the spectrum, which it would, if it weren't so unforgivably boring. The ridiculous appearance of the central fishman, a costume that's bad even by 70s monster movie standards (imagine a snarling Greedo covered in Spanish moss) is the only source of unintentional laughs in the whole movie. The first twenty minutes of the film (aka, a good fifth of its runtime) consist entirely of Dr. Leopold walking around his lab, looking at his schedule, checking equipment, reading his notes, and literally nothing else. It doesn't get any better after that, either - there are only four kill scenes in the entire movie, and it's obvious that the guy in the fish costume cannot see a damn thing, so all of the attacks move at a snail's pace while the fishman sloooowwwwwwwllllyyy aaaaammmmbbbblllessss his way towards the victims, until you'll find yourself wishing the fishman would kill you just so they don't have to watch the movie anymore. Mortifyingly, the cast of hapless humans is somehow even less expressive than the monster, and when the movie's not content with simply being boring, it's boring and baffling: there's an extended musical number where a group of random hippies we've never seen before sing a song together and then put themselves in jail. Yup. After 100 agonizing minutes, the movie finally just abruptly ends without much being resolved. Watch Jay and Mike of Half in the Bag take a crack at it here, and I Hate Everything suffers through it for your enjoyment in The Search for the Worst, but do not, under any circumstances, attempt to watch it without Mike and the Bots providing running commentary.

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