Horrible / Live Action Films N-Z

0-F | G-M | N-Z

N

• Nativity 3: Dude, Where's My Donkey? is a catastrophic failure of a holiday movie. The threequel of the British holiday franchise stars Martin Clunes as Mr. Shepherd, a teacher who loses his memory when the nativity donkey kicks him in the head. The film's plot, which has the pupils of St. Bernadette's trying to get Mr. Shepherd to New York and remember Christmas with his fiancee (Catherine Tate), is a disorganized mess filled with ear-piercingly bad dialogue. The few characters who returned from previous Nativity! movies have grossly devolved into flanderized caricatures of themselves and repeat the same mistakes they've done in previous films without any of the charms. The film also features cheap-as-chips sets and horrific musical numbers filled with poorly-synced choreography. As identified by the 3.5 ratings on IMDb, moviegoers and critics alike in the UK have blasted the film to hell and back, to the extent that Entertainment One has removed the like/dislike and comment features from its trailer on YouTube. Mark Kermode shares his thoughts here and Matthew Buck gives his two-cents here and would later call this film the 3rd worst film he saw at the cinemas during an episode of The Film Brain Podcast, which featured guests Ashens and Oliver Harper. When Clunes did a guest spot on Have I Got News for You, not only did the panel constantly take the piss, but Clunes also joined in with the bashing.
• The NeverEnding Story III: Escape from Fantasia takes Sequelitis to jaw-dropping extremes. Having run out of material to adapt, the film instead treats characters, locations, and even the basic premise of the book as throwaway window-dressing for a trite, derivative, and otherwise completely unrelated plot involving a pair of bratty teenagers in a high fantasy setting. The story seems to outright shun even basic reasoning—whole story beats rely upon the cast playing hot-potato with the Idiot Ball, massive plot holes are kept in place by a single word, and even the dialogue contradicts with what occurs on-screen. The film is further mired in desperate attempts at appealing to teens, from the change in setting to the ridiculous dialogue. And to add insult to injury, it just plain looks cheaper, to an obvious extent. Nothing more so than the animatronics and special effects (created by Jim Henson's Creature Shop), a high point of the first two films. You shouldn't ask Jack Black (who plays the main villain—a high school bully!) or The Nostalgia Critic (who reviewed the movie) about it…
• Night of Horror. The "plot" is as follows: a bunch of ugly old farts and a rather pretty girl go on a road trip to the Virginia Mountain Country; 30 minutes of driving can be seen. They then arrive at the site, and at night are haunted by an old ghost. They then bury a fake-looking skull. Bam, movie over. But that's not all: there's a disclaimer at the start of the film warning people that it's "a depiction of an actual event", yet at the very end there's a warning stating that the characters and stories are fictitious and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. There is also a smudge on the lens for 10 minutes of the film. It would be on the So Bad, It's Good end of the spectrum if it wasn't so dull. (The Cinema Snob also tackled it). The director also remade it as Curse of the Screaming Dead, which, as The Agony Booth made sure to point out:
  The rights to distribute this movie were eventually bought up by Troma Studios, who repackaged it as Curse of the Cannibal Confederates and proudly declared it to be one of the worst films in its library. I say again: It's one of the worst films in the library of Troma Studios. And as terrifying a statement as that is, [Night of Horror] is that much worse.
• North is considered to be Rob Reiner's worst movie, hopefully ever. A child prodigy feels that he's unappreciated by his (admittedly not the best) parents and decides to go look for new ones around the globe. That sounds like a good idea for a movie, but guess what? The movie is filled with stereotypical Texans, Hawaiians, Eskimos, Amish, Africans, Chinese, and French. The jokes that don't involve terrible stereotypes aren't funny at all. The moral is sadly broken when North is supposed to accept his parents despite their flaws, and then the film reveals itself to be All Just a Dream. The movie bombed at the box office and received a very scathing 0-star review from Roger Ebert (and an equally-scathing review by him and Gene Siskel) that at least one person thinks is too nice. Cinematic Excrement also briefly talks about the film here, and believes that the film should have won the Razzie Award for Worst Picture that year, over the eventual winner Color of Night. Reiner's hitherto awesome career never recovered. The only other notable thing about this film besides the infamous Roger Ebert review is that it was Scarlett Johansson's acting debut, who would go on to do far bigger things.
• Not Cool is Shane Dawson's attempt into a film career by directing and starring the movie, about a group of friends in Pennsylvania who reunite for Thanksgiving. Sadly the movie is full of unfunny jokes, ethnic stereotypes, and poor pacing. It has a 14% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with an average of 2.1. I Hate Everything reviews it here.
• Nukie was intended as a children's movie (specifically, a South African E.T. ripoff), but what sort of sick monster would show it to a child?! It's a depressing mishmash of kid's show ideas mixed with a staggering whiff of Apartheid-era stereotypes, utter boredom, and cloying stupidity. Two alien brothers crash-land on Earth: one in the African savanna and the other captured (never explained) by the "Space Foundation". What follows is a stew of Kudzu Plot and Epic Fail, mixing in ugly alien costumes, talking monkeys, a backwards-ass tribe, two young boys exiled to die because of said tribe, Know-Nothing Know-It-All missionaries, greedy scientists against good scientists, a magical supercomputer, and a dance number. All this in a plot that fucks Show, Don't Tell sideways throughout, a sudden Eagleland moment (America, HELP US!!!), and the dumbest, most saccharine Ass Pull ending in any kid's film. Longtime Something Awful movie reviewer Ben "Greasnin" Platt gave his only -50 review to Nukie, calling it "the most painful experience of my life, with the possible exception of when I had to watch it again." The Cinema Snob took a swipe at it, and ranked it as even worse than Ax' Em, Night of Horror, and Las Vegas Bloodbath as perhaps the most painful movie he's ever reviewed. This review sums up the film's failures in this paragraph:
  "Talking animals with no explanation, poor acting, twins characters that the filmmakers couldn't keep track of, poor science, scenes that add nothing to the rest of the movie, poor writing, comedy that isn't funny, poor special effects, annoying repetitious use of the documentary technique for scene transitions, and alien protagonists that unintentionally resemble giant pieces of fecal matter."
• The Nutcracker in 3D is an apocalyptically misguided Rewritten Pop Version of the ballet classic that is clearly aimed purely at children, but should not be shown to children under any circumstances. The "plot", if it can be called that, is thus: a young girl dreams that her uncle, Albert Einstein (yes, really), gives her a magical nutcracker who comes to life and takes her on an adventure. That's about it. The real stars of this atrocity are the downright horrifying characters who join her on an adventure, including (in addition to Einstein) the poorly-rendered CGI title character, a creepily realistic chimpanzee in a suit, a little drummer boy who for some reason is also a black stereotype, and a living clown doll who bears an uncomfortable resemblance to John Wayne Gacy. The villains are even worse, as the director made the baffling decision to make the rats into rodent-faced Nazis in everything but name—even the death camps, uncomfortably enough, get a nod in the form of the Smoke Factory—led by John Turturro hamming it up as the Rat King in what can be best described as a Dr. Evil suit with an Andy Warhol wig, and his evil plan features his soldiers burning children's toys in the Smoke Factory's furnaces to produce enough smoke to blot out the sun. No, seriously. Even the film's potentially interesting steampunk aesthetic is ruined by the poor color correction and atrocious misuse of post-production 3D. The most baffling part of it all? This film was apparently serious labor of love for the director, Russian arthouse star Andrei Konchalovsky, who spent upwards of 20 years trying to get it made. Despite all this, the film had a budget of $90 million and somehow managed to attract a cast that includes Turturro, Elle Fanning, Richard E. Grant, and Nathan Lane. It goes without saying that this movie bombed critically and financially, boasting a stunning 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and is likely responsible for the fact that no one has tried to produce a large-scale adaptation of The Nutcracker until Disney's take nearly a decade later, and even that couldn't escape this one's shadow. Watch Matthew Buck of Bad Movie Beatdown tear it to shreds here, Bobsheaux skewer it here and Musical Hell place it on trial here. The Nostalgia Critic calls it "The Most HATED Nutcracker Movie Ever Made" here.

Advertisement:

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, which 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 gotten its own movie before it became impossible - 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 2000s, 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 Spill crew, on the other hand, were awestruck about how insane the movie gets.
• 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 fake-out 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 Unreveal in recent history where basically everything that happened beforehand was retroactively made pointless. Elvis the Alien gives a good breakdown of the movie here, and Doctor Wolfula covers it here.
• Ouija is a wannabe horror flick had that had became infamous for being pretty much everything wrong with modern horror movies. Aside from the plot making absolutely no sense whatsoever, the movie's not scary at all (as they rely on too many jump scares), the story's so cliched to the point that it's downright boring, the acting's terrible, and for some reason, the characters had to play the titular game 3-4 times, before they realize the game was haunted. Not to mention, the characters barely have any identity or personality when they're not playing the game. And for the movie's twist, the girl was trapped in the spirit world and thought to be the victim, but when she's released and turns out to be the true culprit, this opens up a whole new Plot Hole: how did all the murders happen if the Serial Killer was trapped all this time? While the film managed to turn a large profit despite critical panning, audiences who saw the film were every bit as venomous as the critics, boasting a dismal 6% from critics and paltry 24% from audiences on Rotten Tomatoes, a 4.5/10 on IMDb, and a 1.7/5.0 on Letterboxd. Oddly enough, they were able to create a prequel film to this one. Even more odd is that it was well-received by critics. And here's Chris Stuckmann's, and Jeremy Jahns' reviews on the film.
• 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).

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 confusing 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 (although it does exist on DVD, 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 into 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.
• Pink: El rosa no es como lo pintan is a 2016 "religious drama" by Mexican director Paco Del Toro about a gay couple who adopts a boy. All potential this story had is utterly lost because the nuance required for the premise to work was never Del Toro's intent; the film is anti-gay propaganda created in response to Mexico legalizing gay marriage, portraying gay men as effeminate, promiscuous and even predatory. To make matters worse, the main character turns straight after converting to Christianity (he was just gay because of his bad relationship with his father) while his partner contracts HIV. Besides its blatant homophobia, the movie has lousy acting, writing, and direction. It currently is rated 1.6 on IMDb. It went to the point that, when it was discovered that Netflix Mexico carried the film, the platform quickly removed it, a move that was applauded by Pablo Chung, the actor who played one half of the film's gay couple (and who is gay in real life), who apologized for his role in the film, saying that the result was "trash." Watch MxGerryNava video (in Spanish) reviewing the movie here.
• 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 managed to balance seriousness with comedy, but 3DD instead took things into much more Denser and Wackier territory. 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. The Co-Host 3000 and Cyrus of Spill also gave their thoughts on the movie here.
• Pledge This!, yet another memorable film starring Paris Hilton. Much like The Hottie & the Nottie, 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.
• Released in 2005, Popstar can best be seen as Aaron Carter needing to star in a movie and not much else. The film is about Aaron Carter getting enrolled into a public school and needing to pass his classes, or else he can't tour in the summer. During that time, he experiences every cliche possible, complete with him having two third-act break-ups with the same girl. Other highlights include Carter being next-level unable to act, characters and plot points coming out of nowhere and disappearing as soon as they appear, and Carter getting a better score on his final when he does it himself then when he cheats off a girl who got a perfect score on her SAT's. Kyle Norty gave it a look mid-2016, and later declared it one of the worst things he has ever reviewed.
• Pure Hearts: Into Chinese Showbiz is a vehicle for main star, writer, and director Bi Zhifei, which became infamous in China as soon as it released. The film is a Cliché Storm, but becomes barely comprehensible due to somehow juggling eleven plotlines at once, most of which pile on film cliches, including sensitive subjects like sexual assault and suicide. The presentation of the film is overshot and gaudy, frequently wasting time on showing how "rich" it is, even dedicating the end credits to this, yet it has the gall to try calling out Chinese showbiz for something it's doing constantly. To top it off, the acting is consistently low quality, the main storyline is purely about sating the ego of the main star who just happens to also be writer and director, and the film is bursting with misogynistic depictions of women that frames them as either some bastions of purity or gold-digging sluts. The film also has a very questionable production history; all of the actors were unpaid, most of them still students at that, and were frequently bullied and pushed around, leading to nine of them leaving over the course of production. It averages a 2.2 on the Chinese film website Douban, and Accented Films covers the trainwreck here.

R

• The 2008 film Race and its 2013 sequel are considered guilty pleasures by many Indian moviegoers. However, no one will defend Race 3, which is actually a reboot of the 2008 original. The first two movies had IMDb Ratings of 6.7 and 5.3 respecively. The third movie received a 1.9 and sits comfortably on the IMDb Bottom 100. The film was criticized for its lack of plot, poor structure, weak action, and terrible scriptwork. Despite the panning, the movie ended up becoming the fifth highest-grossing Bollywood movie of 2018, most likely due to the presence of Bollywood superstar Salman Khan. The movie has been reviewed by various Indian publications such as Times of India, Hindustan Times, Bollywood Hungama, The Quint, and Deccan Chronicle.
• 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 island^note We find out how near the end of the movie: It can fly. 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 possibly one of the worst Christian propaganda films ever made. It centers around a Christian boy named Jeff, whose love of rock music concerns his mom because she believes that all rock is evil. After a preacher suggests giving it up for a week and researching why it's "bad", Jeff 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 unlikeable 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 lists several supposedly Satanic songs, including Santana's "Evil Ways"^note A song about becoming a better person, Jefferson Starship's "Dance with the Dragon"^note Which is about the Chinese Year of the Dragon, not a Satanic dragon), The Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil"[[note]]Which is written from Satan's point-of-view and has him claiming responsibility for various historical atrocities, AC/DC's "Hell Ain't a Bad Place to Be"^note 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 Captain & Tennille just for having suggestive but largely non-explicit mentions of sex or magic, even attacking some musicians as "homosexuals". With poor camera quality, terrible messages and no mention of Christian Rock music anywhere, 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 here, Letterboxd here, Brad Jones on DVD-R Hell here, and Emer Prevost here.
• R.O.T.O.R., a Terminator / RoboCop ripoff about a scientist in a grimdark cyberpunk future creating a robot cop / leather daddy for the purpose of judging felonies and misdemeanors and killing the people responsible for them, only for the robot to go rogue. 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, 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, Something Awful's Neil brothers honor it as their second -50 rating here. and Shitcase Cinema also panned it 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, even lamenting how it could have been So Bad, It's Good.
• 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  The film is so overloaded with cameos that it has the bizarre distinction of being the last film of at least five veteran performers: Rona Anderson, Francis Matthews, Bill Pertwee, Donald Sinden, and Frank Thornton. 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 here.

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 sets up 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, while 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 (other than being male) and another character who espouses conspiracy theories yet his overall attitude seems to actually make him a parody of conspiracy theorists and people who believe in 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 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 of 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.
• Segurança Nacional is an attempt to cash in on The Elite Squad's success by making a Brazilian action movie. However, it lacks everything that made the latter memorable by having a ridiculous story about Latin American drug dealers who aim to explode an atomic bomb in Santa Catarina (seriously), laughable and inexplicable action scenes (the main character and his girlfriend make out while a bomb is about to explode), blatant patriotic symbolism and bizarre dialogue. It is currently rated 3.5 on IMDb. Brazilian youtuber Tralhas do Jon tears it apart here (in Portuguese).
• 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. The 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 third-weakest debut of any movie ever in over 3000 theaters, ^note  Behind Hoot and The Rhythm Section. 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.
• 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 art form, 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 at least some of the Fan Disservice is probably 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 main plot ends 45 minutes in, with the rest of the runtime spent on two Filler scenes that are only tangentially related to the plot and were obviously made to pad out the movie. The acting is stilted, awkward, and unnatural, with actors looking and performing like they're in a really bad porno flick. The special effects and production values wouldn't even pass on YouTube. 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'd ever seen by that point and Best of the Worst warns people to stay away from it, finding it worse than Bigfoot vs. D.B. Cooper, their previous "worst movie ever".
• 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 (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, declared that "no dogs is better than Show Dogs", and drew particular attention to a moment where a character remarks that no one makes movies about talking dogs 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  Not to be confused with a similarly-named Off-Broadway play also involving the Holocaust. 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  Which shares this status with Bio-Dome, Chaos, and United Passions, all except Chaos being featured on this page. 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.)
• Slender Man was released 4 years after the character fell out of popularity, but that is the least of this movie's problems. The protagonists are selfish and make poor decisions (such as summoning Slender Man in the first place), and the movie ruins whatever mystery and spook factor the character had left for a weak, laughable twist. Not only that, the advertising went beyond tasteless by showing scenes closely resembling the Slender-Man stabbing incident of 2014, which was already horrible enough to kill buzz about Slender-Man in the first place, but the backlash to that resulted in at least one local market refusing to screen the film at all—which is just as well, because with or without the scenes the residents of the community where it happened would've absolutely hated its celluloid/electronic guts anyway, as when the offending scenes were removed in an effort at damage control it rendered the film a lot harder to understand and created enough giant plot holes that you can drive a semi through the whole length of the film. Many critics wondered if the movie was a deliberate attempt to sabotage the character. It ended up getting 8% on Rotten Tomatoes (17% audience score), 3.2 on IMDB, and a D- Cinemascore. Jeremy Jahns and Chris Stuckmann look at the movie here and here respectively.
• 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 two famed editors, Claire Simpson and Thelma Schoonmaker ^note  Claire Simpson was the initial editor for the movie but after seeing the mess Universal got due to the movie lacking a lot of necessary footage, they asked Schoonmaker, by Scorsese's request, to re-edit the movie as best as she could., 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.
• Songbird, a 2020 exploitation thriller about the COVID-19 Pandemic produced by Michael Bay. Set in 2024, an extremely deadly mutation of COVID has turned Los Angeles into a dystopia where the infected are sent to concentration camps called "Q-zones". When the grandmother of artist Sara Garcia (Sofia Carson) falls ill to the virus, her boyfriend, immune contraband courier Nico Price (KJ Apa), has to save her before the L.A. sanitation department takes her away. Audience-Alienating Premise aside, the film suffers from an uninteresting romantic subplot due to neither Nico or Sara having much development, with Nico's attempt to bring a highly-contagious person to a remote community coming off as dangerous and selfish rather than romantic, which has two other subplots involving the immunity bracelet contraband and another romantic plotline to distract from it. While the actors involved are generally considered to be decent, the rest of the cast also suffer from being uninteresting or undeveloped, such as the governor Emmet Harland being an evil politician hell-bent on capturing Sara and her grandmother, and Nico's main client being an overprivileged rich couple selling illegal immunity bracelets for profit. The setting and plotline leave many questions unanswered, such as how Los Angeles came to be a dystopia, how the government has the technology to make a phone app that can check if a person has COVID-23, or how nowhere else seems to be affected by the pandemic. The film was immediately panned by critics, with some saying it didn't handle pandemic plotline well or found its premise to be fear-mongering. It received a 9% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and 27/100 on Metacritic, and only made back just over $400,000 in the box office. Double Toasted reviewed the film in-depth, where Martin flat-out calls it one of the worst films he's ever seen. YouTuber Heavy Spoilers also criticized the film, finding it to be dull and devoid of fun.
• 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 unlikeable, 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 films were already on the decline, after Peter Sellers died all of a sudden, Son of the Pink Panther, the ninth, is hands-down considered the nadir. Taking place ten years after Curse of the Pink Panther, the film stars Inspector Clouseau's bastard son Jacques Gambrelli (Roberto Benigni, in one of his first international film roles). Chief Inspector Dreyfus sends Gambrelli to rescue Princess Yasmin of Lugash. Given that he's is supposed to have the same personality and traits as his father, you'd think he would be just as funny as Sellers' Clouseau. Alas, you would be wrong. Benigni's performance may be charming at times, but it can't save the horribly-written script, overused slapstick jokes, confusing storyline, and bland, tired retreads of past films' humor. Even the opening credits, featuring the animated Pink Panther character, fall flat. Son of... was released to universally negative reaction, currently boasting a 6% score on Rotten Tomatoes, the lowest of the any Pink Panther film. Benigni almost lost his overseas reputation to a Razzie nomination for Worst New Star, until he bounced back with Life Is Beautiful. Adding salt to the wound, the movie grossed 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. And to top it all off, the original Pink Panther franchise died for good; co-creator and director Blake Edwards became disillusioned with film-making and retired, and composer Henry Mancini was stuck with this as his swansong when he died the following year. David Mills of The Washington Post summed up his feelings about the movie and expressed fears of further Sequelitis 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.
• Made entirely without input from the estate of the man it was based on, Stardust (2020) is a biopic about David Bowie that Bowie fans and film critics everywhere regarded as, to quote one of Bowie's most famous songs, "a godawful small affair" that would stir up a minor dust storm in Bali, where the real Bowie's ashes were scattered. The film doesn't even pretend to hide the fact that it's riding the coattails of the far better received Bohemian Rhapsody, and everything that film did right when telling the story of Freddie Mercury and Queen, this one got completely wrong (which considering that Bohemian Rhapsody did take its fair share of artistic license with the history of Queen, is saying something). The plot is VERY loosely based on the real David Bowie's life and offers no meaningful insight nor anything new about the man himself. Bowie's portrayal is In Name Only at best (and borderline insulting to the man and his legacy at worst) and despite trying his darnedest to do so in spite of the poor script, lead actor Johnny Flynn is unfortunately unable to fully capture Bowie's charisma. Worst of all is, despite having many songs, the movie has no David Bowie songs at all despite taking place at the point in Bowie's life when he was just starting to become a music superstar, draining the movie of one of its possible saving graces. Boring, pointless, and lacking any of the charisma of Bowie and his music, this Bowie biopic was roundly dismissed as a disservice to the man himself by nearly everyone who saw it, receiving an absolutely miserable 14%/31% critic/viewer rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 3.6 on IMDB.
  RT Consensus: Ground control to Major Tom, Stardust forgot to put its helmet on.
• 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." In the end, the entire film comes across as essentially a giant ad for the F-104 Starfighter...which practically needed one due to the plane being plagued with various performance and mechanical problems which had practically dried up interest in it.
• Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation is an In Name Only sequel which ditches the satirical tone of the original to rip off superior horror films such as The Thing (1982) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). The characters are dull, the acting is awful and budget was clearly small leading to Special Effects Failure. While its Rotten Tomatoes rating seems reasonable at 33%, this is based on a sample of only 8 reviews (with 2 in favour). The audience rating is only 12% and its IMDb rating is 3.5 out of 10. Shitcase Cinema covered it here, while The Angry Joe Show slated it during his look through the whole series here.
• Still Flowin' - The Movie by none other than rapper Raed Melki (whose music is covered here and here). The film is a fictionalized depiction of Raed's life story, particularly his feud with noted Australian record producer Michael Gudinski and subsequent admission to a mental institution. 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 filled with Plot Holes that caused Capcom to want to forget its existence, and no-effort fight scenes. Neal McDonough's Bison looks less like the game's Bison and more like he's trying to channel equal parts Hannibal Lecter, Lex Luthor, and Sho' Nuff, and failing miserably on everyone, further cementing the great Raúl Juliá's already classic interpretation of Bison as the cinematic Bison to beat. Even Kristin Kreuk as Chun-Li couldn't save it as critics have bashed it and Michael Clarke Duncan was ashamed of it. Here's Spill giving their review of the movie. James Rolfe from Cinemassacre and Chad James from Rooster Teeth give their thoughts on this movie here. Folding Ideas dissects the film and its many storytelling flaws here.
• Super Capers fails in nearly every imaginable way at being a great parody of superhero films. Ed Gruberman,^note whose name is stolen from the far funnier Frantics sketch "Tai Kwan Leap" aka "Boot to the Head" 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 late '90s/early '00s era of teen movies, 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 abuses her and threatens to 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. Cinematic Excrement also takes a look at it here.

T

• 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 unmistakable 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.

Advertisement:

U

• The Undefeated ^note (not to be confused with The Undefeated, the 1969 Western starring John Wayne and Rock Hudson, or Undefeated, the Oscar-winning documentary about high school football that was released in the same year as this film, 2011 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 1.^note Putting it in an elite club of only eight films to hold the site's lowest possible score — a list that includes the aforementioned Bio-Dome, InAPPropriate Comedy and Death of a Nation 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 the line and gives 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 Moon^note See Battlefield Earth and Inchon above, respectively, for how both those worked out, 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 mocking 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.

W

• 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 RealLife 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.
• While She Was Out is a 2008 suspense-thriller based on a short story by Edward Bryant and starring Kim Basinger as an abused suburban housewife who is forced to fend for herself in the woods against a cliched four token band of hoodlums. In practice, it's one part Lifetime Movie of the Week, one part gory Exploitation Film... or an offbrand Eden Lake. Even then, it tries and fails to choose between being a horror movie, a Black Comedy, or a thriller, and its central message is outright reprehensible. But all that aside, the script has numerous plotholes and logic gaps, and the story is completely telegraphed. The chase sequences are badly choreographed, and a few scenes just didn't need to be there. There are also long stretches—5-10 minutes at a go—where nothing happens. And of course, the gang just plain isn't a convincing threat; Della just picks them off one by one, each in the same predictable, contrived way. The story offers no insight into Basinger's character, or the impact of her trauma—she just turns into a killing machine capable of MacGyvering with no justification. The supposed shocker ending where it's implied that her abusive husband is next feels rather abrupt, over-the-top and tacked-on. While She Was Out only garnered a Rotten Tomatoes score of 31% and an audience score of 17%. It did marginally better on Metacritic with a score of 40% and a 4.8 score on IMDb. Mathew "Film Brain" Buck eventually would cover it as part of Bad Movie Beatdown.
• Despite (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 sportswriter 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.
• The Wild World of Batwoman, released in 1966 and directed by Jerry Warren, was clearly made to cash in on the popularity of the Batman (1966) TV series, but completely lacks the charm of its "inspiration". Its plot is centered around Batwoman, who simply wears the most garish outfit, and her Batgirl minions, who don't really fight crime and spend more time on go-go dancing instead. There's also a ridiculous plot about trying to find a hearing-aid that the villain, Rat Fink, wants to obtain for himself. Even more, there are too many Big-Lipped Alligator Moments that have nothing to do with the film itself, most of which seem to be stock footage from other movies. For example, there's a scene where two Batgirls witness a mugging scene and they don't do anything about it. Even more, this film takes footage from The Mole People as well! Whatever "funny" moments are in this movie are hardly even worth laughing over, feeling so dry and boring instead, and even its opening scene of "synthetic vampires" has nothing to do with the rest of the movie, considering it was shot to avoid a lawsuit from DC/National Comics. Ultimately, this film is so dry and lifeless, even the crew of Mystery Science Theater 3000 have found it difficult to sit through, with Tom Servo famously screaming "END! ENNNNND!" towards the end of the film. Currently, this film has a rating of 1.9 out of 10 on IMDb, and rightfully so.
• 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,^note The film glosses over most Belushi's short-but-illustrious career to focus almost exclusively on his drug addictions, and on top of that, he is portrayed as a boorish, violent, unprofessional, adulterous, openly racist hedonist who cares nothing for the harm his actions caused. In real life, while he did struggle with cocaine addiction, John Belushi was a kind, compassionate, generous man who took his work seriously and made a genuine (albeit sadly unsuccessful) effort to clean up his life. and thus treats its message like an Afterschool Special. The film also contains moments in John's life that either never happened or are heavily disputed, like him being punched by an Expy of John Landis while being high on coke (which Landis refuted) or performing live in concert as The Blues Brothers; it also contained rather mean-spirited scenes of John being chastised for his drug use by (get this) his Puerto Rican guardian angel (played by the decidedly not Puerto Rican Ray Sharkey)^note In a case of bitter irony that further eroded the movie's moral high ground, Sharkey was a drug addict in real life and died in 1993 of AIDS after reportedly contracting HIV through intravenous drug use. and by Woodward (who John never met in real life), and 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 nowadays it's perhaps best known for being the film debut of Michael Chiklis (who played John), and yet it almost derailed his career just as it began 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. Interestingly, musician Peter Gabriel was said to have enjoyed it, but he was under the impression he was watching a rough cut of Say Anything....^note Gabriel asked to see said rough cut after Cameron Crowe asked him for permission to use "In Your Eyes" in the film. Crowe's assistant sent Gabriel a copy of Wired by mistake and Crowe didn't find out until Gabriel expressed concern over the main character dying of a drug overdose.
• 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. In a story you've probably heard a billion times, a greedy real estate lawyer is attempting to build an investment home in Woody's woods, and so he wreaks havoc upon those who try to intrude. Said lawyer is also a work-obsessed father who needs to learn the value of family. But instead of just stopping there, the film bogs itself down with a myriad of subplots that add nothing. Woody is a clueless, obnoxious, juvenile sadist of a character, whose antics are all played dead straight and whose few moments of good are almost all by accident. His CGI is riddled with errors, including several moments of botched squash-and-stretch, visible clipping, and moments where animations that should take place don't. No real effort is made to integrate it, either—characters routinely get Woody's position dead-wrong when interacting with him. Even his voice buries Eric Bauza's talents under heavy-pitch shifting and a low-quality export. The direction is abysmal, with several shots having a cheap zoom effect added in post-production. And many of the jokes are topical or dated references no kid should get. The film pandered heavily to Woody's contemporary popularity in Latin America, going as far as to cast Thaila Ayala as the villain's girlfriend. It failed at the box office, grossing only $14 million on a $10 million budget; most of that was thanks to a strong opening in Brazil. 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. The Nostalgia Critic has nothing nice to say about the movie, and equates it to a Spiritual Successor to Universal's Dark Universe.

Z

• ZaAt, sometimes known as The Blood Waters of Dr Z, is a 1971 movie made on a $75,000 budget that truly puts the "z" in zero-budget Z-movie creature features. 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 fisherman 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 fisherman, a costume that's bad even by the 70s monster movie standards (imagine a snarling Greedo covered in Spanish moss) is the only source of unintentional laughs on the whole movie. Even at barely 100 minutes, the runtime is still padded to the gills: 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 you 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 singing 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.

---