So Bad It's Horrible/Film

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

"Oh my God... this movie exists."

—The Cinema Snob

Can you believe that somebody paid the equivalent of $10 U.S. to see these movies in theaters (or paid about $30 U.S. to watch them at home)? Yeah, we couldn't either. Somebody made these films which, to put it kindly, didn't turn out so well.

Important Note: Merely being offensive in its subject matter, a Box Office Bomb, or a film you don't plain like is not sufficient. Hard as it is to imagine at times, there is a market for all types of shlock, no matter how small a niche it is. It has to fail to appeal even to its given niche to qualify as this. If you're unsure whether it belongs here or not, visit the Talk tab above and give your input; otherwise, if it's something you just plain don't like, please don't shoehorn it in, this isn't a page for complaining about things that fail to you.

Second Important Note: It isn't a Horrible film just because anyone from That Guy With The Glasses and/or any other Caustic Critic reviewed it, nor for having an article in the Awful Movies Wiki. There needs to be independent evidence, such as actual recognized critics (emphasis on plural) for example, to list it (though once it is listed, they can provide the detailed review). A good hint to know if a film belongs to this page is by checking its rating in sites like IMDB, Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes; if its scores are below the twenties on those sites, it's a sure candidate to be listed here.

Examples (more-or-less in alphabetical order):


Repeat Offenders

Listed by last name or company, in alphabetical order.

  • The Asylum: Low-end production company infamous for familiar-sounding Mockbusters — low-budget "remakes" of popular films with suspiciously similar titles, all of them cheap Follow the Leader-fodder. Most of their films end up going direct to Syfy, but they still qualify for their rare theatrical releases. Apparently, the only way they can get people to watch their films is to trick them into it and throw in a few moments of gratuitous nudity. They have a habit of failing to provide sources for the gushing quotes on the DVD cases. And do not get us started with their arrogant behavior. Examples:
    • Mega Piranha: A knock-off of Piranha 3D that's painfully boring with special effects akin to early PS2 graphics, a terrible script, and horrible acting.
    • Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus: From the title, one would expect a hilarious sci-fi B-movie where two giant polystyrene monsters fight, taking half the world's population with them. In reality... it's just dull. The acting's predictably terrible, the script's weak, the titular "fight" only lasts for two minutes at the end, and the one hilariously brilliant scene (the one where the shark manages to jump up to airline-cruising altitude and takes a bite out of a jet) isn't brilliant enough to redeem it.
      • It has a sequel, Mega Shark vs Crocosaurus. At least that film featured a little more giant-monsters-smashing-stuff-and-wailing-on-each-other this time.
    • Snakes on a Train. The film is boring, extremely dull, the dialogue is extremely clunky (especially the racist remarks from the redneck at the very beginning), which is especially a total annoyance since the film is just essentially boring conversation scene after boring conversation scene on the train. Not even the few minutes of topless women in the middle was enough to save it. As for the titular snakes, there's one that appears in a very dark lit shot about 20 minutes into the movie (you have to essentially squint to see it), a few garter snakes coming out of a woman's arm, and there's about maybe 17 small pythons or corn snakes in the last 5 minutes, and they don't attack anyone (thus proving the "1000 venomous vipers" claim on the cover to be a complete lie). The closest the film gets to snakes fucking shit up is when the people get off the train, and the female protagonist turns into some fake CG viper and devours the train, then suddenly mysteriously vanishes into a weird lightning flashing sky or whatever. Never has 80 minutes felt so much like 3 hours.
    • Transmorphers: No, not Transformers, Transmorphers. It's painfully boring and the writing is bad, but the worst things about it by far are the special effects and audio. The robots start out like something out of a PS1 cutscene and only get worse as the movie goes on. There's missing sound effects, which lead to sensory-screwing scenes where things explode silently. Also, the first round of DVDs had the audio sync slowly get worse as the movie went on to the point where it was off by over a second. They Just Didn't Care.
      • Despite the misleading title, Transmorphers isn't a Transformers knockoff... but a Terminator knockoff. Making things just that little bit more bizarre, when The Asylum eventually produced an actual Terminator knockoff (The Terminators, released at the same time as Terminator Salvation), it actually owed more to Battlestar Galactica than it did any of the Terminator films.
    • They also have forayed into Christian-oriented "entertainment", releasing a film called Sunday School Musical. Besides the obvious cribbing from High School Musical, the film is too light in the religious content (despite being obviously oriented to the Christian public and the plot being about a competition of church choral groups), and the script is rife with Unfortunate Implications (an example: all the "good" musicians in the story are African-American). Film Brain and Todd in the Shadows explain it further.
  • Dinesh D'Souza is a far-right political commentator who was previously best known for making 2016: Obama's America, a documentary that grossed fairly well and is claimed by him to be the highest-grossing documentary aimed at conservatives (a debatable claim, but possible). It wasn't until 2016 where he resorted to Insane Troll Logic and multiple Logical Fallacies, deliberately twisting historical facts and interviews he held with people in order to promote his political rhetoric, in addition to his inability to properly tell a coherent narrative without going on multiple tangents. Much of his work seems to be biased as a result of his conviction for making illegal campaign contributions, which he plead guilty to, and as a result, his films are more like Troll Fics, Revenge Fics and/or poorly-made Propaganda Machines than actual well-researched documentaries.
    • Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party has gathered a great deal of vitriol. The film begins with D'Souza playing the victim card over the fact that he spent 8 months in the halfway house for the aforementioned campaign finance violation (to the point that he even blames Obama for his plight).[1] Then he starts launching into a baseless and not-at-all-original strawman attack on the Democratic Party as being racist as if the Democratic Party who supported the Ku Klux Klan back in the day is the same Democratic Party of today. All this is thrown together haphazardly, interspersed with Big Lipped Alligator Moment-level musical numbers, cheesy historical reenactments, and needlessly patronizing images of slaves being beaten. He doesn't even get to discussing Hillary Rodham Clinton herself until over an hour into the 90-minute movie, instead spending more time digging up "dirt" and "revealing secrets" (which are "secret" only to Americans who neglected to take even remedial history classes) on Andrew Jackson, Lyndon Johnson, and Barack Obama. The film has a 4% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 2 on Metacritic, which is the second-lowest score recorded there, behind a four-way tie of Chaos (the David DeFalco one), Bio-Dome, United Passions, and The Singing Forest, the latter three of which are also on this list.
      • The Midnight Screenings review is a first, as Brad Jones reveals that it is the first movie that he has ever walked out of. The other guys involved with that series weren't all that nice to it either, to put it mildly. Brad later reviewed the movie negatively as The Cinema Snob, though the first two times he attempted to put the episode on his channel it was forcibly removed from YouTube, with people suspecting D'Souza of reporting the video because he can't take it. The Smeghead was similarly harsh, noting that it wouldn't change the perspectives of anyone on any end of the political spectrum. It was nominated for 5 Razzies and won 4 (including Worst Picture), and something worth mentioning is that the Razzies rarely ever touch political films. That should give you an idea of just how bad this stinker is. It doesn't help that even though D'Souza felt quite honored for the participation there, he considered his nominations as "petty revenge" for Donald Trump's Presidential victory and thinking that his film "might have played an important role in the election" despite Donald Trump only mentioning it once during his 2016 campaign.[2]
    • As bad as that was, D'Souza topped himself with Death of a Nation: Can We Save America a Second Time?, a film that once again repeats the mistakes Hillary's America made and layers it with a heaping dose of lazy filmmaking. Just about every argument made in D'Souza's previous film is repeated in this one, along with new ones such as comparing liberals, progressives, and the Democratic party to Those Wacky Nazis for very superficial reasons. (Brad Jones claimed for this one that D'Souza was right on one account - Liberals, like Nazis, know how to make decent movies.) Once again, the main selling point - favorably comparing Donald Trump to Abraham Lincoln - isn't touched on in detail until the last ten minutes of the film. The movie received a Metacritic score of 1 and a Rotten Tomatoes score of 0% and, unlike D'Souza's previous films, was a Box Office Bomb, grossing $5.9 million against its shoestring budget of $6 million. Brad Jones on Midnight Screenings considers this movie to be even worse than Hillary's America by virtue of being more lazily made.

"Probability dictates that every now and then, a totally clueless director like Hal Warren or Tony Malanowski might punch through and end up making one of the worst movies ever just by pure chance, but to make three of them clearly requires active hatred towards paying audiences."

  • Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer: every film written solely by them qualify. They try to bring a modernized version of the legendary Zucker, Abrams and Zucker style of comedy, but they fail due to their fondness of extreme vulgarity and their over-reliance on Shallow and Narrow Parody that gets dated before the films get out of theaters. Tellingly, the best-reviewed works they have been involved with (the Scary Movie franchise) are the ones who were done in collaboration with other people. They had managed to get steady work in Hollywood, despite the unanimously known low quality of their productions, because they managed to release low-costing productions that managed to turn a profit. It all changed when they released...
    • Disaster Movie (2008), like most of its predecessors, displays both a total lack of awareness of the distinction between referencing something and parodying it, a lack of research beyond watching the previews, and wave after wave of painfully-dated pop-culture references. The rest consists of long Running Gags that were never funny to begin with and Refuge in Vulgarity. What makes Disaster Movie "special" is that it goes even further on all of this, managing to be more aggressively unfunny, more pandering, more vapid, and even cheaper-looking than the films before it. The film shot up (down?) to the #1 spot on IMDb's worst film list in less than a day (as of 2018 is still among the IMDB 20 worst films) and bombed in theaters.
    • Their next productions - The Starving Games (2013), Best Night Ever (2014), and Superfast! (2015) (no points for guessing what they are parodying each) - flopped even more. None of them even managed to recoup production costs, and they are all part of the 0% Club in Rotten Tomatoes.
  • Happy Madison Productions: Adam Sandler's production company has given us a lot of Guilty Pleasures, but has also inflicted on us these stinkers:
    • Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star (2011): puerile, obnoxious, and inept in all aspects, the film feels more like a Saturday Night Live sketch drawn out to feature length. The plot revolves around the eponymous Bucky Larson discovering his parents were 1970s porn stars and deciding to follow in their footsteps; it was essentially an excuse to cover the script with hackneyed sex and dick jokes (particularly those about small penises). Couple this with hopelessly wooden acting, and you've got the kind of film that gets a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, and a film so bad that the DVD doesn't even have any blurbs from critics on it, positive or negative. Naturally, all of this led to the film bombing, making less than one-third of its (small) budget back in ticket sales. It was eventually pulled from theaters after just two weeks. Smeghead did a review of the disaster. The film was bad enough on its own, but its failure was probably further precipitated by quite possibly the worst promotional campaign in history, consisting primarily of ads featuring an obnoxious, overly-enthusiastic man yelling loudly at the viewer to go see the movie. Repeatedly. Despite all of that, it did not take home a single Golden Raspberry Award, thanks to…
    • Jack And Jill (2011), an abysmal 'comedy' starring Adam Sandler as a set of estranged twins. The premise concerns Jack Sadelstein, a commercial director, who is visited by his annoying identical twin sister Jill. During the Thanksgiving holidays, Jill is wooed by Al Pacino, much to Jack’s annoyance since he sought out Pacino for his Dunkin’ Donuts commercial. Like Bucky Larson, the film's plot is essentially a bad SNL sketch stretched to feature length. Worse still, the gags are all lowbrow and derivative of Sandler's earlier works, there are a multitude of negative implications regarding its depiction of Mexicans, the cameos from celebrities such as Drew Carey, Shaquille O'Neal, and John McEnroe are wasted, and the direction is hopelessly careless. The film got a 3% on Rotten Tomatoes, a Metacritic score of 23, and a 3.5 on IMDb. It also won a Razzie in every category of 2011, resulting in a record of 10 awards. Director Dennis Dugan's career was tarnished by this film and has only helmed Grown Ups 2, the sequel to his Grown Ups, since. If you have a lot of time to kill, Half In The Bag takes a look at it here, extensively detailing Sandler's scam-like laziness in making his films. Film Brain has his own review of it here, Smeghead gives his opinion here, and Mark Kermode shares his thoughts about it here. The Asian Critic Chick provides commentary on the racial stereotypes here.
    • Joe Dirt was panned by critics, but nonetheless grew a devoted fan base over time. The same cannot be said for the Direct-to-Crackle 2015 sequel Joe Dirt 2: Beautiful Loser, which was as reviled by fans as it was by critics and earned a 0% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes, as well as a 22% audience score. An overly long 106-minute longtime, a nonsensical plot where Joe Dirt is thrown back in time by a tornado, pop culture references that are either overly dated or shoddy attempts to stay modern, and jokes that are either mean-spirited or pathetically lowbrow and lazy, and you have one of the worst movie sequels of all time. Which is saying a lot. Read Nathan Rabin rip it apart for the A.V. Club here.
    • The Master of Disguise (2002), meant to be Dana Carvey's Career Resurrection's ticket, became his Career Killer instead. In theory this was a family film specially designed to showcase Carvey's talent for imitation and mimicry; in practice, it was a dull movie with an incredibly childish plot full of inappropriate jokes and tired stereotypes, and the disguises and imitations by the main character range from boring to very horrible. Carvey's character is meant to be a bit of an idiot hero but instead comes as a completely moronic walking stereotype of Italians. Critic savaged it. The Nostalgia Critic reviewed it, suffering each minute of its footage and its overextended Credits Gags.
    • Pixels (2015) is an action-comedy starring Sandler (among others) and based on French filmmaker Patrick Jean's 2010 short film of the same name. It's also an unfunny, abysmal wreck of a film that may well mark an even lower nadir for Sandler's career. The writing and jokes are forced and hackneyed. The special effects are likewise hollow, while the characters are at once unlikable and virtually recycled from every other Sandler movie. It also tries hard to cash in on contemporary nostalgia for The Eighties and video game arcades from that decade, but comes across as ignorant if not insulting to both. To the surprise of a few, it was panned by many critics, with a 17% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. More than a handful of gamers also expressed disdain, with The Escapist's Matthew Parkinson highlighting how the premise was completely wasted. Chris Stuckmann also has quite a few scathing comments about how sloppy the whole farce is.
  • Ulli Lommel: German director whose career dates back to the early 1970s, gaining mainstream attention in 1980 with The Boogeyman (the second sequel to which, Return of the Boogeyman, also falls under this) which they mention on the cover of all his DVDs, apparently hoping people confuse it with the Sam Raimi produced one. Though most of his stuff was never well-received critically, it seems that it didn't turn full-on Horrible until about 2004, when he began churning out a long line of Direct to Video, No Budget, shameless Mockbuster horror flicks and true crime films that rated less than Boll even when the latter was at his worst. They include:
    • Daniel: Der Zauberer, starring Daniel Küblböck (he finished 5th in the German version of American Idol). There's No Budget, and the plot's incomprehensible — for instance, the protagonist's dead grandfather (played by Lommel himself) is the "Zauberer", not Daniel, and is running around in the world of the living for no clear reason. The German mafia wants to kill Daniel, also for no clear reason. Neither of the major characters is likable, and Küblböck as Daniel is spectacularly bad; he shows here why he was voted "Germany's Most Annoying Man" two years in a row. Apparently, when a theatre decided to show a large portion of it as an unannounced special preview, the audience rioted. The film has regularly been in the "top" five or so on IMDb's Bottom 100 since it was released, and has occupied the number one spot on more than a few occasions. Küblböck himself eventually distanced from this film and agreed on it being one of the worst things ever filmed.
    • The Tomb. It claims to be an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's short story The Tomb, but it's a ripoff of Saw. The story's about some people wandering around in a tomb where they were trapped by some guy and have been tortured. They keep finding other torture victims, who all die. Excited yet? That's an educated guess of the plot. The sound recording's inexcusable, obscuring the dialogue and often slipping out of sync. It has wooden acting, a nauseating Jittercam, dollar-store props, and one scene with a man who is supposed to be jogging but doesn't even try to look like it. This is probably the worst "adaptation" of Lovecraft ever filmed. Oh, and the ending makes no sense.
    • Zodiac Killer, the first of Lommel's modern true crime films, is a Mockbuster of The Zodiac, which was also re-released around the same time as the cinematic release of David Fincher's Zodiac. In other words, a Mockbuster of a Mockbuster. Poor production values and performances abound, as does Critical Research Failure (DSM IV is a book about psychiatric disorders, not a disorder itself) and gratuitous stock footage, gratuitous scenes, and obviously-improvised dialogue, all of which drag on. There's pretense in spades, with Unfortunate Implications such as the killer comparing serial killers to all members of the armed forces, and ranting about wanting to join the military so he can kill who he wants when he wants without fear of repercussions. It later had a pseudo-prequel known as Curse of the Zodiac, which somehow garnered even worse reviews, with one stating it seemed like it was made "by an epileptic with Tourette's".
  • Nick Millard (aka Nick Philips): Specifically, his films Criminally Insane, Crazy Fat Ethel, Death Nurse and Death Nurse 2. Criminally Insane is the original movie and is not in itself Horrible—if you like 1970s exploitation films, it might be okay. The sequels, Crazy Fat Ethel and the Death Nurse movies, come a decade later, are Horrible, and for the most part mix footage from the first film and Stock Footage. Only Crazy Fat Ethel is a direct sequel. The four films together are four hours worth of one film with, according to The Cinema Snob, 3 hours total footage; Crazy Fat Ethel is half stock footage from the original film, and the Death Nurse films are each one-quarter from Criminally Insane. One scene is used in all four, and there's one scene of stock footage flashbacking composed, itself, of stock footage... They all use the same five or six actors, and each film has the same credits sequences.
    • The movies still collapse on their own (de)merits. The first one might be a Guilty Pleasure if you're in a forgiving mood, but the other films are just plain bad. They're shot on bad video with terrible quality, the actors are awful, and the scripts are so stock and so linear that the stories (story?) are like 10-minute skits stretched out to an hour in a way that makes Star Trek: The Motion Picture look fast-paced. Both Death Nurse films end the same way. The editing is so bad it defies description. The "star" actress that played Crazy Fat Ethel, Priscilla Alden, is not good at acting and plays the same character in every picture, a crazy fat broad who gently taps people with a plastic fake knife about the chest and back. See the Cinema Snob's reviews of the Death Nurse films here and here.
    • Along with the post-Criminally Insane Priscilla Alden films, he also made a number of other poorly received flicks, such as Doctor Bloodbath, .357 Magnum, a loose adaptation of The Turn of the Screw and the admittedly awesomely titled Dracula in Vegas.
  • Vince Offer: While well loved for the creative way he promotes ShamWows and Slap Chops, among another infomercial products, his attempts to get a cinematographic career have been less than successful.
    • Before his infomercial career he directed The Underground Comedy Movie (1999), a painfully boring and unfunny attempt at Refuge in Vulgarity, with guest stars such as Slash (then of Guns N' Roses fame), Joey Buttafuoco, and the late Michael Clarke Duncan, of all people.
    • InAPPropriate Comedy (2013), a sequel featuring Michelle Rodriguez, Adrien Brody, and Lindsay Lohan, is just as awful, maybe worse. Not only tried to compete with Movie 43 (itself in this page), but also recycled material of his previous film, and the framing device (the sketches being "apps" and "podcasts") show profound technology ignorance. Has 1% in Metacritic.
  • Derek Savage: Writer, producer and director (in)famous for his Cool Cat series of books as well as for his treatment of copyright. His direct-to-DVD movies, all of which self-made, are also known for their appalling quality that must be seen to be believed:
  • Chester Novell Turner: There are two films by him. Both of them are poorly produced, both of them have much of the dialogue drowned out by ambient noise or the synthesized soundtrack, and one of them involves dollfucking. The other is a terrible anthology. That the guy shares his name with a notorious serial killer doesn't really help either.
    • Black Devil Doll was so horrifyingly bad that The Cinema Snob still refers to it (and Novell Turner) with terror. The Spanish website Cinecutre wrote a hilariously scathing review of it, where they qualified the movie as "Fitting for showing it at Guantanamo", and the nicest thing they could say about watching it was that they were genuinely mesmerized by its disquieting atmosphere, but only because they expected that the movie would be interrupted by the police arresting everyone involved.

1940s

  • Child Bride (1943),[4] an exploitation film with Moral Guardian pretensions set in the wilderness of the Ozarks, is often considered one of the worst ones of its kind ever made. Directed by Harry Revier, its supposed appeal against child marriage and "honest" look into the lives of "back-yonder-folk" doesn't mask how simultaneously sleazy, hypocritical and patronizing it is. If the nigh condescending portrayal of rednecks and the deepest parts of the Deep South that would make Deliverance look like yuppies don't do the trick, the infamous skinny dipping scene by a 12-year-old girl will. In other words, the film is everything wrong with Reefer Madness amplified and minus any of the redeeming Narm, not to mention is still remembered today for the aforementioned skinny dipping scene. Mike Nelson and Kevin Murphy couldn't bear to feature it in their show, Murphy even saying that he needed "a good cry and a shower" after watching it. Here's The Cinema Snob proving their point.
  • No Orchids for Miss Brandish (1948), the adaptation of a novel by James Hadley Chase, is one of the earliest and most grating example of Fake American, as it features a casting of British actors trying and failing to portray American gangsters. At its time of release, it was savaged by its highly violent and sexual content for the time; later critics instead prefer to point on how the film tries very hard to be a genuine Film Noir but falls very short on its ambitions.

1950s

  • Lost Continent (1951). Cesar Romero and rock climbing. The movie concerns a group of rock climbers who are rock climbing to find rock climbing. On the way, we see them rock climbing for a good half of the rock-climbing movie. They stop rock climbing. Then they start rock climbing. They make it to the top of the rock (climbing) and find poorly-done dinosaurs...uh...being dinosaurs, but then they remember rock climbing, almost immediately turn around, and mountain traverse back down. Whatever good cast it has is wasted in the rock climbing. Mystery Science Theater 3000 covered it:

"Rock climbing, Joel."

  • The Conqueror (1956) an epic film portraying the life of Genghis Khan, is a gem of WTF Casting (and, as of April 2020, provides the page image for that trope), as it starred John Wayne as the Mongol conqueror and the redheaded Susan Hayward as a Tatar princess. The Yellowface in the cast is the minor of its problems, as most people of the era would have forgiven it has Wayne not interpreted his character as an Asian version of his cowboy type. Howard Hughes, its producer, after seeing the film bought all the copies possible and forbid it from showing on TV until 1974, and its bombing killed Hughes' illustrious movie producer career. Nowadays it's better known by its Troubled Production, which involved filming near a former (and still irradiated) nuclear test site, which allegedly caused or accelerated the cancers who took the life of a good chunk of its stars and crew, as well as its contribution to Hughes' dwindling sanity in his later years.

1960s

  • A Place for Lovers (1968) is considered the worst film by Vittorio De Sica, the famed neorealist italian director that created renowned classics like The Bicycle Thieves, Two Women and Umberto D. Starring Faye Dunaway and Marcello Mastroianni as a terminally ill fashion designer and a racer card driver who met and have a whirlwind romance during her last vacations in Venice, Italy, the couple were allegedly having a Romance on the Set while filming but that didn't translate into on-screen chemistry. Roger Ebert called it the "most godawful piece of pseudo-romantic slop [he]'ve ever seen!", Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times referred to it as "the worst movie I have seen all year and possibly since 1926," and Rex Reed wrote the film "Looks not so much directed as whittled to death." This film was listed in the 1978 book The Fifty Worst Films of All Time, which called the film "a putrid tearjerker," while the Italian Vanity Fair also included it on its list of the 20 worst movies ever made.
  • Fun in Balloon Land (1965) is one of the stranger pieces of American regional cinema that's also considered to be one of the worst films ever made. Released by a long-defunct balloon company with little much else known about its creation, everything about the movie is either inexplicable or unintentional Nightmare Fuel if not plain irredeemably bad. Right off the bat, it opens with a slipshod theme song that's painful to the ears. What little Excuse Plot that's present (involving a young child wandering around a large warehouse with various props and balloons hastily set up) covers only about 15 minutes or so of its runtime, the rest being running commentary of a Thanksgiving parade in Philadelphia that borders on nonsensical. Combined with atrocious acting, No Budget and the camerawork of a degraded Zapruder film, the end result could be charitably described as anything but fun. It's no wonder why this garnered a 1.1 on IMDb, and has both caught the ire of Riff Trax (as seen here) and made The Cinema Snob suffer.

Narrator: Suddenly, there was no trail. There was no giant, no monster, no thing called Douglas to be followed. There was nothing in the tunnel but the puzzled men of courage who suddenly found themselves alone with the shadows and darkness.

    • ...So there was no monster after all. False alarm, sorry to make you sit through the movie, have a nice day. Please stop asking what happened to all the people the monster killed, there was no monster! It's like a dadaist anti-movie...except instead of making us question our conceptions about beauty and what makes a good movie, it sucks.
    • The team of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 has stated that, yes, they believe this to be the worst film they ever featured.
  • My Baby is Black! (1961) is a French exploitation film ostensibly about the evils of racism and interracial love conquering all. Its pretentious goals and delivery, however, are marred by inept execution, with a dragging plot, terrible acting and tons of filler that don't contribute to said plot. Not to mention a muddled, nonexistent aesop, given how the supposed racism and discrimination being highlighted is barely even present save for the occasional grumpy looks and mild annoyances. The end result renders the whole film simultaneously boring and meaningless. Here's The Cinema Snob's review of it.
  • The Starfighters (1964), another common candidate for "films that are almost unwatchable even on Mystery Science Theater 3000", echoes the title of a So Bad It's Good Sci Fi film as sheep's clothing to lure in the viewer. It details the lives of US Air Force pilots as they...don't do anything. Scenes of routine flight tests, mundane conversations about corn detasseling, and a half-assed romantic angle that doesn't go anywhere are what passes for the plot of what may be one of the most boring movies ever made about the military. A popular "game" when watching the film is to defy the person next to you to name a single character by the film's halfway point.
    • As one YouTube user said, "If I were in the Airforce, and it was actually this boring, I would pray for a war to break out, just so I could finally get some action--or get killed. Either would be better than this."
  • They Saved Hitler's Brain (1968) takes B-movie badness to previously uncharted regions. The bulk of the film is confusing exposition about Hitler's brain, which doesn't appear until near the end. Not even the car chase that switches from night to day is enough to keep you entertained. The reason for this is pretty simple — the money ran out after half the film was shot, then set aside for ten years until another director acquired it and filmed enough completely unconnected footage to pad the movie to feature length. For some reason, it didn't occur to him to add more scenes with Hitler's brain, which is the only part of the movie that isn't painfully boring. The Cinema Snob has also taken a look into it.
  • Tom Thumb and Little Red Riding Hood (1962) (aka, Caperucita y Pulgarcito contra los monstruos and Little Red Riding Hood and the Monsters) is part of a trilogy of children's movies by Mexican director Roberto Rodríguez. While the original Spanish dubbed version could be seen as So Bad It's Good at parts, both it and the even more notorious English dub (produced by K. Gordon Murray) are by and large a pain to sit through. This is largely due to an incomprehensible plot that isn't quite sure of its own intended audience, grating musical numbers, out-of-place mishmash of fairy tale characters and sloppy presentation in general. The Cinema Snob has covered it, to his chagrin. It was also covered (in Spanish) by Lo Mejor de lo Peor del Cine Mexicano.

1970s

  • Black Rage (aka Charcoal Rage or Catch the Black Sunshine) (1972) is an exploitation film about two slave brothers in the Antebellum Deep South searching for treasure while escaping their white masters. Directed by and starring Chris Robinson, it's infamous for him playing an "albino" black guy in what could be described as Blackface without the Blackface, and not particularly well at that. The rest of the movie meanwhile suffers from shoddy camera work, an Idiot Plot with plot holes that anyone with a right mind could easily solve and sub-par acting. The result is an abysmal trainwreck of a film that fails on all counts. Aside from a ludicrously bad VHS cover this would have floundered in relative obscurity if not for The Cinema Snob.
  • Moment by Moment (1978), starring Lily Tomlin and a fresh-out-of-Saturday Night Fever John Travolta, is considered one of the worst romantic movies ever. Whether it's the dull pacing, the chemistry between Tomlin and Travolta being off if not borderline nonexistent (which isn't helped by the latter's age difference), the fact that both of them looked similar enough that they seemed like brother and sister, or a script that's more insipid than intimate, it's no wonder why this film won a Stinker Award for Worst On-Screen Couple and eventually scored a 2.8 on IMDb. Aside from having a song that's managed to stay in the airwaves longer than the movie it was made for (in addition to having no substantial re-releases in home video), it would have largely stayed obscure and forgotten today if not for The Cinema Snob unearthing it for his review; Brad Jones is on record as describing it as an anti-Valentine's movie, a feat only matched by both the 1981 and 2014 versions of Endless Love.
  • Santa and The Ice Cream Bunny is a 1972 children's film that would probably be unknown if it weren't for The Agony Booth. Ice cream never appears in the movie, and most of the film is a hideously-poor adaptation of Thumbelina; Santa and that bunny are a mind-numbing Framing Device to kill time. The opening frame consists of a sweaty Santa having children bring all manner of local farm animals in attempts to roust his sleigh out of a half-inch of sand. The finale's mostly the Ice Cream Bunny driving slowly while children sing without a soundtrack. The Thumbelina film has a frame story of its own with a girl wandering around an amusement park and staring at some kind of Thumbelina display, and a recap narrated by Thumbelina. The kicker? The director of this movie was the real life inspiration for the Steve McQueen character in The Great Escape. He escaped to do this? Picked up from Public Domain and run with by the Riff Trax crew.
  • Sextette (1978): Mae West's final film concerns the 86-year-old's marriage to the 32-year-old Timothy Dalton, which is obsessively covered by a series of newscasters including Regis Philbin, Rona Barrett, and Gil Stratton, culminating in a huge group of bellhops dancing to "Hooray for Hollywood". West is caked in makeup to conceal the fact that she looked every year of her age despite the role being written as if she was still the same sex-kitten of her golden age. Ex-husbands are played by George Hamilton (a film noir gangster), Ringo Starr (a temperamental director), and Tony Curtis doing an Anton Chekhov Berlitz Annex of Russian Stereotypes; they all show up to prevent the newlyweds from having sex. Keith Moon shows up as a gay fashion designer, Alice Cooper shows up and sings the final song, Dom DeLuise does a soft-shoe number on top of a piano singing "Honey Pie", numerous Mr. Universes show up and flex... and there's a subplot about Mae and her new hubby both being secret agents. If any of this sounds even vaguely amusing, it's being told wrong. This is a black hole of comedy, failing at the box office despite the wattage of its cast. And it's probable that at least some of the Fan Disservice is Fetish Retardant...

1980s

  • Can't Stop the Music, a musical faux-biopic of the Village People, which was released all the way back in 1980, but would have a lasting impact on both the world of film and the world of music... and not a good one. Watching it together with Xanadu as a double feature would inspire John Wilson to create the Golden Raspberry Awards; it sank the careers of the Village People and is considered to have not only set the movie-musical genre back years, but also to have been the last nail in the coffin for the Disco era, which was already on its way out at the time of release. It suffers from many, many problems: its story lacks any lasting struggles or setbacks, the designated romantic relationship progresses at an implausible rate and has nothing to do with anything else in the movie, its jokes (ranging from poorly-done slapstick to running gags that seem more absurd than amusing) are goofy and unfunny and it blatantly attempts to pair the Village People up with women while also blatantly pandering to the band’s LGBT fanbase in a sequence at the YMCA featuring good-looking extras. These issues are compounded by almost universally bad acting, the general loathsomeness of the supposed good guys, and a script that clearly only went through a single draft. On Rotten Tomatoes, a grand total of 13 critics reviewed it, and 12 gave it a Rotten response; even the lone fresh review acknowledged its status as "[A]n absolute trainwreck of a movie", which the reviewer considered only worth watching for its camp value. It was the well-deserved winner of the first Razzies for Worst Picture and Worst Screenplay and was nominated for several others, including both Worst Actor and Worst Actress. It formed part of The Cinema Snob's Musical March (in September), and his review can be watched here; you can also watch it being mocked by minor YouTube personality Musical Hell here, and by the Smeghead here.
  • The world of Bruceploitation is already a seedy place, but there is no worst film within the trend that 1980's Fist of Fear, Touch of Death, an extremely bad Mockumentary depicting both a very inaccurate version of Bruce Lee's life (using footage of an old Hong Kong soap Lee participated as "actual footage" of his early life), and "documenting" an alleged tournament to choose "Bruce Lee's Successor" (in truth using footage of some semi-famous martial artists of the era during a tournament in 1979). The film is extremely ineptly produced and edited, Hong Kong Dubbing goes rampant, and whoever scripted the thing doesn't know the difference between kung fu and karate, and at some point even claims that one of Lee's ancestors was "one of China's greatest Samurai masters". Also, the climax of the film involves a kickboxing match, which is as removed of anything practiced by Lee as you can get. The movie is actually a very cynical effort of Aaron Banks, a New York martial arts promoter, on Astroturfing himself by using edited footage of Lee praising him while Banks pretends false modesty. The film has 2.1 in IMDB and is on their list of 100 Worst, and numerous fans have qualified it as the actual worst Brucesploitation film ever made, in account of its inaccuracies, exploitativeness, and sheer laziness. When the Spanish webshow Videofobia reviewed this film, the hosts, who usually try to keep a lighthearted mood over the awful movies they review, became actually angry.
  • Gamera: Super Monster (1980). Whether you love the Showa series, warts and all, or think Gamera is hard to take even with the aid of Joel, Mike, and the Bots...you'll be astounded by how bad this film is. The enemy ship is a blatant Star Destroyer rip-off. The three-girl alien hero team sits and plays a magical music organ with a kid more annoying than all other Kaiju kids combined. In the end, Gamera sacrifices himself to blow up the enemy ship after re-fighting all his foes in footage from prior films which wasn't even edited and didn't have the Godzilla's Revenge excuse of taking place in a dream. When Gamera dies, you feel good for him even though the sequence is lame because he's out of the picture!
  • Based on a brand of trading cards and stickers, The Garbage Pail Kids Movie (1987) features cheaply-made and scary-looking puppets (what's with the mouths on these kids?), a Running Gag of a zit-covered geek wetting his pants, a romance between someone who looks twelve and someone who looks in her twenties[7], and a climax where everyone farts and vomits. There's a government agency that kidnaps ugly people and kills them. This aspect, the "State Home For The Ugly", is perhaps the biggest Plot Hole as it brings about a dozen questions the story never attempts to answer. The "heroes" want to catch the Garbage Pail Kids to put them back in their tiny little pail, but they're heartbroken to hear that they'd be imprisoned in the State Home. The Obi-Wan says that they're equivalent to the horrors unleashed by Pandora's Box, yet wishes to save them from the State Home. Why? And the "plot" only goes downhill from there. The movie is so bad that Doug Walker himself, during the 2009 donation drive, named this movie as the worst he ever reviewed. Walker was so visibly suffering by having to watch the movie in his review that watching the review is painful.
    • The movie's so bad that not even the review blurbs on the back of the DVD cover have anything nice to say, instead using words like, "vile", "rude", "smelly", "ugly", and "gross" in an attempt to pass it off as part of their uglyist aesthetics. Oh and it was removed from theaters because of Media Watchdogs complaints.
    • If the review didn't make it clear how much Doug Walker hated it, then Doug and Rob's commentary definitely does. In the commentary, Doug says that the movie is so bad it doesn't deserve the right to be considered worst film but rather the film he outright despises. Keep in mind that part of their commentaries are to give Out of Character positives to the film. They even gave The Star Wars Holiday Special some compliments. This was the only film that didn't get ANY compliments. The closest that they got was saying that the guy who played The Obi-Wan seemed like he could have been a good actor in a better movie.
  • Going Overboard (1989), the first starring role for Adam Sandler, is a cheap No Budget comedy flick that was shot with poor quality on a cruise ship. It has very unfunny jokes that are either stupid or disgusting, a very degrading story about a struggling comedian taking on another comedian, actors doing very annoying stuff, and even the main character addressing the camera like it's more of a fake reality show than a movie. It's a wonder that Sandler's career wasn't killed in its cradle by this flop.
  • Howard The Duck (1986) makes the rather impressive accomplishment of being one of the only comic book adaptation movies to actually make Batman and Robin seem un-ironically good when compared to it. For starters, Howard himself is depicted as a horrifically ugly and cheaply made animatronic robot that honestly would not look "out of place" in a Five Nights at Freddy's game and has one of the most painfully unfunny "snarky comic relief" personalities in existence; on top of that, the film also features "hot" human-on-duck action and a villain whose voice sounds uncannily similar to Beverly Bighead's. On top of that, the film's plot might as well be non-existent. And people thought that Batman v Superman was bad...
  • Inchon (1981), an infamous flop known to be one of the reasons why Americans don't do that much media about the Korean War. It was produced, financed, and obviously script doctored by the Unification Church (Sun Myung Moon himself claimed that he wanted to showcase MacArthur's "spirituality" with this film). The Moonies' involvement was merely one of the many production troubles that plagued the film, which included a change on director after the first one epically blundered shoot material, and the U.S. Army bailing out of their support the minute they learn that the Moonies were in. The resultant film was called "the most expensive B-movie ever" by at least one critic, and the box office agreed by bringing it down. Laurence Olivier, usually a great actor, deservedly received a Razzie for his role on this film; when asked why he stayed on the production despite the obvious problems and quality he responded by becoming the Trope Namer for Money, Dear Boy, which, given the performance of the rest of its cast, was probably the reason for them too.
  • Ishtar (1987) was produced because the studio had money in foreign banks they couldn't repatriate, so they approved the first project who could be filmed in location that could make use of those funds (and legitimately write them on accounting), and the execs believed that a comedy directed by Elaine May and starred by Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty at the top of their forms was going to give them returns. Unfortunately the film, about a couple of singers searching for a gig in Morocco while hiding from gangsters, blown up its budget while filming (and the nature of its financing kickstarting one of the most infamous cases of Troubled Production this side of Apocalypse Now), was painfully dull and boring, and was hated by everybody who watched it. Predictably, it bombed hard and earned a Razzie for worst Director. Time magazine placed it on their 1999's list of the 100 worst ideas of the 20th century.

"The plot is that the shark (y'know, the one that Chief Brody killed in Jaws) now has a hatred of the Brody family and wants to kill them all as revenge for Brody's actions in Jaws. Y'know, the shark that's dead. That shark. That shark that's dead, wants revenge."

    • Its badness also inspired an entire stand-up routine by the late Richard Jeni.
    • Astoundingly, the Novelization is a decent book. Writer Hank Searls must have realized how ridiculous much of the movie was; he tweaked the shark's death so it was more realistic (though almost anything would've been) and added an interesting subplot about drug trafficking. The novel was based on an earlier screenplay of the movie. It also explained the shark's motives, even if it did end up being the Trope Namer for Voodoo Shark — it was the spirit beast of a Bahamian witch doctor who places a curse on Michael Brody for a slight he made against him. In the film's final version, the voodoo and the drug trafficking were taken out...leaving a Plot Hole about Hoagie's character (an undercover officer investigating the drug trafficking in the earlier draft).
    • The version just before the final theatrical version has the shark killed by being impaled in the boat's prow and sinking into the deep, taking the boat with it. The ending was then changed, but no money was given to do it, leading to one of the worst effects shots in a major motion picture ever.
  • Bill Cosby co-wrote, produced, and starred in Leonard Part 6, an alleged spoof of spy films and of sequelitis. At some point during its postproduction Cosby must has realized how bad it was, seeing how during many a TV interview prior to its release he asked people to stay away from it, as if trying to distance himself of the project. The video box cover, showing Bill Cosby riding an ostrich, may well be the best thing about the movie (pity that the actual scene said image was captioned from isn't nearly as funny or cool). Siskel and Ebert's beatdown, plus The Agony Booth's recap, are worth a look... if only For the Lulz. It earn a Razzie, that Cosby received during a talk show (albeit a marble and gold copy he commissioned instead of the sprayed plastic real trophy.)
  • The Lonely Lady (1983), adapted from the 1976 novel written by Harold Robbins, is absolutely and completely inept on portraying the story of a female scriptwriter that climbs in the industry via Casting Couch, which this movie portrays with all the nuance of a Lifetime Movie of the Week. It doesn't help that is starred by Pia Zadora, the indisputable mistress of Dull Surprise - and the rest of the cast isn't any better, all of them hamming and overacting one way or another. The film earned six of the eleven Razzies it was nominated to and is part of Rotten Tomatoes 0% club; Zadora herself eventually admitted that she knew the film was bad all along, and called it "a real turkey, done very badly".

"Talking animals with no explanation, poor acting, twins characters that the filmmakers couldn't keep track of, poor science, scenes that add nothing to the rest of the movie, poor writing, comedy that isn't funny, poor special effects, annoying repetitious use of documentary technique for scene transitions, and alien protagonists that unintentionally resemble giant pieces of fecal matter."

  • You should know to abandon all hope when your film's actually named Violent Shit (1989) and has taglines like "Experience a lesson in real BAD taste" and "Expect the worst". It's filled with terrible sounds, blurry images, Padding to a ridiculous level for a plotless 75-minute film, stuff that just doesn't make any sense at all, and the film itself thinking that it would be useful for being hired for a job. Despite that, it ended up having three sequels and having "K. The Butcher Shitter" appearing in five other films. If you don't believe us, ask the Cinema Snob how good the film is. The only advantage the later films have is that the main character's name becomes "Karl 'The Butcher' Berger".

The Cinema Snob: ...This movie is so fucking awful, that comparing it to Uwe Boll IS AN INSULT TO UWE BOLL.

1990s

  • 1998's film An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn attempted to be a tongue in cheek Mockumentary about how Hollywood turkeys came to be, by telling the story of a director that cannot disown the bad film he directed because his legal name happens to be Alan Smithee, the very same stock pseudonym the Directors Guild of America assigned in such cases... but things became way too meta when the film itself became so bad its director decided to disown it, eerily replicating the film plot. The humor of the film is terribly flat, consisting mostly on cameos of the "point the famous person" type and the occasional self-deprecating humor (like a line saying that the in-universe film is "worse than Showgirls!", referencing another infamous film by Joe Eszterhas, the writer of this turd). The film entered on Roger Ebert's "Most Hated" list, and earned five Razzies including "Worst Movie".
  • Ax 'Em (1992) (released theatrically as The Weekend It Lives) is one of the cheapest, most amateurish films ever made. Made by director Michael Mfume, son of a former Congressman/head of the NAACP, this film could be one of the worst released in modern times. It looks like it was filmed with a webcam, and the sound is such that anything in front of the camera can barely be heard and anything to either side of it is impossible to hear; thus, the actors scream off-screen constantly to be heard...and so the volume spikes randomly. There are parts of the film--plot-relevant parts—where the sound cuts out altogether. Even then, the lighting and framing are so terrible that you sometimes can't see what's happening because it's off-screen when it's not supposed to be off-screen! All of this would not necessarily be fatally bad, except the plot is so stock, so poorly written, and so filled with typos (including the opening info-scrawl!) that it's virtually impossible to describe. The actors are possibly even worse, but it's hard to tell. The sound and (lack of) lighting make it all but impossible to hear or see the actors, except for one woman at the beginning who seems to howl "I'm HUN-GRY" every five seconds for a solid hour and a half.
    • To give you some idea of how bad this film is, it starts at a party where the dialogue's mixed in with the crowd — there's no way to hear what anyone is saying, and it doesn't help that everybody's talking in slang. The film then cuts to a man walking into a house with an axe and assaulting an elderly gentleman who's looking for his medicine. The gentleman, when confronted by the ax-wielding intruder, matter-of-factly says "Oh, shit." Inexplicably, the film cuts to public domain footage of a step-dancing show at an university for the opening credits, interspersed with an African-American DJ busting out "yo' mama" jokes at a crowd of onlookers. If you make it that far, you won't believe what happens next. But you don't have to take our word for it. Take his.
  • Batman & Robin (1997) quickly gained fame as the worst film of the Batman franchise, due to it being an extremely poor attempt to mimic/modernize the So Bad It's Good nature of Adam West's Batman TV series while also awkwardly attempting to mix in elements of Batman: The Animated Series. Over two decades later it is still among the worst audiovisual products related with the franchise. Joel Schumacher, the director of this disaster, apologized to the fans during the DVD release in 2005.
    • For starters, it featured a ton of Character Derailment for Batman (a George Clooney whose version of the character was more goofy than the previous ones by Michael Keaton and Val Kilmer) and Robin (Chris O'Donnell reprising the character with the apparent instructions of play it as an bratty wangsty teen). Poor Clooney and O'Donnell had the indignity of having to do ridiculous scenes like the infamous "Bat-Credit Card" one, all while wearing extremely form fitting and nipple-having latex costumes.
    • Then the choice of villains: Mr. Freeze, who has the tragic backstory of the animated version of the character but the ice pun spewing nature of his Silver Age version, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger hamming it all the way: and Poison Ivvy, interpreted by Uma Thurman as a Femme Fatale outcharacterized by her Stripperiffic outfit.
    • There was also the Batgirl subplot, who only served to add minutes to the film length and little more, and featured an Alicia Silverstone that was way less athletic that what the role required.
    • The overly camp aesthetic contrasted too heavily with previous films (the previous one, Batman Forever, which was directed by Schumacher too, also had campy elements but those were limited to the villains), and it only added to the bad reception. It's not surprising that when the franchise was restarted a decade later it went for a darker tone in both themes and visuals.
  • Bio-Dome (1996) is probably one of, if not the most loathed comedy film of the decade. Its plot involve a pair of stoner slackers, interpreted perhaps too well by Pauly Shore and Stephen Baldwin, accidentally trapping themselves into the titular "bio-dome", a closed experimental environment to be sealed for a year. Once inside, Shore and Baldwin's characters spend their time being irritating beyond tolerance and sexually harassing the female scientist in ways that were uncomfortable even for 90's standards, and yet these characters are supposed to be the heroes. You end sympathizing with the "villain" when he tries to kill them near the end of the film. Its only saving graces was that it killed the career of Pauly Shore, that there was an brief apparition of Tenacious D that kickstarted their jump to fame, and inspired an episode of Johnny Bravo parodying the plot of this film that was better and funnier than its inspiration.
  • Cinderela bahiana ("Bahian Cinderella", 1998) could be called the Brazilian predecessor of both Glitter (as it was made as a vehicle for axé dancer Carla Perez and it was an extremely fictionalized version of her life) and Gigli (as it was made to exploit the romantic relationship between Perez and then popular singer Alexandre Pires), up to being a complete failure in both screen and box-office. The magazine Veja placed this as the top of their list of the 10 worst Brazilian movies, and Perez herself disowned the film a decade after its premiere. Many of the worst moments tend to appear in Brazilian YouTube Poops.
  • Will the producers of Exit to Eden (1994) please explain why they thought a film adaptation of a book about a BDSM resort needed a cliche-ridden buddy cop comedy subplot involving stolen diamonds, which wasn't in the book? Or why Rosie O'Donnell dresses up as a dominatrix? It also has Dana Delany as a dominatrix, but unfortunately this isn't the Dana of China Beach or even Desperate Housewives; no, this is a Dana who had inexplicably let herself go and didn't make much effort to get in shape for the role, and whose screen time was split between phoning-it-in and Narm. She didn't look bad, but wasn't at her best.
  • The Howling: New Moon Rising (1995) had little Werewolf activity. The only werewolf seen is an actress with a laughably-obvious Halloween mask. The rest of the film consists of bar conversations between director/screenwriter/actor Clive Turner (who cameoed in two previous Howling films and is apparently the same character{s} here to tie up the loose ends in a silly fashion) and the real-life residents of a small town originally built as a backdrop for Westerns. In the end, the film ends up being about 40% country music, 30% exposition, 20% dick and fart jokes, and 10% werewolf-related stuff.
  • Following the success of Wayne's World, the producers of Saturday Night Live greenlit an interminable series of sketch-based movies of questionable quality. It's Pat (1994) stood out as particularly terrible. It, like the skits it's based on, consists primarily of scenes in which the revelation of Pat's gender is set up and then avoided, with a few scenes of Pat just being irritating to pad the movie to feature-length. It grossed only $60,822, among the lowest totals of any major-studio release. The worst part about It's Pat (spoilers ahead; you're welcome) is that the movie never reveals Pat's gender, nor does it even hint at it, thereby negating the entire purpose of a movie based on a skit whose only purpose is to raise speculation about the character's gender! Without that, it's just a feature-film version of a skit which isn't even all that funny in its short forms. Imagine a locked-room murder mystery where neither the killer or the method is ever revealed, and the story just...stops in its tracks at some undefined point after about the sixty-minute mark. If Monster A Go-Go is a dadaist anti-movie, It's Pat is the cinematic equivalent of nihilism.
  • Le Jour et la Nuit (Day and Night), a 1997 romantic french film directed by public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy and starring Alain Delon, Lauren Bacall, Arielle Dombasle and Francisco Rabal, was highly promoted before its premiere due to the fame of its director and cast, but when it was premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival most journalists and critics just walked away enraged by the low quality of the movie. The plot is about an author that retires to Mexico and an actress who tries to seduce him for a role in the adaptation of one of his books; the execution is as bad as can be expected from a movie done by a rich heir and philosopher with no previous filming experience. The reception was abysmal, with famous movie magazine Cahiers du cinéma considering it the worst French film since 1945, and Variety claimed that the film was "Laugh-out-loud awful without touching the cult realm of 'so bad it's good," and L'Humanité called it an "Absolute debacle". A documentary about the (very deserved) bad reception of the film, titled Anatomy of a Massacre, was included in the film's DVD release.
  • The Omega Code (1999), a film about the End Times. Casper Van Dien, Michael York, and Michael Ironside become involved in a plot where a code is found in The Bible that allows the UN to be replaced with a Nazi-esque One World Government that nobody seems to object to. It brings about the end of the world, but only after York (the Anti-Christ) becomes stronger because he was shot in the head and Van Dien's chased by a demon truck. The effects and sets look like something out of a bad Twilight Zone episode.
  • Pocket Ninjas (1997), a Three Ninjas ripoff that manages to look like someone took discarded storyboards from the worst season of Power Rangers ever and decided to film them on $30 and whatever kids they could pick up from the playground. Plot elements happen in almost reverse order, the main villain (played by Z-movie veteran Robert Z'Dar) makes maybe two appearances before being replaced by his kids, eco-conscious messages are shoehorned in such a blunt fashion that Ted Turner would shake his head, the voiceover outright lies about the circumstances of the film (opening with a mention of the kids saving the universe when all the stakes are entirely local), the characters are dumber than stones in a remedial class, and the dialogue thinks "butt-whiff" and "fat Republican" are the height of classy insults. Something Awful takes a hatchet to it here, and if that's not enough you can watch it eat a part of Obscurus Lupa's soul here.
  • Santa with Muscles (1996) is a horrible Hulk Hogan movie that makes other Hogan movies seem enjoyable. The plot revolves around Blake Throne (Hogan), a fitness guru who sells health products under his name. He makes a paintball game for his employees after refusing to give a charitable donation. Their speeding and all-round roughhousing catches the attention of the local authorities. Hulk escapes into a mall, changes into a Santa outfit, hides in the trash, and gets whacked on the head. The mall elf convinces Blake that he's the real Santa Claus...and the film goes downhill from there. The Idiot Ball's passed around a lot — adults believe a famous bodybuilder is Santa, the Mooks are easily dispatched by children, police officers are armed with rocket launchers, etc. And it has almost nothing to do with Christmas besides Santa. It's a cheesy action flick. This is considered one of IMDb's top 100 worst movies of all time and barely got recognition when it hit theaters. The Spoony One has reviewed it.

2000s

Early 2000s

  • One day, Eddie Murphy will look back on his career and ask what the hell he was thinking when he and the producers of The Adventures of Pluto Nash (2002) decided to pull that film out of Development Hell. Bad acting, dull humor, worse special effects... yeah, this one takes the cake. Murphy later admitted that the film was terrible, but he also stated that it was hard to regret making it because of the paycheck. Here's Film Brain taking a look at it.
    • Over $100,000,000 had been invested in Pluto Nash; they had to try and get some money out of it sooner or later. Then again, considering that the film made a grand total of $5,000,000 (which film prints and advertising materials alone would have gobbled up) at the box office, maybe they would've been better off leaving it on the shelf. Internet comedian Seanbaby once did some calculations and concluded that filming the cast and crew eating nothing but 50$ bill for two years instead of doing this film actually would have been cheaper.
    • Among the potshots to this disaster was an Robot Chicken sketch that claimed that the Monday after the premiere came with the theater numbers, over 50+ studio employees killed themselves out of the embarrassment of being associated with this flop.
  • Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever (2002): Stuff Blowing Up and nothing else, but somehow manages to screw that up. Calling it an Idiot Plot would be a disservice to idiots everywhere. The title is completely misleading: isn't about the titular characters (played by Antonio Banderas and Lucy Liu as agents of rival American Secret agencies) battling each other, but about them teaming it to fight against the Big Bad. Said fight is incongruently taking place in Vancouver, Canada, where no American agency has jurisdiction. It's rated as the worst movie on the meta-review site Rotten Tomatoes, with 118 "rotten" (negative) professional reviews and absolutely zero "fresh" (positive) ones as of mid-2021. It was called the "Worst Movie of the Decade" by Rotten Tomatoes, outclassing such atrocities as Gigli, Disaster Movie, and Alone in The Dark (all of which are listed here). When a movie's outclassed by its Game Boy Advance tie-in game (based on an earlier and far better version of the script, getting very high praise from even Nintendo Power), it's failed. Just read Roger Ebert's review of the movie, or watch the Ebert and Roeper review; it's some of his finest work.
    • The DVD has no blurbs of positive reviews, meaning that there were neither positive reviews nor phrases in the reviews that could be twisted to look positive. The distributors resorted to describing one of the scenes in the movie to make it seem interesting.

The Rhode Island Providence Journal: Battlefield Earth’s primary colors are blue and gray, adding to the misery. Whenever we glimpse sunlight, the screen goes all stale yellow, as though someone had urinated on the print. This, by the way, is not such a bad idea.

I'd like to end with three quotes about Battlefield Earth that touched me very deeply:
 The critic for The New York Times said, "Battlefield Earth is about the extinction of the human race. And after seeing this movie-- I'm all for it!"
 The Banana Daily wrote; "I'd like to call the movie a train wreck, but that's not really fair to train wrecks, because people actually want to watch a train wreck."
 And my favorite quote of all: "This is the worst fucking piece of shit movie I've ever seen in my entire fucking life." That quote was from my mother.

  • The 2003 Cannes Film Festival cut of The Brown Bunny. The official cut was relatively well-received, considered So Bad It's Good at worst, but the Cannes version, which its director and main star Vincent Gallo admitted wasn't completely edited (about 26 minutes had yet to be cut out), had even more trouble with pacing. Many scenes were either pointlessly long or merely pointless, which, alongside the stuff present in the final cut — such as Gallo's role as the protagonist (and the countless shots of his face) and the notorious closing scene with Chloë Sevigny — resulted in a freak hybrid of Gerry’s absence of pacing and Ctrl+Alt+Del’s lack of humility. Roger Ebert, who would later give the final cut a good review, claimed the Cannes cut to be the worst Cannes film he'd ever seen.
  • In the story of DC Comics adaptations, there may never be no one as infamous as Catwoman (2004), a terrible attempt to use the name of the iconic character without actually having anything to do with the character, on the logic that having Halle Berry at her finest doing cheescake poses while in a ridiculous S&M inspired outfit would be enough to attract the fanboys. In this film, "Catwoman" is a very shy lady named Patience who received feline powers from an Egyptian deity after a fake death they obviously ripped off from Batman Returns, a concept so removed of any version of the character that she was quickly nicknamed "Catwoman in Name Only." She must defeat an evil makeup company directed by Sharon Stone, who has the nefarious plan of commercializing a line of indestructible makeup that causes disfigurement on its users if they ever stop applying it. And this plot is played extremely seriously, despite almost everybody phoning its performances; unlike other disasters like Batman and Robin, this was too dull to actually be enjoyed ironically. Predictably bombed, got instantly into Roger Ebert's "most hated" list, and it went to earn four Razzies (for Worst Picture, Worst Actress, Worst Director (Pitof) and Worst Screenplay). Berry decided to accept her Razzie in person, bringing with her Best Actress Oscar for Monster's Ball, and gave a very hilarious speech mocking the film and thanking Warner Bros and her agent for having convinced her of getting involved in such a turd. The Nostalgia Critic took a dig on this. Currently at 9% on Rotten Tomatoes, with the consensus "Halle Berry is the lone bright spot, but even she can't save this laughable action thriller".
  • Children Of The Living Dead (2001) presents itself as a sequel to George A. Romero's classic Night of the Living Dead. In reality, all it has in common are the words "Living Dead" in the title, one of the producers on Night (John A. Russo) filling the same role in Children, and the fact that it features zombies. What would otherwise have been an unremarkable zombie exploitation flick got turned into an absolute trainwreck by the egotism of writer-producer Karen Lee Wolf, who took the film away from the director (he unsurprisingly disowned it afterward), re-edited it into a total mess, and then hired a bunch of talentless voice-over "artists" to redub all the dialogue in order to make some sense out of the butchered storyline. Add some horrendous cinematography and mediocre zombie/gore effects, and you have a film every bit as bad as the cheap Italian zombie movies of The Seventies. The one thing it has in its favor is an entertaining cameo by Tom Savini... who dies five minutes into the film.
  • Dracula 3000 (2004). What stands out is all the ways it could have been So Bad It's Good:
  1. The intro speech mentions Energy Weapons; not one is present in the movie.
  2. The rampant use of familiar names can lead one to believe it's Bram Stoker's Dracula In Space; it isn't. The vampire isn't even Dracula; his name is Orlock. (And yes, that's a Mythology Gag attempting to use the vampire from Nosferatu.)
  3. The room full of coffins can fool you into thinking that the protagonists are going to face down a vampire army like that in From Dusk till Dawn; there are at most three vampires in the whole movie.
  4. You might be expecting space vampires to be some kind of grotesque alien evil (hell, even the box cover tries to deceive you with this); instead you'll find a silly old man in a vampire costume that was probably bought at Wal-Mart and looks it.
  5. You might expect a decent final showdown; instead, the protagonists slam a door shut on Orlock's arm, cutting it off, and he breaks down crying and screaming.
  6. You'll be expecting a sex scene after the last human carries the sex-droid towards the bedroom; instead, the ship explodes from getting too close to the sun in order to kill Orlock.
  • Fear Dot Com (2002) was an extremely failed attempt to jump in the Japanese-style terror films of the era. The laughably bad plot can be described as The Ring but ON THE INTERNET!, and it's more probable that any horror the hypothetical viewer experiences from this film comes from the poster or from the very bad CGI than from the story itself.
  • If there was one film that could define the bottom pit of the decade, that could be the infamous Freddy Got Fingered (2001). Directed and starred by Tom Green, then famous for his absurdist and hocking brand of comedy. The plot is about a slacker cartoonist of dubious sanity going in a series of extremely gross antics on his search for inspiration, that at some point accuses his father of committing sexual abuse towards his younger brother on what could be probably the Squickiest Title Drop in film history. Narrative incoherence, awful acting, and all-around shock stunts in lieu of actual production values ensue. The film was unanimously panned; Roger Ebert instantly included it on his list of "Most Hated" films, gave it zero stars and wrote about it "This movie doesn't scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels", while Razzies' founder John J. B. Wilson called it "offensive, stupid and obnoxious" and said it had "no redeeming value". The film earned five of the eight Razzies it was nominated for; Tom Green himself went to the ceremony to collect them (bringing his own red carpet, even).
  • From Justin To Kelly (2003) features Kelly Clarkson and Justin Guarini, the winner and runner-up of American Idol Season 1. Texan singing waitress Kelly Taylor meets Pennsylvania college student Justin Bell; they fall in love and spend the rest of the movie being annoying. The dialogue's just as bad as the forgettable musical numbers, and wouldn't even have been passable in old cheap 1950s-vintage flicks. Clarkson has publicly apologized for the movie, saying that as the winner of American Idol she was contractually obligated to do it. Notice that no other American Idol winner has done a movie, entirely because of how much this one bombed. It won the Golden Raspberry Award in 2005 for "Worst 'Musical' of Our First 25 Years".
    • Fun fact: this movie was written by Kim Fuller, whose brother (Simon Fuller) created American Idol. Kim Fuller also wrote Spice World and S Club: Seeing Double,[10] but it's every bit as bad as Fuller's other flicks. It's quite an artistic legacy.
  • Gigli (2003) was made for one reason — to sap money out of teenage girls who wanted to see Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez necking. Unfortunately, when the film came out, that was being shown on syndicated television for free. The film concerns a mentally-retarded man being held for ransom by two mobsters (Affleck and Lopez). Not much happens beyond the three languishing in an apartment and coexisting. There's a feature-length Romantic Plot Tumor between the two stars which is long on awkward sex talk but devoid of chemistry. Oh, and apparently Ben Affleck's character can cure lesbianism. Not even the stars could defend it.
  • Among vanity projects and Non-Actor Vehicles, Glitter (2001) stands as the most egregious. Starring diva Mariah Carey in a role that could be charitably called autobiographic, and she still managed to blow it. The movie allegedly takes place in The Eighties but very little of the fashion or the aesthetics of the decade appears on screen. The plot was a whirlwind of badly rehashed clichés with little continuity between scenes and plot points, the plot itself was badly paced, the music was terribly bland, and the whole was horribly edited. Carey later claimed that the film failure was due to the soundtrack being released on September 11, but people who actually saw the film (like Todd In The Shadows) say otherwise. It's widely believed that making this film contributed to Carey's 2001 burnout, and its bombing brought her a career's slowdown from whom she wouldn't recover until 2005. Wisely, Carey limited her later acting gigs to supporting roles and small parts.
  • Sex Lives Of The Potato Men (2004) is a British "comedy" about the sex lives of a group of potato delivery men in Birmingham. Throw in a terrible director, a script devoid of taste or humour, appallingly-awful performances from the two leading actors (Mackenzie Crook and Johnny Vegas) — who were both made to look as grotesque as possible just for the Squick factor of them trying to have sex — and a supporting cast with Brummie accents so thick you can't make out a word of what they're saying. The result? A movie described by critic Christopher Tookey as "enough to put you off sex, and films, for life" and in national newspaper The Times as "one of the two most nauseous films ever made". The producers even admitted it in the film's tagline:

"The search for the lowest form of life on the planet is over."

    • To cap it all, the film was widely criticized because one-third of its £3,000,000 budget was public money from the National Lottery granted by the UK Film Council. Because this film was released in the same year that the above mentioned Fat Slags, there was a widespread public discussion about the state of the British film industry, with a lot of worry about its decay. A film so bad that makes a whole country worry if its film industry has truly decayed; you can't get worse than that.
  • Super Babies: Baby Geniuses 2 (2004) failed in much the same way that Disaster Movie did — it took faults the audience was willing to forgive and made them much, much worse. The writing's god-awful, with ostensible plot holes and the film itself quite obviously had a much lower budget—among other things, the lip-synching looks like it was done on drugs. But the saddest part of it? It was the last thing Bob Clark (yes, the one you're thinking of) directed before his death. Let's watch an Englishman insult it.
  • The remake of Swept Away (2002) with Madonna, directed by her then-husband Guy Ritchie. The first half consists of a fingernails-scratching-the-chalkboard shouting match between the two main characters (seriously; just argue with your friend, spouse, or children for 40 minutes, occasionally shoving each other, and you've pretty much seen it); the second half's a misogynist fantasy in which Madonna's character pretty much seems to fall in love with the male lead after he rapes her. The failure of this film marked the end of both Madonna's marriage with Ritchie and her acting career, to the celebration of many.
  • The Time Machine (2002) is both an adaptation of H.G. Wells' classic novel and a remake of the 1960 film, directed by direct descendant Simon Wells.[11] Despite the star-studded cast (featuring among others, Guy Pierce and Jeremy Irons) doing their best with the material, one of the most elaborate props made at the time (the titular Time Machine), the occasional glimmers of potential and even having a cameo from the lead of the 1960 version, the movie was unfortunately brought down by myriad failures that almost ruined the careers of those involved. The writing alternates between being riddled with Plot Holes and being sloppily inconsistent. The whole set-up, be it how the Morlocks and Eloi evolved or the protagonist's motivations, is even more removed from the source material than the previous film adaptation. Combined with all the wasted potential and talent as well as the impression that the special effects took higher precedence over actual content, it's no wonder why the 2002 film came to receive a 29% on Rotten Tomatoes. Roger Ebert had less than positive words for it, as did Film Brain.

Late 2000s

  • 88 Minutes (2007). It's as if Al Pacino said to himself one day, "I've done so many absolutely brilliant movies considered to be among the greatest of all time; I need to do a bad one, otherwise I won't be a real celebrity." The plot gives Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever (see above) a run for its money. Richard Roeper said that it was as though someone had dropped the script on the ground, mixing all the papers up, and then just picked it up and said "Eh, never mind, let's just film it like this."
  • Aag, (2007) a (unauthorized) remake of Bollywood classic Sholay featuring an All-Star Cast, failed to both understand and update the social conventions of the original, substituting those by Totally Radical antics. The music was also frankly unmemorable, the script turned memorable characters into flanderized caricatures, and on top of the cast's absolute lack of chemistry (especially painful since Sholay basically banked on the endearing on-screen chemistry between its stars) the acting direction was so lackluster it made even competent professionals appear like amateurs trying to be hammy but failing even at that. Its director, Ram Gopal Varma, eventually was fined for copyright infringement, as he didn't bother on asking for permission to film it. It flopped on box office and was widely panned (is currently at 1.9 stars on IMDB), appearing in first place in FHM India list of the 57 worst movies ever made. Amitabh Bachchan, who participated in the original and returned for the remake, claimed that doing this film was a mistake. Also, the overall failure of this film openly tinted the reception of Varma's next films, which, given how until this movie his filmography was an extremely acclaimed one, makes Aag his North equivalent. Watch the guys of Mind Blasting Cinema giving this film the flames its translated title calls for. Tried&Refused Productions called it "The Worst Bollywood Remake That Should Have Never Been Made", and proceeded to point all the ways it was painful to watch.
  • After Last Season is a 2009 indie film with no discernible subject which reaches levels of Porn Without Plot so high you're left enraged and confused. Despite being made in 2009, it looks like it was made in the 1980s and EVERYTHING looks cheap. The props are absolutely ridiculous (including, but not limited to, an MRI machine made out of cardboard and covered with flimsy printer paper, featured in the very first scene of the movie), every single scene is shot in either someone's bedroom or an abandoned warehouse, and the CGI makes the "Money for Nothing" video look like Terminator 2. There's a 30-minute scene of two people sitting around looking at horrible CG images that would've looked realistic in the 1980s; it makes the DEEP HURTING sequences in Hercules Against the Moon Men look fast-paced. Carlyle of Spill called it the worst movie of 2009 and the decade, if not the last two decades. Almost everyone would be blissfully unaware of it if it hadn't been briefly featured on The Spoony Experiment. (It was taken down, officially for copyright reasons.)
  • Even fans of Steven Seagal films in general dislike Attack Force (2006), in which Seagal battles violent berserker types created from a drug emptied into the water supply of Paris after one of the team he leads gets murdered by one of them. It opens with credits superimposed over blurred images of what appear to be strippers dancing, then proceeds to a shootout that has nothing to do with the rest of the film before it gets to the main plot. Seagal voice in this one was inexplicably dubbed by another actor. Not to mention a massive change in the script from the original idea, which would have involved Seagal and his team taking on an Alien Invasion. Includes this line:

"We must find that titty-bar!"

  • A leaked trailer for Basic Instinct 2 (2006) promised the same level of sleazy entertainment as the first, with images of lurid and deviant sexual encounters. In one of the most unashamed examples of Bait and Switch in the film industry, not only did the final print not have these scenes, but it was also boring and lazily plotted, with painful acting and an ending that boggled the mind. Oh, and you don't get to see Sharon Stone's snatch, in case you were wondering.
  • Christmas In Wonderland is a 2007 Christmas movie with an all-star cast, apparently zero script, and exists solely to piss off every Edmontonian and Canuck in its sight. Its main selling point is that 90% of it was shot in West Edmonton Mall in Edmonton, Canada, yet when it's not being a 100-minute commercial for West Edmonton Mall, it's trying to justify its plot by relying on the seminal characters being ten times as moronic as families in average family Christmas films. To make a list of all its inconsistencies would be writing a list as long as the script itself: for example, the opening credits are supposed to be in Los Angeles, yet it's obviously shot on Whyte Avenue. The two boys apparently hate Canada, yet they have strong Canadian accents. Furthermore, the mall itself is made to look like a magical palace on the exterior, with puke-worthy results. That's only the beginning. The film's an insult to Edmonton and Canada, and the one cinema in the mall that showed it in 2007 dropped it after a week because it's so bad. And boy, Patrick Swayze looked horrible; not a film you'd want to remember him by.

"Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks."

  • Dirty Love (2005), starring ex-Playboy Playmate Jenny McCarthy. A gross-out sex comedy with a female viewpoint may be unusual (and Bridesmaids proved that it can be done well)... but the novelty of the movie's premise quickly foundered under a bad script (by McCarthy herself), bad acting, and wretched cinematography. McCarthy's tasteless turns, such as dancing topless with her breasts covered in vomit and carpeting a store with her menstrual blood, made the movie seem misogynistic. Carmen Electra played her Black Best Friend as an Ethnic Scrappy, even though she isn't black at all.
  • The Dork Of The Rings (2006), a Godawful retelling of The Lord of the Rings, consists primarily of fart and pedophilia jokes. That is, when it wasn't falling prey to some serious pacing issues.
  • Dragonball Evolution' (2009) is considered as one of the worst anime adaptations ever made, and the actual worst audiovisual product related with the Dragon Ball franchise. Trying to adapt (badly) the first arc of the manga by mixing it with the first Piccolo arc, they also bring down beloved characters into their cut-out versions, when not becoming into the bizarro version of the original manga character. And if the lack of fidelity with the original in plot, characterizations, and looks wasn't enough, the fights and the special effects are of excessively low quality for the budget they had. Even one of the scriptwriters ended asking for forgiveness over this awful film. The only positive thing about this thing is that it fueled up the Dragon Ball revival of the 2010's, due to the incredible amount of spite Akira Toriyama felt towards this disaster.
  • Lower Learning (2008), starring Jason Biggs, Eva Longoria, and Rob Corddry. It takes badness to uncharted levels, takes Refuge in Vulgarity with offensive "jokes", and includes tasteless scenes involving elementary school teachers explaining and demonstrating sex acts in front of children. The filmmakers managed to make 88 minutes seem like three hours. The only redeeming aspect is the behind-the-scenes featurette, in which Rob Corddry talks about how the best part was getting paid. Unfortunately, that's Paratext.
  • Night Junkies (2007) is attempting too much with too little. A first-time director with no budget makes a movie that can't decide whether it's an attempt to cash in on post-Twilight vampire-romance enthusiasm, a skeezy softcore skin flick, or a deep and meaningful investigation of the damage that drug addiction causes (like Requiem for a Dream). The film has terrible acting: it's unclear from his accent where the lead actor is supposed to be from, and the villain is supposed to be Axe Crazy but just looks like he's having seizures. The script's awful, and the pacing's terrible. The nature of vampirism in The Verse is undecided: does it make you tougher than a human, or is it just a lamer version of mundane drug addiction? Who knows? Who cares? The only redeeming factor is the nudity, and there are works that do that better than this.
  • The American remake of One Missed Call (2008), which took everything good about Takashi Miike's J-horror classic and bungled it. For one thing, it simply isn't scary. (The poster is terrifying, but it's Paratext, not part of the film.) The story's lazily plotted, and the acting's poor. The filmmakers did transfer some scenes directly over from the Japanese version, but the transfers fail. Its failure at the box office seems to have killed any further interest in remaking Japanese horror films. As of 2017, it has a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
  • Pledge This! (2006) Yet another memorable film starring Paris Hilton. Much like The Hottie and 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 Humor even Surf School was head and shoulders above.
  • The Seeker (2007), the film adaptation of The Dark Is Rising. It takes They Just Didn't Care to new and amazing levels: the screenwriter didn't read the whole book, and the director admitted that he hated fantasy. The result was about what you'd expect, only worse. They changed so much so badly that the movie was universally loathed not just by the fanbase, but by critics and viewers who'd never read the book. The Stantons are a large, loving British family in the book; they're now an American Expy of the Weasleys, if they were dysfunctional and one-dimensional. Main character Will is a thoughtful, wise-for-his-years eleven-year-old in the book; he's now a Jerkass, whiny fourteen-year-old who's more interested using his powers to impress girls than accomplishing his quest. The plot was butchered almost beyond recognition, bearing very little resemblance to the source material. The writer and director took pride in throwing out the Celtic Mythology elements that gave the series its depth. The movie was so terrible, it's difficult to imagine how anyone would've thought it would do anything other than bomb horribly... which it did. It had the second-weakest debut of any movie ever, and holds the record for the largest theater-drop (the number of cinemas who dumped it from their lineup after the obligatory three weekends).
  • Son of the Mask (2005) brings up both disappointing sequels and horrifying family films to new lows. The only thing in common between this film and the original was the titular mask and its world-warping, cartoonizing powers, and maybe the presence of a doggie. Stars Jamie Kennedy as a milketoast artist who gets the Mask and impregnates his wife while wearing it, conceiving a baby with the titular artifact's powers; meanwhile, the god Loki (Alan Cumming wasting his talents) is searching for the Mask and involves himself in the plot above. The plot is extremely unfunny, made worse by the fact that Kennedy lacks the charisma and energy of Jim Carrey, making the already annoying film even harder to watch. In contrast, there are the Mask's powers, made up of Special Effect Failures and Conspicuous CGI that look terrifying instead of comedic and was proved to be way too intense for the younger audiences. No wonder it bombed on box office (earning only $57.6 million of its $84 million budget), and received scathing critics including a Double Thumbs Down from Ebert & Roeper. Has a rating of 6% in Rotten Tomatoes and is part of the Bottom 100 IMDB with 2.2 stars. It was the most nominated film at the 2005 Golden Raspberry Awards with eight, albeit only won for Worst Remake or Sequel. Watch The Nostalgia Critic being infuriated and scared by this flick.
  • Witless Protection (2008), the last of a triad of films starring Larry the Cable Guy, this time as a small-town sheriff who gets in problems when he "rescues" a woman from being "kidnapped" by the FBI agents who were trying to protect her while she is testifying in a big corruption trial (said agents then turn out to be henchmen of the real villain). Hilarity does not ensue at all despite this being marketed as a comedy. Full of racist jokes that aren't even delivered well, this movie got a 3% in Rotten Tomatoes and ended whatever chance for protagonic roles Daniel Whitney on his Larry The Cable Guy shtick could still have had (outside of Cars′ sequels).
  • Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009): Some people consider this film to be So Bad It's Good, and while it certainly does fit that description at times (its "Devastator having a scrotum" joke immediately comes to mind), its brief but satisfying moments of actually funny over-the-top campiness are not even nearly enough of a redeeming quality/factor to make up for practically everything else about it. While Michael Bay's first Transformers film was painfully "just okay" to begin with, ROTF pretty much embodies every single one of the worst things about the completely mindless cash grabs that said film's sequels were/are. Its "plot" is one of the most obnoxiously stupid and cliched things in existence (with the film itself showing practically no self-awareness of said fact), it seems to exist even-more-purely "just to sell toys" than the original Transformers cartoon series, Skids and Mudflap exist in it, and it is "edgy for the sake of being edgy".
  • The Love Guru. This is the movie that killed Mike Myers’ career, and a lot of folks can't help but think he wanted to retire from acting and set the movie up for failure on purpose to accelerate his exit - hard to imagine someone making a film like this on purpose. While this was hardly the first movie he made that depended on Running Gags and gross-out humor where the protagonist was a pervert, the Austin Powers flicks were at least imaginative, creative, and actually funny. This one was offensive (mostly to Hinduism, but also pretty much to everyone) and everyone unlucky enough to have actually watched it couldn't help wonder what in the world he was thinking when he thought this one up.

2010s

  • Bear (2010). The characters are beyond unlikable, the acting's poor, the plot's poorly explained (they don't say where they were going until after the titular bear attacks). The special effects are highly questionable (there are several shots where you can clearly see the lights, film crew, and stuntmen... and when the bear's obviously a guy in a suit), and the bear behaves in ways that aren't possible in real life. Watch Film Brain tear it apart here.
    • The ultimate low point is when they're crawling out of a pipe. You can see a man wearing a bear glove standing on top, ready to reach through for a Jump Scare. This is after the tunnel scene is finished; as Film Brain points out, he's waiting for a non-existent cue and therefore has no reason to be in the shot.
    • The most surprising thing about this film is that it was produced by (of all people) Freddie Wong, who is usually praised for his great special effects on his YouTube channel.
  • The Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Cats is still very well loved, but its 2019 film adaptation was considered the worst film of its year the minute it was released. Not only the adaptation was terrible script-wise, the director artistic decision of placing CGI on top of the performers to give them a fur effect gave us terrible moments of Uncanny Valley, Off-Model and CGI glitching galore, to the point that the studio immediately released an "updated" version of the film (comparisons with patch release of video games were made). The talents of James Corden, Judi Dench, Jason Derulo, Idris Elba, Jennifer Hudson, Ian McKellen, Taylor Swift, Rebel Wilson, and Francesca Hayward were usually misdirected or just plain wasted (Hudson and Swift being the only ones who received some sort of praise). While the film may be on its way to becoming a Cult Classic like other musical extravaganzas, there is still a sour taste about it in the mouth of every critic who reviewed it, earning a mere 20% freshness on Rotten Tomatoes as of 2020. The film was nominated for seven Golden Raspberry Awards, including Worst Picture (which it won).
  • Within critics, it was considered that the "comedy" Dirty Grandpa was definitely the worst film of 2016. The film, which starred Robert De Niro and Zac Efron, revolves around an elderly man who drags his grandson with him to Florida for a sex-filled Spring Break romp, which is depicted with enormous levels of grossness and shocking humor, plus some extra racism, homophobia and misogyny for variety. Many people was particularly shocked at De Niro accepting this role, with one critic saying that, just as Bela Lugosi ended his career with the notorious Plan 9 from Outer Space after having starred in numerous classics before, this film could be De Niro's own Plan 9. It was at 11% at Rotten Tomatoes, and was nominated to several Razzies, including Worst Picture, Worst Actor (De Niro), Worst Supporting Actress and Worst Screenplay, but did not win in any category because it was outshone by Dinesh D'Souza's output described above.
  • Humshakals (2014), directed by Sajid Khan (a director with a record of bad critical reception, and already loathed by his remake of Himmatwala in 2013), was considered upon it's release the worst Bollywood film of its year, the worst of the decade so far, and probably one of the worst ever made. While the premise (a couple of rich idiots friends are sent to an insane asylum by a treacherous relative, and once there they are accidentally mix up with a couple of lookalikes) sounds innocent enough, the execution was simply horrible, with a dim, aimless plot full of inappropriate sexual content and Unfortunate Implications galore against women, homosexuals and the mentally ill, for what was allegedly a familiar comedy. Not even the stars wanted to defend it, with the main female star, Bipasha Basu, refraining from participating on the film promotion because she was "extremely disturbed by the end result" and stating that "Humshakals was the worst experience of [her] life". Meanwhile, leading actor Saif Ali Khan confessed that "[t]he film didn't have a script as such, it was all there in Sajid's mind", and later lamented "I've been introspecting a lot and will never repeat a mistake that was Humshakals," In case you weren't sure this was a deserved flop (not even managing to fully cover its production costs) and an all-around atrocious film, the two Indian equivalents of the Razzies, the Golden Kela Award and the Ghanta Awards, independently gave this film their "Worst Picture" awards in 2015.
  • Innocence Of Muslims (2011) is both horribly anti-Islamic propaganda (and this is all we'll say about that aspect of this movie) and a horrible film on its own. Besides its obvious political slant, the film itself suffers of No Budget, wooden acting, incomprehensible and offensive jokes (including an scene of Mohhamed sweetalking a horse just to add bestiality overtones), atrocious overdubbing to shoehorn more dialog and references, and disjointed, amateurish editing. The kicker, though, were the duplicitous antics of its director, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, (also known as "Sam Bacile" and "Alan Roberts"), who managed to film this dreck without no one in either cast or staff realizing they were in an anti-Islamic production (allegedly, the thing was originally filmed as a story about tribal life in Egypt 2000 years ago and the anti-Islamic stuff wasn't brought until post-production). Because of all of it, nobody among those involved in the filming liked the flick! The full thing was projected only twice, but there are two versions of the 14 minutes "trailer" in YouTube whom got the site blocked in several Islamic countries due to the protest and outrage they generated.
  • Left Behind (2014), starring Nicolas Cage is a reboot of the apocalyptic Christian films based on the Left Behind series. Whereas the previous adaptations, featuring Kirk Cameron, were So Bad It's Good when they weren't being insufferably heavy-handed, this one makes the earlier movies look stellar by comparison. Failure abounds in just about every aspect, be it the slipshod cinematography, sensationalist yet tedious premise, wooden acting (with Cage not even looking remotely interested throughout), Special Effect Failure or messing up its own source material. And that's saying nothing on how the movie manages to be insultingly moronic if not outright insulting to Christians and non-Christians alike. The movie would go on to be nominated for three Razzies (losing only to Kirk Cameron's Saving Christmas) and garner a 2% on Rotten Tomatoes. Here's The Bible Reloaded suffering through the whole thing. Or as FanboyFlicks puts it, it's that bad.
  • Movie 43 (2013), an anthology comedy film produced by Peter Farrelly and boasting an All-Star Cast in both actors and directors, intended to take Refuge in Vulgarity, but his own tasteless nature merely added to the lack of funny both the concept and its segments have. Richard Roeper called this" the Citizen Kane of awful", and another critic claimed that adding all the legendarily bad films listed here into one wouldn't even scrape to the awfulness on this one. As of 2017 it has 4% in Rotten Tomatoes. It earn 3 Razzies awards, including Worst Movie and a Worst Director meant to be shared by the 13 directors this piece of filmic excrement had.
  • Old Fashioned (2015) is a romantic film that's evidently meant to be a Christian alternative to Fifty Shades of Grey and to that end, goes out of its way to glorify what its creators present as a chaste, moral and chivalric romance. The end result, however, is a ludicrously tedious movie with tons of Padding that doesn't go anywhere, largely unlikeable and underdeveloped characters and a plot that seems to rely on heavy-handed preaching rather than telling a worthwhile story. That's not even getting to a zero-chemistry romance rife with Unfortunate Implications that bears little resemblance to what one would generally consider "chivalric" love, with actor-director Rik Swartzwelder behaving more like an obsessed, Norman Bates-style creep than anything else. While it's no surprise that it garnered a 20% on Rotten Tomatoes, let the Cinema Snob fill you in on just how it manages to make the poorly-received Fifty Shades film adaptation look good.
  • Run For Your Wife (2013), based on a long-running play about a bigamist trying to please his two wives, was directed by the play's author, Ray Cooney. Intended to be a winking throwback to the Awful British Sex Comedy, this turned out to be an incredibly unfunny film that was savaged by critics upon release, one of them claiming "From the look of it, Cooney hasn't been in a cinema for about 30 years". It got only £602 in its first week (and its total earnings barely passed £750), entered in the 0% Club on Rotten Tomatoes almost instantly and has 2.6 stars on IMDB as of 2017.
  • Saving Christmas (2014), produced and starred by Kirk Cameron, he of ruining-Growing Pains-with-his-Reborn-Christian-antics fame. The film is about Kirk trying to convince his brother and the public about the Real Christian roots of several Christmas traditions. The parts that are not boring Christian indoctrination are boringly self-serving, while just about everything else comes across as either heavy-handed or just plain lazy. As of this writing is within the 10 top films in the IMDB Bottom, and probably the fastest movie to be placed there (at some point it was as low as the 4th place). Let The Cinema Snob guide you through its "wonders." I Hate Everything and The Bible Reloaded also had much to say about it.
  • The Undefeated (2011) is perhaps one of the biggest critical and commercial failures in the world of documentaries, with a 1.9 of IMDb as of yet. 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 promoted her while ignoring facts that reflected poorly on her (including the fact that John McCain and Palin lost the 2008 presidential election to the Obama/Biden ticket). It was chock-full of yes-men, over-the-top, heavy-handed imagery and obvious falsehoods, with the odd Demonization or two of left-wing ideologies. It came off as more of a lengthy campaign ad than a documentary, and with its many intelligence-insulting moments, it failed at being that, too. The Atlantic's review had "Bad Propaganda, Worse Filmmaking" right in its title. And here's an article... by the only person still left in an arch-conservative Orange County theatre by the half-hour mark.
  • 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 documentary Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe (2016), 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 cause (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 and 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.[14] 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.
  • War Room (2015), a Christian drama by the Kendrick brothers, is very much a nadir in Christian movies just as much as it is a technically competent distillation of just about every religious movie cliche.[15] Ostensibly about a family's troubled marriage and an aging Vietnam War widow trying to save it with the power of faith, the film is rife with issues from the get-go. The leads aren't really actors, with their performances coming across as forced or stilted. The story is incredibly Anvilicious, laden with plot holes, and just keeps going even after the main plot ends. And then there's the bizarre blend of Unfortunate Implications, Space Whale Aesops (like relying on God to solve problems and doing nothing else) and militaristic language sprinkled all throughout, ultimately culminating in an Author Filibuster ending right out of nowhere that turns the movie into a propaganda piece. Garnering a 34% on Rotten Tomatoes, the film in the end comes across as patronising if not insulting to religious and non-religious people alike. The Cinema Snob has covered it, though Brad Jones himself is on record saying it's one of the worst movies he's seen as of late.

2020s

  • Buck Breaking (2021) is a Tariq Nasheed-produced "documentary" framed entirely around a psuedohistorical conspiracy to feminize black men, and goes off the rails into Crazy Town right out the gate. Starting with Hotep "academics" blaming white Europeans on the creation of rape as a concept and "white Turks" for spreading it to Africa, Alex Jones-tier conspiracy theories run abound, such as the Vatican Obelisk being a symbolic black penis that the Pope worships, white people stealing black hair in order to weaken them, and soy being used to feminize black men on a genetic level. And the documentary's key topic, the act of white slavemasters raping their black male slaves, is treated like a widespread, normalized atrocity despite the complete lack of evidence to support it. And if that wasn't enough, the production values are laughable, with the biggest example being the weirdly homoerotic, narmy slave rape art Tariq commissioned himself. The art, along with the frequent homophobia and baffling focus on gay sex has left plenty of viewers accusing it of being gay erotica disguised as a documentary.
  • Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, was a comedy/horror Slasher Film where the killer was Winnie the Pooh himself, seeking revenge upon the now-adult Christopher Robin for abandoning him. Unfortunately, while this plot showed potential, that was the only positive trait most reviewers could give it, the movie failing because it committed the cardinal sin of horror movies - it was boring. Dennis Harvey of Variety criticized the film for lack of humor, poor acting, and incoherent screenplay, summarizing that the film "fail[ed] to meet even the most basic expectations set up by its conceptual gimmick", while Nick Allen from RogerEbert.com wrote that it failed as both a comedy and a horror film, noting the poorly lit scenes in the film made it hard to for viewers to tell what was happening. All agreed that poor writing, poor dialogue, lame humor, uninteresting characters, and only vague references to the source material, ruined what might have been an interesting premise.
  1. ↑ By the way, he plead guilty to said violation, something he conveniently doesn't mention.
  2. ↑ However, in May 2018, Trump did use his power as President to pardon D'Souza and apparently told him he'd been "screwed".
  3. ↑ Ruth indeed managed to get to the premiere merely three weeks before his death
  4. ↑ The American Film Institute lists its release date as 1943, although the film itself appears to have been made in 1937.
  5. ↑ IMDb lists the movie as dating to 1973, although nothing really conclusive has ever been confirmed.
  6. ↑ IMDb lists the movie's release date in the United States as 1992, though filming took place in 1986.
  7. ↑ Actually both characters and their actors were teenagers of roughly the same age, but they were hit by an unfortunate case of developemental disparity and became a case in favor of Dawson Casting
  8. ↑ With studio executives demanding Cimino to trim the film from its initial runtime of just over five hours to around three hours, forty-five minutes for its one-week run in New York; the theatrical cut ran about two-and-a-half-hours.
  9. ↑ The first one being the So Bad It's Good 1979 Made for TV Movies featuring Reb Brown.
  10. ↑ (which you probably won't have heard of given that S Club were only ever popular in the UK and had actually disbanded by the time of the film's release)
  11. ↑ Although Gore Verbinski of Pirates of the Caribbean fame is known to have also taken some directorial duties over the film's production, the difference in styles becoming evident in later scenes.
  12. ↑ The sort of backroom politics, drama and turmoil that went on over the movie's production are on par with Ishtar mentioned above.
  13. ↑ See above our references to Battlefield Earth and Inchon to see how those went down.
  14. ↑ Robert De Niro, whose son Elliot is autistic, initially advocated for the film's inclusion hoping it would start a useful conversation, while having no idea of its actual content.
  15. ↑ According to Word of God, the choice to predominantly star African Americans was because of a dream and partly so as to prevent accusations of racism.
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