The Best Worst Movies of All Time

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This is a list of the best of the worst movies of all time. I'm specifically putting this together for those who like to gather a group of friends together and enjoy the shared pain of a truly tragically awful movie. You know who you are.

I'd like to first give out props, though, to ITA Software, whose Movie Camp was a refuge for the huddled masses of bad and campy movies, and from which I'm drawing for this list among other sources...

Warning: The following reviews come with pictures, but the pictures in question come from Amazon item links, which are very often blocked by ad-blocking software. If you don't want to see ads, I understand, but fair warning that you're missing some quality badness. ;-)

Contents

Classically Bad

These films are old enough to be considered "classics"... they're just not good enough to be considered classics.

Zardoz

Year: 1974
Starring: Sean Connery, Charlotte Rampling
Content: Murder, rape, sex, nudity, adult themes
Links: Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB, Wikipedia
My tag line: "If you've been dying to see Sean Connery rape someone and chant 'the penis is evil', then you're in for a treat."

Honestly, this isn't as bad as they come. Mostly it's just amazingly slow in coming to its point, and it spends far too much time flaunting the new-found ability to put nude women and barely clothed men on the screen for half the film without being relegated to the red light district. Ah the 70s... a more innocent time. The dialogue is the typical stoner-driven semi-Eastern mumbo-jumbo that was popular at the time (see Logan's Run, etc.) The acting ranges from wooden enough to give wood a bad name all the way up to Sean Connery (who does what he can with the dialogue). On the other hand, there's a semi-coherent-if-slow plot that makes its own kind of sense, and in the end it really is a fairly decent science fiction story that could have been enjoyable at a running time of 20-30 minutes.


Manos: The Hands of Fate

Year: 1966
Starring: Tom Neyman, John Reynolds, Diane Mahree
Content: Violence, adult/horror themes
Links: Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB, Wikipedia
My tag line: "How the MST3K robots made it through this without killing someone, I'll never know."

This unspeakably bad film was actually the result of the way drive-ins worked, and would have languished in the heap of quite literal "B movies" (the films shown after the main attraction so that the teens in their cars would have more time to make out) if it hadn't been for Mystery Science Theater 3000. When this movie was shown on MST3K it quickly became the fan-choice for worst "misty movie" of all time.


Obscurer and Obscurer...

Films that never really made it to the popular consciousness. The more recent examples tend to be direct-to-DVD.

Misery Brothers

AKA: Misery Bothers Y2K
Year: 1995
Starring: Leo Rossi, Lorenzo Doumani with notable cameos by Abe Vigoda, Lou Ferrigno, Joyce Brothers, Erik Estrada and Pat Morita
Content: Sex, language, adult humor
Links: Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB
My tag line: "Godfather in drag, Ponch as Elvis, Pat Morita's career obit... this has it all."

It's hard to imagine a worse movie. It's a fairly standard stupid-buddy film with the usual sort of accidental-chain-of-events. However, it takes a step down from its comparatively high-brow peers such as Dumb and Dumberer by including a string of insultingly painful cameos. Abe Vigoda's opening Godfather send-up in drag is probably worth the price of admission for the true connoisseur of bad movies, though Pat Morita doing every bad Asian joke ever isn't much fun.


Galaxina

Year: 1980
Starring: Stephen Macht, Avery Schreiber, Dorothy Stratten
Content: Sexuality, violence
Links: Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB, Wikipedia
My tag line: "If you were hoping the sexy babe would save this film, you'll make it through the first 20 minutes."

Galaxina was released at a time when Star Wars (1977) was still creating tectonic faults in the movie-making industry. Everyone was convinced that this "new" market for science fiction was going to make them rich. So, what better way to capture that audience than to directly rip off every memorable scene from every successful science fiction movie released in the previous 10 years? Star Wars and Alien are the notable contributors, here. However, they run out of material about half way through the film, and so the whole thing picks up and moves planet-side for a dip into everything from westerns to motorcycle gang flicks. It's tragically bad, but somehow it keeps pulling you back in to see what genre they'll fail at next.



The curious business of making bad movies fast

Of late, there's a huge business in making really bad movies, really fast. The best known example of this is the "direct-to-SciFi" films that air on the SciFi channel every Friday night. However, there are a bunch of these. I'm going to touch on two films and their production companies:

Mammoth

Year: 2006
Starring: Tom Skerritt, Vincent Ventresca, Cole Williams, Leila Arcieri, Summer Glau
Content: Gore, graphic violence (though somewhat cartoonish), etc.
Links: Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB, Wikipedia
My tag line: "Zombie Space Mammoth Comedy says it all, really!"

The SciFi channel has been spewing forth what amounts to a weekly anthology series in the form of a movie-of-the-week in a very literal sense. This particular film's high note is Summer Glau (The Sarah Conner Chronicles, Firefly/Serenity), but she's sadly underused. The real story, here, is the production company: Castel Film Romania. They have put out some of the worst films of this newly minted century, and continue to produce them at an alarming rate. Ever wonder if there was a Prophesy 3? Try 5, and it was their baby!


Snakes On a Train

Year: 2006
Starring: Alby Castro, Ryanne Ruiz, Giovanni Bejerano, Al Galvez, Lola Forsberg
Content: Gore, graphic violence, occult rituals, etc.
My tag line: "Get these ... no wait, wrong film... oh, that was the point."

The Asylum specializes in cranking out films with similar titles to big-budget movies that are about to come out. Essentially having from the time that a trailer appears to the time that the film is released, David Rimawi and crew have to write, cast, shoot, edit and release direct to DVD their mock version. It's actually a fascinating little dance they do, but the end result is terrifying beyond all capacity for rational thought. Have a look at some of their titles:

  • The Day the Earth Stopped
  • Street Racer
  • 100 Million BC
  • I Am Omega
  • Transmorphers
  • Snakes on a Train
  • The Da Vinci Treasure

Good stuff. I don't really feel that Snakes On a Train was a good movie, but if I had to choose a film to torment my friends with, it just might be this one.


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