25. Jaws: The Revenge (1987)
Kicking off our bottom twenty-five, we have another legendarily bad sequel, Jaws: The Revenge. Suffice to say, this movie’s as bad as everyone has said. Again, this is another horror sequel that just kills off its most famous characters, making Sherriff Brody die of a heart attack off-screen and then having his son, Sean, get killed by the shark at the very start of the film. It just feels insulting to the series’ legacy and is such a lame way to try to make us give a shit about Ellen Brody… that’s right, the main fucking character of this movie is the mom who is basically window-dressing in the previous films. This could work with a hell of a writer who tries to flesh out her character, but this is Jaws: The Revenge: of course we don’t give a shit about her. The film is just fucking boring, and rehashes the original film for most of the runtime, only a thousand times worse and with nonsensical plot developments which make the shark seem like it has psychic powers. I generally find that the movies most notorious for being bad are over-hyped: sure, they’re bad, but they were also famous enough that a general audience would recognize them. For the real bad shit, you usually have to look into the more obscure films which lack even professionalism. Jaws: The Revenge, on the other hand, is one of those bad movies that has well and truly earned its reputation. Like I said before: the 80s were a wild time for baffling, theatrically-released stinkers.
24. BloodRayne (2005)
Oh hey, BloodRayne has an entry in both my all-time worst games and worst movies list, what an accomplishment! Once again, we’re looking at a Uwe Boll video game adaptation “classic”. Despite its star-studded cast (which includes Michael Madsen, Billy Zane, Udo Kier, Ben Kingsley, Michelle Rodriguez, Meat Loaf, and Kristanna Loken, fresh off Terminator 3, as Rayne), the film feels completely amateur on every level you can think of. It makes for an incredibly shoddy film, which attempts to create this huge fantasy epic, but with basically no talent, budget, or capability to do such a thing. It doesn’t even feel like this is a passion project for Boll, everything is just lazily done. It’s not even as laughably entertaining as some of his other, more notorious efforts either.
23. Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)
Even by the standards of 90s slasher sequels, Freddy’s Dead is just the worst. The film is so embarrassing: New Line Cinema clearly viewed Freddy Krueger as a global icon, and so they removed the last shreds of horror from him to give him more mass appeal. Instead, they just play up his one-liners, making him completely insufferable. The result is like one of those corporate mascots who is marketed as edgy, but they can’t actually be edgy or they’ll piss some people off, so they just come across as lame instead.
The film looks incredibly cheap, which is why it’s so shocking that they actually had a fairly large budget to work with. Its plot is also downright insane, immediately starting with the premise that, in a ten year period, Freddy has killed every single teenager in Springwood, except one. That is just monstrous and gets glossed over almost immediately. It also just suffers every pitfall you’d expect a bad slasher sequel to fall into (bad acting, bad narrative, tired formula, etc).
That said: Carlos’ death scene is still a solid, grade-A kill, and the one time that the cartoonish tone actually works for the movie.
22. Pompeii (2014)
I would say that this movie was a bigger disaster than the real-life eruption of Vesuvius, but that would be just insensitive, stupid and uninspired… oh hey, all of those words COULD describe Pompeii adequately though. Pompeii is clearly trying to be a mix of Gladiator and Titanic: a lowly gladiator and a high-born merchant’s daughter fall in love and try to evade her betrothed and survive the natural disaster going on around them, only to be met with tragedy at the end. Unsurprisingly, Kit Harrington and Emily Browning put in terrible performances as the lead characters. Only Kiefer Sutherland puts in an enjoyable performance, as he hams it up like mad as the primary antagonist. The actual eruption sequences are about as loud, CGI-filled, and over the top as you’d expect. The eruption of Vesuvius has a ton of potential for a great film, but you’re not going to find it here. Stay as far away as possible.
21. Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (1997)
This… this movie did not get a theatrical release. In 1997!? No, there is no way they would do that. I literally am having to look this up as I’m writing this, because I do not believe it happened. Not with this level of quality. No, that is not possible, no one in their right mind would think that this movie belongs on a theater screen. OH MY FUCKING GOD, IT GROSSED $51.3 MILLION!??!
I legitimately think that the original Mortal Kombat is one of the best video game adaptations of all-time. This sequel is staggeringly bad, even by the standards of video game movies. The acting is abysmal. The narrative is nonsense. The special effects look horrendous. The fights are terrible. The sets and costumes look so fake. THIS MOVIE HAD A $30 MILLION BUDGET!?!?!!!?
It might sound like I hated Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, but I actually love it. It is a special kind of bad, one which is utterly unhinged and never boring. However, it is because of that love that I have to put Annihilation in the place it deserves: near the top of the worst movies of all-time list.
20. Dogman (2012)
I’ve long had a fascination with the legend of the Michigan Dogman, a werewolf-like beast said to roam the woods of its namesake state. So, when I found out that someone was making a movie based on the cryptid, I was immediately interested. Hell, I saw a copy of the Blu-ray of this movie at an HMV back in the day for like $30 or $40, but I was so interested that I almost went and paid that outrageous amount for it. THANK GOD I did not, because it would have been the worst purchase of my life. I’d love to say that Dogman is this plucky, indie film success story, but it is anything but that. The film looks so cheap that you could confuse it with a home video. The narrative is incredibly dull, with no suspense at all. The acting is below even amateur. Oh, and to make it all worse, the film just ends anti-climactically, leaving you feeling even more pissed off after all that. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen it, but Dogman really left an impression on me that I vividly remember it for just how bad and boring it was and will often bring it up whenever I’m asked what the worst movies I’ve ever seen were.
19. Monster Hunter (2020)
Boy, Paul W.S. Anderson sure is getting a lot of spots on this bottom twenty-five list, isn’t he? I’m not even exaggerating when I say that Paul W.S. Anderson has to be the worst writer-director and producer in Hollywood these days. After ruining the Resident Evil film franchise, Anderson and Milla Jovovich turned their sights to another Capcom video game franchise: Monster Hunter… and, somehow, they’ve managed to make an even more insulting adaptation of their source material.
Now, I do think that Monster Hunter could make for an interesting high-fantasy film series if it’s confined to the world of the games and features a character learning to hunt these monsters that threaten civilization. Instead, Anderson goes for that lucrative US military propaganda money and makes this a dimension-hopping misadventure where a bunch of marines get pulled into a portal to a world full of monsters. Pretty much everything here sucks, particularly the direction and breakneck pacing. The film barely makes use of the Monster Hunter concept of preparing for the hunt ahead, which is nuts considering that’s entirely what those games are about. Instead, this is just another brainless Paul W.S. Anderson flick that will entertain only the most undiscerning of tastes.
18. Silent Hill: Revelation (2012)
Silent Hill: Revelation is staggering for how badly it captures the appeal of its series. The original Silent Hill is definitely one of the better video game adaptations (which is to say that it’s not great, but has some interesting ideas and captures the tone perfectly). It pretty much laid the blueprint for what a sequel would need to do: use the same brand of spooky, psychological of horror and aesthetic, but just have a stronger story this time and you’ll make a legitimately great film, guaranteed. Revelation didn’t give a shit about that. Released at the height of the garbage Silent Hill games and the 3D movie trend, Revelation discards its predecessor’s lessons entirely and instead dives face-first into a pile of shit. Gone is any attempt at psychological horror, this is just the most generic horror slop you could imagine. Seriously, this film is a total disaster: the writing, the acting, the special effects, the direction… everything. Like, I don’t want to be “that guy”, but I’m certain that even I could make a better Silent Hill film than this.
17. Alone in the Dark (2005)
Yet another Uwe Boll classic, Alone in the Dark gets us near the top of his game. Like BloodRayne, this film feels embarrassingly amateur. This can be felt the moment the film begins. Like, you know that a movie is going to be bad when it opens with a lengthy narration which explains the movie’s backstory. It just keeps going on and on to the point that it’s comical. Legend has it that this narration was added after test audiences said that they couldn’t understand what was going on in the film, which caused Boll to over-explain everything in response. The rest of the film isn’t much better, as it’s a horror movie that is direly short on scares. That said, there is one pretty cool moment halfway through where a bunch of soldiers have a shootout with a bunch of monsters in the dark, which is lit only by their muzzle flashes as they get swarmed. It’s the sort of cool sequence that makes the rest of the movie feel even more boring in comparison… like, you’re telling me you could have been doing that this entire time?
16. Vanished (2016)
Vanished was so bad when I watched it for this year’s Left Behind retrospective that it was legitimately shocking. It is just so cynical, stapling a gaggle of YA movie tropes onto a Walking Dead narrative, and then loosely tying it to Left Behind in an attempt to appeal to general audiences. That said, it’s hilarious that about 80% of this movie is a pissing contest between conservative evangelicals and conservative libertarians. That at least makes the movie kind of interesting, but the film is so badly made that it’s almost unwatchable. I legitimately think that Tim LaHaye was lying to his grandson when he said that he liked the movie, and the fact that he died shortly after watching it… well, I’m not gonna say that the movie did him in, but hopefully it left him with one more massive disappointment before the end.
15. God’s Not Dead 2 (2016)
God’s Not Dead 2 is a torturous watch. It’s the absolute worst example of the American evangelical Christian persecution complex in action, a propaganda piece which is so transparently cynical in its construction. Atheists are portrayed as a bunch of God-hating body snatchers who love nothing more than to ruin the lives of poor, innocent, put-upon Christians who never bothered anyone in their lives. The entire premise here is ridiculous, but even the filmmakers realize this, because after all their posturing about how the government and courts are biased against Christians… they end up siding with the Christians, because there’s literally no case here that can be made against them. The film doesn’t even make this out like there’s a big, clever twist that the Christians use to save themselves, it just fucking happens. Like… I can’t believe I’m defending Left Behind: Rise of the Antichrist again, but at least that movie tries to justify its propaganda and persecution complex by having it be set in a nebulous near-future where the government has taken over everyone’s lives after an unprecedented emergency. Getting any enjoyment out of God’s Not Dead 2 requires you to be fucking deluded.
14. Fantasy Island (2020)
Oh, speaking of movies that shocked me with how bad they were… I wasn’t expecting much out of a Fantasy Island remake, but somehow this movie managed to be worse than I could ever have imagined. This is supposed to be a professionally-made film with big-name actors, an experienced director, and a great production studio, so how is this the result of all that talent!? The film is entirely bereft of any sort of scares or tension, which would be bad enough, but the writing is also incredibly dumb and the characters are paper-thin and uninteresting. About the only fun in this movie was when the two brothers were on screen because, while they were a couple of stereotypical “bro” types, they were at least enjoying themselves… so maybe I’m just jealous, because I sure as hell was not enjoying myself watching this shitty film.
13. Piranha 3DD (2012)
Piranha 3D is a surprisingly solid horror film, with some of the gnarliest gore I’ve ever seen in my life thanks to Alexandre Aja’s involvement. It’s also just really fun, bringing in creative kills, big set-piece carnage, and an unabashedly sleazy tone that we rarely get out of a big movie like this these days, all wrapped around a very competently told Jaws-like narrative.
Piranha 3DD attempts to double down on the sleaze, the humour, and the cameos, but the resulting film is so much worse than its predecessor in every way imaginable. The humour and sleaze have been pushed to a point where it just makes the film stupid… like, the first movie had a guy get his dick bit off and then eaten and regurgitated by the piranhas, so in the sequel we need to have more penis trauma, right? How do they go about this? Well, a baby piranha… swims up a girl’s vagina… Somehow she does not really notice that there’s a fish swimming around in there, and this piranha doesn’t do what every other piranha in this series has done up to this point. Anyway, she has sex with her boyfriend, who gets a piranha biting him in the dick for his troubles. How does he deal with this problem? If you said “he grabs a knife and cuts his own dick off!”… then congrats, you’re as insane as the people who made this film. That’s the level of contrived, tired bullshit this fucking movie is subjecting you to.
12. The Hills Have Eyes 2 (2007)
Speaking of bad horror sequels to Alexandre Aja movies which double down on the things their predecessor did, The Hills Have Eyes 2 left me fucking infuriated. The Hills Have Eyes remake (and the original before it) is notorious for having a character get raped by the villainous mutant cannibals. It’s stomach-churning stuff, but it’s shot in a tasteful way that really emphasizes the horror of the act and its effect on the women involved. Anyway, want to take a guess what aspect of the first movie The Hills Have Eyes 2 doubles down on? Yeah, the movie opens with a woman, who has been raped who knows how many times by these cannibals, giving birth to a mutant baby, and then is immediately killed by the mutants. Oh yay, cheap, mean-spirited sexual abuse and violence against women, just what I wanted… Later on, we also get a full-on rape scene after the cannibals capture one of the main characters. It’s infuriating, because the film makes you think she’s going to fight her way out before anything can actually happen to her, but no, right after she beats up her attempted rapist, a stronger cannibal immediately shows up and then he rapes her. Making matters even more despicable, the goddamn thing’s shot like a fucking porno.
The movie isn’t just shit for the ham-fisted and juvenile handling of sexual violence though. This movie attempts to follow the Aliens sequel template by having a bunch of marines fight against these mutants… but, my God, these are the worst soldiers I have ever seen on-screen. They act like a bunch of children in a Call of Duty lobby, rather than actual trained soldiers. I don’t care how much these cannibals know the terrain, they got killed by a dog and a pissed off nerd in the last film, they wouldn’t stand a chance against a squad of trained marines with guns. Fuck this piece of shit movie, I despise it.
11. Lost City Raiders (2008)
We are really scraping the bottom of the barrel now. Lost City Raiders is a TV movie about a bunch of Indiana Jones-style adventurers who look for relics after global warming has flooded most of the Earth. As you’d expect, the acting, effects, and narrative are terrible. Unfortunately, it also has a budget which would make a shoestring take pity on it. This film’s big MacGuffin is an ancient staff which is obviously made of plastic. At least it’s somewhat entertaining, but this movie is so painfully far from its ambitions that it’s downright pitiful.
10. Noobz (2012)
Man… 2013 was a different time. In a pre-Trump, pre-Gamergate, pre-anti-woke grifter world, Noobz legitimately seemed like an outdated portrayal of gamer stereotypes. Not even a year later, it would turn out that a large contingent of gamers actually were proud of being racists, homophobes, and general assholes and wanted you to know it. So… yeah, Noobz is basically Gamergate: The Movie. Even if that wasn’t enough to turn you off, the “comedy” here is awful, just a bunch of “edgy” stuff that sounds like it was cooked up by a teenager. Like… I don’t care how much you want to offend people, if the bulk of your comedy revolves around constantly making fun of a character’s life-threatening disability, and making fun of a character for being really obviously gay, you really need to diversify your jokes and get some actual fucking taste. This movie was pathetic in 2012. Now it’s just annoying in a world where fuckwits like Grummz exist to jerk off the losers who look at Noobz and think that it speaks to them.
9. Atlas Shrugged Part III: Who Is John Galt? (2014)
I really cannot understate just how badly made Atlas Shrugged Part III is. As bad as its predecessors were, you can at least tell that John Aglialoro and company were trying to make something good – they just were too inept to actually pull it off. However, after bleeding tens of millions of dollars on those movies, it feels like Part III exists only out of obligation and pure spite. Part III is cheap and shoddy to a shocking degree, to the point where I was constantly having to pause the film to take notes about some ridiculous detail I noticed. This happened so frequently that I ended up doubling the film’s runtime from all the notes I took. It’s not even like the film itself is all that interesting: it’s mostly just a bunch of time wasting to try to fill out a feature length and then get it all over with. The politics also get downright insane, ending with a scene where Dagny shoots a guard who would rather discuss a toddler’s understanding of the philosophy of free will rather than just get the fuck out of the way when told to… oh, and we’re supposed to think Dagny is righteous for doing this. If there was ever an indictment of Randian philosophy, there can be no clearer example than Atlas Shrugged Part III. It comprehensively shits all over the entire philosophy in both narrative and in its tawdry execution.
8. House of the Dead (2003)
House of the Dead is our final Uwe Boll entry and another shocking example of a movie that got a theatrical release. I legitimately do not understand how someone could see this movie and then say “people need to see this in theaters!” In a lot of ways, it’s an incredibly generic 2000s teen horror movie, but Boll packs in some proper batshit insanity which make this movie unintentionally hilarious. My jaw was agape so many times while watching this movie because I couldn’t believe that Uwe Boll had actually put something so ridiculous to film. We’re talking action sequences which are filmed on a turntable, so Boll can get copious amounts of slo-mo shots while the camera spins around the actors, and there are even sequences of the video game spliced into the film at complete random. While it may be easily one of the worst video game movies ever made, it’s also incredibly watchable and a lot of fun mock.
7. The Room (2003)
The Room is legendary for its poor quality and insane writing. The subsequent decades, and the release of The Disaster Artist, have pulled back the curtain on this film’s bizarre aspects in a way that actually makes the entire thing an interesting exploration of Tommy Wiseau’s own psychology. However, even with that in mind, The Room is legendarily bad for a reason and deserves every bit of its reputation, even if it is one of the most fascinating and unintentionally funny bad movies of all-time.
6. Teenage Zombies (1959)
Again, here’s a temperature check so you understand just how far down on this list we are in terms of quality: Teenage Zombies is a no-budget, Z-grade sci-fi movie from the 50s with basically no filmmaking talent to speak of. Hell, long stretches of it are shot more like a stage play than a movie… not for any stylistic reason, just because everyone involved had no idea what the fuck they were doing. The film also features the world’s worst gorilla costume, and the poor guy inside has clearly been given no direction, so he just kind of stands there awkwardly and wriggles around every once in a while as the camera just lingers on him pathetically. It’s not even particularly fun either, it’s just boring. A friend of mine actually bought this movie on DVD when we were in high school, and it turned out that the DVD distributor had inserted a softcore porn feature at the start of the film. I don’t know if that was just put in to try to try to sell copies of the DVD, but I am certain that that was infinitely more enjoyable than Teenage Zombies.
5. Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus (2009)
Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus was my warning to never again trust movies that sell themselves as “so bad it’s good”. This movie was infamous on release for its ridiculous scenes of giant sharks jumping out of the ocean to catch passing jet liners. These scenes are indeed hilarious… but they are also where literally all of the money has been spent, because they are intended to go viral and sell copies of the film to the morbidly curious. However, there are no funny secrets hiding here waiting to be discovered: it’s just a bunch of wheel-spinning and constantly reused CGI shots until they can get to the ending. I bought this for five dollars on DVD, because I figured it would be funny-bad. It wasn’t. It was soul-crushingly awful. They even forgot to key out the green screen at one point! Did literally no one even watch the movie before releasing it!? I’m not even kidding here, I want my ninety minutes and five dollars back.
4. Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2010)
Another legendarily bad “classic”, Birdemic is a surreal experience. It’s basically like if someone ripped off The Birds, but shot the whole thing on a handicam, hired the world’s worst actors, and then used literal animated gifs for the birds. There is actually a legitimate message here about environmentalism and love, so you can tell that writer-director James Nguyen really believed in this movie… he just has zero talent, so instead we get this. It’s also just really fucking dull for the first half, wasting so much time on a weirdly chaste romance that no one gives a single shit about… only to suddenly cut to a bunch of looping gifs of birds flying around and exploding. I nearly ran out of breath from laughing when this first happened, and some of the bird attacks are hilariously pathetic (they fight them with goddamn coat hangers!), but Birdemic is mostly just dull. Truly one of the worst movies ever made, but at least it made me laugh, which is more than I can say for…
3. Project X (2012)
I was not kidding back in the day when I said that I loathed Project X. A found footage film released at the height of that trend, Project X follows a group of teens who try to throw the biggest, craziest party of all-time. You’d think that this would be a formula for some fun hijinks, but Project X‘s cast of assholes make the whole affair insufferable. Costas is still the most infuriating character in cinema, up there with Dolores Umbridge in that class of characters that even Mother Theresa would murder with her bare hands if she met them. It literally nothing more than eighty-eight minutes of douche bags being douche bags, with no redeeming qualities. Even the party aspects aren’t that entertaining. Oh hey, it’s teenagers drinking, doing drugs, and… uh… pissing on each other and throwing Martin Klebba in an oven, because making fun of little people is always good for a laugh, right? Fuck this fucking piece of shit movie.
2. Scary Movie 5 (2013)
All of the other Scary Movie films were really bad, but they at least had the occasional laughs and the presence of such comedic talent as Anna Faris, Regina Hall, and Leslie Nielsen would help elevate the proceedings immensely. Scary Movie 5 has none of these qualities, making it a pathetic film to watch. The jokes are tired, stupid and go on for way too long. About the only good thing that I can say about this movie is that, for once in this franchise, at least it doesn’t lean into mean-spirited homophobia, transphobia, and making fun of people with disabilities… but, like, I shouldn’t have to congratulate the movie on that. The Zucker spoof movie was well and truly dead long before Scary Movie 5 came out, and the fact that this movie was still this bad after all that is just an indictment on humanity as a whole.
1. Howling: New Moon Rising (1995)
I cannot conceive of a movie worse than Howling: New Moon Rising. In every single way imaginable, this movie is abysmal. It is, allegedly, a werewolf movie which has more country music line dancing sequences than it does scenes with werewolves. The entire cast are extras… like, full-stop, there are no actors here. The film reuses copious amounts of footage from previous Howling movies in order to pad out its runtime. Nothing fucking happens in this movie until the last couple minutes, at which point we get the world’s worst werewolf costume and then the townsfolk immediately shoot it to death. There is literally nothing redeeming about this movie, it is pure garbage and makes the other Howling sequels look like fucking masterpieces in comparison.
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