The key to a great ‘so-bad-it’s-good’ movie is that it doesn’t know how terrible it’s being. There’s this constant feeling that someone put unrestrained effort into making what you’re watching and the fact it’s also so bad can, somehow, make it great in its own way. What must have been entire years of people’s lives and huge amounts of their capital go into what amounts to 100-ish minutes of accidental comedy. If you’re going to fail, fail so big that the world watches for years to come.
Every one of these will make you laugh more than all but the best intentional comedies. So get your friends over and see if you can make it through any or all of these without falling just a little in love with these cinematic mistakes.
Updated on December 1st, 2020 by Mark Birrell: Bad movies are made almost every day and this is only troubling if you haven’t learned that a bad movie can be just as mind-blowing as a good one. The realm of so-bad-it’s-good is already so big and it’s getting bigger all the time as older movies are rediscovered and newer ones are reevaluated. With this in mind, we’ve added an extra 5 movies to our list for fans of the art of bad filmmaking to cherish and enjoy.
15 Miami Connection (68%)
Do you want evil ninjas? ’80s club ‘rock’ so hardcore that one of the lyrics is “friends for eternity, stick together through thick or thin”? Martial arts, super light on the ‘arts’? About half-a-dozen shirtless dudes sharing a miniature apartment? Miami Connection is for you!
The music is awful but, at the same time, also incredibly catchy and oddly quotable. The actors are clearly giving their all and their failures are so entertaining. The action is so close to being good but it ends up just too silly, and shot so strangely, that it’s mesmerically confusing.
14 Plan 9 From Outer Space (67%)
Ed Wood was a director who couldn’t grasp why he liked cinema so much, but he pressed right on making things anyway and this was his opus. Sets that make liberal use of curtains if they bother with a background at all, narration over far too much of everything, and hilarious effects, makeup, and writing come together in this SOBIG. One stretch of road gets so much screentime you’d think it should’ve been credited.
The movie’s big ‘star’, Bela Lugosi, died before production ended (or really began) and Wood hired a chiropractor to pull a cape across his face to finish the scenes they “needed”. Narration connected the loose Lugosi Dracula-ish scenes to a story about grave-robbing aliens and zombies, and of course, it all went tragically wrong.
13 Samurai Cop (47%)
Very much in the same vein as Miami Connection, except where that one is peculiarly wholesome, this one veers right off into vulgar, childish attempts at raunch between cheesy action failures. And every failed attempt is comedy gold for the viewer. This movie has the most luscious hair ever seen on film, and it’s a wig that the main star wears in about half the movie because of reshoots after he shaved his head.
Edited into swiss cheese so that actors could be in scenes together without having shot them as such, you’ll cry laughing at the attempts at comedy and sexiness. Stilted acting from everyone, as well as jarring tonal shifts, make this an iconic favorite of bad movie fans.
12 Fateful Findings (46%)
Writer/director/producer/actor Neil Breen has become one of a number of modern filmmakers to live up to the standard set by the legendary Tommy Wiseau, his distinctly awful idiosyncracies moving beyond ‘so-bad-it’s-good’ to something more akin to ‘so-bad-it’s-art’.
Breen’s low-budget high-ego movies often cast him as some kind of superhuman, or even Christlike, figure but his third movie rather tamely just gives him paranormal abilities to become the world’s greatest hacker and undo all corruption in society. The nonsensical plot is typical of most notably bad productions but it’s Breen’s overall sense of timing, mixed with the awkward performances of the entire cast, that truly elevates Fateful Findings to the realm of unintentional comedy gold.
11 Jupiter Ascending (27%)
Huge stars, reliable character actors, a huge budget, and the creative brainpower of the iconic Wachowskis. Jupiter Ascending was meant to be a massive hit when it was released but it was quickly revealed to be the definition of a flop.
From Mila Kunis and Channing Tatum’s lack of onscreen chemistry to Eddie Redmayne’s decadent scenery-chewing performance, the movie is a messy experience and not even Sean Bean’s character helping out with mountains of exposition can make it coherent.
10 The Room (25%)
Perhaps the most famous so-bad-it’s-good movie ever made and for good reason. The subject of The Disaster Artist, writer, producer, director, and star Tommy Wiseau made something so unintentionally fascinating it transcended genre and form.
Tuxedo football-tossing games, inexplicable conversations, overlong softcore weirdness primarily featuring Tommy’s glutes, clueless characters, and whiplash tonal changes confound the watcher at every turn. It must be seen to be believed.
9 Birdemic: Shock & Terror (19%)
Birdemic has everything you could want in a bad movie. The special effects are so terribly unconvincing that they mock the phrase itself. The acting so painfully bad you’ll hope it was the first take.
For half the story the audience is bombarded with some of the most hamfistedly moralistic messaging ever seen in a movie and then it becomes something entirely funnier as birds straight out of a 1996 windows screensaver assault the heroes. You can’t prepare for Birdemic, and it wasn’t prepared for us. An instant classic.
8 Wish Upon (19%)
One of the more modern movies on this list–but no less of a certifiable Bad Movie Classic as a result–Wish Upon is a fairly derivative teen horror movie about a musical wish box that acts like the famous Monkey’s Paw, with the tone and plot straddling a line between Final Destination and Goosebumps. In this respect, it’s quite normal but this is a movie where it’s best to turn on the subtitles because it would be a crime to miss any of its howlingly hilarious dialogue.
Unconvincing teenage slang always sticks out like a sore thumb in screenplays and there are few movies that hinge on it as hard as Wish Upon does. Lines like “Maybe in the multiverse, neither of us farted” are magnificently excruciating, not to mention the neverending world-class insults such as “I mean, she’s supey smegma. Like, ultimate smegma.”
7 The Happening (17%)
Writer and director M. Night Shyamalan had been falling out of favor with both critics and audiences for some time before The Happening came out. But, for many people, this confounding take on the Hollywood disaster movie was the final straw. For others though, it was a landmark in an emerging genre of almost avant-garde comedy, regardless of whether or not it was intended to be.
Performances are, again, a big highlight in this bigger-budgeted Birdemic, and made all the more interesting and entertaining by the fact that they’re coming from remarkably expensive and experienced actors. Though it’s easy to see how anyone could struggle with the material. The non-sequiturs alone in Shyamalan’s increasingly nonsensical script are enough to make a person’s head spin, and that’s not counting one of the most famously underwhelming plot twists in movie history.
6 The Wicker Man (15%)
Not to be confused with Robin Hardy’s 1973 original movie The Wicker Man, which is by all rights a classic of the horror genre, this 2006 remake starring none other than the overacting champion of the world himself, Mr. Nicolas Cage, was famously hated by critics and general audiences on release.
Part of this is certainly because of its direct link to a much better movie, which this can be viewed as some kind of tarnishing of, but the 2006 version of The Wicker Man is no ordinarily bad movie. Its bizarre storytelling and performance choices denote a far less experienced director and star than it had. But, as many of the now-infamous clips of Cage’s acting in the movie demonstrate, it has a strangely compelling energy running through it that often results in hilariously unexpected moments.
5 Batman & Robin (11%)
Batman & Robin was so bad that it put Batman movies in a deep freeze for several years. Joel Schumacher went full camp with his second effort and nobody in the cast takes things seriously, save for a few select scenes with Bruce and Alfred. But otherwise, it’s ice and plant puns all the way!
Don’t watch this if you adore Batman and need his image somewhat protected. Definitely watch this if you want to laugh at tacky word-based puns and misplaced sixties razzmatazz.
4 The Incredible Melting Man (7%)
No one can ever accuse The Incredible Melting Man of false advertising, except for maybe the “incredible” part. But, mostly, the audience gets what it pays for here.
Released the same year as Star Wars, this sci-fi story of a radioactive astronaut who wanders around the hills attacking people and, well, melting is as unremarkable as they come, if a little humorous due to its simplicity, but the copious make-up effects that it entails, some of which were from the renowned Rick Baker, have helped it to stand out as a grossly entertaining oddity from an era of significant progress in genre filmmaking.
3 Troll 2 (6%)
How could they possibly top the grandeur and majesty of Troll? Well, this wasn’t it. Definitely a good laugh though.
Start by removing all the trolls, add in wonderfully ‘blarty’ keyboard music, make every actor both weird to look at and behave in ways that defy explanation and you’ve got the foundations of Troll 2.
2 Battlefield Earth (3%)
Are you ready for tilted cameras and goofy Scientology aliens!? What if it sprinkled in an Oscar-winning actor giving a Razzie-winning performance? Whatever justification you need to waste your time with this movie will be rewarded in full.
Battlefield Earth is a triumph of wrong decisions for an entire blockbuster-length feature. The story makes no sense, there are plotholes galore, the aforementioned cameras have one leg shorter than the other for 97% of the movie. And those are just the filmmaking gaffes. John Travolta will never be the same after watching this one.
1 Manos: The Hands Of Fate (0%)
0%, people! The movie that puts the ‘cult’ in cult classic. When a suburban family spends the night at a little house with the confusingly-kneed (yes, that) Torgo, their lives are forever changed. As will yours, if you manage to sit through this entire thing.
Every other movie here has some redeeming features in some form, but not Manos. Acting? Insipid. Storyline? Incomprehensible. Editing? A testament to wrongness. Music? Bad and used in ways that human ears were not meant to suffer through. And yet, somehow, beyond all likelihood it forces laughter from you whether you want it to or not. It’s endlessly bizarre. Take your fate into your own hands and dare to watch this monument to bad filmmaking.