Most Famous Bad Films List
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Last Updated: 6/22/25
Note:
It's simple and straightforward: the worst of the worst in famous bad cinema history. In order to qualify, the film
has received a rating of less than '7' from me and then must also meet the following criteria:
1. Most people have declared it a bad movie.
2. And I agree with them.
3. It has achieved notoriety.
Multiple parts (i.e. duology, trilogy, etc.) or films in a similar vein can be put together as one if there's a
continuation in the narrative. Miniseries and telefilms are fair game, but documentaries are excluded. Anything
made after the year 2000 will not be mentioned because of the unbelievable avalanche of totally bad films
that persists.
These films have shown awfulness in most, if not all, aspects: acting, characters, screenplay, plot, direction,
editing, cinematography, and so on. They must also be "culturally, historically, or aesthetically insignificant."
Then, I think about cultural phenomenon, uniqueness, infamous movie moments, terrible scenes and/or lines, and a
lack of cinematic power and timelessness.
This list is based on what I have seen so far and is limited to the top 60 with 5 dishonorable mentions in that
order. While ranking the films, I am simultaneously thinking about infamy before lack of quality and lack of
quality before infamy.
Heaven's Gate has been routinely included in just about every Worst Films list there is. There are good
reasons why it belongs there, but I don't view it as a truly awful movie because there have been worse.
Hypothetically speaking, if Platoon was released before The Deer Hunter, Michael Cimino would've
never won anything. As a result, he doesn't get a Wellesian-like free rein to make Heaven's Gate as the
prolix picture it is.
Stop! Or I Will Shoot Your Mom is the most infamous movie of Sylvester Stallone's career. Whoever thought
of this deserves to be shot. The title should be Shut Up! Or I Will Shoot Your Mom. I liked Estelle
Getty in The Golden Girls, but no disrespect to her...she's awful. Apart from Mr. Magoo by Leslie Nielsen,
Estelle plays the most annoying, obnoxious character of all time.
What the fuck was going on in Gus Van Sant's head when he agreed to plagiarize Psycho? Not only Gus did
that abominable piece of shit, but he also went an extra step further to insult Alfred Hitchcock by including a
masturbation scene which is unexplainable. Everybody who was part of the remake should be shamed, and Vince
Vaughn will burn forever in cinema hell for what he did.
Ishtar is a stupid film that falls flat on its face in every scene. There's a feeling of "yeah...okay"
most of the time. Reading up the history behind the scenes is more compelling with Elaine May never directing a
movie again. Hence, Ishtar should've never been made in the first place, and the poster on right says it all.
Yep, this is the most infamous film of the franchise. The tagline of Jaws: The Revenge reads, "This time,
it's personal." What the fuck are they talking about? Didn't Jaws die in the first part? Four different
Jaws films. Four different Michaels. Four different Seans. And Michael Caine's clothes are still dry.
Mario Van Peebles' character unbelievably survives after being thrashed around so much.
My head still shakes in disbelief, befuddlement, and shock all rolled into one. Marlon Brando was a sex symbol
in A Streetcar Named Desire and then reaffirmed it in On the Waterfront. Fast-forward to
The Island of Dr. Moreau forty years later, he's a 500-pound indescribable vat of Larry Drake ugliness.
Not only that, but Brando has also lost his mind for good.
Located in the extreme west of Texas, a piece-of-shit city called El Paso made two contributions to mankind.
The first is a serial killer named Richard Ramirez who's better known as the Night Stalker, and the other is
Manos: The Hands of Fate. Certainly not among those movies that people must see before they die, it's rather
a gigantic waste of time. In other words, there's no reason for it to enter anybody's consciousness.
You know Criterion Collection's reputation went down the toilet when it decided to add this piece of shit to its
library by calling it an "important classic and contemporary film." This is one of the most ridiculous popcorn
junk movies of all time and is an abuse on the eyes, intelligence, and ears. The asteroid is "the size of Texas"?
Yeah...whatever.
Caligula is a trashy sexploitation picture that fails on many levels, hence its much-deserved disreputation.
Moreover, it's so theatrical, nonsensical, unstructured, and free-going that it no longer resembles a film. Random
scenes are followed by more random scenes, making the whole thing a disjointed mess. Any notion of a plot has
gone out of the window.
The first one was fine, but the rest? Jeez. According to IMDb, "Ron Perlman (Konstantine Konali) considered his
work on this movie [6th sequel] 'a public service' by shutting down the Police Academy movies for over
two decades. Perlman said, 'I'm not going to apologize. I did that piece of shit.'" It goes without saying there's
no point to adding more and more sequels to prolong the franchise.
The Wiz is too bizarre. $24 million was budgeted for the film, but they couldn't squeeze five bucks out
of it on light bulbs? At any rate, the film is so dark and ugly that I'm flabbergasted it received Oscar
nominations for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Best Cinematography, and Best Costume Design. The voters must
have been high on crack back then. And we have the mother of them all: the casting of the 33-year-old Diana
Ross in the leading role that's owned by Judy Garland who was 16 at the time.
Richard Burton, Louise Fletcher, James Earl Jones, Paul Henreid, Max von Sydow, and Ned Beatty...all in the same
film. What the hell happened? It's hard to pinpoint what exactly the problem is: the locusts, the trip to
Ethiopia, the boy doing the lasso thing, Kokumo's inconsequential impact, the sync machine, Richard Burton's
deadpan stares, the fancy terrace with almost no fence, or the inane line "The wings are brushing me!"
Written by her adopted daughter Christina Crawford, Mommie Dearest is the first and the most famous
tell-all book about Joan Crawford and the mystique of Hollywood. It obliterated Joan Crawford's reputation.
To soil her image even further is Faye Dunaway's iconic camp performance. Talk about two controlling kooks. The
movie does go overboard at certain times, most especially the "No...Wire...Hangers!" moment.
Trash, stupid, long, juvenile, boring, overblown, nonsensical, excessive, and plain silly, Duel in the Sun
is nothing like the movie poster. Most of the fault lies in David O. Selznick, the ultimate puppet master.
For starters, he was trying to top the success of Gone with the Wind which would never happen. Then,
he was trying to make Jennifer Jones the greatest leading lady of all time when she had no acting chops to
begin with.
Howard the Duck was a massive box-office failure back in the 80's, and everybody made fun of it.
Occasionally, there are funny moments, but the rest is a mess. No question, the grossest scene is when Lea
Thompson was about to commit an act of bestiality with the duck. What a nauseous moment.
"Catch the excitement. Catch the adventure. Catch the Hawk. Bruce Willis. Hudson Hawk." What'chu talkin'
'bout, Willis? Bruce Willis, with all of his four gold looped earrings, actually thought he could write a
story? Ha, that's a laugh! It's impossible to follow the ridiculous plot or what everybody is doing or saying.
Basically, anything goes in spite of rationality. Oh, yeah. Bruce? Just one thing: wipe that stupid smirk off
your face.
Quick! What's the first thing that comes to your mind about Batman & Robin? If you said, "Nipples," then
yep...you are correct. Fans of the franchise have universally voted Batman & Robin as the worst
Batman movie of all time. Joel Schumacher goes overboard with the use of colors. I can imagine him
trying to decide: "What color should I use? Is red good? Or yellow? How about a pitch of orange and some purple?
I feel blue. No! Yes! No! More green! No! More yellow!"
"Yippee!" young Darth Vader yells. In the meanwhile, I don't consider myself as racist, but I have to say this:
Jar Jar Binks acts like a foolish black person in a minstrel show, speaking some of the worst made-up language
I've heard in movie history. There's no way he would've been accepted in any elite circle, let alone be granted
a generalship. "Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic. The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems
is in dispute." Taxation??? Oh, my goodness. Who the fuck cares?!?
I looked at the DVD case to see who the director of Staying Alive was. To my surprise, it's Sylvester
Stallone. After blinking twice, I reread the words, and they still said: "Sylvester Stallone." Yes, that Sylvester
Stallone of Rocky and Rambo fame. Holy shit, he directed a dance movie. Staying Alive fails
on so many levels that it's a train wreck. Forget about the magic of Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever.
It's gone.
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is one of the worst pictures made. It's trash beyond trash and so poorly
directed and edited that I had nightmares afterwards. The acting by the cast is across-the-board atrocious. Pure
nonsense is the dialogue that's written by none other than the moron sock puppet named Roger Ebert. It's the
single number one reason why I never read his reviews or believe any of the shit he says about cinema.
Great balls of fire, what the hell was the poor man thinking? I can't believe that John Travolta still defends
his work to this day. Apart from the money, the only reason for doing the film is that he, a long-time
Scientologist, wanted to make a film that's based on a novel by L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology.
At any rate, Battlefield Earth deserves a place in cinema hell as one of the most famous bad movies
ever made.
Proclaimed as one of the most outrageous and controversial made, Last Tango in Paris, which is better
known as Hey, Marlon Brando Is Fucking Me in the Ass with a Slab of Butter, is a boring, pointless, and
unsexual film. It's not Brando. It's not the girl. And it's not the concept. Rather, the direction, along with
the damn bad dialogue, is what killed the movie. It just goes nowhere. In fact, Marlon Brando said he had
absolutely no idea what Last Tango in Paris was all about. Neither did I.
Cruising is a big disappointment. An even bigger disappointment is Al Pacino. What he did is nothing.
Pretending to be a homosexual character, he never kisses a guy, only to lets him cop a feel of his chest for
one moment, or partakes of oral sex either way. In short, Al Pacino chickened out, plain and simple. Meanwhile,
Cruising is infamous for the mistreatment of homosexuals and transsexuals and the perpetuation of
stereotypes about them.
Well, congratulations, Jack Sholder. He committed the greatest cardinal sin: directing an unintentionally gay
horror picture. Never mind asking about horror in A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge because
there isn't any. It's all about the gay undertones. Yet I thought the movie was supposed to be about Freddy
Krueger? Even the last two words in the title is irrelevant.
You can watch the fat, old John Wayne, a WWII draft dodger, kill Viet Cong in The Green Berets, which
is usually regarded as the first film about the Vietnam War. Many Vietnam vets have lambasted it for being
inaccurate in details. A bland war movie that runs far too long, I have no idea what's going on in most of
the scenes. Psst, John...the sun sets in the west, you fucking racist idiot.
There's a long dragged-out sequence of ridiculousness and pointlessness in Zabriskie Point with the last
ten minutes of stuff being repeatedly blown up in a slow-motion at different angles before closing out with a
sunset. I've been wondering the whole time: was Michelangelo Antonioni mentally retarded? Also, did he watch
2001: A Space Odyssey and Easy Rider too many times and try to emulate them?
During the filming, Montgomery Clift was involved in a serious automobile accident by driving straight toward
a telephone pole which happened on May 12, 1956, setting off the longest suicide in Hollywood history. Elizabeth
Taylor had to remove two front teeth from Clift's throat that were choking him. Afterwards, he was never the
same again, and the filming of this Gone with the Wind wannabe had to be suspended for a few months.
At 2:30 in the morning, two illegally hired Asian kids, ages 6 and 7, were working with Vic Morrow on July 23,
1982, in a scene for Twilight Zone: The Movie, and a helicopter killed them. Steven Spielberg lost so
much respect for John Landis based on what happened that he ceased their friendship. Oh, the movie? Who cares?
Oh, boy...more Friday the 13th insanity. I love the poster on right because the hockey mask is the most
fake I've seen and should be considered as a dead giveaway. Therefore, the fifth part is the
Halloween III: Season of the Witch of the franchise and is a major source of contention among the fans.
The filmmakers have done a good job of making the characters as annoying as possible and then having them killed
pronto. I guess the goal is not to feel bad about it.
The movie has a notorious reputation for being one of the worst book-to-film adaptations ever, but honestly,
it's not that bad. The only biggest misgiving I have about it is the casting of Morgan Freeman. As much as I like
him, his cartoonish character ruins the film. I wish there were more incorporations of well-known
Bonfire phrases such as "social x-ray," "the girl with the brown lipstick," and "the Master of the Universe."
Not taking itself seriously is a major problem throughout. Of the cast, Demi Moore is the only one who thinks
it's a drama picture. No matter how often strippers are naked, it feels so clinical. Ditto for Demi Moore who
looks old and plastic. Replete with manly legs and breast implants (or enhancement?), she puts on a long, boring
dance show before taking her top off, and it's immediately over afterwards. If Demi Moore can't be sexy, then
what's the point?
Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf is an infamous horror movie for one and only one reason: Sybil
Danning. Seventeen is the number of times she rips her top off at the end. Why? I suppose it's to get the
audience to stay through the stupid rock video. There's an occasional random insert every ten minutes of either
the concert or a sex orgy. Sometimes, it's been both. They do nothing but add fuel to the runaway disaster.
No...no...no...the horror. Nothing works in The Bad News Bears Go to Japan. It's a train wreck of
a picture. What the hell was Tony Curtis thinking when he agreed to appear in this steaming pile of crap? I've
been clueless as to why the team had earned the privilege to travel to Japan to play a meaningless game with
tons of dollars wasted to make it happen.
Oh, boy! Who wants to see a penis on Dan Aykroyd's nose? Billed as a comedy, Nothing But Trouble is never
funny and brings a new meaning to the word "tasteless." Forget the cast which includes Chevy Chase, John Candy
(twice as he also plays a drag queen(!)), and Demi Moore. All should be embarrassed of themselves for eternity.
The franchise takes a bizarre detour as Halloween III: Season of the Witch abruptly drops Michael Myers
(well, he makes a cameo via Movie of the Night) and subsequently goes in a new direction. Um, why? Although the
premise is interesting, there's a lot of Invasion of the Body Snatchers going on with many coincidences.
Hook is a rare misfire in Steven Spielberg's oeuvre. For a kid's film, it's far too long to sit through,
clocking at a whopping 144 minutes when it should be 54 minutes shorter. The main fault, despite the lavish
production and several big-name stars, is that it never gels together. Add the annoying child stars into the mix.
And finally throw in the earnestness to make every moment so Mary Poppins special. Then, we have the mother of
them all: Julia Roberts as Tinker Bell. Aaaaargh!
Well done. Reefer Madness has me sold. Marijuana is the greatest menace ever, worse than the Black Death,
syphilis, polio, alcohol, and the dust bowl. Although intelligence is sorely lacking and there are slow parts,
it's a somewhat enjoyable and amusing movie. Dave "Faster! Play It Faster!" O'Brien is effective in a campy way.
Everybody seems to be having a good time. Hence, for a moral picture, Reefer Madness fails miserably.
Yep, this is the worst Superman movie of all time. Nothing works. Every time a subplot occurs, I've
forgotten what happened before that. If a Superman sequel is going to leave out Marlon Brando, Margot
Kidder, Gene Hackman, Ned Beatty, and Valerie Perrine, then it's fair to say the franchise is over. Allowing
Richard Pryor to play a crackhead doesn't help matters any.
No, no, no...absolutely no fucking Madonna. Don't be fooled by her blond hair. Shanghai Surprise sucks.
Whenever Sean Penn is left alone by his then-wife Madonna, the movie works well because he can lead with
relative ease. But as soon as she's back, it falls apart. Hence, Madonna is the worst big-name actress ever lived.
Ah, Virginia, but the story of Shakespeare in Love takes place in 1593 and the colony didn't exist until
1607. Ah, Shakespeare is single and in love with a rich lady, but the real playwright had a wife and three kids.
If you ask me to name some of the worst Best Picture winners ever, Shakespeare in Love immediately comes
to my mind. It's that bad. Hence, Saving Private Ryan should've won.
The tagline of the poster for Boxing Helena says: THE MOST TALKED ABOUT FILM OF THE YEAR. That's funny
because almost nobody saw it in 1993. Boxing Helena is the one that bankrupted Kim Basinger who initially
agreed to star but backed out after reading the script and learning she's required to be nude for some scenes.
Now, when Madonna turns down a film like Boxing Helena, it's a warning for everybody else to stay far
away from the turd.
What the hell was Gus Van Sant thinking? To be fair, he did direct the remake of Psycho which took
stupidity to a new level. Van Sant admitted to being upset with the negative critical response to his film of
which he didn't see coming. Oh, come on. How could he not? Look at Uma's fucking huge thumbs. Start from there,
and realize the magnitude of this...absurdity.
Wow, is Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation the worst ever? In the midst of a dense fog,
Matthew McConaughey constantly screams and loses his shit. It's highly doubtful he was in the right frame
of mind. That stupid mechanical leg of his has to be one of the most bizarre ever conceived in movie history.
So is the moment when a plane came out of nowhere to kill his character. Everybody involved with this crap was
either mentally unstable or on drugs.
Alec Baldwin reportedly told his brother Stephen if he agreed to go ahead with Bio-Dome it would end
his career. Well, the prediction didn't happen exactly as expected, but Stephen Baldwin sure sucks in acting,
having done so many rubbish pictures afterwards. No A-list star would be caught dead appearing on the same screen
with Pauly Shore. He's just so unmercifully unfunny. There's not a single laughter out of this train wreck from
anyone else.
Calling the Guinness Book of Records, we have a winner here: St. Elmo's Fire for the film with the most
unlikable characters. Let me reiterate that: it's about seven worthless recent college graduates with useless
problems. Every time something goes wrong, my answer has been uniformly the same: "Like I care." Remember they
were called "The Brat Pack"? Make that "The Untalented Pack."
The most damning indictment comes from the author of "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy" Isaac Bashevis Singer when asked
about his thoughts on Yentl and whether he liked it or not: "I am sorry to say I did not. I did not
find artistic merit neither in the adaptation, nor in the directing. One thing is sure: there was too much
singing in this movie, much too much. It came from all sides."
Imagine my surprise when I came across a VHS copy of An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn at a flea
market. It was like finding plutonium in the middle of a godforsaken desert. The comments "Hilarious!",
"Outrageous!", and "One of the funniest movies in ages!" are splattered all over the cover. What the fuck are
they talking about? It's nothing but a soporific dreck that revolves around the missing reel of an upcoming
crappy Hollywood blockbuster.
Submitted eleven times to the MPAA, Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III is infamous for being
extensively cut to avoid an 'X' rating. Ken Foree's character is first hacked into pieces, and then he
miraculously survives the bloodbath with only a band-aid on his head not long after. A new ending was shot
without the knowledge of the director who found out about it for the first time while seeing the film at a
theatre in Tennessee.
Valley of the Dolls is about how an actress can go from a big star to a drug junkie, but such films have
been fairly common for decades. Obviously, the focus is on the drug-infested lifestyle that Judy Garland, famous
for playing Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, used to lead. She attempted suicide so many times until one day
that it finally happened through an accidental overdose of barbiturates. No matter what, the film is a mess.
Did they blatantly rip off the idea from A Hard Day's Night featuring the Beatles? The problem with the
five females is they're virtually indistinguishable, at least from a personality standpoint. Not only that, but
the editor also has to make rapid cuts by going from one character to another, therefore making for a
disorientating film. As a result, it has been a madcap of pure nonsense.
Cocktail...now, that's what I call a bad movie. To be fair, it's highly watchable because of the
bottle-throwing crap which is called flair bartending that can be listed among the top ten of pointless skills.
But it's a good thing that Tom Cruise did many impressive films during the 80's and early 90's to wipe
Cocktail away from memory.
Made and released in 1974, I wonder why it's called Airport 1975. In many ways, the film is a disaster,
and I'm not even talking about the airline disaster. Although the first half hour is hilarious and camp, it goes
downhill afterwards. The characters are loathsome, and the plot is stupid. Momentum dies after the small jet
collides with Boeing 747, and the ending is predictable as ever. Oh, my goodness...Linda Blair. Her performance
is so bad and cheesy that it's infamous enough.
Le Mans is a famous bad film in Steve McQueen's résumé. It had no script to begin with. Setting up for an
editor's nightmare, the race was shot with a million feet of film despite the absence of a story. Steve McQueen
wasn't allowed to race in the 24 hours of Le Mans because if he did, the funding for the film would have to be
withdrawn. Virtually granted total control, he wanted every aspect to be perfect yet was more
interested in fucking women and staying high as much as possible.
Uh...The Searchers, anyone? Whatever the point John Huston was trying to make in The Unforgiven,
an appropriate title after all, simply has come down to this: "The only good Indian is a dead Indian." It's an
infamous film because of what happened to Audrey Hepburn. She fell off a horse and subsequently broke her back
which led to miscarriage not long after yet was smoking three packs a day at the time. Hence, it's the only
Western movie of her career.
An all-time bad movie, The Arrangement confirms what I've known all along: without Marlon Brando or James
Dean, Elia Kazan sucks. Instead of them, it's Kirk Douglas putting on a bizarre performance. With the exception
of A Streetcar Named Desire, the director doesn't know what to do with actresses. Deborah Kerr...my
goodness.
A hybrid between Get Carter and a pick of any Ken Russell films, Performance is a good example that's
a product of its time. Worse, it's an unwatchable mess of self-indulgence. I can hardly make heads or tails of
the plot. In fact, there isn't any to speak of. No wonder why the androgynous-looking Mick Jagger didn't appear in a
major picture again for many years.
Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan sucks so violently hard that it hardly qualifies as
a horror picture. The title is misleading. Jason does not take Manhattan but only to show up there to keep
chasing the same characters from the nearly crewless cruise boat which is the Panamanian version of the
Titanic that came out of Bram Stoker's Dracula.
I'm curious about one thing: if The Avengers was based on a British TV show that ran during the 60's, what
made Hollywood think that it would appeal to anyone in 1998? No matter what, the following axiom will always
be true: it's impossible to convert a bad script to a good movie. While watching The Avengers, I had no
idea what was going on, and nothing made sense.
When former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower comes out of retirement to have a meeting to denounce a military
picture for its gross historical inaccuracies, that's when you knew it's in deep trouble. That's what happened
to Battle of the Bulge. The filmmakers claimed it took place on a sunny day on green grass in Spain when
in fact it's supposed to be during the winter in the densely forested, snow-covered Ardennes region of northern
France and southern Belgium.
Tony Richardson fired a stunt coordinator because of his maniac swordplay that killed several horses. He also
fired John Osborne for refusing to rewrite his script because it was too close to the facts as outlined in the
book. (Gee...talk about defeating the purpose.) At one point, the director wanted the Guardsmen at the Battle
of the Alma to wear blue tunics, thinking they would look better on screen than the authentic scarlet. He only
relented when his military/historical adviser, Boris Mollo, threatened to resign.
Dishonorable Mentions:
Diabolique (1996),
Caddyshack II (1988),
Batman (1966),
Exodus (1960),
and
Evita (1996)