My bad movie cannon (UPDATED for 2025)
Terrible movies are pretty much their own subculture at this point. From podcasts to YouTube channels to subreddits, there is no shortage of material for fans of movies that don’t quite land for whatever reason. But if you’re new to watching bad movies, where should you start? I’ve watched a ton of bad movies over the years, so let me be your guide.
Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966): Like a lot of millennials and gen-xers, my first encounters with terrible movies came courtesy of the Comedy Central (back when it was called the Comedy Channel) and later Sci-Fi Channel (now SyFy) show Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K). Manos: The Hands of Fate tends to be a favorite among MST3K fans, and it’s not difficult to see why: it was written and directed by Hal Warren, a fertilizer salesman from Texas who made a bet with a screenwriter that he, a guy who had never made a horror movie, could make a horror movie. Warren did, sort of: Manos is nominally a story about a family getting lost on vacation, accidentally getting trapped at a cult’s compound, then trying (and failing) to escape as cult leader The Master returns to enact a mysterious ritual with his many wives. Unsurprisingly, this was the only movie Warren ever made. At least he gave himself a starring role as the dad—although the real standout here is John Reynolds as Torgo, the Master’s awkward satyr assistant who delivers every line with more creepiness than the last. I should note that “Manos” is the Spanish word for “hands,” making the film’s actual title Hands: The Hands of Fate.
The Apple (1980): I first learned about The Apple in 2007, when my friend Amy, upon hearing that I’d never seen it, practically screamed, “ANNA, YOU HAVE TO WATCH IT, YOU WILL LOVE IT BECAUSE IT IS TERRIBLE.” The Apple is many things: a musical with some of the least catchy but also most over-the-top music ever put to screen; a dystopian story about an American Idol-style competition run by an evil corporation in the not-too-distant future of 1994; a Biblical allegory that doesn’t quite add up. Like many of the films on this list, it must be seen to be believed. Unpopular opinion: The “BIM’s On the Way” song at the start of the movie slaps. The other songs decidedly do not.
Showgirls (1995): One of Paul Verhoeven’s worst movies, which is saying something. It’s a movie that tries so hard to be “sexy” that it just comes off as the least erotic thing ever filmed. Its two-hour and eleven minute runtime feels like four hours. Elizabeth Berkley’s lead performance as Nomi is the moldy cherry atop this mud sundae; she is clearly trying SO HARD to separate herself from her Saved By the Bell days that it’s not at all surprising that this movie torpedoed her film career in a spectacular fashion. Also of note: Kyle MacLachlan’s atrocious hair and even worse overacting; all of the supporting characters commenting on how Nomi’s dance skills are SO INCREDIBLE even though her moves are very much not that; the pool sex scene that is perhaps the least erotic thing ever captured on film.
An American Werewolf in Paris (1997): I’m not sure if I have an accurate description of this in-name-only sequel to the 1981 horror classic other than impressively bad and aggressively late-‘90s. This movie cannot decide whether it wants to be a gritty horror, a horror-romance or a bro comedy—-and then tries to be ALL THREE within its 102-minute runtime. Add in the wooden lead performances of Tom Everett-Scott and Julie Delpy (two actors who have been great in other projects, but are…not good in this movie), the bizarre visual effects sequences where viewers are occasionally treated to a first-person view of yellow, grainy werewolf-vision, and the questionable creature design choices (the werewolves look like dog-gorillas on steroids)—-and you’ve got this movie.
Face/Off (1997): Director John Woo has made some good movies. This is not one of them. On one of my favorite episodes of the podcast How Did This Get Made, co-host Jason Mantzoukas described Face/Off as “a movie that starts with Nicholas Cage’s character KILLING A CHILD…and it only gets better from there,” which is an accurate assessment. You’ve got Nicholas Cage doing his weird shit as only he can; you’ve got John Travolta acting poorly. Their characters’ faces are surgically switched, and each man has to assume the other’s identity for REASONS. Since this is a John Woo movie, there is (of course) an action sequence that is beautifully shot, but sadly, hammy acting ruins Face/Off’s one great scene (not to mention the rest of the movie).
The Boondock Saints (1999): Willem Dafoe is one of my favorite actors, and he has also starred in many awful movies. In this one, he plays an over-the-top straight gay FBI agent sent to Boston to investigate why mob bosses, hardened criminals and other assorted bad guys keep winding up dead, and it’s because a pair of brothers (Sean Patrick Flannery and a pre-Walking Dead Norman Reedus) have decided to mete out some classic vigilante justice against said bad guys. It’s like Pulp Fiction without any of the originality and even more gratuitous violence. There is one scene where Willem Dafoe has to go undercover in drag, and it is entertaining and really fucking weird at the same time. The “THERE WAS A FIREFIIIIIIIGHT!” scene is also a classic.
The Room (2003): Most bad movie fans know this one as “the Citizen Kane of bad movies,” and that still seems like a pretty accurate description. A “romantic thriller” with a plot that could have been dreamed up by a men's rights subreddit, The Room follows Johnny (played by the film’s writer and director, Tommy Wiseau) as he discovers that his two-timing girlfriend Lisa is having a torrid affair with his best friend Mark. If you’ve seen the “You are tearing me APART, Lisa!” or “Oh hai, Mark” memes floating around the internet during the last two decades, this film was the source.
Dreamcatcher (2003): Legendary horror author Stephen King wrote the book upon which this film is based while he was recovering from being hit by a car and on an assload of painkillers, and wow does that explain this disaster of a movie somewhat! Speaking of assloads, this is a movie about some friends who go to a remote cabin in the woods for a dudes’ weekend and find themselves battling tentacle parasite aliens that prefer to enter hosts through their…um…backsides.
Fateful Findings (2013): Las Vegas-based architect and indie filmmaker Neil Breen is perhaps the 2010s version of Tommy Wiseau, although he’s been more prolific since there is a moviegoing public eager to support his weirdly earnest movies. Naturally, all of Breen’s films feature him in the lead role as a brilliant hacker (Double Down; Fateful Findings), alien super-being (I Am Here….Now; Pass Thru), or AI entity (Twisted Pair) who has been sent to Earth to save humanity or something. Fateful Findings is about a guy who has a magic rock that gives him special powers; reunited with a childhood friend, he begins a quest to uncover government secrets and bring the powerful and corrupt to justice. As Nathan Rabin writes at Rotten Tomatoes, Fateful Findings is, at its core, a “political thriller with no politics.” If you want to see a horrendously green-screened montage of crooked politicians, bank presidents, and CEOs shooting themselves in the head at press conferences, this is the movie for you. It’s also the only movie I have ever seen where a bunch of laptops get destroyed by the lead character for no apparent reason.
Cats (2019): This was the last movie that I saw in an actual theater before the Covid-19 pandemic came to the U.S. (No regrets.) Here’s the thing: when I was an impressionable 11 year-old back in the late 1990s, my mom and I saw the stage musical version of Cats on a trip to New York City. From that point on, I was extremely into that musical for about a year and a half. If 11 year-old me could time travel and watch Tom Hooper’s film adaptation of Cats, they would hate it, perhaps even more so than adult me did when I watched it in 2019. Everything about Cats is awful, including:
The casting: Jennifer Hudson is a great vocalist, but does she have the acting chops to bring the washed-up melancholy of Grizabella to the screen? Sadly, she does not. I don’t know why the casting directors thought audiences would want to see Jason Derulo as Rum Tum Tugger, or Rebel Wilson as Jennyanydots. The less said about James Corden’s Bustopher Jones, the better (the joke is that his character is FAT, get it?). I’m also not sure what Idris Elba, Dame Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellan are doing here other than consigning their own acting legacies to the litterbox, but hey, a paycheck is a paycheck.
The visual effects: floating fur faces, HELLO (and goodbye because what the fuck).
The production design, which looks like someone who macro-doses LSD regularly took care of…well, everything. How much neon is too much neon? I don’t know if I can answer that question after having seen Cats.
Every single directing choice made in this movie is bad, and Tom Hooper’s inability to properly film dancers in a musical where THE DANCING IS PART OF THE WHOLE THING (BECAUSE WHAT OTHER MUSICAL IS SO LASER-FOCUSED ON CAT/HUMAN HYBRIDS HORNILY GRINDING ON EACH OTHER?) is one of the most glaring errors.
Megalopolis (2024): This is likely to be Francis Ford Coppola’s last film. Too bad it’s a real legacy-ruiner in a myriad of ways: the clunky dialogue that sounds like it was written by ChatGPT prompted to sound like a pretentious philosopher; the visual effects, which are a few steps up from those you find in SyFy original movies; the EXTREMELY WEIRD acting choices that every single cast member makes. My personal favorites are this exchange between Adam Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel’s characters, and Jon Voight’s line delivery of “Whaddaya think of this boner I got?”. Megalopolis is the work of a writer/director who wants to engage with big ideas, but doesn’t follow through on any of those ideas at all. Coppola sold part of his winery to fund this movie (yikes). He is also adamant that the film will not be released onto any streaming platform or getting a physical media release, because he feels that it MUST BE SEEN IN A THEATER for the full experience. Okay! Big talk for a guy who hasn’t made a good movie since the early 1990s! There are ways to track it down if you know what rhymes with “snore Ent.”
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