There are plenty of really bad movies out there, but few transcend their awfulness, and loop back around to being so bad they’re good. Movies that are so unavoidably bad, that you can’t help but watch. Best experienced when exceedingly drunk (or using other substances), with a group of friends, and a willingness to yell at the screen and throw things, these 16 movies are so hilariously bad that they’re amazing.

16. Beast of Yucca Flats

We really do owe MST3K a debt of gratitude for introducing us to so many of these truly awful films, like the wonderfully poorly conceived Beast of Yucca Flats. It starred frequent Ed Wood collaborator Tor Johnson, and made almost no sense at all. It starts with a murder scene, which is never mentioned or dealt with again. People are frequently badly injured by gunfire, only to be fine in the next scene. The entire film was shot silently, with sound effects and dialogue added afterwards, so whenever a character speaks, they’re either off screen or facing away from the camera, in order to avoid problems with syncing the audio. Even gunshots are mostly handled off camera, for the same reason.

15. Santa Claus Conquers The Martians

I think it takes a very special kind of person to decide that having a movie about Martians kidnapping Santa Claus is a good idea, especially when you don’t have the budget to do it. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians deserves a permanent spot on everyone’s Christmas viewing list, preferably after consuming vast quantities of very strong egg nog, so you can laugh your ass off at the fight scenes made dramatic by shaking the camera, and the wonderful absurdity of the plot. Kidnap Santa Claus to make presents for the children of Mars! Genius! And the Martian’s names! Momar, the mom Martian; Kimar, the king Martian; Girmar, the girl Martian; and Bomar, the boy Martian. Lucky thing there are only two kids.

14. Gymkata

When an athlete wants a vanity movie, it’s generally about the sport they’re good at, but in the 80s, everyone wanted to be a ninja, so when Olympic gymnast Kurt Thomas got into the acting game, it was a martials arts flick. That’s right, they combined karate and gymnastics into Gymkata! Since it’s a fighting style based on performance gymnastics, they had to fill the movie with locations that just happen to have the appropriate gear for Thomas to use — like how Jackie Chan films are always in ladder factories. The utter pinnacle of this was the fight scene on a pommel horse. That’s right, Thomas fights off a mob of angry Eastern European peasants from a pommel horse.

13. The Wicker Man

Man, Nic Cage, what happened to you? You used to be a legitimate actor, grabbing an Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas, being nominated for Adaptation, not to mention starring in actually good films, like Lord of War, Face/Off, and Raising Arizona. I guess he’s pretty badly in debt, which shows why he’ll sign on for just about anything, like the completely unintelligible remake of The Wicker Man. The original Wicker Man was a terrifying existential horror film that influenced a generation of scare-mongers. The remake was hilariously crap, and worth it just to see Cage ridiculously overact at every possible point, chewing up scenery like nobody’s business. Plus, you know, the bee mask.

12. Manos: The Hands of Fate

Another film brought to light thanks to the good folks at MST3K, Manos was produced by a fertilizer salesman on a bet, starring inexperienced actors, and a crew who had next to zero experience making movies. The audio and video are completely out of sync, and a number of scenes have exactly nothing to do with the plot, and are shown then completely ignored. It’s a horror film about a family stumbling on a polygamist occult group in the wilds of Texas, before eventually falling prey to “The Master”. And there’s a requisite wrestling scene of women in nightgowns, a sure sign of a classy flick. The whole thing was shot for just $26,000, which was nothing, even in 1966 terms. It’s just so gloriously pointless, like the couple making out in a car who pop up twice, but are never mentioned. Or that all dialogue and sound effects were added in post production. It’s a gleefully stupid movie, and hilarious to watch.

11. Hobgoblins

When you don’t have the budget to do a decent Gremlins-ripoff, you really shouldn’t try, because without a decent flow of cash behind you, there’s nothing making your sock-puppet villains look in the least bit scary. The titular hobgoblins are poorly constructed monsters that look like they were made by a bunch of grade school kids during a crafts period. These wonderfully non-scary creatures make your wildest dream come true, but turn it against you, killing you. When your movie has almost no budget, it gets kind of hard to show a person’s wildest fantasy in all the grandeur you would expect from such an event, so instead the stars are just all incredibly boring people, wishing for the utterly mundane. The clothing in particular is absolutely amazing, and it’s almost worth watching the movie just for the 80s stripper-wear.

10. The Conqueror

A movie so bad, it gave all the actors cancer. No, seriously, all the outdoors scenes were shot downwind from a nuclear testing site, and a huge number of people involved with the film came down with the Big C, three times the normal rate of the disease. None of that really changes how godawful it was, and casting John Wayne as Genghis Khan? Who the hell thought that was a good idea? And the sets look far more like Utah than they do anywhere near Mongolia. Wayne’s horrific moustache deserves and entry of its own, and the acting and writing in this film were utterly, utterly horrible.

9. Mac and Me

A low budget flick trying to cash in on the success of ET, Mac and Me was so deep in the pockets of corporate sponsors, it came out covered in lint and gum wrappers. See, this wasn’t so much a movie as a 95 minute long love song to McDonalds, Skittles and Coke — including a completely unexplained five minute dance sequence with Ronald McDonald in the middle of the movie. To avoid having to actually make the alien walk at all, the dummy was just strapped to a cart and rolled everywhere, which was just kept out of shot.

8. Toxic Avenger

Troma could rock this entire list on their own, as the kings of horrible and awesome films. Every single thing they touch is pure genius in its own twisted way. None more famous than Toxic Avenger, a weeny kid who falls into a batch of toxic waste, and emerges a horribly misshapen super hero. Filled with completely unnecessary gore and sex, Toxic avenger is 80s cinema at its absolute worse, and it’s completely okay with that. It’s over the top, gross, and utterly, wonderfully low brow, with constant inventive killing scenes. Yeah, it’s utterly horrible, which makes it great. And somehow it got made into a short lived ecological kid’s cartoon.

7. Street Fighter: The Movie

There’s a pretty good rule of thumb that any movie based on a video game will suck, and man, the original Street Fighter movie just about defined that. Despite having some decent acting weight behind it (the amazing Raul Julia, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Kylie), the movie blew proverbials. The plot made no sense, and had no connection to the game’s already thin story. Characters were only vaguely based on their video game counterparts, and the worst part was that the fight scenes were utterly horrendous. Seriously, if you’re going to make a movie about a fighting game, at least hire a decent fight choreographer so you can get some good scenes in there. Instead you have a cast where only one person knows how to fight, so the rest of the film is just people flailing at each other stupidly.

6. Double Dragon

Everything I said about Street Fighter goes for Double Dragon. Based on a game? Check. Useless acting? Check. Stupid plot? Check. Horrible, horrible special effects? Check. Fighters who have never thrown a punch in their lives? Check. They had the T-1000 as a villain which should have made it easy to have an awesome bad guy, but just…no. Set in a post-apocalyptic LA of 2007, where Police rule the day and gangs rule the night! Absolutely everything about this film is wonderfully bad, with day glo gang members, cheesy special effects, and stars who have never even been in a fight. I will give it one thing: Alyssa Milano looks pretty freaking hot with short hair.

5. Breakin’ and Breakin’ 2:Electric Boogaloo

Oh my lord, the Breakin’ movies. Never before have such hideous 80s fashion disasters been committed to celluloid. Dudes in belly shirts, horrible earrings, MC Hammer pants everywhere! It’s horrible! Every scene in these films just serves to get towards the next dance scene, all of which are performed with absolutely hilariously dated flair. The second one takes it out, though, for having the most clichéd 80s plot ever — the evil uptight developer wants to bulldoze the community center! Has anyone ever actually gone to a community center? I only know that they exist from movies like this, and from what I understand their sole purpose is to become a rallying point for when the man tries to knock them down.

4. Cool as Ice

A vanity project from Vanilla Ice, this loose (*loose*) remake of Rebel Without A Cause had a hilariously outfitted Vanilla rocking into town on a crotch rocket, upsetting all the delicate squares, and romancing the local belle. Every single line that comes from Vanilla Ice’s makes you want to smack the pompous twat round the upside of his hair, ideally knocking off that stupid metal plated cap, and ruining his fade. With an outfit as stupid as his forced lingo and completely lacking in any street cred, it’s like watching Justin Beiber try and be a Blood. Just isn’t happening. Which is what makes this movie so bitterly hilarious, and if you can make it through an entire showing without yelling at Vanilla Ice or cracking up laughing, you’re a better person than me.

3. Plan 9 From Outer Space

For decades, Plan 9 was the king of bad movies, an unbelievably low budget flick that set the bar so low that even with $10 and a handycam, you couldn’t help but stumble above it. It’s Ed Wood at his finest, complete with knocked over sets, unintelligible plot points, liberal use of stock footage, and Tor Johnson stumbling around bumping into things. The best part is that Bela Lugosi died while it was being made, so Wood cast a stand-in — his dentist, who looks about as much like Bela Lugosi as he does Bella Swan. The continuity errors and general low-budget feel of this film are the stuff of legend, like how the UFO is described as looking like a cigar, even though it’s clearly a disk. Or the opening narration, which drops the words “future” something like 10 times in one paragraph.

2. The Room

In 2003, Tommy Wiseau wrote, produced, directed, and starred in one of the worst movies of all time. The Room. It…just…there are no words for how bad this is. Characters get introduced as multiple different people. Emotions shift rapidly from sentence to sentence. Wiseau is completely unintelligible, alternating between mumbling and yelling his way between the scenes. What the hell is with the drug dealer stuff? Or the breast cancer subplot, which is mentioned once, and never again? Apparently all the actors had next to no experience, and the role of Mark was only cast 72 hours before the filming started, and was a friend of Wiseau’s. After being so utterly mocked and derided for being a festering shitheap of a movie, Wiseau started claiming that the entire thing was intentional, an ironic black comedy. Everyone (and I mean everyone) involved with the $6 million flop says otherwise.

1. Troll 2

Could there ever be any doubt? Hell, there’s even the documentary about it, called “The Best Worst Movie.” Everything about it is gleefully horrible, and if you haven’t made a midnight showing of it around you anywhere, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Troll 2 (which neither contains trolls, nor is a sequel) has monsters that look like they were made of burlap sacks, and features the only time ever when eating a bologna sandwich has saved the day. A number of the kids involved grew up into hipsters, so the guy who famously yells OOOOOHHH MYYYYYY GOOOOOODDD at one point now has a twitter account as ArnoldOMG, and the main kid made the documentary and comes along to many showings to ironically mock the flick he was in.

Written by Tim on October 31st, 2010 | Tagged as: Popular Culture