Bad movies can be an art form. Sometimes you are in the mood to watch a challenging biopic or a depressing documentary, but other days you want nothing more than to turn off your brain and turn on a movie so bad you can hardly believe it was ever greenlit. Oh, the sweet power in daring to be the worst.
‘Miami Connection’ (1987)
This indie martial-arts flick was a total flop on initial release and remained unseen for decades — until Drafthouse Films restored it in 2012. Inevitably, “Miami Connection” became an underground cult favorite. “The plot centers on a tae kwon do-themed synth-rock band called Dragon Sound and the group’s 10-fisted battle against an evil Florida empire of cocaine-dealing motorcycle ninjas,” said Zack Carlson at Wired. “Now, ask yourself why your eyebrows just leaped up when you read that sentence. Because it sounds bad? No. Because it sounds incredible.”
‘Road House’ (1989)
“Road House,” the story of a tough guy hired to clean up a rowdy roadside bar, was recently remade starring Jake Gyllenhaal in Patrick Swayze’s stead. But the new version fails to “capture the B-movie spirit of the original,” said NPR. The 1989 action landmark is still beloved for its colorful characters, campy violence and incessant onslaught of face punches. “It’s dumb and satisfying, a straight-no-chaser shot of sex and violence,” NPR added.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
Sign up for The Week’s Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
‘Troll 2’ (1990)
This low-budget lark follows a family vacationing in a small town called Nilbog (goblin spelled backwards), where they discover the inhabitants are man-eating monsters. The actors are all non-professionals who do everything in their power to recite lines as robotically as possible. (“Poor Darren Ewing’s elongated ‘Oh My God!’ may be the film’s most famous crime against acting,” said SyFy.com.) Director Claudio Fragrasso and his Italian film crew spoke little English, and the American cast appears noticeably confused. There is no “Troll” preceding this film; it emerges, inexplicably, as a sequel. There are also no trolls.
‘Showgirls’ (1995)
Paul Verhoeven’s erotic thriller is a camp- and sequin-infused, chaotic romp. It follows the transformation of Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley), a Las Vegas stripper on a quest to become a star, and received a record 13 Razzie Awards nominations. Many kids grew up watching the NC-17 melodrama on basic cable, where floating bras were drawn over the topless actresses. The film has earned cult status due to its “big budget yet inherently trashy premise, quotably absurd dialogue ridiculous characters … [and] lavish musical numbers,” said The Guardian.
‘The Room’ (2003)
Tommy Wiseau’s “The Room” is perhaps the most infamous movie on this list. In a true auteur effort, Wiseau wrote, directed and starred in the project that “spawned seemingly endless viewings at midnight showings around the world, where fans quote the film’s garbled script by heart,” said Vox. To put it on an even higher pedestal: “It is one of the most important films of the decade,” Ross Morin, a professor of film studies, said to Entertainment Weekly. “‘The Room’ is the ‘Citizen Kane’ of bad movies.”
‘2012’ (2009)
“2012” was released after an online panic arose over the Mayan calendar’s alleged end of the world prediction date of December 21, 2012. It was ultimately nonsense, but disaster master Roland Emmerich took that fear and ran with it, directing an epic apocalypse blockbuster full of improbable moments like a tsunami consuming the entire planet and a limousine driving through an active earthquake unscathed. “Like all the best disaster movies, it’s funniest at its most hysterical,” said Roger Ebert. “This one ends the world, stomps on it, grinds it up and spits it out.”
‘Cats’ (2019)
The popularity of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Broadway musical “Cats” has always been mysterious, but even more mysterious is why director Tom Hooper thought it would make a good film. Instead of putting distinguished actors Sir Ian McKellen and Dame Judi Dench in cat costumes, Hooper employed the use of skin-crawlingly creepy special effects to create “transmogrified CGI human-cat hybrids,” said The Guardian. The result is somewhere between a waking nightmare and an acid trip, which plenty of viewers embraced. “Watching ‘Cats’ is like a descent into madness,” said a Collider review.
‘Irish Wish’ (2024)
Lindsay Lohan rose to fame as a child star, oscillating between two roles in “The Parent Trap” with aplomb. She then disappeared from the big screen for many years, before finally reemerging to star in Netflix holiday projects. 2022’s “Falling for Christmas” marked her first role in a major production in over a decade, and this year’s March release — tied vaguely to St. Patrick’s Day — continued the pattern. The film is so bland and unconvincing, it’s almost hallucinatory. “Irish Wish” is a “crypto-fascist work of art cluttered with … dialogue that could have only been written by a malevolently programmed artificial intelligence,” said Vulture. Who wouldn’t want to watch that?
