The 50 Worst Movies Ever Made

The narration is rather forgettable, but at least it offers occasional interesting info (sometimes dubious) about the movie in question. Obviously, such a short list cannot possibly please everyone, and will be omitting many fan favourites, so to complain about why such and such was not on the list is just childish. After all, there aren't 50, but probably around 20,000 truly bad films. Personally, I could complain that "Malcolm X", "Yentl" or any Gus van Sant or Emil Kusturica film didn't make the list, but what's the point? The fun is in anticipating what the next film in the countdown will be...

There were some films I've seen, some that were ripped apart by MST3K, and some that are so obscure I've never heard of them. Some useful tips here...

One criticism is that I'm not sure I can trust everything that was said here. For example, the narrator claims that Bela Lugosi died before "Plan 9" was completed. Utterly wrong. The movie was never even started during his lifetime; Ed Wood used old reels that had nothing to do with it. I wonder how many other pieces of misinformation there are...

Not as entertaining as "It Came From Hollywood", but quite solid.

I have seen most of the movies on this list and agree that they are all terrible. But with less than 1 minute given to each movie, there's no time to actually explain why they are bad. Some only get about 30 seconds which is just silly. Some even feature clips from other movies, leaving the narrator about 15 seconds to say "This is bad". Your time would be much better spent reading similar online articles. I learned about all of these movies from IMDb and movie blogs without ever even seeing a list. Most of the time the reviews were positive but I can usually tell by the title that a movie sucks. If you watch this to discover movies you will need to watch it numerous times because you can't write fast enough. If you are like me and watch it to fondly remember these terrible movies and hear another's opinion, you will be severely disappointed.

This 2004 compilation of 'worst' movies includes many of the usual suspects and doesn't provide much information beyond what is now readily available on Wikipedia, IMDB etc. "Worst" is subjective and I'm sure that many people will object to inclusions and/or omissions (IMO 'Black Belt Jones' (1974) is a reasonably good film for its genre and any cinema-merde list must include 'Manos: The Hands of Fate' (1966)). Clips from these kinds of films are always entertaining, as is the advertising, the 'teasers' and the marketing hyperbole, but this compilation's commentary is smug and superficial. If this is your first look at a collection of this type, it's OK; but if you are already an aficionado of celluloid-crap, this opus offers little new (admittedly, it did inspire me to watch 'Bloodsucking Freaks' on TUBI).

50 Worst Movies Ever Made, The (2004)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Whenever a magazine, critic or documentary tries to come up with a "Best Of" list you know controversy is going to follow. I think this documentary takes quite a bit of heat so let's just get some of the issues out up front. If you're looking for talking heads to explain why these movies are so bad then this isn't the film for you. We really don't even get clips showing us why the films are so bad as this is clearly a public domain documentary as it uses clips from the trailers and adds a few comments over them. The film runs just under an hour and when you consider there are fifty-movies that makes it very clear that not too much time is spent with any of them. I understand why many see the dumbness of any list but I've always enjoyed them simply because I enjoy reading other opinions on films. This one here has the obvious selections like GLEN OR GLENDA?, PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, ROBOT MONSTER, KILLERS FROM SPACE, BELA LUGOSI MEETS A BROOKLYN GORILLA, BRIDE OF THE MONSTER, TEENAGE ZOMBIES, THE WILD WOMEN OF WONGO, EEGAH, THE CRAWLING HAND, TROG and FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE SPACE MONSTER. Now, the debate will always be how many films are worse than what's selected and that's certainly true here. I've seen countless Al Adamson films and God knows he's made many, many bad ones but only Dracula VS. FRANKENSTEIN gets mentioned here. I think many people would agree that this film is one of his better ones or at least more entertaining ones. Ed Wood's PLAN 9 cracks the top five but is KILLERS FROM SPACE really a better movie? I don't think so. Is SPIDER BABY really one of the worst movies ever made? Not to me. We even get some Italian films like GREAT WHITE and THE GREAT ALLIGATOR but anyone who is familiar with the genre will know there are much worse out there. So, there's a lot to disagree about but if you asked 1000 people to name the fifty worst movies ever made then every list would be different. There's certainly a lot more that could have been done with this thing but if you're a fan of bad movies then you'll get plenty of nice rentals here.

The content of the documentary itself is interesting. As a film fan I always am interested in bad films as well as good ones. The problem with this movie is just how it was done.

First of all, there's no rhyme or reason to the order. They're not in order of box office, Rotten Tomatoes rating, or IMDb score. It's just like some guy with Final Cut Pro made an hour long video from some cheap movies he bought and ordered them to his personal opinion. It's little different from the numerous lists on YouTube.

Then, there's no real discussion for the movie. Each segment is basically a minute or two of revealing the movie then pointing out the problems with it. It's almost like whoever made it just went through the Goofs section on IMDb.

Finally, the original content is pretty poor. It's the same lousy animation with the same library sound effects between each segment. Again, nothing that no ordinary person couldn't do with FCP.

It's an interesting subject matter, but I wish whoever made this put some more thought into it.