Alert reader Ed suggests:
We’re having a small exchange of comments on the announcement of the new Rifftrax of “Dark Power.” There were a couple of comments as to Rifftrax introducing, even people who thought they’d seen it all, to bizarre-beyond-belief movies, such as (natch) “Dark Power” and “Santa Claus and the Ice Cream Bunny.” Cinematic Titanic gave me “East Meets Watts” and “Rattlers.” So, what’s the most over-the-top entrée into new levels of weird?
I have noted a time or two that when somebody calls “Manos” or “Fu Manchu” the worst movie ever, it’s because they haven’t seen some of the films being made in places far from Hollywood. Me? I’ve seen the Catman movies.
So what truly truly truly bottom-of-the-barrel movies have you discovered?
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Oh, and I still have my VHS copy of W (also known as W is War). It’s an another one of those odd action films from the Phillipines. It starts out as a sort of Dirty Harry rip-off, throws in a little Straw Dogs, goes through a weird Mad Max interlude, and ends up full-on Rambo II.
A few terrible favorites:
The Chilling (a Christian-themed movie where Linda Blair and Dan Haggerty fight zombies created by cryogenics)
Night of the Demon (basically Boggy Creek 2 with half the budget and a quarter the acting talent, but with the most Bigfoot violence ever committed to film)
Nail Gun Massacre (my favorite low budget slasher film of all time. Visible scripts, flubbed lines, looks in to camera, actors waiting for “action” to be called… it really has everything)
(Dis)honorable mentions: Black Devil Doll From Hell, Goremet Zombie Chef From Hell, and probably the worst attempt at a movie I’ve ever seen: Ax’em.
“GINGERDEAD MAN VS EVIL BONG”
We’re talking maybe 15 minutes of plot at the most, and the rest is just filler. Bad, hard to laugh at filler. Not to mention a lot of archive footage from the first three EVIL BONG films (yes there’s more), and the first GINGERDEAD MAN. There’s also more of those. *sigh*
Tommy Chong appeared in the first EVIL BONG, so he gets a couple laughs. Gary Busey was in the first GINGERDEAD MAN, but other than that there’s not much to say about it.
Even with the MST3k riffs, I still have a very difficult time watching “Hamlet”. The dull, drab, black n’ white films are the worst. “The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living & Turned Into Mixed Up Zombies” is also a whole abysmal level below the normal standard of crap.
I really enjoy both of those films. But yes, the wasp costume is inexcusable.
#28 nominated any Ross Hagen film, which I’ll agree with. A great one of his films for riffing is called Prison Ship (AKA Star Slammer). It’s a WIP film in space, with Ross as a sort of low-rent Darth Vader. Also features MST names like Vivian Schilling and John Carradine (in a posthumous performance). Best actor in the film is Johnny “the Rockabilly Rasputin” Legend as a sort-of space wizard – reminds me of if Gandalf was played by Tommy Chong.
NOTE: there is a little T&A, which you expect from the WIP sub-genre. One scene in this film is so over-the-top gratuitous, it’s laughable in itself.
Warriors of Virture (1997)
Horrific karate kangaroo monsters? Check.
Guy from Braveheart playing half his age and attempting to be attractive? Check.
Rehash of every plot of every martial arts movie made since movies began? Check.
Repeat: freaking KARATE KANGAROOS? CHECK!
Nobody’s mentioned Turkish “re-makes” yet?
Briefly, as I understand it, copyright laws in Turkey are virtually nonexistent so anyone with a mind to can crank out a Turkish version of any movie starring any character he thinks will get butts in seats. I’ve heard tell of something featuring Captain America teaming up with El Santo to fight an evil Spider-Man, who’s taken to killing girls in bikinis. And I recently purchased a copy of the Turkish version of THE WIZARD OF OZ, which is… I mean, they’ve clearly seen the MGM version at least once and they’ve read the book, which is nice, but the whole thing is filmed in the forest and what look like abandoned buildings, the costumes look like they were borrowed from a high school drama department, and instead of singing and dancing, Dorothy and her friends periodically break into traditional Turkish folk dances. And there’s midgets, which should help but somehow doesn’t.
I might as well also mention the truly horrible MGM ‘Our Gang’ shorts from the declining years of the series when the kids were compulsive do-gooders who spent their time teaching moral lessons and staging elaborate kiddie USO shows.
Then there are things like THE GENESIS CHILDREN, which are evil and not funny. It’s literally an attempt to pass off kiddie porn –The ‘stars’ are boy hustlers between the ages of ten and fifteen and spend much of the film completely naked– as an art film. No, I don’t own a copy, thank you, and I don’t know where you can find it.
Anyone remember “Freejack” with Mick Jagger and Emilio Estevez? Talk about a total piece of cheese.
I don’t get to watch a lot of movies anymore, but back in the day it seemed like zombie movies were where talent feared to tread.
Boy that EricJ guy really takes smug, superior nostalgic antagonistic nerd to new levels!
Well, as I was reading postings up to this point, a few soul crushers came to the surface of my memory:
A late 1970s monster movie called “Slithis”.
“Mac”, the McDonalds commercial stretched into a feature length radiation burn.
“C.H.U.D” (“Cannabalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers”).
“Alienator”, featuring our good friends “Rommel”, “Commander Kalgan”, and “Crapout” (“That’s a number 5!!!”).
Finally, just about any Stevie Seagal movie.
@58
Turkish Star Wars
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahawhXzUV8Q
Syfy entry. don’t recall the name really, all i recall is giant mutant gator vs. giant mutated snake. why this genre hasn’t brought in more oscars is beyond me. oh yeah, i was really shocked that the raw star power of Tiffany and Debbie Gibson (helllooo ’80’s) didn’t bag 4 stars for this one.
Perhaps Yeti: Giant of the 20th Century (Yeti – Il Gigante del 20° Secolo)? Starring a guy who looked like Timothy Hutton pasted up with carpet remnants being transported inside a red phone booth suspended under a helicopter? It’s really, really, really bad. If that’s not it, give us all the details you can–I can’t recall any other Dino Kong knockoffs besides A*P*E, Mighty Peking Man, King Dong (don’t ask; AKA Lost on Adventure Island) and Queen Kong, but I enjoy a good hunt.
Personally, I think Godmonster of Indian Flats and Erik Estrada’s Light Blast are excellent choices, but would love to see someone try to riff the insane Taiwanese cartoon (The Story of) Chinese Gods. Does anyone think a subtitled movie can be riffed well? Because Golden Bat (Ogon Batto) is sittin’ right there.
biggest piece of cinematic kryptonite:’Superman 3 or 4?’
(checks Youtube)
Nope–That’s the one. Thanks, I, er……think.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YwSShWuUgA
One down. :)
A heads up for those of you who have Turner Classic Movies. Miami Connection will be on next Saturday night (really Sunday morning). This is the one that will be riffed live in October. And as a bonus we get “Shake Hands with Danger” a few hours later!
http://www.tcm.com/schedule/weekly.html?tz=est&sdate=2015-06-06
‘Black Devil Doll From Hell’, a “movie” I became aware of after seeing the Cinema Snob do a review of it. Written and directed by Chester Novell Turner and shot on the crappiest video camera from the 1980s, it makes anything Coleman Francis made look like a Bertolucci film.
Anything made by Andy Milligan. Must be seen to be believed.
Chupacabra vs. The Alamo (2013)
Eric Estrada collects a paycheck playing a “Texas Ranger”. Apparently there is a secret 200 mile long tunnel between Mexico and The Alamo in San Antonio. The eponymous Chupacabra uses this tunnel to escape from Mexico. I guess he was looking for a job in construction. True to the Made For TV genre there are bouncing boobs, flame filled explosions, and precious little plot. Did I mention the basement? If you ever visit The Alamo and someone asks you where the basement is tell them THERE IS NO BASEMENT AT THE ALAMO! Except in this coprolitic MFTV movie. Savor the scene where Jim Bowie’s Bowie knife is used to stab the goat sucker. I suspect this production was financed by the descendants of Santa Anna.
Hot Rod with Andy Samberg. I wanted to shoot myself long before it was over.
(One Hour Photo with Robin Williams is a close second. Only movie I’ve walked out on.)
(And that God-awful Robin Williams movie “What Dreams May Come.”)
“The Wizard of Mars.”
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059920/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
Astronauts land on a planet, wander under and overground for what seems like an eternity, then meet the titular wizard in the form of John Carradine’s floating head. Carradine then proceeds to monologue for 33% of the film’s running time.
Thank you for mentioning “the Curse of Bigfoot”! Saw it on Chiller Theater in the ’80’s; was so bad I tracked it down on VHS. Was bad, still bad.
No one has mentioned Blood Hook yet? I saw it a few years ago, and found it interesting that although it was made by Jim Mallon and Kevin Murphy, it is really no better than some of the movies they would later riff.
Nukie technically isn’t bottom of the barrel since it has Steve Railsback and Glynis Johns, but it’s still just about as low as you can go while technically making a movie. Curse of Bigfoot goes even past that milestone.
If they found Pee-Wee Herman’s bike in the basement, the movie might’ve redeemed itself.
@ck #17: Believe it or not, “Cube” was a theatrical release! I worked in a movie theater during college, and I remember showing that movie. What a long, nihilistic, boring way to go to a really depressing ending. At the theater where I worked, we would get all kinds of promotional swag for giveaways and such, and we had all these “Cube” boxes that had a shoestring and a button (the button was something the people trapped in the Cube used to suck on to keep from getting thirsty, and the shoestring must have been a similar plot device but I can’t remember.) They also contained a small choose-your-own-adventure style comic book that, you guessed it, you couldn’t navigate through successfully. All paths led to a bloody demise. Fun. I think they showed it a lot on the Sci-Fi Channel (or SyFy) when it went to video, but I thought it was a Canadian movie with a bunch of unknowns. I could be wrong–I’m being too lazy to check IMDB.
As for my vote, I’m still in a “The Room”-induced stupor after the Rifftrax live show. The guys did a brilliant job with it, and I laughed a lot, but wow, I just can’t see how people can watch it over and over again. Especially on video, without the help of Rifftrax, or even a theater of fans at a midnight showing a la Rocky Horror. “Birdemic” is right up there too; it just drags soooo much and feels like it’s 3 hours long. Blerg.
Doesn’t anyone follow somethingawful.com??? There are these “movies” shot on vhs camcorders by the polonia brothers which are just god awful: eg ‘feeders’ and ‘feeders 2 slay bells’ plus more
I always credit Something Awful for getting me interested in bad movies since I missed out on MST3K as a kid. They introduced me to the glorious dungheap that is “Actium Maximus: War of the Alien Dinosaurs”. Unfortunately I can’t recommend that to Rifftrax since the audio is incomprehensible.
Naked Space, aka The Creature Wasn’t Nice. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Creature_Wasn%27t_Nice 3 great minutes of musical comedy smothered by an awful Alien Parody.
If you factor budget and distribution into the mix I’d argue that, pound for pound, “Titanic” and “Pear Harbor ” are truly truly truly at the bottom of the barrel. Seriously, who has damaged more souls, Harold P. Warren or James Cameron? Who has caused more eyes to bleed, James Nguyen or Michael Bay? Sometimes the real enemy can be found hiding in plain sight!
Sompote Sands makes some pretty god awful things that occasionally involve killing animals in the process.
Interesting. I’m a big fan of Cube and Cube Zero (Cube 2:Hypercube was a bit of a disappointment), but I do have a definite nihilist streak in my outlook, certainly metaphysically.
The most incompetently made film that stands out in my mind is Carnage:The Legend of Quiltface which I picked up on VHS for 99 cents. I should have asked for a refund. It’s a bald faced rip off of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre whose most distinguishing feature is its’ lack of a wind sock that results in a near constant whooshing sound that provides about as much entertainment value as anything else in this film.
The movie looks like it was filmed in a desert place that had recently been bulldozed and graded. I can’t remember a single plant or animal anywhere in any scene. Robot Monster looks quite lush by comparison. The movie seems to have been made by a bunch of drunk C- grade college kids who thought getting their hands on a camera meant they were cinematographers. Seriously, Monster A-Go-Go bears a much closer resemblance to a real movie than Quiltface does. The gratuitous nudity is less compelling than that in The Room. The only thing resembling an innovation in the genre is that instead of a survivor girl there is a survivor guy who runs and screams in such a pathetically girly fashion as to embarrass Popeye’s girlfriend. When this character failed to die at the end I felt the movie had against all odds managed to let down the audience one final way. When movie rental places started going big time into DVDs they started unloading their VHS tapes at “please just take these things out of here” prices. I picked up a few pieces of real crap back then, but Carnage/Quiltface holds a unique place in my mind for it’s ability to fail so spectacularly and comprehensively by any conceivable metric. It probably fails the Bechdel test as well.
Well, back in the 1950s, there was this “actor” named Audie Murphy, who got his chance at stardom because he was a hell of a good soldier in WWII. His movies, however, all sucked and his acting was terrible. He did a lot of Westerns so maybe Rifftrax wouldn’t be interested.
Also, I recommend any movie made by Midnight Shamalamadingdong. Signs is the obvious choice – aliens who can be destroyed by water invade a planet that us at least 70 percent water and then pick a spot – Pennsylvania – where water frequently falls from the sky. The Sixth Sense is pretty bad too.
Ever seen “Liquid Sky?” Don’t.
Aside from the nonsense of letting fan grudges extend all the way to Sixth Sense–
One Internet reviewer looking at the trailer for Shyamalan’s “The Visit”–which looked like the creepy good moments of Sixth with the goofy-camp worst moments of The Happening, and the creepy good moments of The Happening with the goofy worst moments of the The Happening–amended his blog column with the warning that he was “absolutely earnest in his review, and any poster who posts THAT joke will immediately have his post removed.”
You can imagine the cheers from his readers.
(It’s time to start doing therapy, like Joel did with cops-in-donut-shop jokes and NBC-Mystery-Movie-flashlight jokes. Oh, and it’s already been pointed out that both 50’s songs were “Ram-a-lama-ding-dong”….Seriously, apart from Tarantino, I don’t know where you’re getting this.)
Y’mean, inside or outside the MST3K “universe”?
For the longest time, I thought Plan 9 From Outer Space was, bar none, the rottenest movie I’d ever seen — hell, it was even officially voted Worst Movie Ever Made in the early ’90s — until I started watching MST3K and discovered stinkers like Manos and Skydivers.
There are quite a few movies featured on MST3K which I first saw on the local “Creature Feature” as a teenager in the early ’70s — such as The Creeping Terror and Robot Monster — which would definitely qualify as rock-bottom awful.
In the course of participating in the “group riffing writing” project over at Club MST3K, I also discovered the sublimely awful cut’n’paste chop-socky stinkburger Ninja Terminator, produced by a man — whose name escapes me now — known to many as “the Ed Wood of martial-arts movies”.
I also recently discovered the 1979 “classic” Starcrash, starring Marjoe Gortner, Christopher Plummer, David Hasselhof and former Bond Girl Caroline Munro, one of many cheap, campy knockoffs made in the late ’70s, attempting to cash in on the Star Wars craze.
As far as “recent” movies — for me, anything I’ve seen in the past ten years — I’d have to include Adaptations, Defending Your Life, Moulin Rouge and Sideways. In fact, while watching Sideways, I violated my own personal rule against free-lance riffing in a movie theater; in the final scene, when the thoroughly unlikeable “sympathetic” protagonist knocks on Virginia Madsden’s door, I couldn’t help blurting out “Don’t answer the door! DON’T ANSWER THE DOOR!”
I’ve even gone so far as to suggest Sideways on the “suggest a movie” page at the RiffTrax Web site, along with the immortal Starcrash.
Btw, Starcrash is available on YouTube, for those of you who have what it takes. (WARNING: DEEP HURTING)
Stay strong, ninja. By sheerest chance I found one lonely copy of The Gamma People on my favorite torrent site. I lost the external hard drive, and it took me TWO YEARS to simply find the torrent again. ALL THE TAGS I COULD THINK OF WERE USELESS, in any combination. Fventually, it happens a second time.
Oh, if you think Starcrash is bad, you’ve never seen Starcrash 2, which is an otherwise unrelated bad Italian sci-fi flick that uses the special effects from Starcrash the same way Space Mutiny used Battlestar Galactica footage. At least Starcrash has Christopher Plummer using his battleship to HALT! THE FLOW OF TIME!
There’s one out there that I would never watch again, but if anybody can identify it for me, I’d like to know the title.
It was a toss-off, shot-on-video POS about teenagers at the beach and I THINK zombies, intentionally shot to be funny. No matter. The big key to this one is that the morons who made it thought it was hilarious to end it by having the “actors” break frame and start comparing notes about how little they were getting paid, and then stomp off. I can’t find it again. I THINK I got it off Something Awful’s movie blog, which gave me some real treasures.
The Worst Thing Ever, however, was The Misery Brothers. I got a VHS copy. I’ve been around the block a few times, gang. But Misery Brothers took me five attempts before I could finish it. This is the single most unwatchable movie I’ve ever encountered, and I mean literally unwatchable. And I used to think that such a thing didn’t exist.
Pretty much every “Seltzer-Friedberg” film.
@88
That would be the legendary Godfrey Ho, who made no less than three “Robot Cop vs Hopping Vampire” films.
The Vulture – guy in a vulture costume, only the costume’s head’s missing, so ultimately it’s about a human sized vulture with the head of an aging scientist flapping around and carrying people off…
Oh, man. I’m the ‘proud’ owner of a copy of White Comanche. My husband and I hosted a showing with friends, and riffing was encouraged. ‘Kill us both, Spock!’ was uttered at least once.
I LOVED FDR. But I like stupid humor. :-/
David DeCosteau’s (as Mary Crawford) A Talking Cat!?! which I discovered on Netflix. It has a couple of fairly known people (Jody from Family Affair and Alice from the X-Rated musical of Alice in Wonderland), a million establishing shots of like 3 places, music played on a Casio, and Eric Roberts doing his part on a phone while drunk(?). There is also A Talking Pony!?! and some Holiday Puppy movies that are all made about the same way!
Also, don’t get me started on the 1313 film series, either. Cougar Cult just places .JPG heads of Cougars on the ladies!
@ck #17 & @AFFA 78: See, I’m with Cornjob (#84). I thought ‘Cube’ was a really well-made indie Canadian psychological drama, and I bought the DVD after seeing it. Sure, it might be a downer in terms of plot and resolution, but that doesn’t make it a bad film. It has subtext and poses some serious questions for the audience, so it’s already miles beyond anything Michael Bay touches.
Can’t speak for either of the sequels, though.
‘The Room’ hurt. I’m glad I’ve never seen it before, and I never will watch it unriffed. It’s so bad that now it’s making me rethink friendships with people that list it as a ‘Like’ on social media.
I’ve watched about two minutes of Wiseau’s *sitcom* ‘The Neighbors’ on Hulu. That’s my barrel bottom submission.
Almost forgot.
“Mad Love” with Drew Barrymore and Chris O’Donnell. Barrymore’s character spends the entire movie whining and threatening to kill herself. I think I pissed my wife off by starting the chant” DO IT…DO IT…DO IT!!!
Luther, The Geek 1990
Filmed on a farm in Iowa.