The Worst Movies Ever Made (That Are Actually Fun)

The Distinction

Every year, thousands of bad movies are produced. Most of them are boring. They fail quietly, inoffensively, and without leaving any impression on the viewer beyond a vague sense of time having passed.

This list is not about those films.

This list is about the rare, the precious, the cosmically improbable: films that are so bad they become genuinely, repeatably, reliably fun. Films you will watch more than once. Films you will force upon friends. Films that will become rituals.

The distinction is everything. A boring bad movie is a waste of ninety minutes. A fun bad movie is a gift that keeps giving. The difference between the two is sincerity. The filmmaker must have been trying. The failure must be earnest. Deliberately bad movies — the Sharknado franchise, the Scary Movie sequels — are excluded. They're in on the joke. We are here for the filmmakers who were the joke and never knew it.

The Criteria for Fun

A bad movie earns the designation "fun" when it produces involuntary reactions:

1. Laughter you didn't plan. Not at a joke. At a creative decision.
2. Quotability. You will repeat lines from these films in contexts that confuse people who haven't seen them.
3. The rewind impulse. You will want to show specific scenes to anyone within reach of your phone.
4. Group amplification. These films are better with an audience. Each additional viewer increases the entertainment exponentially.

The List

The Room (2003)

The gold standard. Every scene produces at least one moment that makes a room full of people look at each other and silently confirm that what just happened was real. The football scene. The flower shop scene. The roof monologues. The love scenes, which occur with a frequency that suggests Tommy Wiseau's screenplay had a quota system.

Fun factor: Maximum. Groups of twenty or more have been documented watching this film while providing real-time commentary that exceeds the entertainment value of most Netflix originals.

Troll 2 (1990)

A family vacations in a town called Nilbog (spell it backward) where vegetarian goblins turn people into plants so they can eat them. The child protagonist defeats the goblins by eating a double-decker bologna sandwich. The grandfather — who is dead — provides guidance via ghost.

Fun factor: The earnestness of the cast's confusion is palpable in every frame. They know something is wrong but cannot identify what.

Samurai Cop (1991)

A film where the lead actor's wig is the most dynamic performer. The love interest appears to have been cast mid-production. The villain's henchmen attack in waves of precisely two. The climactic sword fight features choreography that suggests neither actor had previously held a sword.

Fun factor: Every scene contains exactly one element that is wrong enough to be hilarious and exactly one element that is almost competent enough to be confusing.

Miami Connection (1987)

The twist: this film has a genuine emotional core. Between the motorcycle ninja fights and the rock band performances, there is a scene about a man finding his long-lost father that is sincerely moving. The whiplash between "orphaned taekwondo rock band defeats drug ninjas" and "man weeps at the possibility of familial reunion" is what elevates this from fun to essential.

The Wicker Man (2006)

Nicolas Cage, unrestrained. He runs through the woods. He commandeers a bicycle. He punches women. He wears a bear suit. He screams about bees. At no point does the film acknowledge that anything unusual is happening. At no point does Cage reduce his intensity. The gap between the film's intended tone and its actual tone is wider than any canyon on Earth.

Fateful Findings (2013)

Neil Breen's masterwork is fun in the way that encountering an alien civilization would be fun. You cannot predict what will happen next because the film operates on a logic system that has no Earth equivalent. Characters appear and vanish. Laptops are thrown. The national anthem plays over a press conference where world leaders kill themselves.

Fun factor: Every viewing reveals something you missed, because your brain physically cannot process everything that's happening.

Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2010)

The first forty-five minutes contain no birds. A man drives to work. He goes on dates. He discusses solar panels. Then, without narrative transition, clip-art eagles appear and begin dive-bombing and exploding. The tonal shift from "indie mumblecore romance" to "apocalyptic bird attack" occurs in a single cut.

Fun factor: The anticipation of the birds makes the first half unbearably tense in retrospect.

Gymkata (1985)

The pommel horse scene. If you know, you know. If you don't: a man fights his way through a medieval gauntlet, stumbles into a town square, and finds — inexplicably — a pommel horse. He proceeds to use Olympic gymnastics to defeat an army. The pommel horse is never explained. It does not need to be.

Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966)

This film requires patience. The first twenty minutes are a family driving. Then driving more. Then still driving. But when Torgo appears — knees bending, theme music lurching — something shifts. The film enters a trance state. You will watch it not because it is fun in a conventional sense, but because it fundamentally cannot be looked away from, like a car accident directed by someone who has never driven a car.

Over the Top (1987)

Sylvester Stallone arm-wrestles for custody of his son. He turns his hat backward before each match, and this is treated as a legitimate competitive technique. The film ends with him driving his truck through a wall. Fun is not always sophisticated. Sometimes fun is Sylvester Stallone committing absolutely to the premise that arm wrestling is a viable custody strategy.

The Principle

What makes these films fun — reliably, repeatably, generationally fun — is that they were made by people who believed in what they were doing. Tommy Wiseau believed he was making a great drama. James Nguyen believed he was making the next Hitchcock. Neil Breen believes he is making the most important films of our time.

This sincerity is the engine. Without it, a bad movie is just noise. With it, a bad movie is a window into the magnificent, unquenchable human capacity to reach beyond one's grasp and grab something nobody expected.

A good movie entertains you for two hours. A great bad movie entertains you for the rest of your life.