The key to a great ‘so-bad-it’s-good’ movie is that it doesn’t know how terrible it is. There’s this constant feeling that someone put unrestrained effort into making it and the fact it’s also so bad can, somehow, make it great in its own way. What must have been entire years of people’s lives and huge amounts of their capital go into what amounts to 100-ish minutes of accidental comedy.
These movies are best enjoyed with friends and an attitude that’s prepared something that’s mindblowing in all the wrong ways, and many are available on streaming services online. Due to their awful ratings on both IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes, they’re also often available for free.
Updated on November 14th, 2021 by Mark Birrell: So-bad-it’s-good movies have become an art form in their right at this point, and the fact that they can only truly be made by accident makes them quite rare too. The best of the worst have, for the longest time, been closely guarded secrets by only the most masochistic cineastes but, in more recent years, the funniest so-bad-it’s-good movies have gained enough notoriety to appear on widely accessible streaming services, and should be sought out for anyone looking for a unique experience.
Fateful Findings (2013)
Rotten Tomatoes score: No critics consensus
• Available to purchase on Prime Video
Writer/director/producer/actor Neil Breen has become one of a number of modern filmmakers to live up to the standard set by the legendary Tommy Wiseau, his distinctly awful idiosyncracies moving beyond ‘so-bad-it’s-good’ to something more akin to ‘so-bad-it’s-art’.
Breen’s low-budget high-ego movies often cast him as some kind of superhuman–or even Christlike–figure but his third movie rather tamely just casts him as the world’s greatest hacker who is able to use his powers to undo all corruption in society. The nonsensical plot is typical of most notably bad productions but it’s Breen’s overall sense of timing, mixed with the awkward performances of the entire cast, that truly elevate Fateful Findings to the realm of unintentional comedy gold.
Samurai Cop (1991)
Rotten Tomatoes score: No critics consensus
• Available on Tubi
This movie has the most luscious hair ever seen on film, and it’s a wig that the main star wears in about half the movie because of reshoots after he shaved his head.
Edited into swiss cheese so that actors could be in scenes together without having shot them as such, you’ll cry laughing at the attempts at comedy and sexiness. Stilted acting from everyone, as well as jarring tonal shifts, make this an iconic favorite of bad movie fans.
Miami Connection (1987)
Rotten Tomatoes score: 68%
• Available on Pluto TV and Tubi
Evil ninjas, ’80s club ‘rock’ so hardcore that one of the lyrics is “friends for eternity, stick together through thick or thin”, martial arts that’s super light on the ‘arts’, about half a dozen shirtless men sharing a miniature apartment, Miami Connection is the leader in all of these fields.
The music is awful but, at the same time, also incredibly catchy and oddly quotable. The actors are clearly giving their all and their failures are so entertaining. The action in the movie is so close to being good but it ends up just too silly, and shot so strangely, that it’s mesmerically confusing. A true classic of so-bad-it’s-good movies.
Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)
Rotten Tomatoes score: 66%
• Available on Pluto TV and Tubi
Ed Wood was a director who couldn’t grasp why he liked cinema so much, but he pressed right on making things anyway and this was his opus. Sets that make liberal use of curtains if they bother with a background at all, narration over far too much of everything, and hilarious effects, makeup, and writing come together in this so-bad-it’s-good movie. One stretch of road gets so much screentime, it should’ve been credited.
The movie’s big ‘star’, Bela Lugosi, died before production ended (or really began) and Wood hired a chiropractor to pull a cape across his face to finish the scenes they needed. Narration connected the loose Lugosi Dracula-ish scenes to a story about grave-robbing aliens and zombies, and of course, it all went tragically wrong.
Jupiter Ascending (2015)
Rotten Tomatoes score: 28%
• Available on Tubi
Huge stars, reliable character actors, a huge budget, and the creative brainpower of the iconic Wachowskis. Jupiter Ascending was meant to be a massive hit when it was released and came close in many ways, but it was quickly revealed to be the definition of a flop.
From Mila Kunis and Channing Tatum’s lack of onscreen chemistry to Eddie Redmayne’s scenery-chewing performance, the movie is a messy experience and not even Sean Bean’s character helping out with mountains of exposition can make it coherent.
The Room (2003)
Rotten Tomatoes score: 23%
Perhaps the most famous so-bad-it’s-good movie ever made and for good reason. The subject of The Disaster Artist, writer, producer, director, and star Tommy Wiseau made something so unintentionally fascinating that it transcended genre and form.
Tuxedo football-tossing games, inexplicable conversations, overlong softcore weirdness primarily featuring Tommy’s glutes, clueless characters, and whiplash tonal changes confound the audience at every turn. It must be seen to be believed.
Wish Upon (2017)
Rotten Tomatoes score: 19%
• Available on Tubi, Crackle, and Fubo TV
Wish Upon is a fairly derivative teen horror movie about a musical wish box that acts like the famous Monkey’s Paw, with the tone and plot straddling a line between Final Destination and Goosebumps. In this respect, it’s quite normal but this is a movie where it’s best to turn on the subtitles because it would be a crime to miss any of its howlingly hilarious dialogue.
Unconvincing teenage slang always sticks out like a sore thumb in screenplays and there are few movies that hinge on it as hard as Wish Upon does. Lines like “Maybe in the multiverse, neither of us farted” are magnificently excruciating, not to mention the neverending world-class insults such as “I mean, she’s supey smegma. Like, ultimate smegma.”
Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2010)
Rotten Tomatoes score: 18%
• Available on Tubi and Prime Video
Birdemic has everything a viewer could want in a so-bad-it’s-good movie. The special effects are so terribly unconvincing that they mock the phrase itself. The acting is so painfully bad it makes the entire cast seem plucked off the street on the day of shooting.
For half the story, the audience is bombarded with some of the most hamfistedly moralistic messaging ever seen in a movie, and then it becomes something entirely funnier as birds straight out of a 1996 windows screensaver assault the heroes.
The Happening (2008)
Rotten Tomatoes score: 18%
• Available on HBO Max
Writer and director M. Night Shyamalan had been falling out of favor with both critics and audiences for some time before The Happening came out. But, for many people, this confounding take on the Hollywood disaster movie was the final straw. For others though, it was a landmark in an emerging genre of almost avant-garde comedy, regardless of whether or not it was intended to be.
Performances are, again, a big highlight in this bigger-budgeted Birdemic, and made all the more interesting and entertaining by the fact that they’re coming from remarkably expensive and experienced actors. Though, it’s easy to see how anyone could struggle with the material. The non-sequiturs alone in Shyamalan’s progressively nonsensical script are enough to make a person’s head spin, and that’s not counting one of the most famously underwhelming plot twists in movie history.
The Wicker Man (2006)
Rotten Tomatoes score: 15%
• Available to purchase on Prime Video
Not to be confused with Robin Hardy’s 1973 original movie The Wicker Man, which is by all rights a classic of the horror genre, this 2006 remake starring none other than the overacting champion of the world himself, Mr. Nicolas Cage, was famously hated by critics and general audiences on release.
Part of this is certainly because of its direct link to a much better movie, which this can be viewed as some kind of tarnishing of, but the 2006 version of The Wicker Man is no ordinarily bad movie. Its bizarre storytelling and performance choices denote a far less experienced director and star than it had. But, as many of the now-infamous clips of Cage’s acting in the movie demonstrate, it has a strangely compelling energy running through it that often results in hilariously unexpected moments.
Batman & Robin (1997)
Rotten Tomatoes score: 12%
• Available on HBO Max
Batman & Robin was so bad that it put the very successful series of live-action Batman movies in a deep freeze for several years. Joel Schumacher went full camp with his second effort and nobody in the cast takes things seriously, save for a few select scenes with Bruce and Alfred. But otherwise, it’s ice and plant puns all the way!
This isn’t really a good choice for hardcore Batman fans. But fans of tacky word-based puns and misplaced ’60s razzmatazz will feel right at home.
The Incredible Melting Man (1977)
Rotten Tomatoes score: 7%
• Available on Paramount+
No one can ever accuse The Incredible Melting Man of false advertising, except for maybe the “incredible” part. But, mostly, the audience gets what it pays for here.
Released the same year as Star Wars, this sci-fi story of a radioactive astronaut who wanders around the hills attacking people and, well, melting is as unremarkable as they come, if a little humorous due to its simplicity. But the copious make-up effects that it entails, some of which were from the renowned Rick Baker, have helped it to stand out as a grossly entertaining oddity from an era of significant progress in genre filmmaking.
Troll 2 (1990)
Rotten Tomatoes score: 5%
• Available on Hulu and Paramount+
How could producers possibly top the grandeur and majesty of Troll? Well, this didn’t do it but Troll 2 was definitely a good laugh for audiences with the right mindset.
It starts by removing all the trolls, adding in wonderfully ‘blarty’ keyboard music, making every actor both weird to look at and behave in ways that defy explanation and these are the foundations of the infamously bad Troll 2.
Battlefield Earth (2000)
Rotten Tomatoes score: 3%
• Available on Netflix
Needlessly tilted camera angles and goofy aliens are mixed with an Oscar-winning actor giving a Razzie-winning performance in Battlefield Earth and seekers of movies so bad they’re good will be fully rewarded by choosing this notorious trainwreck.
Battlefield Earth is a triumph of wrong decisions for an entire blockbuster-length feature. The story makes no sense, there are plotholes galore, the aforementioned cameras have one leg shorter than the other for 97% of the movie, and those are just the filmmaking gaffes. Fans of John Travolta will never be able to look at him quite the same way again after viewing this movie.
Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966)
Rotten Tomatoes score: 0%
• Available on Tubi
This is the movie that put the ‘cult’ in cult classic. When a suburban family spends the night at a little house with the confusing Torgo, their lives are forever changed. As will the lives of anyone watching, if they manage to sit through this entire thing, that is.
Most other so-bad-it’s-good movies have some redeeming features in one respect or another, but not Manos. Acting? Insipid. Storyline? Incomprehensible. Editing? A testament to wrongness. Music? Bad and used in ways that human ears were not meant to suffer through. And yet, somehow, beyond all likelihood, it forces laughter from viewers whether they want it to or not. It’s endlessly bizarre.
