The Worst Movies Of All Time (2004)

I liked that the moviemaker
acknowledged upfront that some movies can be wonderfully bad. Movies
that achieve their own unique level of off-center reality that takes
them to a new level. This documentary is not about those movies.

Bad
movies are born of many parents. It would have been easy to stick
with the low hanging fruit of low budget awfulness that has been a
big-screen staple for generations. But that would overlook several
wretched major motion pictures that deserve their place on this
list.

I won’t spoil the joy of exploring all the titles
on the list here, but some familiar names appeared along with titles
unknown to me.

The biggest budget mess on the list is
“Ishtar”, a movie that has the rare distinction of being so awful
that I stopped watching it halfway in and never returned to it.
Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty, directed by the brilliant Elaine
May (in her first directorial attempt) should have been great. Much
like the desert in the movie, this one is a vast, empty
wasteland.

There are familiar titles here: “Glen or
Glenda” and “Robot Monster” show up every version of the worst
movies of all-time lists I’ve seen. Other big-budget turkeys
include “Howard the Duck”, “Xanadu” and “Smokey and the
Bandit 3”. OK, that last one stretches the definition of “big
budget”. Compared to movies like “Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn
Gorilla”, it had an epic-sized budget. Then you can sample “Santa
Claus Conquers the Martians”, “Troll”, and “The Mesa of Lost
Women”.

You won’t lack for stars along the way. Beyond
Lugosi, you’ll find Julia Louis Dreyfus, Phyllis Diller, Jayne
Mansfield, Pia Zadora, Robert DeNiro, Brian De Palma, Barbara Bach,
Merle Haggard, Basil Rathbone, Lon Chaney, Jr., even TV star Erin
Moran.

I do take exception to including “Plan 9
From Outer Space” on this list. Plan 9 is a bad movie. But unlike
most of these, it has transcended the realm of the bad, even soaring
beyond (Above? Below?) the awful. Like a handful of movies, it is SO
bad that it creates its own kind of “good”. I would swap in the
odious “Nightfall” for this in an instant.

What you
won’t see are any good movies. Some movies here have developed cult
followings, but none of them will ever be mistaken for the highest
form of movie-making. The documentary itself shows all the signs of a
low-budget movie too, but that seems perfect for the subject.

Best
of all, it’s still fun.

Rating – *** Worth A Look