#1: Troll 2
I know what you’re thinking. Troll 2? What was Troll 1? And it doesn’t matter, because Troll 2 has literally nothing to do with its supposed predecessor other than the title. The movie follow the Waits family as they take a trip to the town of Nilbog (THAT’S GOBLIN SPELLED BACKWARDS!), only to notice some strange goings on, such as the entire town being secretly goblins (or trolls, depending on who you ask) who want to turn them into symbiotic plant creatures, melt them into green liquid, and eat them. Also, there is a witch, and the family’s grandpa presumably comes back from the dead to help the family assault their goblin neighbors with Molotov cocktails. And that’s the most believable part of the movie. Add in horrible acting, stilted dialogue, impressively low-budget special effects, and “goblins” that are actually midgets running around in burlap sacks, and you have a recipe for success disastrous failure. Troll 2 is a movie that is so bad and yet so, so good that it merited an entire documentary on its production called Best Worst Movie. Now that’s an achievement.Worst Moment: There’s an extremely awkward encounter between a witch and a teen boy in an RV involving corn on the cob. I don’t think I can legally say more.
Worst Line: “They’re eating her. And then they’re gonna eat me next! OH MY GOOOOOOD.”
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KCct4RwLNM]
#2: The Room
The Room is widely acknowledged to be one of the worst movies ever created, and it’s actually picked up a pretty large cult following because of this. The movie stars Johnny (Tommy Wiseau), a loveable banker living in San Francisco whose girlfriend Lisa (Juliette Danielle) cheats on him with his best friend, Mark (Greg Sestero). Of course, this summary doesn’t do the film justice, as most of the screen time is filled up with confusing subplots about drug deals and men playing football in tuxedos. It’s really a nightmare that must be seen to be believed. Unsurprisingly, the production behind the movie was just as disastrous and bizarre. Supposedly, Tommy Wiseau, who directed, produced, wrote, and starred in the film, financed its entire $6 million budget by importing bootleg leather jackets from Korea. He also fired and replaced the entire cast several times over the course of filming, but if his final cast was an improvement, I shudder to imagine what the original actors were like. The acting is horrendous, the editing is bad, the plot is minimal, and the writing is dismal. I really think The Room should be taught at film schools, because by studying it and copying exactly the opposite of everything in it, you could make a perfect movie.Worst Moment: Johnny destroys his entire apartment in the most half-hearted way possible. Truly lackadaisical.
Worst Line: “I did not hit her. I did not! Oh, hi Mark!”
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCj8sPCWfUw]
#3: Freddy Got Fingered
Freddy Got Fingered is about a failed cartoonist/slacker named Gordon Brody (Tom Green). That actually amounts to most of the plot. I almost didn’t put this nightmare on the list for two reasons. First, it was meant to be a comedy. While horrible tragedies make great comedies, horrible comedies are just tragic. Second, I’m not sure that the disjointed series of events that is Freddy Got Fingered actually constitutes a movie. For example, scenes include Gord failing his job at a “cheese sandwich factory” (yes, apparently that’s a thing), wearing the body of a road-killed deer, swinging a newborn infant by its umbilical cord, and some unsavory incidents with a horse and an elephant. This is gross-out comedy at its worst, and it is wretched. If you can sit through the entire movie, you deserve a medal, and if you don’t cringe a single time, you are made of steel.Worst Moment: The aforementioned newborn-infant-being-swung-around-a-room-like-a-lasso.
Worst Line: “Daddy, would you like some sausage?”
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKe7h1211CE]
#4: For Y’ur Height Only
Probably the closest to a good movie on this list, For Y’ur Height Only is an action-comedy that is hilarious in precisely none of the ways it intends to be and in all of the ways it does not. Just the premise is fantastic: it’s a 1981 Filipino James Bond parody about a secret agent/professional midget who goes by Agent 00, played by Weng Weng, a 2’9’’ actor with the distinction of being the shortest human to ever play the lead role in an action movie. It has been dubbed into English extremely badly, and this, coupled with stunts and special effects that are as amazingly fake as they are amusing, makes for possibly the greatest James Bond parody of all time.Worst Moment: Agent 00 jumps out of a high-rise hotel with an umbrella and floats to safety like some sort of covert ops Mary Poppins.
Worst Line: “You're such a tiny little guy, though. Very petite, like a potato.”
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OxB-jq5XLY]
#5: Birdemic: Shock and Terror
This cinematic masterpiece cleverly synthesizes homages to Alfred Hitchcock’s classi—oh? What’s that? Sorry, I had the wrong movie. Hitchcock’s The Birds is to Birdemic what milk is to milk left out in the sun for two weeks. And it is rotten. The “film” stars a Silicon Valley hotshot by the name of Rod (Alan Bagh) and his new girlfriend Nathalie (Whitney Moore) as they try to survive a sudden onslaught of bird attacks from a flock of eagles and birds assaulting the California coast. Oh, and the birds can explode and spit acid for some reason. Maybe even more impressively, this movie manages to be boring at the same time: a copious amount of time is devoted to watching the main characters work at tech startups, drive in traffic, make heavy-handed commentary on global warming, and go to gas stations. The real stars here, though, are the birds themselves. These special effects are astoundingly, shamefully, laugh-inducingly horrible. I can’t do them justice with words, just see for yourself below.Worst Moment: Rod and Nathalie fight off the birds with coat hangers, their one weakness.
Worst Line: “It's the human species that needs to quit playing cowboy with nature. We must act more like astronauts, spacemen taking care of Spaceship Earth.”
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jE5dJDgZ644]