20. The Master of Disguise (2002)
The movie that single-handedly destroyed Dana Carvey’s career, I remember being a fairly young lad and seeing advertisements for this and thinking it looked hilarious. I went to the theater and saw this and was absolutely stunned at how awful I was. And this was when I like 95% of movies that I saw in the theaters.
So what’s so bad about it? In short, everything. The humor is juvenile even for a kids’ movie, all the running jokes are incredibly awkward and unfunny, and the moments that illicit a small grin from the audience are brief and completely overshadowed by all the groans.
The running jokes are poorly done and no less than disturbing. Dana Carvey has a really weird obsession with butts and there’s almost like this Oedipus complex thing implied. And then there’s a joke about how he’s really hairy and this comes up multiple times.
The movie slightly redeems itself when Dana Carvey does impressions, but really the film truly sucks even with those.
19. Bride of the Monster (1955)
Edward D. Wood, Jr. He is said by many people to be the WORST director of all time, perhaps rivaled only by Coleman Francis and Uwe Boll. His budgets were incredibly low and his bloopers incredibly many.
Bride of the Monster is his first monster movie and it is flat-out great. It stars Bela Lugosi as a mad doctor who wants to create a “rice of pipple” which will take over the world. I think he means race of people but it’s so difficult. He has his assistant played by Tor Johnson (in the first of multiple appearances for him on this list), a strange mute half-giant monster man help him. There’s not much of a plot.
The best creature though in this film is easily the giant octopus, which never moves though it manages to kill multiple people. Literally it kills people by not moving. When a person is attacked by the octopus, they lie in it and move around, using their hands to move the octopus’s tentacles. It’s not done in a clever way so as to hide this fact, either.
The sets are also interesting. There’s the really weird room with a stairway that is never used. There’s the laboratory which shakes in its entirety when Tor Johnson can’t quite fit through the door, again, left in the film.
Lugosi frequently whips Tor though it is painfully obvious that no force is being applied whatsoever.
It’s certainly a funny movie and I recommend it, but it’s not Ed Wood’s best (worst).
18. The Pink Panther 2 (2009)
The Pink Panther films never should have been remade. There is quite literally no one on earth who could even compare to Peter Sellers’s portrayal of the bumbling Jacques Clouseau, the greatest comedic performance in film history. That having been said, the first Steve Martin Pink Panther film was at least tolerable.
This one is not. It’s just an hour and a half of Steve Martin making an idiot out of himself in front of the camera with no humor whatsoever. He starts a building on fire, gets flung across the entire city of Paris, etc. None of it’s funny and all of it’s annoying.
The film sets up a plot of multiple detective geniuses coming together from different countries, and of course, Clouseau is one of them. The stereotypes are offensive and not funny. Martin is scolded multiple times for his lack of political correctness in his racist and sexist comments, which is both screaming for laughs and something that wouldn’t have been included in the original films. The fact that this is a running joke just disgusts me. See, there’s a right way to make it funny that your protagonist is politically correct and not with the times (see Austin Powers). This is not it, folks.
Again this film pushes the limits of how much sexual humor you can have in a PG film, but what’s the point? It’s not funny.
17. Grizzly (1976)
The most shameless rip-off of a film that I’ve ever seen, Grizzly would simply not have been made had Jaws not been the huge success that it was. Even the fucking poster resembles Jaws’s poster!
So it’s Jaws with an 18-foot tall grizzly bear in the woods with terrible acting, horrendous dialogue, and no subtlety.
Two hikers are killed in the opening scene, the bear having torn down a cabin to get to them. The ranger and a photographer go and check it out. Eventually they find out it’s some kind of prehistoric grizzly bear previously thought to have been extinct.
There are plenty of kills. They argue about shutting down the park or not. They say no until a kid is brutally mutilated, and then they finally shut the park down. Completely original, I know.
There’s even a scene with the three people who are tracking down the bear at a bonfire that resembles the haunting USS Indianapolis monologue delivered by Quint in Jaws. Here, like the rest of the film, it’s just laughable.
With such a poorly constructed film, whenever it wants the viewer to feel tension or excitement, I must politely disagree.
The ending is strange and yes, I’m giving it away here, it’s worth it. One of the main characters is attacked while on horse and the horse is killed and he’s unconscious or whatever. He wakes up and is partially buried and then the bear kills him. What was the point of all of that? Why wasn’t he just killed right away? The two guys left track the bear on helicopter, find him and land, and the bear attacks the helicopter. The bear kills one more dude and then the last guy fires a bazooka that kills it.
16. The Beast of Yucca Flats (1961)
A Coleman Francis film, some consider this to be the absolute WORST film ever made. I think that’s a little too far but it is hilarious just how awful it is.
The film opens with a credits scene of a woman being murdered after a shower. Never again is this explained and it has nothing to do with the rest of the plot.
Tor Johnson is back as an ex-Soviet who is apparently bringing information to the US. The worst thing about the film is the narration. There’s narration just about all the time and most of it makes no sense. Usually it’s just to explain something that whoever wrote this bullshit didn’t know how to explain through action or dialogue, but sometimes it’s just a series of random words. If you’ve seen Mystery Science Theater 3000 do this, then you may recall the line “Flag on the moon,” which comes out of nowhere.
Tor Johnson is attacked by KGB dudes and he escapes into the desert which apparently was a nuclear test site. The radiation turns him into said beast of Yucca Flats and he’s on a murderous rampage for the rest of the movie.
The police are after him. So much so that they don’t mind shooting at innocent people. In a scene that goes on for far too long, a character who is at this point unnamed is shot and injured and then shot at and shot at and shot at by a person who thinks it’s Tor. Might I point out that Tor Johnson is basically the most distinct-looking person who ever lived and he doesn’t in a way resemble this man?
There’s so much wrong with this film. Primarily though, it makes no sense. Even with the narration which most of the movie spells things out for the audience, I still could not tell you what’s going on for most of the movie.
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