Disclaimer: These are based on my opinion and are not official or canonical in anyway. It's not like I'm a professor of bad horror movies at some university or a major contributor to the genre, so it would be awfully arrogant of me to seriously call these "the worst."
The way I see it, there are three kinds of bad horror movies:
1) Good-Bad: Films that are so bad they're great. Rawhead Rex and Troll 2 are a prime examples of this.
2) "Cute" Bad: Horror movies everyone considers to be the worst and definitely are bad, but are don't hold a candle to the most abysmal entries. Pretty much any bad horror movie can go here. No, I don't feel Seed People and Contamination .7 are the worst horror movies around. You be trippin'.
3) Utterly Abysmal: There's no topping the awfulness of these movies...
In my time, I've seen a lot of bad movies via rentals, MST3K, and SyFy. Whenever I hear someone call some banal SyFy Original or Asylum movie "the worst of all time," I usually say, "That's cute." There are some that I've somehow made it through without turning them off, and have lamented my lost time as a result. I've decided to post the eight that have made me cry the most here.
NOTE: The lack of Manos, Hands of Fate is due to never bothering to suffer through the movie. I know I must one day, but I just can't muster the courage. Same goes for Birdemic.
8. The Creeping Terror (1964)
Premise: An alien life form that resembles a dried up turd covered in matted hair and bits of carpet sloooooowwwwwwly crawls across the countryside, sloooooooowwwwwwwly gobbling up people too stupid to run away.
As you can tell, The Creeping Terror's major sin lies in its pacing. Never mind that it's an ill-begotten movie plagued by misfortune. Not only was the original monster suit stolen and replaced with a last minute contrivance, but much of the movie's voice track was lost, which resulted in the producers using a narrator for almost all of the film.
VIDEO: MST3K riffs the Terror
7. Killing Birds (1987) [aka Zombie 5: The Killing Birds]
Premise: College students search for a rare woodpecker, using an old murder house in the middle of the woods as their base of operations. Upon arrival, they experience numerous supernatural phenomenon, culminating in murderous zombies that seek to pick them off one by one.
The first half of the movie tedious filler with painfully dull characters and a frickin' harmonica montage. An '80s montage! In a horror movie! Why? The rest of the film, though fittingly bloody, is standard zombie fare with one really cheesy irk: there's only one actor playing all of the zombies, and you only see one at a time on the screen. After slogging through 45-50 minutes of boredom, they reward you with cheap ass makeup and a few kills that are ho-hum by Italian horror standards (although the necklace death scene was neat).
VIDEO: Random scenes
6. Zaat! (1971) [aka The Blood Waters of Dr. Z, Hydra, or Attack of the Swamp Creatures]
Premise: A mad scientist transforms himself into an anthropomorphic catfish to exact revenge on the community that mocked him.
A plodding ripoff of The Creature from the Black Lagoon, albeit with a more sentient antagonist. Most of the movie consists of the doctor wandering the streets and killing random citizens before terminating in one of the most shrug-worthy endings I can recall. There's little tension and the scare scenes are stale, not to mention that the creature effects are pretty junky. I nearly fell asleep watching this one, although that might have been preferable to watching the rest.
VIDEO: More MST3K
5. Evil Things (2012)
Premise: A found-footage home invasion film about mysterious stalkers tracking a group of noisy twenty-somethings in the middle of the nowhere.
I like a good slow-burn movie, provided that there's an effective payoff in the end. Evil Things had a lot of promise, but asked for too much of my patience in exchange for a horribly disappointing conclusion.
**SPOILER*** Everyone runs off into the woods and is never seen again. One guy gets pulled into a room with the door slamming behind him and is similarly never seen again. Finally, the sole survivor screams at the camera before it freeze frames and reveals that the stalkers had been filming the entourage since the beginning of the movie. We never find out what happens to anyone, except that the movie insists that they were never heard from again. BOOORRRRR-IIIIIINNNG. ***END SPOILERS***
Yes, I do like subtle horror, but I also need some sense of finality. For all that was shown, it could be argued that the stalkers were merely innocent pranksters and that everyone died of exposure rather than being murdered because they freaked out and ran away.
VIDEO: Trailer
4. Look What's Happened to Rosemary's Baby (1976)
Premise: Following the events of Roman Polanski's classic Academy nominated/winning (Best Supporting Actress - Ruth Gordon) film, the son of Satan grows up and his followers attempt to corrupt him. However, things don't go according to plan...
Oh. My. Made for TV. God.
This movie is tamely inept, rife with unconvincing performances and simply godawful scenarios. Geez, where do I even begin:
Adrian, Rosemary's son, goes all Satanic on a bully by using his telekinesis to gently push the kid over. THE HORROR!
Rosemary falls for the dumbest trick when a penniless hooker named Marjean, who's obviously working for the Satanic cult, offers to pay her bus fare. Rosemary somehow doesn't realize that she's being duped until it's too late, despite the fact that the bus stop is unmarked in the middle of nowhere and the bus is ridiculously ominous with pitch black windows. Marjean also instructs Rosemary to flag down the bus--something you shouldn't need to do because it's a fucking bus--while Marjean holds the baby. Like an idiot, Rosemary gets on the bus without Adrian and is taken away, never to be seen again.
In Adrian's adulthood, Satan attempts to stymie Adrian's righteous best friend by sending a bird to cause a minor flesh wound. I somehow doubt that such would be the extent of Satan's power.
The Satanists paint Adrian to look like a mime and begin some corruption ritual, but find that he's still too innocent to turn into the Antichrist. Then again, his worst sins were traffic violations and public drunkenness, so he's more like Douchemodeus than the Antichrist. Adrian begins to wander away after the ritual like a zombie and dance to a life rock band, which the cult reasons is a good thing because that damn rebellious music might help corrupt him. Oh please...
In the end, Adrian's evil fizzles out and the movie leaves you with a predictable conclusion and a shrug.
Truly, Look What's Happened... is a difficult film to get through, mostly because of how laughably tame it is and how desperately it tries to make good on its predecessor's expertly built tension and atmosphere, only to wind up coming off like an amateurish fanfic.
VIDEO: The whole damn movie on YouTube, for those of you who hate your free time
3. Zombie Chronicles (2001)
Premise: An indie zombie anthology including the following stories: a reporter who falls victim to a ghoul and his minions, an undead soldier who seeks revenge against his tormentor, and a trio who are stalked by zombies while camping.
Another crappy offering from Brain Damage that features everything you would expect from their material: bad acting, lousy makeup, blatant anachronisms, and attempts at depth that fall absolutely flat. Most of the gore looks like Halloween store quality (with the exception of a decent decapitation scene), with guts that look like clusters and strands of Silly String and zombie faces that appear to either be obvious masks or poorly clumped on "earthy tones" and stick-on teeth attached to actors' lips. The worst is the first story, which takes place in the '70s but clearly has vehicles from the late '90s and early 2000s. Plus, most of the stories are slow and clumsily written, with plot points that feel like filler needed to pad out the space between the film's mostly lame kill scenes.
VIDEO: Trailer
2. Superbeast (1972)
Premise: A pathologist travels to the jungles of the Philippines searching for answers surrounding a strange occurrence at an airport. She finds a mad scientist's lab and numerous genetically altered humans.
Quite possibly the most boring movie in existence. There are bits of dialog that establish nothing and even lengthy segments in which the protagonist explores the jungles in real time doing absolutely nothing but staring at trees. There's even a bit in which our heroine accidentally rows her boat down a waterfall she somehow doesn't realize is there. The worst part about this movie is that you suffer through its arduous hippie-style narrative so you can see the "superbeast," only to discover it's just a dude with slightly pushed out facial features. That's it. "Thanks, TNT. I could have been playing Chrono Trigger," a younger version of me once said.
VIDEO: Nibbles video
1. Gauri: The Unborn (2007)
Premise: A couple and their daughter plan a trip to their ancestral home and are plagued by the ghost of their aborted child.
I have a policy when it comes to horror movies and commentary. Obviously, I'm not going to agree with every director's or writer's views, and I'm fine with that. Most horror maestros are aware that their views could alienate potential viewers and typically hide their opinions, points, and criticisms behind metaphors and allegories. This prevents movies from feeling preachy or ham-fisted, and it shows that the writer and/or director trusts the audience's intelligence enough to read between the lines.
...then you have Guari: The Unborn, in which writers Mohan Azaad and K. Gireesh Kumar and director Akku Akbar beat you over the head with the film's moral.
Now, I'm not going to go into the subject of abortion. No. Way. In. Hell. This blog isn't used for those purposes. However, I will say that regardless of your stance, violently shoving a point down the audience's throat is bad filmmaking and storytelling, plain and simple. I say this because those who don't agree will feel like they're watching a propaganda film, and those who do agree might feel the filmmakers thought they were too stupid to reach the same conclusions they did regarding particular subjects.
Of course, this isn't Gauri's only flaw. The movie's list of misdeeds includes:
Over-expressive, sugary acting.
Some of the worst scares I've ever seen. For instance, during one scene you can hear stereotypical tense music playing while the ghostly antagonist removes flowery printing from a man's shirt and transfers it to a nearby curtain. I'm not sure how this supposed to be scary, but the music seems to insist that it is... Another scene does the same thing with a girl swinging higher than normal on a swing set and poorly animated CG glass shards rain from the ceiling during another segment.
It tries to do the "creepy kid" thing with a girl who isn't creepy in the least, but is quite irritating.
As you can tell by the above scares, the antagonist isn't imposing or frightening at all.
The movie's style is uneven and jarring, featuring scares alongside overly pleasant music, a steamy sex scene next door to some childish humor and dialog. I can't tell half the time if I'm watching a movie aimed at families, children, or horror fans. It's not exactly Hallmark appropriate, but I wouldn't fathom most adults watching this movie without cringing.
As I said in my review of the movie: "Gauri's story draws from sobering life matters, but weakens its terrifying punch with happy-go-lucky music, annoying children, and terrible dialogue." In all honestly, Gauri is my least favorite horror movie and a prime example of how not to make an effective social horror flick.
VIDEO: Even the trailer is poorly made
overdrive Staff Nov 2, 2015
In no particular order.
The Suckling: Another !!abortion iz evviiiilllll!! movies. Chick and boyfriend go to some low-rent abortion clinic/whorehouse so she can get abortion. Baby dropped down toilet into radioactive waste in sewers to where it grows into a giant alien thing, imprisons EVERYONE (ie: girl, boyfriend, matron/abortion-giver, her bouncer, her asshole son, a couple hookers and a john, at least) in the house and kills them off, one by one. Boring, predictable and just stupid. You may get the idea with a couple scenes that the makers were going for shocking or controversial, but they never got beyond spinning their wheels at inept.
2. Grim: We've had many a laugh at Mr. Grapefruit Head getting his head crushed to show all the citrus-y goodness inside. That is about the only scene I remember from the movie and, in fact, its only bright point. Boring subterranean trek with bland characters getting picked off by powerful demon monster.
3. The Fear: In theory, it's about a wooden doll of some sort that's able to get characters to face what they most fear, destroying them in the process. In reality, it's a dull semi-thriller where a couple people have really dark secrets (one killed someone and another is a serial rapist who is having an incestual affair with another character) and the doll's presence causes shit to go down. Slowly. With a lot of drama and the villains basically losing because the doll's magic causes them to freak out at bad times (for them). Which makes the mid-movie scene where two minor characters (or at least one of them) gets taken out by FEAR all the more weird, as they didn't seem to be remotely villainous. I guess the makers realized they had a 90-minute film with all the interesting parts coming in the final 15 or so minutes, so they threw in a horror movie kill or two earlier on to keep peoples' interest, even if doing so went at odds with the doll's sense of morality at the close. Oh, and those interesting parts in the final 15 or so minutes...not even close to salvaging things. Not at all.
JoeTheDestroyer Blogger Nov 11, 2015
I haven't seen The Suckling, but man does it sound awful.
Grim almost made the list, but the grapefruit scene redeemed it enough to at least be terrible and not abysmal for me. I also think the concept could have been good in the right hands (monster living under suburbia, taking people from their homes).
Geez, The Fear. I saw that one and it is pretty bad. They also made a sequel called The Fear: Halloween Night that was just as painful. Like, there's a guy in the movie who's afraid of horses and he gets killed by a horse. For some reason, Morty from The Fear reminds me of the antagonist from The Scarecrow movies (Scarecrow, Scarecrow Slayer, and Scarecrow Gone Wild). It seemed to me that the producers/creators of both flicks really wanted their monsters to be the next Freddy or Jason, maybe even along the lines of Puppet Master, but they ended up cheap imitations.
There's a whole slew of movies I never finished that probably would have made the list (Silo Killer is the only one I can think of off hand).
overdrive Staff Nov 17, 2015
I bought a couple of those 15-18 movies in one collection DVD sets where you get 1-2 name movies and a bunch of direct-to-DVD stuff of varying quality. This was an 85-minute slasher where the opening 45-50 was just listening to 5 insufferably annoying college kids banter and bicker. The killing was okayish, if mainly off-screen and carried by overly long stalking scenes, but it was an eternity to get to that point and my attention had long waned.
Killjoy also sucked -- if not for some remotely entertaining things early on, it'd be insufferable with dime-store special effects, blah acting, horrible one-liners from Killjoy and whatnot. It was crap, but The Ridge was a level even lower than that.
JoeTheDestroyer Blogger Nov 17, 2015
A WWE Pictures production about a widower who visits a cabin with his kids, gets snowed in, and starts seeing spirits. Everything goes all weird, but not the least bit creepy, the movie eventually becomes confusing, then you reach the big twist at the end (***SPOILER*** the man and his children were just suffering from the flu, so his kids comforted him through the worst of his sickness while he hallucinated ***END SPOILER***) and say, "Did I really just sit through this entire thing for this ending?"
Backwoods is another one that almost made the list. It's a horror/comedy hybrid about a mentally disabled redneck who's coaxed into killing by a transsexual evil spirit called Mangina. From there, the movie is filled with apparent in-jokes that only people involved with the movie (or friends of the crew) would get, followed by some really low quality gore. The only funny part involved a woman having a flashback about her abusive father, who was a ridiculous French stereotype, that ended with her saying something like, "Jesus, even my backstory is stupid."
JoeTheDestroyer Blogger Nov 17, 2015