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. 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 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 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.
