100 Best b Movies

100. The Giant Claw
Year: 1957
Director: Fred F. Sears
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The Giant Claw is not the most captivating of the classic 1950s giant monster run
ning amok movies, but it must be seen exclusively for the fact that it features t
he goofiest-looking movie monster of all time. This thing this antimatter space buz
zard, as it is eventually called is so laughably stupid that it s hard to believe the
y actually chose to feature it so extensively in the trailer rather than hiding
it from sight. The poor actors weren t even aware of how incredibly lame the monst
er would be until they saw the completed film, and by then it was too late. The
Giant Claw stands as a classic example of 1950s drive-in cheese.
99. Hercules in New York
Year: 1970
Director: Arthur Allen Seidelman
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Remember when Arnold Schwarzenegger burst into the public consciousness with Con
an the Barbarian and late night hosts mocked his stilted English? Well, that mov
ie was made in 1982, after Arnold had been studying the language for more than a
decade. Hercules in New York was his first feature film, credited as Arnold Stro
ng, Mr. Universe because Schwarzenegger was too long. A massive 22-year-old with ze
ro acting experience or charisma, he s absolutely lost in this thing, casually str
olling around New York and competing as a pro wrestler. His line delivery was so
unintelligible he had to be completely dubbed, but evidence of the original can
still be found. The words are so flat and vapid, he s like a muscle-bound Lennie
Small. It s captivatingly bad because there s so little evidence of the fun, campy a
ctor he later became.
98. The Big Doll House
Year: 1971
Director: Jack Hill
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There are certain genres you have to check off in a list like this, and the women
in prison film is a classic sub-type of the larger 1970s exploitation genre. You
know what you re getting here: Nudity, abusive guards, a plethora of shower scene
s and a daring escape. It s pure sleaze all the way. Jonathan Demme s Caged Heat is
a bit better known, but The Big Doll House is more sincere and less satirical. I
t s also one of the earliest appearances of blaxploitation legend, Pam Grier, who
will recur on this list. Director Jack Hill clearly saw something in her (or at
least liked seeing her naked), as he went on to direct several of Grier s blaxploi
tation classics, such as Coffy and Foxy Brown. So really, this is one form of ex
ploitation movie giving birth to another.
97. I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle
Year: 1990
Director: Dirk Campbell
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If I gave you three guesses, do you think you could suss out the basic gist of t
his film? If you ventured guy buys a motorcycle that is also a vampire, then you w
ould be correct. This trashy British horror-comedy is partially successful in it
s satire of American cheapo horror schlock in the style of Troma Entertainment,

but it s also got plenty of sincere badness of its own. It s that rare sort of film
that is amusing both in its intentional corniness and its unintentional badness,
which is not a common combination. It s just a gloomy, bizarre film, with scenes
that include a dream sequence featuring a talking turd in the hero s toilet. You p
robably don t want to see that, but if you do, I won t judge. It s exactly what the tr
ailer implies from the first lines: Most good motorcycles run on gasoline. This i
s a bad motorcycle. It runs on blood.
96. Iron Sky
Year: 2012
Director: Timo Vuorensola
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This movie isn t nearly as funny or clever as it thinks it is, but damn if it does
n t earn a spot on the list just through strength of premise alone. In the annals
of great premises for B movies, Nazis from the dark side of the moon invading Ear
th is an instant classic. It helps that the movie looks great for an entry in the
straight-to-video segment, and the acting is serviceably campy. The political h
umor is a bit much and the Sarah Palin-esque American president quickly grows gr
ating, but it s no worse than you d see in your average mockbuster from The Asylum,
coupled with much higher production values. It s a premise that could have been an
all-time classic, but even as is, it s tough not to enjoy Iron Sky as gleefully s
tupid entertainment.
95. Mazes and Monsters
Year: 1982
Director: Steven Hilliard Stern
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File this one into the before they were famous category. Starring a 26-year-old To
m Hanks in his first feature film lead, six years before Big, this movie is the
perfect encapsulation of the early 1980s D&D moral panic. Its research is hilariou
sly poor, painting a D&D-style roleplaying game as a life-devouring descent into
the depths of Satanism and mental illness. Hanks plays the resident psycho of t
he group, who falls so deeply into his cleric character that he takes to wanderi
ng the streets of New York, murdering hoboes he mistakes for orcs. It s incredibly
dour, tackling its subject matter in the same blind, contextless way that Reefe
r Madness handled pot 50 years earlier, and in the process proving how little we v
e learned. This is the kind of film you find in a pawn shop today in a hand-prin
ted DVD case with a 40-year-old Tom Hanks face plastered on it. You like Tom Hanks
, right? Sure you do. You should buy this exciting movie starring Academy Awardwinner Tom Hanks.
94. Foodfight!
Year: 2012 (technically)
Director: Larry Kasanoff
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The saga of Foodfight! is the story of its development, not its actual plot. Con
ceived from the very beginning as an experiment in product branding and consumer
ism, this animated adventure features dozens of household brands and mascots suc
h as Mr. Clean as characters. Taking place in a supermarket for good brand acces
s, it stars the voices of Charlie Sheen as talking dog/super spy Dex Dogtective
and Hilary Duff as Sunshine Goodness, his cat-faced love interest. Also attached t
o this turd: Eva Longoria, Christopher Lloyd, Jerry Stiller and Chris Kattan, am
ong others. The reason you ve probably never heard of it is because it was origina
lly intended for release all the way back in 2003, before the hard drives contai

ning all the animation were stolen. The near-complete film had to be restarted a
ll over again, the animation style was changed and extreme cost-saving measures
were brought in. The result is absolutely the most nightmarishly bad-looking fil
m ever made for a budget of $45 million. The entire time you re watching this feat
ure-length commercial, you ll simply be wondering where all that money could possi
bly have gone.
93. Prophecy
Year: 1979
Director: John Frankenheimer
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I have no idea why this film was named Prophecy, except that 15-foot mutant biped
al bear was sort of a clunky title. Regardless, that s exactly what it s about: A bea
r monster mutated by a combination of man s hubris and some industrial-strength in
dustrial waste. The movie wants to have a serious message about pollution and th
e rape of the natural world, but it s impossible to get past how bizarre the monst
er looks. The highlight is one of the silliest death scenes ever, when a small k
id in a banana-yellow sleeping bag gets swatted through the air by the bear, str
iking a rock and exploding into a rain of goose down. I can t see how this could e
ver have drawn any reaction but laughter in a theater.
92. Death Bed: The Bed That Eats
Year: 1977
Director: George Barry
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Immortalized in an incredible stand-up routine from Patton Oswalt, this is one o
f those great, lost films that finally found its way onto DVD a few years ago an
d was embraced by bad movie lovers around the world. The plot couldn t be more sim
ple: There s a bed, and it s evil! It eats stuff! What kind of stuff? Well, the bed s
not picky, just about anything will do: Teens, criminals, buckets of fried chick
en and a bottle of wine are all on the menu. At one point, the freaking DEATH BE
D even gets indigestion, but thankfully there s a bottle of Pepto Bismol lying on
it at the time. Admit it, that s a far better sponsorship tie-in than anything in
the Transformers series.
91. King Kong Lives
Year: 1986
Director: John Guillermin
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Until Peter Jackson s passable remake, American King Kong movies were a little bit
like the Jaws series, growing progressively cheaper, uglier and more ridiculous
with every installment. This ill-fated 1986 effort picks up where the better-kn
own 1976 remake left off, with Kong having seemingly plummeted to his death off
the World Trade Centers. But hey, turns out he s fine! And not only is he fine, bu
t scientists have located a female giant ape of his species for a necessary bloo
d transfusion. They soon break out and go on the lam, pursued by the military. T
hat might sound exciting, but this film is primarily amusing for how badly it bu
tchers the legacy of one of screendom s most iconic characters. The special effect
s are beyond awful, somehow managing to look less dynamic than the 1933 original
. Even the Japanese portrayals of Kong fighting monsters like Godzilla manage to
have more dignity than this piece of garbage.
90. Sharknado
Year: 2013
Director: Anthony C. Ferrante

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Most films from cheapo-cinema mavens The Asylum fall well short of fun bad and int
o the unfortunate realm of bad bad, but Sharknado is one of the rare few to rise a
bove. Unlike so many other creature features from the same studio, it s not stingy
in its premise. It promises sharks propelled by tornados, delivers on that prom
ise in the very first shot of the film, and then keeps on delivering. It s eminent
ly more watchable than just about any other Asylum film, which is a large part o
f what made it such a phenomenon when it premiered on Syfy in the summer of 2013
. This July, it will even be graced with a live Rifftrax treatment when the form
er MST3k stars riff the film in theaters nationwide.
89. Dolemite
Year: 1975
Director: D Urville Martin
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Rarely has any movie genre turned from sincerity to self-parody as fast as blaxp
loitation did in the 1970s. Only four years after Shaft, comedian Rudy Ray Moore
crafted this absolutely outrageous send-up of blaxploitation films and ghetto cu
lture, playing superhero pimp Dolemite, a badass with a penchant for rhyme and ka
rate-trained hookers. This movie is absolutely bonkers, providing many of the vi
sual and stylistic cues that would become part of the genre forevermore. The 200
9 comedy Black Dynamite often plays like a shot-for-shot parody of Dolemite, but
in some areas it s actually less ridiculous than the original. Case in point: the
four-minute scene where Dolemite stands in a parking lot and waxes poetic in rh
yming verse about the sinking of the RMS Titanic for absolutely no reason. There s
nothing else like it.
88. It s Alive
Year: 1974
Director: Larry Cohen
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Even in the cheapo horror genre, babies are typically handled gingerly and obliq
uely. A film like Rosemary s Baby is really about body horror and the strangers we
live next to every day. It s Alive, on the other hand, is a trashy horror movie a
bout a mutated killer baby see the difference? With creature effects from future O
scar-winner Rick Baker, it s suitably gross, but something about how seriously the
film takes itself makes it inadvertently hilarious. Just look at the trailer, w
hich sounds like a full-blown disaster picture. A city in peril! The national gu
ard is mobilized! Every time you think to yourself, This team of soldiers packing
assault rifles are combing the city for a killer infant, you can t help but smile.
It was followed by It Lives Again and It s Alive III: Island of the Alive, and di
rector Larry Cohen went on to create another classic 1980s entry on this list, T
he Stuff.
87. Ninja Terminator
Year: 1985
Director: Godfrey Ho
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Describing a Godfrey Ho movie to a friend is sort of like standing in the shower
in the morning, trying to remember the specifics of last night s dreams and faili
ng utterly. Widely referred to as the Ed Wood of Hong Kong, Ho is currently credit
ed as the director of 122 films according to IMDB. The true number is impossible

to know, thanks to the dozen or more pseudonyms he used to hide the shoddy qual
ity of his cut and paste moviemaking style. In films like Ninja Terminator, Ho wou
ld literally combine unrelated footage from two or three different unfinished fe
atures to assemble an abomination of a whole. Often these films unwillingly star
red American actor Richard Harrison, who appeared in a few early Ho features bef
ore being edited into many others. This is absolute Z-grade ninja action. The fi
ghts make no sense, the plots make no sense and the costumes make no sense, and
yet the movie is a joy to analyze.
86. The Blob
Year: 1958 and 1988
Director: Irvin Yeaworth and then Chuck Russell
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Separated by an even 30 years, the two versions of The Blob are both perfect exa
mples of a B-movie from their own time period. The 1958 version of The Blob is o
ne of the quintessential 1950s teen drive-in classics, starring a 27-year-old St
eve McQueen as a high school student battling the big pink pile of goo that eats
everything in its path. It s campy and chaste, a Cold War classic with heavy them
es of McCarthyism. The 1988 The Blob, on the other hand, was reimagined as a mor
e serious but sleazy gross-out horror flick. Reflecting a more cynical society,
the Blob is a government experiment gone awry rather than a monster from space,
and the deaths are ramped up in terms of gore and shock value to match other 198
0 s B-movie classics. Which Blob is for you is a matter of your own taste.
85. The Vampire Lovers
Year: 1970
Director: Roy Ward Baker
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1960s and 1970s horror classics from Hammer Film Productions are rightly held in
high regard, especially films in their revived Frankenstein and Dracula series.
The British studio also produced plenty of off-brand horror flicks as well, thoug
h, and one of the most infamous was surely The Vampire Lovers. Daringly depictin
g what is strongly implied as a lesbian vampire relationship, it was quite ahead
of its time, especially for a British production. Like so many other Hammer fil
ms, the best things it has going for it (besides the heaving bosoms) are sumptuo
us production design, great costumes and the presence of Peter Cushing, who acte
d in seemingly every British horror film made between 1958-1975. This was the fi
rst in the Karnstein Trilogy of erotic vampire flicks, which also includes Lust fo
r a Vampire and Twins of Evil, but the original remains the best.
84. Piranha
Year: 1978
Director: Joe Dante
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Thank god for Roger Corman, the prolific B-movie producer/director who gave firs
t chances to so many young filmmakers. In 1978, that director was Joe Dante and
the flick was Piranha, the most fun of all the natural horror movies that prolifer
ated in the wake of Spielberg s Jaws. This one is cheap but funny, giving a first
impression of the dark humor found in Dante s later work on 1980s classics such as
The Howling, The Burbs and Gremlins. The trailer doesn t even try to pretend it s n
ot a rip-off, claiming These are the man-eaters who go beyond the bite of all oth
er jaws. Sharks kill alone, but piranha come in thousands. This is the kind of dr
ive-in film that simply has an x-factor and cleverness not present in most of it
s forgotten peers, thanks to a director who had ambition and bigger ideas.

83. Alone in the Dark
Year: 2005
Director: Uwe Boll
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Uwe Boll, man. All of his films are bad, but only Alone in the Dark makes it int
o fun-bad territory with any reliability. That s what happens when you cast Tara R
eid as a brilliant archaeologist and give her a bunch of pseudo-scientific dialog
to deliver like she s a non-English speaker just phonetically sounding out the wor
ds. Christian Slater, meanwhile, plays a paranormal investigator searching for c
lues on some sort of native American/Lovecraftian monster dimension I d be lying if
I said I understood what was happening, even after the insultingly long and deta
iled opening exposition scrawl read aloud by the narrator. It s more fun to focus
on the action, which by and large looks like a subpar episode of Walker: Texas R
anger with a dash of The Matrix for flavor.
82. Double Trouble
Year: 1992
Director: John Paragon
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This may be the quintessential early 1990s, straight-to-video action movie. Star
ring bodybuilding brothers Peter and David Paul, better known as The Barbarian B
rothers, it s just a nothing of a movie, existing only because they had a few guys
on hand whose skills included being huge and knowing an identical huge guy. Even in
the cheap action movie segment, neither of them would ever have gotten a chance
on their own, but together there s magic in the air. You could probably fill in t
he plot-related blanks without any further information: One brother is a cop, th
e other a criminal. But things are about to get wacky because now they ll be force
d to work together! Both of the brothers have the naïve charm of non-actors who ha
ve recently discovered that action movies are way easier than professional bodybuilding. You can see that they re having a blast doing this.
81. Hobgoblins
Year: 1988
Director: Rick Sloane
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The first entry on this list to receive the MST3k treatment, Hobgoblins often ma
kes appearances on worst movie ever lists, but to be perfectly honest it s one of th
e more entertainingly bad movies featured on the series. It s in the absolute cell
ar as far as production values and filmmaking competence are concerned, but the
acting, creature effects and attempts at comedy are so atrocious that it never o
nce gets boring. There s so much surreal anti-humor, from the extended garden tool
fight scene to the hobgoblins themselves, completely unarticulated puppets that
need to be held against the characters like a modernized version of the octopus
strangling Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood s Bride of the Monster. Every single thing that
makes this film entertaining is unintentional.
80. Leprechaun 3
Year: 1995
Director: Brian Trenchard-Smith
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I realize that saying the best of the Leprechaun series is faint praise, but at le
ast I can affirm that Warwick Davis, the guy who played the titular Leprechaun t

hrough six films, agrees with me. The leprechaun goes to Vegas isn t even close to t
he most outlandish premise of the series (he did go to both space and the hood, aft
er all), but this entry is where the sophomoric humor reached its zenith. It s col
orful, fun and brisk, featuring characters fighting over a piece of gold with th
e power to granted ill-fated wishes in the style of The Monkey s Paw. The kills are
hilariously, absurdly over the top, and the effects are among the best in the se
ries. Best of all, it features the protagonist being bitten by the leprechaun an
d infected like a lycanthrope, which results in him slowly transforming into an
angry Irishman over the course of the film. The scene where he orders half-a-doz
en variations of potatoes from a casino restaurant is delightfully hackneyed.
79. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms
Year: 1953
Director: Eugene Lourie
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The first of special effects titan Ray Harryhausen s major features, The Beast fro
m 20,000 Fathoms was incredibly influential. The first film to ever feature a gi
ant monster directly attributed to the detonation or radiation from an atomic bo
mb, it set the template for dozens of creature features that would follow in the
1950s, such as Them! Like all of Harryhausen s stop-motion creations, the Rhedosa
urus has great personality and an iconic look. The film moves a little bit slowe
r than some of the movies that followed it, but it s an absolute must-see for any
fans of 1950s science fiction, in the same league as better-known films such as
The Day the Earth Stood Still or Earth vs. the Flying Saucers.
78. Dark and Stormy Night
Year: 2009
Director: Larry Blamire
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Most of these films have been of the so bad they re good variety, but Larry Blamire s
work should legitimately be recognized for its loving caricature of various genr
e pictures. This one is a parody of every old dark house film, a combination of mu
rder mystery and horror picture with a twist of fast-talking 1930s wit. Blamire s
films are all about their performances and snappy dialog, and they succeed where
so many others fail because his recurring cast members are all on exactly the s
ame page. Never is one of them more or less committed to a performance than anot
her instead, they all channel the same simultaneous spirit of naïveté and low-budget m
irth. His films have an instantly recognizable quality, an auteurship all but no
nexistent in this budget bracket, because he both adores and recognizes the absu
rdity of the films that inspired him.
77. Basket Case
Year: 1982
Director: Frank Henlotter
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Bargain bin horror really reached a new level in the 1980s as filmmaking equipme
nt became more widely available. Made for only $33,000, Basket Case nevertheless
received a fairly wide theatrical release, proving once again that horror is th
e genre where opportunity always knocks. Armed with little more than some crappy
actors and a big wicker basket, Henlotter crafted this schlocky tale of two bro
thers: A seemingly normal guy named Duane and his separated, deformed Siamese tw
in Belial, who he carries around with him at all times. Little more than a lumpy
, fanged head with one random arm, Belial is at times stop-motion animated as he
escapes from his basket and runs amok. The film eventually developed enough of

a cult for Henlotter to return and direct two sequels in the early 1990s.
76. Santo y Blue Demon contra los monstruos (aka Santo and Blue Demon vs. the Mo
nsters)
Year: 1969
Director: Gilberto Martinez Solares
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Any list like this would be remiss without at least one Mexican luchador epic, a
genre of folk hero film exceedingly popular for several decades. Santo and Blue
Demon vs. the Monsters is just one of dozens of films starring famed wrestlers
El Santo and Blue Demon, who are rivals in the ring but allies against various o
therworldly threats. All of the films are exceedingly slapdash, with action sequ
ences that just feel made up on the spot and fight choreography that typically con
sists of rolling around and winging punches until one guy falls down. This parti
cular entry is notable for the sheer number of opponents Santo and Blue Demon fa
ce, from vampires, mummies and clones to a Frankenstein s monster and a wolf man.
Literally nothing is left out. Watch Santo wail on this ugly cyclops with a tree
branch and tell me you don t want to watch this movie.
75. Robot Monster
Year: 1953
Director: Phil Tucker
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For several decades, the world was happy to forget about Robot Monster before Ha
rry and Michael Medved kickstarted the culture of bad movie appreciation with th
e 1980 publication of their book The Golden Turkey Awards. Shot in only four day
s, this is pretty much the ultimate in zero-budget 1950s sci-fi. Don t have a real
monster costume? No problem, just slap a space helmet on a gorilla suit that s basi
cally an alien, right? And yet, despite its cheapness, Robot Monster is a surpri
singly coherent movie. There s no way to take that monster seriously, but the stor
y is easy to follow and the performances are charmingly hackneyed. The whole thi
ng feels like The Andy Griffith Show collided with Forbidden Planet.
74. Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead
Year: 2006
Director: Lloyd Kaufman
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As a Troma movie, Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead promises a few staples
. It will be trashy. It will be violent. It will have no boundaries and no sense
of good taste. The real question is the same one you ask with every Troma film:
Is it boring? Here, the answer is most certainly not. Billed as a zom-com musical,
even a little bit clever in its social satire of consumer culture you know, in an
obvious sort of way. But is that really why you re watching a film about zombie c
hickens that come to life in a KFC-style restaurant built on an ancient Native A
merican burial ground? I didn t think so. Watching a Troma movie is about embracin
g the gore, scatological humor and low-production values and simply appreciating
some mindless storytelling.
73. The Gingerdead Man
Year: 2005
Director: Charles Band
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i

As a writer, producer and director, Charles Band has been responsible for some o
f the most fun-bad B movies produced since the mid-1980s. His production company
, Full Moon Entertainment, has cranked out an impressive array of genre classics
, from Puppetmaster and Dollman to the Subspecies or Evil Bong series. (The latt
er is about a bong that is evil, if you were wondering.) In terms of ludicrous p
remises, though, it s tough to beat The Gingerdead Man, which stars Gary Busey as
a crazed serial killer who is reborn in a gingerbread cookie before going on a r
ampage. Is it basically the exact same plot as Chucky? Sure, but the casting of
Gary Busey cranks up the insanity factor by at least a factor of five. The repli
cation of Busey s face on a cookie will haunt your dreams for weeks.
72. Cave Dwellers
Year: 1984
Director: Joe D Amato
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In the years following Conan the Barbarian there were a lot of sword-and-sorcery
rip-offs rushed into production. One of the most prolific auteurs in this genre
was Italian director Joe D Amato, whose casual disregard for the quality of his o
wn films gave him a somewhat infamous status and limited his associations to oth
er directors of legendarily poor quality such as Claudio Fragasso. Cave Dwellers
, also known as The Blademaster, starred the brawny Miles O Keefe as Conan replace
ment Ator, and features an effete villain in a ridiculous hat shaped like a black
swan. Lampooned in one of the best early episodes of MST3k, this film has a very
sincere quality that makes it fun to watch in its own right. Keefe is like a bi
g, dopey puppy, bounding from scene to scene. You just want to hug the guy, if o
nly to get closer to those ridiculous pecs. And if you re not sold, it also featur
es one of the most unexpected, WTF moments in cinema history.
71. Feast
Year: 2005
Director: John Gulager
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Probably the best thing to come out of HBO s Project Greenlight series, Feast is a
refreshing horror film that heavily satirizes the conventions of its genre. Wit
h a strange cast that includes Judah Friedlander, Jason Mewes and Henry Rollins,
it does everything a little bit different than expected in telling its story of
a small desert bar besieged by monsters. That point is hammered home in the fir
st 15 minutes when a handsome, blood-soaked man named Hero barges in and delivers
all the necessary exposition. When asked who he is, he replies I m the guy that s gon
na save your ass. And then this happens. It s a fun movie that is frank about its i
ntentions to play fast and loose with audience expectations.
70. X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes
Year: 1963
Director: Roger Corman
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Finally, a Corman movie! And believe it or not, a pretty decent one! The $250,00
0 budget still puts it in B territory, but to Corman that might as well have bee
n $10 million. Unlike so many other schlocky productions from the King of the Bs,
X was actually an idea that hadn t been done to death. This science fiction story
revolves around Oscar-winner Ray Milland s Dr. Xavier, a brilliant researcher who
develops eye-drops that convey the ability see wavelengths of light beyond typic
al human comprehension. The uses for this x-ray vision range from the tawdry (se
eing through women s clothing) to the illegal (cheating at poker) to the disturbin
g. There s even a thread of cosmic, Lovecraftian horror running through this flick

, as Xavier s eyes begin to show him visions from outside our universe. Corman did
n t craft many winners, but this film is one of them.
69. Horror Express
Year: 1972
Director: Eugenio Martin
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An unusual film for its time period, Horror Express stars both Peter Cushing and
Christopher Lee, and yet it s not from Hammer as one would expect. Rather, it was
a joint British/Spanish production simply aping the Hammer formula of classy ac
tors in silly premises. This one is particularly weird: An archaeologist played
by Lee discovers a missing link ape man buried in ice and tries to transport him i
n secret via train. The still-alive ape man defrosts, however, and proves to be
armed with a rather unique set of powers. What follows is a bizarre film about s
tolen memories and brain-swapping, all taking place aboard the train. There are
some really hypnotic performances, especially from relatively unknown Argentinea
n actor Alberto de Mendoza as a crazed priest. Telly Savalas, TV s Kojak, even sho
ws up out of right field playing a Russian Cossack officer.
68. The Valley of Gwangi
Year: 1969
Director: Jim O Connolly
68-100-Best-B-Movies-the-valley-of-gwangi.jpg
Dinosaurs of the Old West! Ray Harryhausen s final dinosaur movie showcases some m
ore of his classic stop-motion animation skills in bringing to life the forbidden
valley visited by turn-of-the-century American cowboys. Seeing as man never lear
ns from his mistakes, when they see Gwangi the vicious Allosaurus, their first t
hought is that people would pay big bucks to see this thing! Eventually capturing
Gwangi, they return to put him on display in a traveling circus show, but I expe
ct you can guess what happens next. It s incredible to watch the dinosaur sequence
s and consider the painstaking manual work put in by a technician like Harryhaus
en. His imagination inspired countless scores of future filmmakers to make their
first forays into cinema.
67. Mr. Sardonicus
Year: 1961
Director: William Castle
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They simply don t make showmen quite like William Castle any more. An absolutely s
hameless producer/director of dozens of films from the 1940s-1970s, he s fondly re
membered by horror fans for his run of classically cheesy 1960s flicks, all of w
hich were heavy on the gimmicks. Truly, there was no form of promotion too silly
for Castle to embrace. In Mr. Sardonicus, the tale of a man whose face is froze
n into a hideous grin (essentially a rehash of The Man Who Laughs, but the makeu
p is fantastic), the gimmick was a punishment poll at the end of the feature. At t
he conclusion, Castle himself would appear and address the audience, polling the
m if they wanted mercy or additional punishment for the villain, with votes bein
g tallied by raising glow-in-the-dark ballots. In reality, a mercy ending was neve
r even filmed Castle seemed to think it would never be needed. Just look at his ha
mmy performance and try to hate the guy.
66. Megaforce
Year: 1982
Director: Hal Needham

66-100-Best-B-Movies-megaforce.jpg
After movies like Smokey and the Bandit and The Cannonball Run, people figured Yo
u give Hal Needham some vehicles, and he ll give you a good movie. Megaforce was th
e refutation of that belief. An absolutely ludicrous sci-fi drive-and-shoot, Meg
aforce is filled with rocket-firing motorcycles and dune buggies, and a hero nam
ed Ace Hunter played by Barry Bostwick. It was pretty much the death of a promisin
g career for Michael Beck after his star-making turn as Swan in Walter Hill s The
Warriors, but that s what happens when you sign up for films about futuristic dune
buggy mercenaries. This movie is famous for featuring probably the worst scene
of rear projection in film history the infamous flying motorcycle.
65. The Stuff
Year: 1985
Director: Larry Cohen
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A cult classic for sure, The Stuff was one of the best 1980s critiques of consum
er culture, all wrapped up in the form of a horror movie. Profiteers find a whit
e, gooey substance leaking up out of the Earth that proves both delicious and ad
dictive. Soon, repackaged as the secret ingredient-laden Stuff, it sweeps the worl
d. The fake commercials are fantastic this one has actress Clara Peller, who only
one year earlier began the famous Where s the beef? campaign for Wendy s. That is cros
s-cultural awareness. It s also a very fun, schlocky horror flick with gross-out s
pecial effects, because as you eat more of The Stuff it gradually takes over you
r body until it explodes out into a self-aware being. This film may actually be
more relevant today than it was in the mid-1980s as awareness of fast food conte
nt becomes more widespread.
64. King Kong Escapes
Year: 1967
Director: Ishiro Honda
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King Kong and the isle of Japan had one weird relationship. Following the Saturd
ay morning cartoon The King Kong Show, Toho Studios (the makers of Godzilla) pro
duced one of their craziest films, King Kong Escapes. The first half of the film
plays like some Japanese producer describing the plot of the original King Kong
as viewed through the lens of a psychedelic fever dream. It s like Hey, remember w
hen Kong fought dinosaurs in 1933? Well, here s some more of that, except now it s a
guy in a dinosaur suit. The highlight of the film, though, is its conclusion, wh
ere Kong fights against the KONG OF STEEL, a Mechani-Kong built by the diabolical D
r. Who. Yes, Dr. Who. No, there s no crossover.
63. The Final Sacrifice
Year: 1990
Director: Tjardus Greidanus
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With no context, you d look at The Final Sacrifice and simply say This is a dumb, u
gly movie, and you d be right. But with the knowledge that it was made for only $1,
500 by a Canadian college freshman at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technolo
gy, it actually becomes a bit of a minor marvel. Remembered fondly for being fea
tured on one of the best episodes of MST3k, it brings together one of screendom s
most iconic duos, precocious young Troy and makeupless clown Zap Rowsdower, who ba
ttle an evil Canadian cult that wants to tap into the forgotten powers of an anc

ient civilization. Most of the action consists of running through the Canadian w
oods, which can get tedious, but the non-actors who make up the cast are all wei
rdly compelling. Rowsdower is of course the breakout character, a hard-drinking
soldier of fortune in head-to-toe denim, one of cinema s only depictions of what a
ppears to be a Canadian redneck.
62. Yor, the Hunter from the Future
Year: 1982
Director: Antonio Margheriti (under the pseudonym Anthony M. Dawson)
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With a title like Yor, the Hunter from the Future, the last thing you re expecting
when the film begins is cavemen, but that s exactly what you get. And that s all yo
u get for about an hour. This Reb Brown vehicle is such a strange film, casting
the star of both the first TV version of Captain America and Space Mutiny as a b
londe caveman with a mysterious destiny. Finally, after an hour of fighting riva
l cavemen and philandering with various cavewomen, Yor s world undergoes an expone
ntial expansion as he discovers his ultimate nemesis, The Overlord and the advan
ced, spacecraft-flying civilization his parents fled only one generation earlier
. It s the ultimate expression of the rock beats laser principle, as cavemen somehow
manage to triumph over psychic robot warriors. And check out that Razzie-nomina
ted theme song
61. Any Bibleman film
Year: 1995-2011
Directors: Various
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This is a special entry, because no Bibleman video is really any better or worse
than any other. Instead, they re all roughly in the same colorfully insane neighb
orhood. Bibleman, as you probably have sussed out already, is a Christian superh
ero who appeared in a long-running series of videos sold through Christian retai
lers. To watch them is to enter a world of psychedelic madness the closest way to
describe them is like a combination of Barney & Friends, Power Rangers and a Ste
phen Sondheim musical. The costumes and sets are incredibly campy, harkening bac
k to the visual aesthetic of the 1960s Batman TV show. The fights are kinetic an
d full of jumping, lightsaber rip-offs and scripture-quoting used as an offensiv
e weapon and defensive shield. But it s really the villains musical numbers that el
evate any Bibleman vehicle into camp classic territory. Bear witness to this and
tell me I m wrong. Totally needs the full three minutes, right?
60. The Tingler
Year: 1959
Director: William Castle
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The name sounds a little dirty, but The Tingler is actually another gimmick-lade
n slice of cheese from William Castle. Starring the great Vincent Price (who wil
l crop up a few more times in this list), it s about a doctor who discovers a para
site called the tingler that feeds on human fear. Conveniently, given that this is
a horror movie, the only way to stop the tingler is to scream at the top of you
r lungs. The gimmick was probably Castle s greatest at a pivotal point in the film t
he creature would escape into a movie theater, and the screen would go dark. Vin
cent Price s narration would instruct theater-goers to scream for your lives! and el
ectrical buzzers installed under certain seats would simulate the tingle of the ti
ngler. A grown man came up with this idea. How wonderful is that?
59. Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama

Year: 1988
Director: David DeCoteau
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Outside of Charles Band, there have been few schlockmeisters more prolific from
the 1980s to the present than David DeCoteau. Simply put, this guy has made some
truly awful movies. We re talking Dr. Alien bad. A Talking Cat!?! bad, even. Yes,
that s a real title. Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama is one of his ea
rliest, and it s also one of the most fun. It s sort of like a horror-tinged version
of Porky s or Animal House, except it revolves around an evil imp who escapes fro
m being trapped inside a bowling trophy and wreaks havoc. It s the kind of film th
at builds a cult of weird fans and compels some helpful Wikipedia editor to writ
e This proved to be one of the best spanking scenes in mainstream film and helped
the film to become a cult favorite. [citation needed] I say trust the guy, citati
ons or no, as he clearly knows what he s talking about.
58. Master of the Flying Guillotine
Year: 1976
Director: Jimmy Wang
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A martial arts movie is only as good as its colorful characters, and those chara
cters are often only as good as their gimmicks. Master of the Flying Guillotine
has the best gimmick weapon ever in a martial arts movie. The story of a valorou
s one-armed fighter played by director Jimmy Wang, he s hunted by an assassin usin
g the wicked flying guillotine, which essentially looks like a hat with a bladed
rim, attached to a long chain. If that hat gets thrown over your head you re as g
ood as dead, because a quick yank of the chain will take off your head like it s a
twist-off bottle cap. And as if that s not enough, it s also got the arm-extending
Indian yoga fighter, whose surreal fighting style looks like a live-action version
of Dhalsim from Street Fighter 2.
57. Deadly Prey
Year: 1986
Director: David A. Prior
57-100-Best-B-Movies-deadly-prey.jpg
This whole film feels like someone watched First Blood and then just wandered in
to the woods with some friends and no script, bound and determined to shoot a mo
vie. It blatantly rips off the first few Rambo movies, but in execution is so mu
ch more surreal. A crazy mercenary commander (who just happens to have history w
ith the hero) is kidnapping random people off the streets so his soldiers can ge
t experience hunting them for sport, but everything goes wrong when they mess wi
th THE WRONG GUY, Vietnam vet Mike Danton. The rest of the movie is just him amb
ushing groups of soldiers in the woods and surviving situations where he should
clearly have died. It s a bizarre flick centered around pure, unadulterated machis
mo, with a really unexpected ending that I won t spoil, but suffice to say things
don t wrap up in a neat little package.
56. Dinosaur Island
Year: 1994
Director: Fred Olen Ray
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The most incredible thing one realizes after watching Dinosaur Island is the fac
t that this film came out one year after Jurassic Park and not 15 years before.

The product of another modern B-movie luminary, Fred Olen Ray, this movie can t de
cide if it just wants to fully embrace its softcore porn leanings or spend more
time on the freakin dinosaurs, but both aspects are equally dreadful. The dinosau
rs might be the worst ever depicted on film you have to see this puppet/rear proje
ction T-Rex to really understand just how bad we re talking. It s a delightfully har
mless movie, one where not even the most deluded actors could possibly have been
taking it seriously. The really amazing thing was that Fred Olen Ray managed to
convince himself that there would be a legitimate market for this thing.
55. Showdown in Little Tokyo
Year: 1991
Director: Mark L. Lester
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Dolph Lundgren! Pre-The Crow Brandon Lee! It s a team-up for the ages in this hype
r-macho, hyper-ridiculous early 1990s action fest. The way they conceived each c
haracter is so anti-intuitive: Both are martial arts masters, but Lundgren s chara
cter is the one who is a self-professed samurai with a background in Japanese cult
ure. Lee, an actual person of Asian descent, was instead given the American punk
kid character archetype, so you end up with him rocking the 90s fashions while Lun
dgren is running around with a Japanese flag headband and a katana. This is exac
tly as silly-looking as it sounds. Anyway, they team up to take down the local d
rug lord/crime boss, because what other kind of plot could a movie like this pos
sibly have? I swear, there was like a 15-year period where there were only two o
r three potential plots for any feature-length action flick.
54. C.H.U.D.
Year: 1984
Director: Douglas Cheek
54-100-Best-B-Movies-chud.jpg
It stands for Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers, if you were wondering.
C.H.U.D. is a product of its time, the sort of mid- 70s/early 80s horror film that
sets itself in street-level New York City when the Big Apple was renowned as the
crime-ridden cesspit of the nation. Cynical as hell, it imagines a race of cann
ibal monsters created by toxic waste dumped into the New York sewers, where it t
ransforms the local homeless population. In execution, it s sort of like a Troma f
ilm that has a larger budget, maintaining a grimy and tasteless aesthetic that n
evertheless has a memorable quality that is hard to define. I think the effects
are a part of that quite icky, but fleeting. I look at this scene of a C.H.U.D. be
ing beheaded and can t decide if it s terrible, awesome or terribly awesome. C.H.U.D
. has lived an entire second life as comedy material, with references ranging fr
om The Simpsons to an April Fools prank from the Criterion Collection.
53. Future War
Year: 1997
Director: Anthony Doublin
53-100-Best-B-Movies-future-war.jpg
Of every movie ever featured on MST3k, Future War has perhaps the most amazing p
remise to sum up in a sentence: An alien kickboxer on the run from cyborgs escap
es to Earth, where they attempt to track him down with dinosaurs scavenged from
the past. Along the way, he allies himself with Hispanic gang members and a form
er prostitute turned nun to take down the cyborgs and their dinosaur servants. T
his is a real movie that actually happened. It s hard to tell if the lead, Swiss k
ickboxer Daniel Bernhardt, actually speaks any English as his character convenie
ntly is unable to speak the language fluently. Not that any of this matters Future

War is all about watching the incredibly bad fight scenes. I personally love th
e moment when the star s shirt is accidentally removed in mid-brawl.
52. Mac and Me
Year: 1988
Director: Stewart Rafill
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If there were some kind of corporate tie-in hall of shame, Mac and Me would occu
py a very prominent and prestigious position. Bankrolled with large contribution
s from McDonald s and Coke, the whole movie is like a historical warning on how no
t to sell your soul, as well as a blatant attempt to duplicate Spielberg s E.T. wi
th the absolute lamest, most disturbing-looking alien character imaginable. The
film is famous for several scenes, such as the infamous wheelchair segment that
Paul Rudd has persistently shown on Conan every time he s visited for the last 16
years. For pure gag reflex-triggering disgust, though, it s pretty much impossible
to beat the nearly five minute McDonald s birthday party scene, which features a
hip-hop shufflin Ronald McDonald. It s absolutely heinous that the film s producers t
hought this pandering would fly. If a film like this can ever be enjoyed un-iron
ically, it will mean the world depicted in Idiocracy has become a reality.
51. Mortal Kombat: Annihilation
Year: 1997
Director: John R. Leonetti
51-100-Best-B-Movies-mortal-kombat-annihilation.jpg
It s not like the original Mortal Kombat was a particularly well-assembled film, b
ut my god does it look like The French Connection compared to the mess that is M
ortal Kombat: Annihilation. You know it s a bad sign when pretty much the entire c
ast from the first movie decides to pass on the sequel, including Christopher La
mbert, who had no problem making Highlander II: The Quickening. The plot makes n
o sense ,and the FX and costumes are all hilariously DIY-looking. The movie seri
ously looks like a bunch of strangers in a karate class borrowed their friends Co
mic-Con outfits and just shot whatever popped into their heads over the course o
f a long weekend. It also features one of the best bad line deliveries of all ti
me. Too bad you will die!
50. The Magic Sword
Year: 1962
Director: Bert I. Gordon
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The best film by B-movie maven Bert I. Gordon, the director of The Amazing Colos
sal Man and others, The Magic Sword may also be the best overall movie that ever
got the MST3k treatment. It s honestly a wonderful little slice of fantasy advent
ure, stylistically quite similar to a movie like The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. You ve
got veteran actor Basil Rathbone as the evil wizard, Estelle Winwood as the good
witch/mother of the hero and a bevy of brave, multicultural knights trying to s
urvive seven deadly curses and save the princess. I imagine I would have loved t
his movie if I was a child growing up in the early 1960s.
49. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
Year: 1965
Director: Russ Meyer
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Great title, right? Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is one of the definitive explo

itation films of the mid-1960s, the product of famous sexploitation auteur Russ
Meyer, whose fixation on large-busted women has become synonymous with his name.
Oddly enough though, the film is actually fairly empowering when it comes to it
s female leads, a band of three go-go dancers who conspire to defraud a villaino
us old man. Being a Meyer film, you can expect a certain grungy quality, along w
ith the following: Racecar driving, women punching and being punched in the face
, and huge freaking boobs. And also a big, dumb idiot named Vegetable. As the trai
ler claims, it s totally satisfying.
48. Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2
Year: 1987
Director: Lee Harry
48-100-Best-B-Movies-silent-night-deadly-night-part-2.jpg
There aren t many B movies that have become famous for the absurd delivery of a si
ngle line, but the garbage day scene from Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 cert
ainly conferred a special brand of infamy. The rest of the movie is almost as cr
azy though, if that can be believed. It s structured so strangely first plodding out
over a series of flashbacks that shamelessly steal reams of footage from the fi
rst film, and then snapping into the present where the brother of the first film s
killer goes on a rampage of his owwould expect from the garbage day clip, it s Eric
Freeman s performance as Ricky that makes this one so much fun to watch. The sham
e is apparently still in full effect today: When the film s director tried to trac
k him down to participate in DVD commentary, he found Freeman completely unreach
able.
47. The Barbarians
Year: 1987
Director: Ruggero Deodato
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We had a Barbarian Brothers movie earlier on the list with Double Trouble, but T
he Barbarians was made five years earlier, before they became master thespians.
This is a film that literally has no reason to exist besides the fact that they
had access to these two beefcakes. The plot is the Conan rehash you undoubtedly
knew it would be two young children captured by an evil warlord and raised to beco
me gigantic, musclebound gladiators must fight to take down his empire, blah, bl
ah, blah. Peter and David Paul are both absolutely abysmal they don t even try to th
row on an old-timey accent like everyone else. Hearing these giant guys in loin cl
oths speaking in a Jersey-like accent is pretty damn funny.
46. Killer Klowns from Outer Space
Year: 1988
Directors: The Chiodo brothers
46-100-Best-B-Movies-killer-klowns-from-outer-space.jpg
This is the sort of B movie that you probably know by name even if you ve never se
en it. It s a deliriously weird sci-fi horror flick where aliens who just happen t
o look like clowns land on Earth in a ship that just happens to look like a bigtop tent, then turn people into cotton candy and eat them. It s a definitive examp
le of the trashy 1980s horror flick, a movie I heard whispered rumors of growing
up but never would have been allowed to view. Culturally, it s mostly significant
for being the only film produced and directed by the Chiodo brothers, Stephen a
nd Charles. Outside this movie (still considered their opus and too distinct to
forget) they ve provided effects for dozens of bad horror movies and a few mainstr
eam ones, with titles ranging from the Critters series to Will Ferrell s Elf, beli
eve it or not.

45. Ninja III: The Domination
Year: 1984
Director: Sam Firstenberg
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There was a time in the mid-1980s when ninjas were just about the coolest possib
le characters for an American action movie. American filmmakers officially caugh
t the fever with 1981 s Enter the Ninja, but this sequel was where the genre hit o
ne of its most nonsensical highs. Historically inaccurate ninjas fighting stuff wa
s deemed not enough of a premise for this one, so it s about a sexy aerobics instr
uctor (all hot women in the 1980s were aerobics instructors) who is possessed by
the ancient spirit of an evil ninja. Thus, it becomes part The Exorcist and par
t inexplicable Godfrey Ho-style slice-em-up. It s just an absolutely ridiculous fi
lm probably the only time that ninjas have staged a daring golf course ambush.
44. It Came From Beneath the Sea
Year: 1955
Director: Robert Gordon
44-100-Best-B-Movies-it-came-from-beneath-the-sea.jpg
The name in the director box says Robert Gordon, but all you really need to know
is Ray Harryhausen. This movie has one of his niftiest creations, the giant kille
r octopus that runs amuck on the open ocean and eventually attacks the Golden Ga
te Bridge in a classic sequence. The H-Bomb blasted it loose from the depths of t
he Pacific, but not even the H-Bomb can kill it! blares the trailer. It s just abou
t the perfect expression of 1950s nuclear paranoia, all wrapped up in a science
fiction shell. It was a huge drive-in success, making more than 10 times its ori
ginal budget in box office receipts.
43. Dr. Terror s House of Horrors
Year: 1965
Director: Freddie Francis
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British film studio Amicus Productions made a lot of goofy portmanteau horror flic
ks in the 1960s and 1970s, but this anthology is one of the funniest. I mean ser
iously, how great is that title? It s made all the greater by the fact that the wh
ole framing story takes place on a train the Dr. Terror character (the fabulous Pe
ter Cushing!) literally has no house and no horrors. Aboard the train, he reads
the future and foretells the terrible deaths of five other men via tarot cards,
in stories that run the gamut from werewolves to voodoo priests and man-eating g
arden vines. Christopher Lee shows up in one of the stories as a pretentious art
critic who gets what s coming to him and then some. It s charmingly innocuous and c
haste, incapable of scaring a soul.
42. Cyborg
Year: 1989
Director: Albert Pyun
42-100-Best-B-Movies-cyborg.jpg
This film is essentially the consolation prize for two other failed film project
s. Pyun (director of the largely forgotten 1990 Captain America movie) was initi
ally contracted to shoot a sequel for the earlier Masters of the Universe He-Man
adaptation, along with a live-action Spider-Man movie, but both projects had th
eir funding stripped. After spending money on costumes for both films, however,

the studio still wanted something to show for their troubles. Enter Jean Claude
Van Damme, playing a kickboxing badass in typical Van Damme fashion. Propelled b
y kickboxing, he utilizes kickboxing to kickbox his way through a post-apocalypt
ic landscape replete with kickboxers
and the occasional cyborg. It s the most bada
ss trailer you ll ever see for a feature film with a $500,000 budget.
41. Masters of the Universe
Year: 1987
Director: Gary Goddard
41-100-Best-B-Movies-masters-of-the-universe.jpg
And speaking of Masters of the Universe
this film is insane! Rushed to completio
n in 1987 in an attempt to boost flagging sales of He-Man action figures, it lan
ded with a resounding thud. It s a perfect example of a film that probably sounded
great when a marketing guy pitched it to a board room of coke-snorting executiv
es, but in execution it wasn t something that could be captured in a non-ridiculou
s way in a low-budget action movie. Dolph Lundgren as He-Man and Frank Langella
as Skeletor seem to be completely unaware of what decade they re in and play their
roles as if they re Flash Gordon and Ming the Merciless. The whole movie acts as
if it s still the mid-1950s, which is the only context in which someone could have
kept a straight face while watching Masters of the Universe. It s one of the most
sincerely over-the-top films of the 1980s.
40. Werewolf
Year: 1996
Director: Tony Zarindast
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MST3k s Kevin Murphy has described this film as essentially a softball that was lo
bbed to the show s writers, and it s hard to disagree with him. Werewolf has just th
e right mix of low production values and shoddy acting that MST3k thrived on. It s
just barely competent enough to keep the plot moving forward, but it s the performa
nces that really make it stand out. Why do all the seemingly American characters
have unidentifiable European accents? Why can t the female lead even manage to sa
y werewolf without it coming out as wahr-welf ? Why does the villain s hairstyle change
radically in nearly every scene? I don t know the answers to any of these questio
ns, but pondering them makes Werewolf an enjoyable experience.
39. Shark Attack 3: Megalodon
Year: 2002
Director: David Worth
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Shark movies are the absolute bottom of the barrel in the monster movie sub-genr
e, simply because there are so many of them. Seriously, I would wager that Jaws
might qualify as the most-imitated film ever made as far as B movies are concern
ed, because every year there are at least a few new shark flicks. None of them c
ome even close, though, to the lunacy of Shark Attack 3: Megalodon. Plot is comp
letely irrelevant; what matters are the astoundingly bad special effects. We re ta
lking some of the worst special effects of all time here this film is to the 2000s
what the spaceships in Plan 9 From Outer Space are to the 1950s. And as if that s
not enough, it also has the single most ridiculous romantic line to ever make it
to the final cut of one of these films. It s far too cringe-worthy to reprint here
, you need to watch and understand.
38. Death Race 2000
Year: 1975
Director: Paul Bartel

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Definitely one of the best premises for a Roger Corman-produced film, Death Race
2000 was cinema gold waiting to happen. The story of a dystopian future where a
ll entertainment has been made into a huge cross-country race between psychotic
drivers in weapon-toting cars, its basic story has been reused in dozens of ripoffs and official remakes, including the likes of The Hunger Games. Kill Bill s Da
vid Carradine plays the main character, Frankenstein, a past winner of the race an
d secret resistance fighter to the totalitarian government. A young Sylvester St
allone (one year before Rocky) also shows up as an antagonist, the stereotypical
mobster character Machine Gun Joe. They must have been really struggling to figur
e out how they were going to get this concept across, so in the end they just st
rapped a pair of Tommy guns and a comically huge Bowie knife to the front of his
car.
37. Hell Comes to Frogtown
Year: 1987
Director: Donald G. Jackson
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Try this premise on for size: A mercenary played by Rowdy Roddy Piper must navigat
e a post-apocalyptic world and fight amphibious frog men to rescue a group of vi
rgins and ensure mankind s survival by giving them his seed. If he doesn t, a cadre
of militant nurses will trigger an explosive device strapped to his groin and bl
ow up his junk. Like a sleazy version of Children of Men, this movie imagines a
world where nearly everyone is infertile, but the setting is much more like a cr
oss between The Road Warrior and an episode of ThunderCats featuring the mutants
. A very early acting role for Hot Rod, who was always a better actor within the
wrestling ring than in front of the camera. This is actually one of the most co
herent films from director Donald G. Jackson, a truly bizarre individual who we
will learn more about shortly.
36. Space Mutiny
Year: 1988
Director: David Winters
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The best episodes of MST3k were almost invariably blessed with films that were n
aturally funny and/or entertaining, and Space Mutiny is one of the best examples
of a film hilarious to watch even without MST3k s riffing. It s one of the cheesies
t films they ever did: Colorful and fast-moving, with extensive use of sets and
costuming that hit just the right note of cheapness, like they were all picked u
p at Goodwill a few days before filming began. It s the kind of film that could co
nceivably be made really well, but with this cast of hammy actors there was no c
hance. John Phillip Law is the highlight as the oily, scenery-chewing villain, K
algan, but you also get to marvel at the big, dumb lump of man that is Dave Ryde
r. He s your perfect sort of late- 80s action hero: A slow, white beefy guy who seem
s like he just wandered in from football practice and is vaguely confused about
the idea of being in a movie.
35. FDR: American Badass
Year: 2012
Director: Garrett Brawith
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There are some bad movie fans who draw the line at any film they deem to be

inten

tionally bad, but the real question we should be asking is if the movie is still
funny. FDR: American Badass is most certainly stupid on purpose, but it also man
ages to be funny as hell, and thus I believe it averts the label of intentionally
bad altogether. The cast, led by Barry Bostwick as an incredibly foul-mouthed FD
R, just seems to be having such a great time with the ludicrous dialog I particula
rly love FDR s ongoing concern with making sure the public is aware that he can st
ill please a woman. Every time this movie could conceivably play it safe, it jus
t doubles down again with the most absurd possible outcome, and I admire its chu
tzpah. Just watch this scene where FDR receives a custom-made werewolf-fighting
wheelchair.
34. Class of Nuke Em High
Year: 1986
Directors: Richard W. Haines and Lloyd Kaufman (as Samuel Weil)
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If it s from Troma you know it s going to be tasteless, but the original Class of Nu
ke Em High is one of the studio s more inspired creations. A perfect encapsulation
of 1980s-era nuclear paranoia, the film is set in the studio s classic Tromaville un
iverse, at a high school directly next door to a nuclear power plant. When thing
s go wrong at the plant, it s only a matter of time before the high schoolers begi
n to mutate. What follows is like a disturbed rendition of Grease, except the gr
easers are super-powered mutant monsters who hold the popular girls hostage. Lik
e most Troma movies, it features disgusting but cleverly executed special effect
s, and was influential enough to spawn a whole family of uninteresting sequels t
hat toned down the violence. You ll want to stick with the original.
33. Ben and Arthur
Year: 2002
Director: Sam Mraovich
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A gay version of The Room isn t truly an accurate description when it comes to plot,
but in terms of production it s just about spot-on. Ben and Arthur is a passion p
roject, an attempt at making an important film by its director/producer/star that
goes about its business in the most incompetent and heavy-handed way imaginable.
Mraovich is completely unable to hide his egotism, casting himself in a mismatc
hed relationship with a much younger and more physically attractive dude, but th
at s only the start. It s the least subtle drama imaginable, as the brother of Mraov
ich s character plots to murder him and his lover after being cast out from the ch
urch due to association with a known homosexual. It looks like it was shot on a
flip phone camera and serves as proof that it takes more than good intentions to
create a significant work of art. What Mraovich actually created is a modern ca
mp classic, especially in the gay community.
32. The Incredible Shrinking Man
Year: 1967
Director: Jack Arnold
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This may truly be the quintessential 1950s sci-fi B movie, a groundbreaking stud
y in cheap moviemaking and innovative special effects, with an intriguing story
to boot. When Scott Carey is exposed to a radioactive cloud he finds he s beginnin
g to get smaller. Doctors are unable to halt the progress, and Scott learns a po
werful lesson about stigmatization. He eventually shrinks down to the size of an
insect and faces life-and-death challenges within the perceived safety of his o
wn house, running from a now terrifying housecat and battling a household spider

. It s a film that is not only a great sci-fi spectacle but also a surprisingly th
oughtful discussion of alienation.
31. The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra
Year: 2001
Director: Larry Blamire
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From a sincere 1950s sci-fi B movie we turn to an inspired spoof. Still the most
well-known of Larry Blamire s films, it s also probably the best. Satirizing 1950s
space movies and especially the work of Ed Wood, it succeeds like the earlier-me
ntioned Dark and Stormy Night because of its loving attitude, understanding of g
enre conventions and total commitment by the actors to a shared in-joke. This ti
me, everyone is in pursuit of the mysterious element Atmosphereum, including alien
s, scientists and a criminal intent on using the element s power to awaken the Los
t Skeleton of Cadavra himself. Rarely has anyone made movies this fun with so fe
w resources at their disposal. Blamire works with micro-budgets as well as anybo
dy ever has. And as a true artist, Blamire is determined to press on. He s announc
ed intentions to shoot the film s second sequel, The Lost Skeleton Walks Among Us
this year, turning to crowd-sourced funding through Kickstarter for the first ti
me.
30. Time Chasers
Year: 1994
Director: David Giancola
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The final film on this list to be featured on MST3k, Time Chasers is a gloriousl
y misguided time travel B movie. It s one of the most watchable movies ever featur
ed on the show, but some small aspect always just feels off about the production
. The hero Nick is such a putz, rocking a hideous mullet and generally getting h
is ass kicked by everyone he encounters. The villain might as well be Skeletor i
n a business suit for how well he hides his scheme. They couldn t even make his ai
rplane-mounted time machine look cool. The time travel segments are definitely h
ighlights, like when they go all the way back to the American Revolution in orde
r to mill around with war re-enactors wearing mismatched uniforms.
29. The Haunted Palace
Year: 1963
Director: Roger Corman
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Probably the coolest of Corman s Poe Cycle of films, even though this one has litera
lly nothing to do with Poe, instead being a story lifted directly from H.P. Love
craft s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. This was Corman working with his biggest bu
dget and proving that he was never a bad director, simply a constrained one. I a
dore the visual look of these films like Hammer s movies of the same period they re gr
andiose and gothic and absolutely beautiful. Plus they have the talents of Vince
nt Price as the descendent of a notorious madman but how much evil runs in the fam
ily blood? It s got all the great clichés, including a mob of villagers with torches
and pitchforks. A sumptuous story of revenge across generations; check out the
classic trailer.
28. Undefeatable
Year: 1994
Director: Godfrey Ho (as Godfrey Hall)
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This is pretty much the only high-budget action film that ninja-master Godfrey Ho
ever had a chance to make, which is to say he had more than 20 bucks. Starring w
orld karate champion Cynthia Rothrock as a kickass female street fighter, it sti
ll has to bring in a male hero to do the real fighting against a psychotic street
fighter/serial killer known as Stingray. The movie became infamous thanks to its f
inal fight scene between Rothrock, Stingray and the male hero, and I m warning you
right now: This might very well be the cheesiest fight scene ever filmed. And a
s if that wasn t enough, the movie even has the gall to end a few minutes later wi
th a five-way freeze frame high-five. It s like a movie constructed entirely from
action clichés.
27. The Roller Blade Seven
Year: 1991
Director: Donald G. Jackson
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Remember when I called Hell Comes to Frogtown one of the more coherent films by
Donald G. Jackson? This is why. When Jackson met martial artist/producer Scott S
haw, they elevated their work to Henry Darger-tier outsider art. Employing a sty
le coined as Zen Filmmaking, they set out to make a post-apocalyptic, rollerbladecentric action movie with absolutely no script involved. As Shaw says, Zen Filmm
aking allows for a spiritually pure source of immediate inspiration to be the onl
y guide in the filmmaking process. Here, it guided them to a movie about a nomadi
c warrior who teams up with a kabuki mime and a banjo player to defeat Joe Estev
ez and Frank Stallone in a Road Warrior-like wasteland. The Roller Blade Seven p
retty easily manages to be the most psychedelic, mind-bending film on this entir
e list my attempts to describe here only hint at its profound weirdness. It s a movi
e that is indescribable until you experience it.
26. Foxy Brown
Year: 1974
Director: Jack Hill
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Essentially a remake or sequel to Coffy from a year earlier, Foxy Brown is prett
y much that film with another layer of gritty blaxploitation appeal. The beautif
ul Pam Grier is the hyper-sexual Foxy Brown, who goes on the warpath after her b
oyfriend is killed by members of a drug syndicate. Everyone ends up feeling her
wrath, from pimps and dealers to men selling women into sexual servitude. It s the
prototypical blaxploitation revenge picture, but lifted above others with great
theme music and the sex appeal of Grier. And of course, there is the wonderful
moment when she runs over some honkies in an airplane.
25. Laser Mission
Year: 1989
Director: B.J. Davis
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Who knew that Brandon Lee made so many deliciously terrible films before The Cro
w? Movies like this are cinematic junk food, lowest common denominator flicks th
at aren t insulting to watch because they re completely aware of their role and don t
aspire to be anything else. Laser Mission is the kind of film where you could pr
edict 75 percent of the plot points before watching it cool guy mercenary is sent
on a dangerous mission, meets girl, falls in love, kills bad guy, roll credits.
It stands out with the stupidity of its characters, particularly Ernest Borgnine
as brilliant German laser scientist Dr. Braun, which is self-aware bad movie cast

ing if ever I ve seen it. The trailer tells you everything you need to know and th
en some.
24. The Toxic Avenger
Year: 1984
Directors: Michael Herz and Lloyd Kaufman (as Samuel Weil)
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Even if you ve never seen The Toxic Avenger, I bet you probably know the gist of i
t: A wimpy janitor is transformed into a hulking monster via a barrel of toxic w
aste and goes about the messy business of punishing his tormenters and exposing
the town s drug-smuggling mayor. It s Troma s signature film, and Toxie has now been the
studio s official mascot for 30 years. It really serves as a template for the ave
rage Troma film, with over-the-top gore, crass language and unapologetic sexuali
ty and titillation. One of Troma s first really successful films in the home video
market, it inspired three sequels: Part II, Part III: The Last Temptation of To
xie and Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Adventure IV. Rumors of another sequel pop up e
very few years, but only Lloyd Kaufman knows for sure.
23. Black Samurai
Year: 1977
Director: Al Adamson
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His character in Enter the Dragon made karate champion Jim Kelly a star, probabl
y the best-known black martial artist of his day. This naturally made him a shoo
-in for the blaxploitation genre, and within a few years he made some absolute c
lassics, including Black Belt Jones and Three the Hard Way. Black Samurai was ma
de a few years later and clearly felt the need to push things far past the bound
aries of reality and into cartoonish excess. Flipping through this movie is an a
bsolute trip: Alright, Jim Kelly is flying around with a jetpack right now. Okay,
now he s fighting voodoo priestesses. Alright, now he s fighting
is that an eagle? A
nd always the answer is Yes. Yes, he s fighting an eagle in hand-to-hand combat. Bec
ause that s what you do when you re Jim Kelly and you re hunting down a ruthless warloc
k who plans to hold the world ransom with a freeze bomb.
22. Night of the Demons
Year: 1988
Director: Kevin S. Tenney
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With no reservations, this is one of the best horror flicks of the 1980s. A clas
sic of the teens party in a spooky location and all die terrible deaths sub-genre,
their deaths in this case are caused by an ancient demon that they unwittingly
release from the cellar of a creaky old funeral home. Rather than simply being a
monster movie though, it s simultaneously sort of a demonic possession flick, as
the demons take control of various members of the party and transform them into
twisted versions of themselves. It s a movie that owes a lot to the Evil Dead seri
es but has an additional camp factor because of how strongly it captures its tim
e period the characters are gross caricatures, a clear satire on prevailing youth
culture. They re all memorable, especially scream queen Linnea Quigley, who of cou
rse gets naked in short order.
21. I Am Here .Now
Year: 2009
Director: Neil Breen

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I truly believe that five years from now, Neil Breen will likely have inherited
a place in the terrible movie hall of fame, alongside the likes of Ed Wood and T
ommy Wiseau. The writer, producer and director of three feature films, he is the
sincere, bizarro filmmaker du jour of the information age. I Am Here .Now is his
middle film, and it might be the only thing on this entire list that can compete
with The Roller Blade Seven for the right to be called weirdest flick. Like all o
f Breen s films, it stars the former real estate agent as a messiah-like figure, t
his time an alien from the stars who arrives to cast judgment on mankind or someth
ing. It s kind of hard to tell, because the actors appear to be people Breen found
at the bus stop on the way to the shoot. It s imperative that you understand, how
ever, that this film is utterly sincere. Everything you see in this compilation
of clips is meant to push Breen s simplistic, idealistic agenda. That is of course
what makes it so weirdly charming, the filmmaker s unfailing belief in the sancti
ty of his message.
20. Chopping Mall
Year: 1986
Director: Jim Wynorski
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The original title of Killbots is a lot more accurate, but you can t deny that Cho
pping Mall has a good ring to it. It s another horror flick that perfectly capture
s the 1980s teen zeitgeist imagine The Breakfast Club in a mall, crossed with a ho
micidal version of Johnny Five from Short Circuit, and you re there. From there, i
t s just teens vs. robots, absolutely nothing complicated or fancy because fancy was
not in the budget. The trailer proclaims that they broke into the mall for the w
ildest all-night party of their lives, but what they get instead are electrocutio
ns and the best exploding head scene outside of Scanners.
19. Moron Movies
Year: 1985
Director: Len Cella
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Moron Movies is unlike every other entry on this list. It was made by a single m
an, and it s not a feature. Rather, it s one of the clearest and least-guarded glimp
ses you ll ever get into the life of a lonely, middle-aged human being. The brainc
hild of the perpetually morose-looking Len Cella, Moron Movies is essentially a
compilation of short, comedic clips directed by and starring Cella. And when I say
short, I mean they re mostly about 15 seconds long, and each individually labeled w
ith titles like Hamburger Comedian and Man With Thumb Stuck in Bowling Ball. They do
n t contain jokes so much as jokelets, the smallest possible suggestions of a joke t
hat you can imagine, as if every one was conceived only moments before it was fi
lmed. Johnny Carson found them spellbindingly weird, to the extent that he featu
red Cella on the show several times between 1983-1985. To really understand the
brilliance of a Len Cella segment such as How to Protect Yourself, though, you sim
ply have to see it.
18. Dead Alive (aka Braindead)
Year: 1992
Director: Peter Jackson
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Before he was the Oscar-winning director of The Lord of the Rings or even the pa
ssable director of The Frighteners, Peter Jackson was the Grand High Gore-Meiste
r of New Zealand. Dead Alive is his masterpiece in that respect, and one might e

ven call it the masterpiece of the gory comedy horror sub-genre in general. It sta
rts out as a film more gross in its portrayal of the elderly than anything and t
hen devolves from there into one of the grossest, bloodiest films ever made. Eve
ry method of zombie mutilation imaginable takes place in just over an hour and a
half, including one with a lamp shoved into its skull like a jack-o-lantern. No
thing, though, can compare with the final scene, the infamous lawnmower massacre
. Watching this, it s nearly inconceivable that producers over at New Line said, Su
re, let s give this guy $300 million to make some fantasy epics, sounds good.
17. Enter the Ninja
Year: 1981
Director: Menahem Golan
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This movie and its successors are pretty much the reason why the historical conc
ept of the ninja is largely unknown to the average person today. What we think of
is the Hollywood ninja, and I m fine with it these ninjas are way more entertaining
anyway. Enter the Ninja was the first of the big American ninja B movies, the fi
lms that established so many stereotypes for hacks like Godfrey Ho to cash in on
later. Primary color jumpsuits? Check. Throwing stars? Check. Caucasian guy as
the primary ninja hero? Naturally. Ninjas were the ultimate martial artists of the
1980s, and it all starts with Enter the Ninja. Every movie about silent warrior
s since then is in debt to this one.
16. To Die is Hard
Year: 2010
Director: Glenn Berggoetz
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Let it be known: I love Glenn Berggoetz. Who is Glenn Berggoetz? He s the man who
can lay claim to the title of director of the lowest-grossing film of all time in
reference to the $11 opening weekend of 2011 s The Worst Movie Ever! (Yes, that s th
e real title.) His best-made film, though, is To Die is Hard, a shameless Die Ha
rd parody about an English professor fighting terrorists on campus, in which he
plays the lead role. A rogue filmmaker and shameless promoter, Berggoetz complet
ed the feature for less than $2,000, making it one of the cheapest films on the
list. The man is a genius when it comes to organization and getting things done
on a budget that even you or I could scrape together, managing to make multiple
features on a part-time professor s salary. There s nobody else like him Berggoetz is
the eternal Hollywood optimist, never giving up on his dreams. It s impossible to
not be charmed by his zero-budget gumption.
15. Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine
Year: 1965
Director: Norman Taurog
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Another Vincent Price vehicle with a great title, this one is anything but horro
r. Instead, this is a spoof of sorts on the spy movie genre, featuring Price as
the nefarious Dr. Goldfoot, whose only defining characteristic is that he wears
pointy gold shoes for no apparent reason. A genius in the field of robotics, he
builds sexy female automatons to sleep with various world leaders and captains o
f industry, then steal their wealth and/or state secrets. As you can probably te
ll from that description, the first Austin Powers movie actually owed a lot to t
his plot. Dr. Goldfoot is pure, unadulterated 1960s camp of the highest order, a
lways funny and never boring. It all wraps up with a five-minute chase sequence
that rivals the infamous 1966 Batman some days you just can t get rid of a bomb

sequ

ence in sheer lunacy.
14. Thankskilling
Year: 2009
Director: Jordan Downey
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I think one of the reasons Thankskilling works so well is the disconnect between
the quality of its writing and direction vs. the capability of the actors to de
liver that material. For a movie that more than follows through on a DVD menu pr
omise of tits in the first second, it s not egregiously written, embarking on an amb
itiously bizarre campaign of surrealism from the very get-go. It s just a little b
it less schlocky in its construction than you would expect a film about a killer
turkey to be, and yet the quality of the acting is even worse than anticipated.
Thanks to scenes such as the turkey impersonating a girl s father by wearing his
severed face, Thankskilling has made itself into a self-aware but still transgre
ssive holiday classic for the modern age.
13. Return of the Living Dead
Year: 1985
Director: Dan O Bannon
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It occurs to me that a lot of these films reek of the 1980s especially this one but
it was a banner decade as far as a certain subset of B movies were concerned. It
was a time when tasteless films zeroed in on youth culture with caricatures tha
t have turned into pure camp when viewed 30 years later, and Return of the Livin
g Dead is a prime example. The group of punk kids have names like Spider,
Trash and
cuz, and there s Linnea Quigley taking off her top (and bottom) once again. The zom
bies, meanwhile, subvert the Romero formula by being highly intelligent, especia
lly if they re recently turned. A great display of practical special effects, it h
as some truly iconic scenes such as the bisected dog biology exhibit that comes
back to life. Also featured: Tar Man, maybe the coolest-looking zombie ever. The f
ilm established the trope that zombies ate human brains specifically, which has
persisted and caused confusion in the public consciousness ever since.
12. House on Haunted Hill
Year: 1959
Director: William Castle
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We ve hit a few William Castle features on this countdown, but House on Haunted Hi
ll is the guy s masterpiece. It s got it all: Vincent Price at his goofiest, a big s
pooky house, a mystery and a profoundly non-frightening walking skeleton. The gi
mmick this time around was referred to by Castle as Emergo, and it amounted to a p
lastic skeleton on a pulley system being flown over the audience not his most crea
tive, but shameless enough that only Castle would stoop so low. To me, this is t
he quintessential 1950s horror film, even though it comes at the end of the deca
de. It s totally tame by today s standards but has some fun, over-the-top performanc
es, a bit of witty dialog and a large helping of cheese. I can watch this thing
over and over without getting tired of it.
11. Plan 9 From Outer Space
Year: 1959
Director: Ed Wood
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S

For decades, Plan 9 was the de-facto answer to What is the worst movie ever made?
But although it s certainly bad, it s not quite that bad or maybe it is, and we re just
willing to forgive because it s also quite charming. It s just a nothing of a movie,
practically plotless and featuring some of Wood s most nonsensical dialog. The al
ien characters in particular are written as these totally ineffectual pseudo-int
ellectuals, lambasting the humans about your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid! As most
bad movie fans know, Bela Lugosi died in the course of filming, and unrelated f
ootage he d shot for other half-finished Ed Wood projects was cycled into the fini
shed product. Some scenes also featured chiropractor Tom Mason impersonating Lug
osi by crudely holding his cape over his face, as if no one would notice. It s per
fectly emblematic of Wood s laissez-faire filmmaking.
10. She Woke Up Pregnant
Year: 1996
Director: James A. Contner
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Ah, Lifetime. Nobody cranks out a terrible TV melodrama quite like the Lifetime
network, and none of them are more melodramatic than She Woke Up Pregnant. It s ab
out a woman who goes to the dentist s office for routine surgery, goes under the g
as and BOOM pregnant. But seeing as her husband is infertile and she s never been un
faithful, how did this come to be? Could it be the devilishly handsome dentist?
Who will believe her story, especially once the dentist claims the two have been
having an affair? Well, because it s Lifetime, the answer is pretty much nobody. No
t the police, and certainly not her husband. It will be up to our heroine to set
the record straight! Here s an example of just one of her lines after being accus
ed of lying by the police: I ve just been raped again, but this time I m wide awake.
9. Five Element Ninjas (aka Chinese Super Ninjas)
Year: 1982
Director: Chang Cheh
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Chang Cheh was probably the greatest director of kung fu flicks for Shaw Brother
s Studio, the producers of dozens of Hong Kong kung fu classics in the mid-1970s
, and this is one of his loopiest films. When his noble school of kung fu studie
s is destroyed by dastardly ninjas, the hero must study their forbidden techniqu
es (based on the five elements of fire, water, earth, wood, and gold) to strike ba
ck. Each set of ninjas has their own colorful, outrageous costumes and fighting
styles, such as tunneling through the ground (earth ninjas) or blinding their en
emies with reflective armor (gold ninjas). The whole thing plays out like a cine
matic videogame, complete with a final boss fight. It s also unusually gory and gr
aphic for a film in this genre, so be warned when somebody gets their ass kicked i
n Five Element Ninjas, the results aren t pretty.
8. Miami Connection
Year: 1987
Directors: Richard Park and Y.K. Kim
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A film that was all but forgotten until its rediscovery by the Alamo Drafthouse
theater chain in 2009, Miami Connection is a sight to behold. Produced by and st
arring motivational speaker/taekwondo master Y.K. Kim, the film is part vanity p
roject and part public service announcement. The story sounds like something a t
hird grader in the mid- 80s would have found really bodacious: An awesome synth-ro
ck band called Dragon Sound practices taekwondo on the side and fights a biker g
ang and a drug-smuggling ninja organization on the streets of Orlando. I d like to

point out that Orlando is not a typo the film doesn t even take place in Miami. The a
cting smashes through lower tiers of bad movie performances into hall of fame te
rritory, especially Kim himself, who can barely speak English phonetically, let
alone legibly. There are plenty of highlights and even a few genuinely catchy so
ngs, but nothing can top the dramatic revelation when one character unexpectedly
reveals his quest to find his birth father.
7. Crippled Avengers (aka Return of the 5 Deadly Venoms)
Year: 1978
Director: Chang Cheh
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The only reason I didn t call Five Element Ninjas the finest kung fu B movie from
Chang Cheh is that he also made Crippled Avengers. Part of a short-lived series
of cripsploitation films that tended to feature injured heroes in the vein of OneArmed Swordsman, this film represents that sub-genre s highest point because of th
e physical talents involved. It stars members of the so-called Venom Mob, the fine
st kung fu performers of their day, and the choreography is nothing short of out
standing, full of long, uninterrupted takes with great acrobatics and athleticis
m. It s got everything that makes for an extremely entertaining kung fu movie: A s
illy story, menacing villains, special powers, great costuming and sets, excitin
g choreography and memorable set-pieces. Just look at the poster and tell me tha
t doesn t look awesome.
6. Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
Year: 2006
Director: Scott Glosserman
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In the years following Scream there was no shortage of films attempting similar
deconstructions of the horror genre, but few deserve to be mentioned in the same
breath as the criminally underseen Behind the Mask. Taking place in a world whe
re supernatural killers such as Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger actually exist
ed, this mockumentary follows around a guy named Leslie Vernon, who dreams of be
ing the next great psycho killer. In doing so, it provides answers and insight int
o dozens of horror movie tropes and clichés, such as How does the killer train? How
does he pick his victims? How can he seemingly be in two places at once? It s a br
illiant, twisted love letter to the genre that also develops an unexpected styli
stic change right when you think you know where things are headed. It s one of the
most creative horror B movies of the 2000 s without a doubt.
5. Troll 2
Year: 1990
Director: Claudio Fragasso (as Drake Floyd)
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If a film has inspired a documentary about it detailing exactly what went wrong,
you know you re probably dealing with a special commodity. For Troll 2, that film
was 2010 s Best Worst Movie, a reexamination of how an Italian schlockmeister nam
ed Claudio Fragasso visited Utah in 1989 and managed to shoot a low-budget horro
r flick about vegetarian goblins (there aren t any trolls in the film) despite bar
ely speaking English. Some of it is hard to believe, such as the idea that casti
ng a local dentist with no acting experience in one of the major roles would wor
k out fine. The final film barely looks real. It feels like some kind of elabora
te practical joke played on the viewer, like at any moment the director will sho
w up at your door and say We really had you going, didn t we? My favorite scene may
be the trip to the general store, which features a shopkeep played by an actor w

ho was apparently on a day trip from a local mental institution. It s mind-blowing
stuff.
4. Samurai Cop
Year: 1989
Director: Amir Shervan
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When clueless Iranian filmmaker Amir Shervan moved to the United States in the m
id-1980s, he brought with him a creative mind that would go on to direct some of
the most amazing fun-bad action movies ever made. His masterwork is Samurai Cop
, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. But oh, how to describe the
shoddiness of this film, which stars hair model Matt Hannon and the impossibly h
uge chin of Robert Z Dar? It s every terrible Lethal Weapon clone rolled into one, a
perfect cocktail of cop movie clichés and 1980s action movie ridiculousness. The
script is impossibly, unfathomably bad some of these scenes couldn t possibly have b
een written out on paper. There s a dozen different ones I can cite, but just take
the hero s conversation with this flirtatious nurse as an example. And how amazin
g are those reaction shots from his partner? The whole film is a riot.
3. Birdemic
Year: 2008
Director: James Nguyen
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People assume it s easy to create a movie so bad it ends up on all-time lists, but
that s anything but the case. Movies like Birdemic cannot be created on purpose it s
straight-up impossible. The most important element in the creation of a Birdemic
is intense, misplaced confidence and optimism, a complete lack of self-doubt an
d common sense. Any filmmaker who realizes what makes for a quality film would i
mmediately see he was out of his depth trying to film this bizarre rip-off of Th
e Birds and abandon the project. He would see that his cast of actors were the l
east-engaging, most listless characters in film history. It would be obvious to
him that a thinly veiled environmental message would not be best-delivered with
exploding birds that vomit corrosive acid. It would be clear that clip-art CGI o
f eagles fluttering in place is not an acceptable visual standard. But Birdemic
is blissfully unaware of how terrible it is, and that makes it totally brilliant
. Never will you look at coat hanger combat in the same way.
2. The Room
Year: 2003
Director: Tommy Wiseau
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The Room is now so well-known, especially after the publication of Greg Sestero s
The Disaster Artist, that it s lost the luster of being obscure and that s fine. This
film doesn t need the mystique of the midnight movie: It will always remain utterl
y charming in its sweet sincerity and cluelessness. The dramatic story of a seem
ingly perfect man undone by his scheming and unfaithful girlfriend, it plays as
both a vanity project and an exceedingly public accusation of every woman Tommy
Wiseau was ever involved with, which couldn t have been many. It s unique among film
s of its caliber for having a production budget so much higher reportedly $6 milli
on if you can imagine it, all of it squandered. It may be the most a director/pr
oducer/star has ever poured into a project to glorify himself, and the beautiful
thing is that Wiseau seems to fully believe to this day that he was successful.
He s never felt the need to shoot The Room 2, even after the original film s massiv
e underground success. Because on a basic level, Tommy Wiseau is a true artist,

just an exceedingly bad one. You can t help but admire that.
1. Hard Ticket to Hawaii
Year: 1987
Director: Andy Sidaris
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There are dozens of films just like Hard Ticket to Hawaii, if we re talking about
plots. Director Andy Sidaris directed 12 himself, all starring gun-toting Playbo
y and Penthouse models as busty secret agents, largely in tropical locales. Thes
e sorts of films were staples of early cable, commonly premiering on USA Up All
Night or Skinemax. They re all trashy. They re all stupid. But Hard Ticket to Hawaii i
s the most fun of all of them, the perfect mixture of classless sexuality and hy
per-macho 1980s action. Its action sequences are insane, from the inflatable sex
doll-clutching skateboard assassin to a henchman named Shades who is executed via
razor-tipped Frisbee. Oh, and have I mentioned that the subplot revolves around
the girls hunting a deadly, escaped snake that has been infected with toxins fro
m cancer-infested rats ? On its own, the snake could make this an awesome movie, b
ut it s just one reason why Hard Ticket to Hawaii is the most enjoyable B movie of
them all.