Movie-making isn't an exact science.
From the biggest blockbuster to the cheapest "Z movie," filmmakers all start out with a
desire to entertain, but many times it doesn't go as planned.
The pieces just fail to come together, and we're left with a product that is less than
transcendent.
However, there are also times when those dysfunctional pieces come together perfectly, and a film
project transcends badness to become something truly, jaw-droppingly, spectacularly awful.
Here are some of those films.
Manos: The Hands of Fate
Hal Warren was a Texas fertilizer salesman who happened to make the acquaintance of Academy
Award-winning screenwriter Stirling Silliphant while working as an extra on a TV show.
According to Entertainment Weekly, Warren proclaimed to his friend that filmmaking was
easy, and ended up betting that he could make and star in a movie himself.
He wrote the first treatment right there on a cocktail napkin, and one of the most ill-conceived
ideas in cinematic history, Manos: The Hands of Fate, was born.
The film that resulted from the friendly bet has so many problems that it'd be easier to
catalog what didn't go wrong.
Shot for $19,000, the Z-horror picture, in which a vacationing family stumbles across
a weird cult, features long, dialogue-free shots of people driving, reaction shots that
don't appear to be reactions to anything, dead-end subplots, shots that inexplicably
linger on after characters have stopped talking…
"There's no place like that around here…"
And overall, some of the most poorly-delivered, atrociously written dialogue you will ever
hear.
"That's ten miles…"
"Ten miles?
Might as well be ten thousand miles."
Its insanely shoddy production values have become the stuff of legend, especially after
the film's notorious roasting on Mystery Science Theater 3000.
"Mike!
Help us!"
"You have to want to help yourself."
The film was lovingly restored by a fan in 2011, so its astonishing ineptitude can be
revisited by generations of future filmmakers.
Troll 2
The problems with Troll 2 begin with the fact that it is not, in fact, a sequel to 1986's
Troll, and the villains are goblins, not trolls.
According to Film School Rejects, the film has become renowned for its incredibly clunky,
heavy-handed, needlessly expository dialogue, which was the result of its screenplay being
written by a non-English speaker, Italian writer/director Claudio Fragasso.
"They're eating her.
And then they're going to eat me."
Despite appeals from his amateur cast, Fragasso insisted they deliver each line exactly as
written, and their enthusiastic overacting renders nearly every line of dialogue in Troll
2 borderline excruciating.
"Oh my God what's happening to her?
And why can't I move?
There must be a logical reason for all of this."
"Shut up!"
The cinematography and special effects are appropriately amateurish, the loopy plot fails
to ever follow through on its occasional threat to make sense, and its scenes of "horror"
register as explicitly comical.
"Oh my Godddd!"
Actor Michael Stephenson went on to direct the 2009 documentary Best Worst Movie, detailing
his experience working on Troll 2, which contains the depressing revelation that Fragasso, for
all these years, was under the impression that he'd made an awesome movie.
"I did a very good movie.
If the others say worst movie, them problem."
"Oh my gosh, that is the worst movie I've ever seen."
MAC and Me
The 1988 film MAC and Me was an attempt, about five or six years too late, to cash in on
the box-office-breaking success of Steven Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, but
that's not all it was.
It was also an attempt to further cash in by stuffing the film to the brim with arguably
the most name-brand products ever before seen on-screen.
In the movie, a young, wheelchair-bound boy befriends a horrifyingly ugly animatronic
alien, and the pair awkwardly stumble through a story that only pauses long enough to prominently
feature corporate logos.
MAC and Me is a film that can't be bothered to present a coherent plot, yet has no trouble
grinding the proceedings to a halt for a full-on, music video-style dance number set entirely
inside of a McDonald's restaurant, and the friendly alien's name was surely no coincidence.
The dialogue is overwhelmingly cheesy, the alien looks like it could have come from your
neighborhood Halloween store, and the plot's lazy reworking of E.T. is inane even by the
standards of cheaply produced '80s kids' movies.
Howard the Duck
It's tough to remember when Marvel didn't utterly dominate the box office, but there
was a time when Hollywood simply had no idea how to handle their properties.
For the strongest evidence of Tinseltown's comic cluelessness, look no further than the
very first big-screen adaptation of a Marvel property.
To call 1986's Howard the Duck a starring vehicle for a C-list character would be generous.
But producer George Lucas apparently felt he could do no wrong in the mid-'80s, and
he brought the full staff of his company Industrial Light and Magic and a $30 million budget to
the production, which would almost instantly be pegged as one of the biggest flops of its
decade.
The film isn't so much funny as it is deeply weird, throwing Howard, who is mysteriously
transported to Earth from his native Duckworld, together with human love interest Beverly,
played by Lea Thompson.
It's a strange pairing in the comics that's rendered downright disturbing in live-action.
Its tone-deaf attempts at humor and creepy animatronics utterly baffled audiences.
"Howard, wait!..."
"AAHH!"
"Uh-huh, typical hairless ape."
The film struggled to make back half its budget domestically.
It showed the first big chinks in Lucas' armor, and tried its best to ruin a character who
wouldn't appear on film again for nearly 30 years.
"You know, this is beginning to seriously undermine my self-esteem."
Birdemic: Shock and Terror
If you gathered together a group of random people with absolutely no interest in film
and forced them at gunpoint to make a horror feature with almost no money and fewer resources,
you would end up with with something that would look a whole lot like 2008's Birdemic:
Shock and Terror.
This complete ripoff of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds tells the simple story of a happy
couple…
"Wow.
Congratulations.
I think you'll look great in those lingerie."
...whose romance is interrupted by an unexplained killer bird infestation.
Its overall aesthetic, shot on the cheap, stiffly acted, and incompetently plotted despite
the story's simplicity, would've been more than enough to earn the film its place among
the worst of the worst.
But the birds themselves simply must be seen to be believed, rendered with the absolute
cheapest CGI anyone has ever seen, dropped clumsily into the frame as our heroes swat
at the squawking menaces.
The repetitive, grating sound effects that accompany their attacks just make the "terror"
seem even more ridiculous.
Some observers have gone so far as to wonder whether Birdemic was actually intended to
be funny.
According to director James Nguyen, it wasn't.
"It's shocking and terrifying, just like a 100 million dollar picture, Hollywood style."
"You think this looks like a 100 million dollar picture?"
"Well, I think from From a distance, you know?"
"From a distance?"
Movie 43
The cringeworthy Movie 43 is the result of an unearthly amount of determination on the
part of Peter Farrelly, once best-known as the mastermind behind gross-out comedy classic
There's Something About Mary.
Farrelly envisioned a new breed of sketch comedy, a film that would play like a series
of Funny or Die skits, but… grosser.
According to The Guardian, Farrelly adopted a strategy of waiting, sometimes for years,
to shoot segments based on his stars' availability, and even moved the production 3,000 miles
to accommodate Richard Gere.
Through sheer patience, pestering and more than a little guilt, he managed to enlist
major Hollywood heavy hitters to completely embarrass themselves in service of the most
horrifyingly unfunny so-called comedy ever produced.
It's been ripped to shreds by critics, but it was famed critic Richard Roeper who hit
the nail on the head when he said,
"[Movie 43] is the Citizen Kane of awful."