50. Halloween II (2009)

Credit where it’s due: Rob Zombie tries to do something completely new with the Halloween franchise for this sequel and he brings his own unique vision to the proceedings. Unfortunately, that vision fucking sucks. The first twenty minutes are absolutely wasted on a dream sequence, which feels like it’s been shoved in by studio mandate just to up Michael Meyers’ body count. Rob Zombie also had to force his wife into the film, so suddenly the entire Meyers family is getting visions of their ghost mother trying to bring them all together (yes, even Laurie Strode, who hasn’t seen her birth mother since she was a baby). The film wastes nearly an hour and a half before Michael even gets into Laurie’s vicinity, meaning that most of the film is a bunch of wheel-spinning, toothless kills, and spending time with straight-up unlikeable characters. It’s a senseless, nasty, nihilistic film that makes you feel like you’re punishing yourself by watching it.

49. Scary Movie 4 (2006)

In my initial drafting of this list, I nearly put every single Scary Movie entry in my bottom one hundred. I binged them all a few years ago, and it was one of the most torturous viewing experiences of my life. However, I know that the first two are kind of well-liked, and I didn’t remember exactly what I disliked so much about them (other than them being dumb and not very funny), so I kept most of them off. That’s not something I can say for Scary Movie 4 though. I’ve actually seen this particular entry a couple times over the years, and it was significantly worse on a revisit. It suffers the usual Scary Movie problems (a disjointed plot which is just a bunch of popular movie scenes mashed together and made “comedic” in the lowest common denominator way possible), but this one was also really lazy and offensive when it got to The Village portion of the plot. Of course these fucking hacks will make jokes about Adrien Brody’s character being autistic. And Bryce Dallas Howard’s character is blind, so they’ll have her walk into a crowded meeting hall and take a big dump, because she can’t see! Haha, fuck this piece of shit movie.

48. Batman & Robin (1997)

I distinctly remember seeing this film in theaters as a child, and my God, upon rewatching it, is is wild that they gave this a major release in the 90s. It was a different time, I guess. That said, Batman & Robin is a pretty entertaining watch, due to its very campy, Adam West-style humour, hammy acting, and wild production design. While I definitely think that moving Batman to a grittier style was a wise choice in response to this movie, Batman’s kind of missing this sillier side to the character after all these years, so Batman & Robin doesn’t feel nearly as blasphemous in 2024.

That said… still not a very good movie. There’s a reason it’s still on this list, after all, but it’s one of those movies that’s entertaining in its badness at least.

47. Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf (1985)

Oh and speaking of entertaining badness and insane theatrical releases, the only explanation I can think of for how we got Howling II is this: copious amounts of COCAINE. This movie is fucking batshit, and the only reason it isn’t completely unwatchable is due to committed performances from Christopher Lee and Sybil Danning, and its legitimately boppin’ New Wave soundtrack. That said, what other movies are you going to find where all the werewolves have wildly different makeup effects, a dude’s eyeballs explode out of his head, there’s a furry threesome, and Sybil Danning tears her shirt open in a shot that is repeated seventeen times during the end credits?

46. Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987)

The reasons for this film’s failure are well-documented, but to sum it up: The Cannon Group purchased the rights to Superman, brought back Christopher Reeve, Gene Hackman, and Margot Kidder, promised a big budget, and even gave Reeve creative control, which led to the optimistic nuclear disarmament plot. However, when it actually came time to make the film, Cannon suddenly slashed the budget in half, leaving them with a shoestring budget to try to bring this superhero film to life. The results were pretty embarrassing, looking significantly worse than the original film from nine years earlier (for that matter, don’t even get me started on how poorly it holds up to the bombastic action of Superman II). Even if that hadn’t been an issue though, The Quest for Peace would have been a letdown due to just being poorly written, easily as bad or worse than Superman III in that regard.

45. Halloween: Resurrection (2002)

Halloween: Resurrection is a bad movie in its own right, but it feels so much worse coming off of H20, which had been the first good Halloween movie in sixteen years. It’s like the Weinsteins made a good Halloween movie by mistake, said “Oops, gotta fix that,” and then immediately sent the franchise back to hell where it belongs. Resurrection commits the cardinal sin of bringing back Jamie Lee Curtis, putting her all over the advertising, and then kills her off in the opening minutes of the film. Oh, and they also undo the ending of H20 by making Michael’s titular resurrection one of the most ridiculous ass-pulls to force a sequel in cinema history (to be fair, this was planned at the time H20 was filmed, and you can kind of tell that that’s not Michael at the end of that film, but it’s so contrived).

And that’s just the first fifteen minutes! From there, Resurrection turns into a stupid, teen slasher movie which tries to riff on reality TV programs and livestreaming. The film is painfully early-2000s, with a kung-fu fighting Busta Rhymes, horror meta-commentary, found footage gimmicks, and a bunch of pretty, one-dimensional teenagers for Michael to carve up.

44. In the Name of the King 3: The Last Mission (2013)

I’ve seen a lot of Uwe Boll movies over the years. Most of his movies are utter shite, but occasionally you’ll get something from him which is borderline competent (Bloodrayne 2, Assault on Wall Street), or even good (Rampage… seriously, check it out), and you just want to give the guy a hug for pulling it off for once. One of those “good for a Uwe Boll movie” movies was In the Name of the King: Two Worlds, a decent action movie featuring Dolph Lundgren and Natassia Malthe (who I will always have a soft spot for due to her appearance in the best video game movie adaptation ever… also, a bit of a tangent here, but I have to give Boll major credit for keeping her employed, as she had been blacklisted in Hollywood by Harvey Weinstein after he raped her in 2008).

Anyway, all this to say, I actually had some hope for the third In the Name of the King movie going in. Unfortunately, The Last Mission feels like no one cared about it at all. Boll is clearly working on a miniscule budget, filming on location in Bulgaria with local, no-name actors, and over-utilizing an awful CGI dragon. Probably worst of all though, the film is in critical need of an editor because it has some of the most boring and drawn out action sequences I’ve ever seen.

43. The Santa Clause 2 (2002)

This movie deserves a special spot in my own personal hell due to how often my parents would put this stupid fucking movie on. I enjoyed the original Santa Clause as a kid, but this sequel was just worse in every way, with Tim Allen over-acting his ass off as an evil, toy Santa, an extremely contrived plot to force Scott Calvin to get married, and weird, talking reindeer who love to fart.

42. The Predator (2018)

The angriest I’ve ever been walking out of a theater may very well have been the time when I saw The Predator. I was pretty excited for this movie going in: it was being directed by Shane Black (fresh off of Iron Man 3) and featured Thomas Jane, Keegan-Michael Key, Olivia Munn, Sterling K. Brown, and Yvonne Strahovski? Colour me interested! Unfortunately, the movie has been butchered to hell and back by Fox, with some of the strangest editing I’ve ever seen (the way that Traeger accidentally shoots himself in the face with his back to the camera would never have been filmed this way if this was actually intended to happen). I do appreciate that it tries to do something a little different with the Predator formula, evolving our understanding of the Predators in an interesting way, but for every interesting idea there are a half dozen which are incredibly stupid. The new bounty hunter Predator is almost all-business, and isn’t nearly as interesting as the classic honour-bound Predators, or even the sadistic Super Predators from Predators. This new Predator just massacres anyone that gets in its way, which goes against the entire appeal of the character. Don’t even get me started on the idiotic characters, or the ending, which is so bad that I walked out of the theater saying that they either had to decanonize this movie, or Predator as a franchise was dead. Thankfully, it seems that everyone involved in the franchise agreed.

41. Halloween: The Curse of Michael Meyers (1995)

The title of “worst Halloween movie” is one that is fiercely contested, but I have to give the crown to The Curse of Michael Meyers. This is largely due to the film being butchered worse in the editing room than one of Michael’s victims, leaving the film largely incoherent. There are long stretches of the movie where stuff is happening, but none of it actually makes sense when you sit and think about it. The film also fails to deliver on the plot threads left dangling by the previous film, introducing the Cult of Thorn and then implying that it gives them power over Michael Meyers… for some reason. But that doesn’t matter, because Michael just decides to kill them all anyway. What an ignoble way to end the original Halloween franchise and Donald Pleasance’s career.

40. In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (2007)

As bad as the third In the Name of the King is, the original is even worse for me, just due to how much more it has going for it. We’ve got a great cast (Jason Statham! Ron Perlman! Ray Liotta! John Rhys-Davies! Burt Reynolds! Matthew Lillard!), a much bigger budget, and some actual ambition on display. You can tell that Uwe Boll is trying to make this his very own version of Lord of the Rings, with some massive battles and there are even some legitimately cool moments, like the wizard’s duel in the finale. However, the film is plagued with utterly laughable dialogue, poor editing, bad acting, and a crappy script. It’s good for a few belly laughs, but after the first hour it just turns into an utter slog. This is one of those movies that’s only two hours, but feels like it’s nearly twice that length. Worst of all, one of my friends used to say that this movie was actually good, so I went in with some actual expectations, only to have them quickly melt away.

39. Against the Dark (2009)

I can’t remember if one of my roommates in university recommended this movie to me back in 2009, but I decided to check it out and was floored by how bad it was. It’s a blatant ripoff of I Am Legend, featuring Steven Seagal’s bitch ass occasionally fighting vampires, with basically no budget and TV movie production values. Suffice to say, it fucking sucks (and no, that’s not even intended to be a pun, this movie doesn’t even deserve puns).

38. Battle of the Bulbs (2010)

Battle of the Bulbs is a total piece of crap TV Christmas movie. Most of these low-budget Christmas movies feature terrible acting, a generic plot, and a totally forced resolution, but Battle of the Bulbs is so much worse and more predictable than you are imagining. My family are obsessed with these formulaic, Hallmark Christmas movies, to the point where they watch them year-round, so I’ve seen plenty of them. With that in mind, I can definitely say that Battle of the Bulbs is the worst Christmas movie I can ever recall seeing.

37. Atlas Shrugged II: The Strike (2012)

As bad as the first Atlas Shrugged movie was, part two is so much worse. At least the first part had the decency to just be cheap and boring, but part two doubles down and hammers you over the head with its shitty politics. To be fair, the movie has much higher production values, and Samantha Mathis put in a legitimately good performance as Dagny Taggart (despite a few shaky line deliveries), actually managing to make her feel sympathetic. Unfortunately, the film’s still shoddily made, has some of the worst special effects I’ve ever seen in a professionally-made movie, and most of its runtime is spent preaching at the audience to make sure they “get” the message rather than actually moving things forward. The politics are just plain stupid here, and I don’t even mean that in a biased way: I mean that you have to be a fucking moron to believe that America would ever implement something like the “Fair Share Law” or “Directive 10-289”, but that’s the sort of idiocy you have to float to make Objectivism seem morally justified.

36. I, Frankenstein (2014)

Some movies are so fundamentally flawed that you have to wonder how they even managed to get greenlit, let alone released. As you may have guessed, I, Frankenstein is one of those movies. The film is basically Frankenstein mixed with Underworld, and even features the writer of the Underworld films (and is co-written and directed by the guy who wrote the Pirates of the Caribbean movies and Collateral!?). The film is just ridiculously stupid at all levels. Maybe with a light tone it could have been enjoyable, but I, Frankenstein is embarrassingly self-serious, features Syfy channel-level production values, and makes you generally feel pity for the actors who ended up trapped making it.

35. Osombie (2012)

Man… 2012 was a wild year. America was fresh off of assassinating Osama bin Laden, and some chuckle fucks thought that it would be a great idea to make a movie where he comes back to life as a zombie and leads a zombie jihad. In case it wasn’t obvious, the film was pretty offensive considering that American soldiers and Afghanis were still dying in the War on Terror at the time. The only nice thing I can say about this movie is that the make-up and cinematography are pretty good considering the budget. Otherwise, this movie is dumb as dirt – you can tell that it’s the ramblings of a bunch of Call of Duty/Nazi Zombie players put to film. The “special forces” characters are stupid, and the civilians are somehow even stupider. It’s not even all that fun, campy, or over-the-top to compensate for this.

34. Paintball (2009)

The first review I ever published on IC2S was for this really shitty horror movie about a bunch of doofuses who go paintballing and find themselves getting killed one-by-one by a lone mercenary. Every good idea this film has gets completely wasted. Most egregiously, the characters are assembling parts for a paintball grenade launcher that fires acid-filled paintballs, but when they finally get all the pieces, it doesn’t fire. What the hell kind of bullshit writing is that, especially given how boring the rest of the movie is!?

33. Howling IV: The Original Nightmare (1988)

Howling IV is another victim of severe budget cuts. Originally intended as a more faithful adaptation of the novel, Howling IV had basically all its funding pulled just prior to filming, meaning that the cast and crew had to work with the smallest filming budget known to man. Unfortunately, this means that what we do get is fucking boring, with basically nothing happening for 90% of the runtime. When stuff does finally start happening at the very ending, it’s still a far cry from the original film in terms of quality (and I don’t even particularly like The Howling, so that’s saying a lot). Romy Walthal also puts in perhaps the worst lead acting performance I’ve ever seen, which is a feat considering this franchise’s pedigree.

32. Beyond Loch Ness (2008)

With Beyond Loch Ness, we’ve hit the point on this list where awful TV movies reside. Beyond Loch Ness sees the Loch Ness Monster coming to North America to snack on locals in surprisingly gory fashion. It’s laughably bad all-round, and the special effects are definitely what you’d expect from a TV movie, but at least it’s somewhat entertaining to make fun of.

31. Evil Bong (2006)

Man… this movie. I don’t even know where to start with it. Despite their miniscule budgets, Full Moon Features have made some reasonably ambitious stuff over the years (I watched this in a double-feature with Trancers, which was a pretty good time!), but Evil Bong is the polar opposite of ambition. Hell, it’s downright lethargic. The film is shot like a sitcom, with basically everything taking place in a one room apartment. The characters just mill about and get high, while the titular Evil Bong offs them one-by-one. We get some cameos by Tommy Chong and Full Moon Features regulars, and there’s some dancing strippers in the Evil Bong’s dream world to give the audience something to look at. It’s all just… so dumb. I was high when I watched this movie, and even then I was just sitting there thinking “what the fuck am I watching?” Clearly, no one involved gave a single shit when they made Evil Bong, they just filmed enough improvised bullshit to get to feature length, and then called it a day.

30. Game Over, Man! (2018)

This movie might have been the point where I just started to assume that “Netflix Original” meant “this movie is a stinking garbage pile that will give you cancer if you so much as sniff it”. I thought that the premise sounded intriguing: it’s a “homage” to Die Hard, starring three slackers trying to pitch their get their video game concept to an influencer who is staying at the hotel when terrorists break in and take everyone hostage. Unfortunately, within the first five minutes, we’ve got a cornucopia of cringy semen and closeted gay jokes, which make up the bulk of this film’s attempts at humour. Like… picture this scene: the terrorists are about to find the slackers, so they need to come up with a plan to slip past them. Two of them basically just hide behind the curtains, and the third pretends that he died of auto-erotic asphyxiation by hanging himself in the closet with his dick out. The two henchmen find him and… turns out they’re gay, so this causes them to want to fuck on the bed in front of him!?!!! Oh, and this also means that we get Adam Devine running around with his dick out for the next five minutes, which didn’t do it for me, but maybe that’s a plus for some of y’all. There are a few laughs to be had, especially when the film really does push the envelope (I legitimately laughed when the terrorists try to humiliate the influencer by forcing him to eat another man’s ass out, only for him to go whole hog into it, to everyone’s enjoyment), but for the most part, Game Over, Man! is either lowest-common-denominator levels of cringe or outright offensively bad.

29. Left Behind II: Tribulation Force (2002)

I recently went into excruciating detail about why this movie is so bad, but here’s the TLDR: it’s boring as fuck. To be fair, the book it’s based on also sucks, but at least it had the good grace to end with a big, exciting war. This movie doesn’t even have that, so it’s just ninety minutes of wheel-spinning and low-stakes drama, with awful evangelism tactics, and the worst romantic misunderstanding subplot I’ve ever seen. I fucking hated Left Behind: Rise of the Antichrist, so the fact that this movie is much further down on this list should really say something about how dire a watch it is.

28. The Cloverfield Paradox (2018)

The Cloverfield Paradox is, to date, the biggest movie disappointment of my life. A friend and I both really loved the first two Cloverfield movies, so we were excited to watch this movie when it shadow dropped during the Super Bowl. We had heard initial impressions that it wasn’t very good… but, c’mon, it’s a Cloverfield movie, how bad can it really be?

Turns out… really, really bad. To put it simply, in The Cloverfield Paradox, shit just happens for no reason. You either go with it, or the entire thing falls apart immediately. The movie sets everything up like we might get an explanation or reasoning for what’s happening. Why is a woman suddenly embedded in the walls? Why does the ship’s worm colony suddenly appear inside a dude and kill him? Why does a dude’s arm get detached and then start moving on its own volition? The answer: just fucking because. There’s no real rhyme or reason: they just went to an alternate dimension and everything is completely fucky here. I think there’s a reality wherein this could be satisfying, but here it just becomes frustrating, as nothing makes any fucking sense and is just there to look cool or spooky. As usual for J.J. Abrams, the mystery of it is most of the actual appeal, so the fact that there is no actual mystery is just a piss-off. Meanwhile, the entire time this is happening, we’ve got a gargantuan Cloverfield monster fucking up Earth and we don’t even get to see this until the final shot of the film, which is just infuriating. I hate this movie with every fibre of my being. It took a bourgeoning franchise of critically-acclaimed, loosely-connected, sci-fi originals and completely destroyed it in one, single movie. How do you fuck up an entire franchise that badly!?

27. Troll 2 (1990)

Troll 2 is legendarily bad, and as funny as it is, it definitely deserves its reputation as one of the worst movies ever made. I saw it in theaters as a double-feature with Best Worst Movie, and I even got to meet George Hardy, so I was primed to enjoy its brand of insanity. It did not disappoint. The film is a combination of low budget, bad acting, and legitimately weird writing, all of which is made worse due to a severe language barrier for the director, which makes everything in the film utterly bizarre to witness.

26. Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1994)

Texas Chainsaw Massacre is an utter embarrassment and easily the worst movie in a franchise notorious for its bad sequels. Despite being written and directed by one of the co-creators of the original film, it completely misunderstands why the original film was so resonant back in 1974. The film makes all sorts of meta-commentary about bad horror sequels, but this falls completely flat because the film itself is even worse than most other bad horror sequels (which is saying a lot). This is largely due to the baffling script, which features the Illuminati controlling the Sawyer family to try to get them… to scare people, I guess (it’s stupid). About the only thing making this movie watchable is Matthew McConaughey’s unhinged performance as Vilmer, which isn’t exactly good, but it is certainly memorable for how over-the-top he gets.

And that’s it for part two. If you’re reading this the day it comes out, then my list of the 25 worst movies of all time will be out tomorrow!