The 10 Best Bad Movies – A Field Sobriety Anniversary Tribute

It’s hard to believe that for one year, week after week every Tuesday night, me and a few friends (including pretty much the entire staff here currently) have subjected ourselves to so many painfully bad movies. As we reach the one year anniversary of Bad Movie Night, which enjoyed a brief tenure on this site in the form of the Field Sobriety Wednesday column before being retired late last year following the viewing of the worst movie ever made, I thought it might be fun to have a brief retrospective on the films that have defined the event.

Part of the reason I retired this column was that I felt it was a bit too insular, appealing only to the select few attendees of the screenings rather than a wider audience that, for one reason or another, was actively seeking out shitty movies as a way of torturing their fragile psyches. While I’m sure the same setbacks will affect this list as well, try to think of it as a survival kit to be used on those weekends where you find you have nothing better to do. Any one of these movies could brighten up a lazy afternoon or, given the current temperatures here in Chicago, a bitterly cold day during which travel outdoors is not advised , provided you have beer (lots of it) and aren’t entirely alone (there’s nothing more depressing than making sarcastic comments about a film to yourself). To be sure, every one of these films is a god-awful piece of shit, but they all possess that unique level of badness that, like a Hofstadter strange loop, somehow doubles back on itself to become genius.

10. The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift

I still find it hard to believe that I saw this in theaters on opening night. It was during that time when I was writing the bulk of bad movie reviews for the now defunct Stylus Magazine website. Out of all the garbage I endured for the sake of that site — Doom, Pulse, Freedom Writers — Tokyo Drift remains the most entertaining of the bunch. Based on a ridiculous concept which I remain skeptical can even be done with a car, at least to the extent that it’s portrayed here (car enthusiasts prove me wrong), and filled with gaping holes in the plot, the third installment of the Fast and the Furious legacy is one of the most ridiculous movies I’ve seen in quite some time. There’s plenty I can say about this, but I’d prefer to let my original review of the film do the talking for me.

09. The Green Berets

John Wayne’s shift from star of Westerns to director never felt as seamless as Clint Eastwood’s would a few decades later; Green Berets is evidence of that. A Vietnam War film by way of Northern Michigan, the film’s locale isn’t the only curiously incongruent element of its mise-en-scene. How about the battles themselves? Fought in trenches and forts that would feel more at home in World War I and the Wild West frontier, respectively; the film’s underlying theme appears to be aimed at glorifying an unpopular war. What makes The Green Berets so jaw-droppingly hilarious is just how out of touch Wayne is with the current mindset, both overseas and on the homefront. His “cowboys and indians” take on conflict would have been corny even in his own time. Imagine if Douglas Sirk had directed Apocalypse Now and you’re half way to understanding how cumbersome and lopsided The Green Berets is.

08. Gymkata

As far as I can tell, Gymkata only exists to soak up ridicule. There’s no other explanation serviceable enough to explain how a film such as this came into existence. It’s bad enough that the film labors extensively to finds ways to highlight its “star” Kurt Thomas’ gymnastic ability, awkwardly inserting scenes in which he’s called upon to utilize them, but the plot that drives this gymnastic buffoonery is itself so groan-inducing that Gymkata has pretty much no merits whatsoever with which to silence its critics. Fans of Larry the Cable Guy will already know that Witless Protection opens this Friday — a fact the rest of us were blindsided by this week when the first TV spots for the film appeared — and it’s noteworthy since Charles Robert Carner, the writer of Gymkata’s screenplay, also penned this film. While Witless Protection is sure to be an awful film, I doubt it will be Gymkata-bad, which is to say hilarious to watch.

07. Knock Off

This isn’t the last time you’ll see Jean-Claude Van Damme on this list. While this film pales in comparison to his triumph (which we’ll get to shortly), it’s still quite hilarious in its own right. Much of that is due to the garish over-direction of Tsui Hark, who uses split screen unnecessarily, runs his film literally through a shredder, and has a POV shot of a foot being inserted into a shoe. Kudos to whoever’s decision it was to pair Van Damme up with Rob Schneider, for it results in a truly surreal scene in which Van Damme is running through Hong Kong, pulling Schneider in a rickshaw while Schneider aggressively whips him with an eel. I’m not making this shit up. While it’s not the single funniest scene I’ve witnessed involving Van Damme (that title is reserved for this scene), it’s enough to push this film to the top of the Bad Movie Night rankings.

06. Halloween III: Season of the Witch

How do you pitch a screenplay like this? Alright, I’ve got this idea for a movie. You know the Halloween series? Well, I’m gonna take it one step further. Let’s eliminate the Mike Meyers character entirely and replace him with a crazy Irish toy producer/prankster hell-bent on world domination. His plan? To sell a special kind of mask to all the kids in the nation, then, on Halloween night, have them all simultaneously view a television commercial with an annoying song and an ultra-creepy image of a skull that somehow activates a piece of Stonehenge (yes, the Stonehenge) lodged in the mask that reduces all the children to a pile of writhing snakes and insects. While I’m not sure how this would result in world domination, I’m not entirely sure even what the main villains’ actually intentions are. Oh, did I mention that he’s protected by an army of androids that crush people’s heads? Yeah, that too. This film is a mess.

05. Alone in the Dark

Uwe Boll has become something of a staple here on COMACC. While many of his films don’t exactly live up to expectations, Alone in the Dark stands out as the best example of Boll’s hubris-fueled incompetence. Staring a triumvirate of washed-up “talent” (Christian Slater, Stephen Dorf, Tara Reid) and, as usual, based on a video game, Boll directs the film as if it were a mash up of all the worst elements of music videos and bad science fiction. But the crowning jewel of this piece of hyper-stylized trash lies in the director’s commentary where Boll, among other shameful transgressions, lambasts Tara Reid for refusing to remove her top and attacks Internet audiences for not understanding his “David Lynch” ending.

04. Robot Monster

After viewing Robot Monster, I’m convinced that Ed Wood enjoys far too much attention as the so-called “worst director of all time.” Ripe with ultra-subversive sexual innuendo, Robot Monster is the kind of film that isn’t aware of its own genius. From the robots wearing ape suits that wipe out the entire human race but can’t destroy one bumbling family of idiots, to the mysterious reappearance of “dinosaurs” (really just stock footage from other films) during the invasion, it’s pretty clear that director Phil Tucker couldn’t construct a comprehensible story to save his life. Somewhat ironically, it conversely almost lead to his untimely death as Tucker took the overwhelming criticism of the film so seriously that it nearly resulted in his suicide. Luckily for Tucker, he was as bad a shot as he was a director, so he got to live long enough to enjoy the ironic appreciation for movies like this one that would rise up during the 80s, unlike his contemporary, Ed Wood, who died n 1978.

03. Planet of Dinosaurs

Planet of Dinosaurs was something of a left-field pick of mine for Bad Movie Night. I recalled watching it as a child, at which time I found the film terrifying. I picked it for nostalgia value, but really wasn’t sure if it would produce the level of comedic badness I was hoping to achieve. Man, did I luck out with this one. It has the film quality of a 1970s porno, only this film might as well be considered ultra-softcore, if not simply non-existent-core in the sense that the only moderately attractive female is slaughtered literally two minutes into the film. Still, that doesn’t stop the filmmakers from keeping most of the less-than-appealing surviving characters from wearing next to nothing, including one guy who inexplicably removes his shirts near the beginning of the film and never finds a reason to put it back on. The dinosaurs are laughably bad stop-motion animation that seems to have come from a different movie entirely. Top it all off with a soundtrack that suggests a blind/deaf person feeling their way around a Moog and you’ve got one of the funniest 70s B-movies of all time.

02. Dreamcatcher

Dreamcatcher represents something of the Holy Grail of bad movies. An artifact that could serve as the McGuffin in an Indiana Jones movie. “Dr. Jones, you and I are only passing through history. Dreamcatcher is history!” How this film came to be is a conundrum in itself. Directed by three-time Academy Award nominee Lawrence Kasdan, written by two-time Academy Award winner William Goldman, adapted from a Stephen King novel and starring a cast of A-list actors, by all filmmaking logic, Dreamcatcher simply shouldn’t be as bad as it is. And yet, it’s the type of bad that causes viewers to rub their eyes in disbelief. Just consider the plot for a minute, which deals with an invasion of alien parasites — “shit-weasels” as Morgan Freeman’s character refers to them — that burst out of peoples’ assholes… but not before making them fart violently and bloat up to the size of Violet Beauregarde. The icing on the cake however, aside from Donnie, not Mark, Wahlberg as the retarded kid who transforms into a giant alien and saves the world, is the demented villain that takes the shape of an alternate and goofy British persona that invades the mind of the film’s main character. It simply has to be seen to be believed.

01. Double Team

Many of my BMN contemporaries will disagree with me on this pick, considering that the general consensus is that Dreamcatcher is the axiomatic apex of all bad movies. Fair enough, Dreamcatcher has all the elements that make it a bona fide classic in this meta-genre of filmmaking, but for pure comedic value nothing will match Double Team. Inept direction paired with a Frankenstein’s Monster of a plot that finds Jeanne-Claude Van Damme in a mashup of conflicting screenplays that include, but are not limited to, a stint on a futuristic island prison derivative of the British television show The Prisoner, a pointless sky dive in tandem with Denis Rodman in a physics-defying, basketball-shaped parachute and a baffling revenge story involving Mickey Rourke’s character that culminates in the explosion of the Coliseum in Rome during which Rodman and Van Damme seek shelter from the flames behind a Diet Coke vending machine that has apparently been equipped with extra-durable Teflon armor doused in flame-retardant. It’s the kind of movie that only comes along every decade or so and it’s telling that in an interview even Van Damme himself dismisses the film as a mess of disparate plot threads with no underlying connection, although not in those words.