But at the time this overblown comedy became synonymous with financial failure, and was thus also universally perceived as a dud movie to boot. It might just be art.īy the standards of later mega-flops, like Cut-throat Island, The Adventures of Pluto Nash or Warren Beatty’s own Town and Country, Ishtar‘s box office wasn’t that shameful. An inexplicable montage of kung-faux, topless bondage, horned demons, skating punks and swordplay carried out across parallel time zones, The Roller Blade Seven makes Eraserhead look positively straight-forward. Jackson and his protégé, the self-styled martial arts Zen master Scott Shaw, crafted this Z-grade rarity out of a passionate belief that there was an audience for surrealist, soft-core sci-fi rollerskating movies co-starring the likes of Frank Stallone, Karen Black and Joe Estevez. Torchwood star John Barrowman looks like he’s having a great time, not least when he ad-libs “the line” at 66 minutes in. Giant Octopusbecause you won’t believe what the makers of this Israeli-South African co-production try to get away with, especially when their oversized mama megalodon swallows jetskiers and life-rafts of survivors whole. While Jaws: The Revenge, Tentacles and Aquanoids are all worthy so-bad-they’re-amusing schlockers, this tale of a giant prehistoric shark chowing down on the citizenry takes the piscatorial prize for laugh-out-loud inanity. This is a cult sensation waiting to be born. Every scene, every line, every hissy fit is simultaneously hilariously amateur and hysterically fever-pitched. Where Wiseau used 35mm and spent millions to achieve at least some production value, writer-director-producer-star Mraovich might as well have shot his story of homosexual persecution and fightback on a cell phone with a budget of about $5.67.
If Tommy Wiseau’s The Room is the over-wrought, melodramatic and self-pitying heterosexual camp classic of choice, then Sam Mraovich’s Ben & Arthur is its gay equivalent.
What also makes this badly watchable is that director Roger Christian shoots every scene on a weird askew angle. Even more over-the-top is his performance, which is all mwu-ha-ha-ing and an almost Shakespearean declamation of eeeeeeevil! Barry Pepper’s terrible, too, bringing Christian Bale levels of intensity to his cave warrior. Set in the year 3000, a millennium after the Psychlo master race invades Earth and enslaves humanity, this has Travolta as a 10-foot-tall alien who gets around in dreadlocks, nose plugs and KISS boots. courtesy Everett Collection)Īfter his post- Pulp Fiction comeback, John Travolta made himself a laughing stock in this partial adaptation of his guru L. Most of all they were shocked that this supposedly erotic drama generated nothing but guffaws. They were shocked at Verhoeven thinking we’d be turned on by Elizabeth Berkley and Kyle MacLachlan making love in a neon-lit pool like they’d been set on the spin cycle. They were shocked at Eszterhas’ ludicrously “hard-hitting” dialogue about who has nice breasts, who is a whore, who finds it hard to adjust to no longer being ejaculated on. Audiences and critics were shocked all right. (Photo by United Artists courtesy Everett Collection)įollowing their smash-hit Basic Instinct, director Paul Verhoeven and writer Joe Eszterhas tried to shock cinemagoers with this sensational look at the sleazy world of Las Vegas strips clubs and showgirl casino spectaculars. Here then are 25 of his picks for those films that, awful as they may be, you simply cannot turn away from… Along the way, he spoke with such bad movie aficionados as John Landis, Joe Dante, Eli Roth, John Waters and the Mystery Science crew, while himself appearing in George Romero’s Survival of the Dead. What makes a film so appalling that it transitions from ordinary ineptitude into the sublime beyond cult status (and all reason) and into that surreal place where you really can’t believe what you’re watching? RT’s regular contributor Michael Adams has a pretty good idea: as part of his new book Showgirls, Teen Wolves and Astro Zombies, he spent an entire year seeking out the greatest atrocities cinema has ever unleashed, watching more than 400 bad movies in a quest to to find the worst film ever made.