10 Amazingly Bad Rip Off Films You've Never Seen

Anyone who bemoans Hollywood’s lack of creativity would do well to remember that ideas are anathema in the business of show, and that commercial reasons almost always trump creative ones.

“Sequels,” William Goldman said, “are whores' movies.” The pulse to create them, he claims, is never creative, always financial. Going by that definition, then, the only difference between a sequel and a rip-off is that the latter is more likely a cheap, unauthorized clone made outside the studio system. Both exist merely to cash in on a famous title, and neither are meant to be good.

Flat, uninteresting sequels are a dime a dozen, but if you want a truly bizarre knock-off, you have to go overseas. During the 70s and 80s, there was a running joke among Italian exploitation filmmakers that if you wanted to know what your next film was going to be, you only had to see what was making money in Hollywood.

Dawn Of The Dead spawned Zombie Flesh Eaters, Alien begat Contamination and Escape From New York birthed 2019: After The Fall Of New York – lively, audacious films that could teach Hollywood a thing or two about how to create entertaining trash.

None of the 10 movies that follow are campaigning for an Academy Award, they just do what a good popcorn movie is supposed to – they entertain.  

So intent were the Italians on ripping off other pictures that they even swooped on Richard Franklin 1978 Horror movie Patrick - which was neither very good nor a sizeable hit. A legit remake, starring Charles Dance and Sharni Vinson, appeared in 2013.

Filling the movie with gratuitous nudity and fake gore, director Mario Landi gives us one of the most outrageous clones that ever met a projector bulb. In this version, Patrick is comatose following an accident and has (for reasons unexplained) developed psychic powers, which his mad scientist father uses to punish those he holds responsible for his boy’s condition.

Bodies are boiled alive in swimming pools, decapitated by car windows and graphically violated by a flying poker, but what really startles is Landi’s determined pursuit of the lowest common denominator. In one scene, a woman discovers a body hanging from a hook and, instead of raising the alarm, stops by a fountain to splash water on herself, causing her negligee to turn transparent.