10 Terrible Movies Everybody Loves
In the immortal words of Troll 2: "oh my God!"
Typically, if you're sitting down with a movie you want it to be good, right? Seems like a no-brainer. In this fast-moving life, with distractions at every corner and millions of hours of content available at any time, if you're going to commit 90+ minutes to something then it better be worth your while.
It doesn't have to be Citizen Kane, it has to be simply entertaining.
Turns out, you can make an entertaining movie by making a bunch of terrible decisions along the way. Kicked off perhaps by the era of Mystery Science Theatre and the riff track, it's become increasingly common that people find themselves enjoying bad cinema.
After years of exposure to great movies, we all know what we want. So why not mix it up, avoid all that choice of competing 90% scores and watch some absolute car crashes?
The movies on this list are objectively awful or, at the least, the critics had very little positive to say about them. Still, each one still manages to capture the attention of almost everyone who sees them in that "it's so bad, it's good" kind of way.
10. The Wicker Man
When it comes to actors starring in films that defy the metric of good and bad, Nicolas Cage has an entire portfolio of them. Whilst the quality of Cage’s acting will forever be a hotly debated topic, it’s a pretty unanimously held opinion that The Wicker Man is one of the biggest overall clunkers he’s ever starred in. And yet, because of it, it’s beloved.
The film opens with detective Edward Malus, as played by Cage, witnessing the death of a small girl after a truck ploughs into her Mother’s parked car. This opening is a beautiful summation of the film’s lack of subtlety. It turns the creeping discomfort of the 1978 original into an unintentional comedy.
As he searches for a missing girl on a mysterious island, Cage flails wildly around a meandering plot with an obvious conclusion, screaming like a man possessed.
The story has a hideous double fake-out moment where Malus saves a drowning girl, wakes up on the dock, realises he has the girl in his arms and then wakes up again. At the movie’s crescendo, Cage dresses in a bear costume and viciously sucker-punches the leader of the all-woman cult. And finally, of course, there’s the “not the bees” meme which might be one of Cage’s finest moments of absurdity.
If you ask anyone, The Wicker Man is a laugh-a-minute comedy no matter what it was originally designed to be.