10 Great Movies With 10% Or Less On Rotten Tomatoes
The Cat in the Hat doesn't work for kids, but it's a deranged riot for adults.
We live in an era of moviegoing dominated by aggregators and algorithms, where our decision to leave the house to watch a movie might well depend on whether its Rotten Tomatoes score crosses the precious 60% threshold for a Fresh rating.
As great as the Tomatometer can be for gauging the general critical reception to a movie, it certainly isn't the be-all and end-all of movie watching. If you relegate yourself to only watching Fresh movies, you're going to miss out on some quality cinema indeed.
And while it's easy to be dismissive of movies that end up scoring extremely low on the Tomatometer, there are even times where those movies have proven themselves more than worthwhile.
These 10 films, though critically demolished upon original release, have built up a considerable amount of fanfare in the years since as mass audiences discovered them on home video.
While these movies may not all be clever or artistically innovative, they're far more entertaining than their brutal, 10%-or-less Rotten Tomatoes scores would suggest, and are absolutely worth your time if you're prepared to approach them with an open mind...
10. A Night At The Roxbury (9%)
It's fair to say that movies adapted from Saturday Night Live sketches don't exactly have a consistent track record, and so it was little surprise when A Night at the Roxbury - expanded from the wafer-thin club parody skit "The Roxbury Guys" - landed just 9% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Yet A Night at the Roxbury endures as something of a cult classic among general audiences, where it rocks a far more appealing approval score of 69%.
Nobody's going to pretend that this movie is high-art, but Will Ferrell and Chris Kattan are a lot of fun to watch as loveable idiot brothers Steve and Doug Butabi, who dream of one day owning their own club.
The story is thinned out but makes way for a rat-a-tat blast of oddball humour that's less-broad and more agreeably weird than you might expect.
Ferrell and Kattan are firmly on the same unhinged wavelength, and it's got a banger soundtrack to boot - most crucially reprising Haddaway's iconic "What Is Love" from the SNL skit.
It's no Wayne's World as SNL movies go, but what is? Removed from its critical drubbing upon release, though, it's a great hangout comedy.