20 Terrible Movies You Should See Before You Die

Stephen King said: “I am no apologist for bad filmmaking, but once you’ve spent 20 years or so going to horror movies, searching for diamonds (or diamond-chips) in the dreck of the B-pics, you realize that if you don’t keep your sense of humour, you’re done for.”

Back in the early 80s, when Ed Wood was posthumously acquiring the title of The Worst Director Of All Time, King was one of the first mainstream authors to advocate the love of bad movies. In his memoir Danse Macabre, he describes the distinction between enjoyably terrible and just plain terrible.

“Movies that are simply bad,” he writes, “can be dismissed impatiently, with never a backward glance. But real fans of the genre look back on a film like The Brain From Planet Arous with something like real love. It is the love one spares for an idiot child, but love is love, right?”

From marijuana warning films through 1950s creature features to backyard slasher movies, there’s something endearing about a movie with primitive effects, bad acting and howlingly hilarious dialogue. The kind of movies where a space gorilla in a diving helmet tears open a starlet’s shirt and asks, “Would you accept me as a man?”

Bear in mind that everything is subjective and that one man’s meat may be another man’s Howard The Duck, but if you’re interested in these types of films, you really need to watch the following.  

Transparent in long shots, solid in close-ups and a giant rubber hand at all other times, scantily clad Allison Hayes wreaks vengeance on her hubby after an encounter with an alien causes her to grow to “astounding” levels.

This is the legendarily awful 1958 movie whose hilarious effects have delighted generations, but whatever the movie’s other failings, it’s well-acted and gets everything said and done in 66 minutes without unnecessary subplots.

Even Quentin Tarantino’s a fan: the poster is seen on the wall of Jack Rabbit Slims in Pulp Fiction.