Atlas Shrugged II: The Strike (2012)
The second film from Ayn Rand’s libertarian fantasy. This gets more into the meat of Rand’s ideas (wherein the wealthy decide to ignore an undeserving world) and is even more ridiculous than the first film
Atlas Shrugged III: Who is John Galt? (2014)
The third of the trilogy of films adapted from Ayn Rand’s absurd fantasy wherein the leaders of the business world decide to go on strike because they don’t feel appreciated enough
Atomic Rulers of the World (1965)
The US release of several short Japanese films featuring the superhero Starman. Cheap and entertainingly absurd, filled with tatty superheroics and laughable science
Atrocious (2010)
Spanish Found Footage film about the investigation of a haunted woods during which almost nothing happens, before a left-field twist ending that makes little sense
Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958)
1950s bad movie classic with Allison Hayes as a wife made into a giant by a passing UFO who rampages through town after her philandering husband. Painfully bad effects make for show that frequently slides into the laughable
Attack of the Adult Babies (2017)
A heist film that ends up in a mansion filled with grown-men who have diaper fetishes. And then things get really bizarre. Some films are so wild and insane they attain cult status. And then there are the wannabes
Automatic (1995)
Olivier Gruner plays an android who goes rogue after accidentally killing his boss. A dull action film with no greater ambition than to be an SF version of Die Hard
Automation (2019)
Another among the recent spate of Artificial Intelligence film, the story of a secretary who befriends a robot. This is an A.I. film on a B-budget that you feel should have been made as a comedy
Avengers Grimm: Time Wars (2018)
Released at the same time as Avengers: Infinity War, this was a mockbuster from The Asylum involving a team-up between fairytale characters. The third in their Avengers Grimm series
AVPR: Aliens vs Predator Requiem (2007)
Second of the Alien/Predator crossovers and the absolute nadir of either series. Gone is the suspense of either series’ earlier entries and the creatures are now no more than standard monsters in a teen horror film
The Awful Dr Orloff (1962)
The first film from prolific horror and exploitation director Jesus Franco to which he would later make four sequels. This is a blatant copy of the French Eyes Without a Face served up with little directorial flair
Babel (1999)
An inane French/Canadian-made children’s film about three cute creatures that come to help a boy stop the resurrection of the Tower of Babel on the eve of the millennium
Baby Geniuses (1999)
Film set around the premise that babies are secretly geniuses and talk in their own language. This makes a beeline for pee and poop jokes and seems to think we should applaud it for the cutsieness of seeing babies doing adult things
Backmask (2015)
Marcus Nispel is a director most associated with remakes of other films. In original material here, he is still rehashing moves from other films – an abandoned asylum and every shock effect in the possession/exorcism playbook
Bad CGI Gator (2023)
A deliberately ridiculous Charles Band production where students throwing their laptops into a lake causes an alligator to float through the air and become giant-sized
Bad Channels (1992)
Another film from Charles Band’s Full Moon Productions, this is made with a deliberate chessiness as aliens take over a radio station shrinking girls down into bottles
Bad Girl Island (2007)
A film that feels like it should be an erotic thriller but isn’t. Antonio Sabato Jr. rescues an amnesiac Annalynne McCord who proceeds to exert a fatal influence
Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever (2002)
An action film that sets Antonio Banderas and Lucy Liu up as rival assassins. Despite a reasonable budget thrown at it, the film comes strangely without enervation
Barbie and the Three Musketeers (2009)
Alexandre Dumas’s classic adventure story is turned into an animated vehicle for Barbie with genders reversed and an absurdly upbeat Girls Can Do Anything vibe. Being a kid’s film, the girl Musketeers are no longer allowed to wield swords
The Bat (1959)
The second remake of the still superior silent Old Dark House classic. The original had incredibly vivid visuals but despite the addition of sound and Vincent Price, this version feels creaky and dated
Batman (1943)
Batman’s first screen appearance in a fifteen-chapter serial. This is a dull, impoverished adaptation, which sees Batman and Robin rewritten in the service of the US government fighting a Japanese invasion force
Batman Forever (1995)
Tim Burton’s superlative duo of Batman films were wrecked after Joel Schumacher took up the director’s chair and turned the films into giant camp fests. Here he allows a madly overacting Jim Carrey and Tommy Lee Jones loose as the villains
Battleship (2012)
Adaptation of the Battleship boardgame that emerges at best as wannabe Michael Bay. Imagine Pearl Harbor mashed up with a Transformers film and lots of bone-headed glorification of American militarism
Beauty and the Beast (2009)
Cheaply made attempt to turn the fairytale into a fantasy adventure where Beauty becomes a kick-ass heroine who joins the Beast in defeating an evil lord and witch
Bedazzled (2000)
US remake of the British comedy where Brendan Fraser is a schmuck who sells his soul to The Devil who twists the wording of each wish. The bite of the original is lacking
Bedtime Stories (2008)
An unfunny Adam Sandler film in which he plays a guy whose bedtime stories come true. Sandler regards himself as the funniest guy in the room and doesn’t even seem to be making an effort.
Bells (1981)
Rather silly thriller in which Richard Chamberlain tries to track a madman who has discovered a means of transmitting explosions by telephone
Beneath (2007)
Girl returns to her hometown after many years, encounters family secrets, ghostly figures, clairvoyant visions. The film holds interest for a time as you try to figure out what is going on but eventually proves a letdown
Berserker: The Nordic Curse (1987)
Justifiably obscure 1980s video release that has been intended as a copy of The Evil Dead concerning possible Viking berserker spirits amok in backwoods Utah. Cheap and routine on almost all counts
Beta Test (2016)
This has the interesting idea of mind-controlled people being used as shooters in a live-action videogame. However, the rest of the film is a routine low-budget action film
Beverly Hills Body$natchers (1989)
Unfunny comedy set around a morgue where a mad doctor has found a process to resurrect the dead. Sort of like Night Shift crossbred with a PG-rated version of Re-Animator
Beware! The Blob (1972)
A sequel to The Blob, although this plays everything for comedy. The one and only film directed by actor Larry Hagman, no less than J.R. Ewing of Dallas fame
Beyond Bedlam (1994)
Tatty British film that feels like an attempt to crossbreed A Nightmare on Em Street with The Silence of the Lambs. Star Elizabeth Hurley sued to prevent the film’s release.
Beyond Skyline (2017)
Skyline was a modest alien invasion film; this is a long-planned sequel. The new director has simply turned it into an action film and tediously deals with every alien encounter with gunfire, stunts and explosions
Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010)
A homage to 1970s SF cinema, full of trippy journeys through transcendental space and white antisceptic corridors. In aiming for this look, the film also forgot a small thing like a plot or coherent explanation of what is happening
Bicentennial Man (1999)
Isaac Asimov may not have been the best science-fiction writer ever but his stories buzzed with challenging ideas. In the hands of Chris Columbus, one of Asimov’s robot stories is reduced to mawkish sentimentalism
Big Bang Love, Juvenile A (2006)
This is one of Takashi Miike’s most incomprehensible films – what appears to be a murder mystery and gay love story set in a prison, along with random SF elements
Bigfoot vs The Illuminati (2020)
From the director of Trump vs the Illuminati, gonzo animation where Bigfoot and several resurrected historical figures fight off invading aliens that include Stalin, Aleister Crowley and Anubis
Bikini Girls on Ice (2009)
This gets full marks for an attention-grabbing title. Unfortunately, it is the most interesting thing about the film that otherwise only offers up plentiful bikini-clad girls but routine slasher mechanics
Billy the Kid Versus Dracula (1966)
This has a reputation as a bad movie classic. The attention grabbing novelty mash-up transforms the Western outlaw into a hero to combat Dracula (a hammy John Carradine)
The Black Cat (1981)
Film from cult Italian director Lucio Fulci. This has almost nothing to do with the Edgar Allan Poe story. With Fulci’s trademark gore sequences tamed, there is not much else for the film to fall back on
Black Christmas (2019)
A remake of the work that has been cited as the first slasher film. This is less a horror film than a horror film that has been hijacked by a political agenda, delivered with a relentlessly loud and damning misandrist tone
The Black Hole (2006)
Of all the concepts in physics, the wildest of these is the black hole. It seems highly disappointing that this set out to be a film about a black hole but all we get is a film about an electrical monster amok
Black Noise (2023)
A team of mercenaries arrive on an island on a retrieval mission only to find everybody has been turned to dust and a mysterious piercing noise that causes them to hallucinate
Bleed (2016)
This feels like mostly a series of horror tropes – ghost hunters with cameras in an abandoned building, backwoods occultists wanting the heroine’s baby – shuffled without originality
Blood Feast (2016)
Blood Feast was the world’s first splatter film. This is a remake with a better budget but suffers a tameness that fails to come anywhere near the go-for-broke rawness of the original
Blood of Dracula’s Castle (1969)
One of the films from Z-budget director Al Adamson, who should be a rival for Edward D. Wood Jr in the bad movies stakes. This resurrects Count Dracula in the present-day, living in a castle in the California desert
Blood Orgy of the She-Devils (1972)
One of the films from director Ted V. Mikels made not long afterRosemary’s Baby and mostly seems an opportunity for Mikels to lecture about historical witchcraft. Certainly, one of the great exploitation titles of all time
Bloodeaters (1980)
A little-known zombie film in which marijuana crop-dusted with an untested pesticide turns hippies into zombies. Listed as a Video Nasty in the UK
BloodRayne (2005)
Another Uwe Boll’s videogame adaptation, this feels slung together from vampire film and sword and sorcery cliches. Among the badly mismatched casting, the most eyebrow raising is Ben Kingsley as the vampire villain
The Blue Bird (1940)
With the success of The Wizard of Oz, 20th Century sought to capture the same by casting Shirley Temple in this appallingly schmaltzy fairytale about two children on a quest for the Blue Bird of Happiness
Blues Brothers 2000 (1998)
John Landis and Dan Aykroyd minus the late John Belushi revisit their cult classic but the reunion exercise smacks of poor judgement and emerges as a haphazard arrangement made only to exploit the appeal of the original
Bolt Neck (1999)
The amusing idea of the Frankenstein story relocated to a modern high school – and with no less than later-to-be superstar Ryan Reynolds as the monster
Bone Lake (2024)
A psycho-sexual thriller that is being heralded as a throwback to the 1990s erotic thriller a la Basic Instinct but suffers from an utter tameness that would have been ridiculed in the 1990s heyday
Boo! 2 A Madea Halloween (2017)
Tyler Perry is an accomplished impressionist but his two Halloween comedies appropriate elements of the horror film while having no interest in the genre. Here all the horror elements only serve to deliver a lecture on child rearing
Boogeyman (2005)
A film that has been construed almost entirely as a series of spooky jumps and hyped suspense scenes with nothing in the way of rhyme, reason or connecting rationale. Produced by Sam Raimi
The Box (2009)
Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly adapts a Richard Matheson story about a couple who are offered a terrible choice by a stranger but delivers a bafflingly incomprehensible film
Box: Metaphor (2023)
Australian film about a future where people are imprisoned inside shipping containers, this suggests it is going to be something like another Cube
The Boy Next Door (2015)
A cougar version of Fatal Attraction with Jennifer Lopez stalked by a teenage boy. On every level this invites ridicule, from J-Lo sleepwalking through her performance to a director who has never made a good film to a script detached from human psychology
Brainjacked (2009)
A low-budget film wherein a teenager falls under the influence of a mad scientist who drills open heads to implant mind control chips. This makes a beeline for gory splatter effects
Bram Stoker’s Legend of the Mummy (1997)
Low-budget and cheap looking adaptation of a lesser-known Bram Stoker novel The Jewel of the Seven Stars. This was clearly made to capitalise on Stoker’s name following the success of Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Brave New World (1998)
TV movie adaptation that conducts a hatchet job on Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel where his vision of a conditioned class structure is turned into an allegory about a media-saturated world
Breakfast of Champions (1999)
Disappointing adaptation of the Kurt Vonnegut novel from Adam Rudolph that substitutes Vonnegut’s satire for clumsy, ham-fisted farce that never gives us any clear idea what it is satirising
Breaking Dawn Part 1 (2011)
The point where the Twilight series collapses under its pretensions and draws every detail of its wedding out for an excruciating hour. A series that has been all about preaching chastity then segues into Right to Life advocacy
The Breakthrough (1994)
A film about the scientific efforts to explore the afterlife, this suffers from too many good ideas and not enough of the effects needed to convey its journey
Brenda Starr (1989)
Disastrous Brooke Shields starring film adaptation of the famous comic-strip about a girl reporter. Nobody involved is taking the show seriously and everything is blown into camp farce.
The Brown Bunny (2003)
Vincent Gallo’s muchly ridiculed directorial effort is an unbelievably indulgent film consisting of long, tedium-inducing scenes where nothing happens. It does arrive at a a surprise left field ending that travels into genre territory
Bruce Almighty (2003)
Comedy in which God appears to Jim Carrey and grants him His powers for one week. Expectedly the film is of zero theological depth and all about Carrey going completely over-the-top
Brutal (2007)
Tedious psycho film that only seems slung together to feature a series of nasty dispatches. Features some incredibly bad writing and maybe one of the most ridiculous pieces of serial killer motivation ever devised
Bulletproof Monk (2003)
Painfully derivative US-made attempt to jump aboard the popularity of Wu Xia following The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. There are talented people involved who should have known better
The Butterfly Effect 2 (2006)
The Butterfly Effect was not a film set up for a sequel but we get one here anyway with a different person flipping back in time to change his rather dull and uninteresting life
Candy Stripers (2006)
Throwback to the 1950s SF film where alien body snatchers take over the nurses of a hospital. This fails to find the right cheesily absurd tone needed
Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh (1995)
The first of the Candyman sequels, this goes back to add a Candyman origin story but mostly rehashes the first film. Director Bill Condon’s constant straining for effect becomes maddening
Can’t Be Heaven (1998)
A low-budget Coming of Age story about growing up in an Italian-American neighbourhood. Ralph Macchio turns up as a ghostly saxophonist to offer advice
The Cape Canaveral Monsters (1960)
The one other SF film made by Phil Tucker, the director of Robot Monster. An alien invader effort made to capitalise on the Space Race with aliens trying to sabotage rocket launches
Captain America (1979)
Laughably cheap and dull tv pilot version of comic-book superhero, which emerges less the Captain America of Marvel Comics fame than Captain America imagined as Evel Knievel superhero
Captain America (1990)
Cheap and fairly terrible adaptation of the Marvel Comics superhero from low-budget director Albert Pyun. The superheroics look impoverished and Matt Salinger makes a dopey-looking Steve Rogers
Captain America II (1979)
Another of the mostly disastrous Marvel tv adaptations of the 1970s. Captain America is sidelined for much of the show. This does conduct the coup of casting Christopher Lee as the villain but criminally gives him nothing to do
Captivity (2007)
Blatant Saw copy from Roland Joffe, a director better known for his arthouse works, from a script by cult director Larry Cohen. This starts stylishly before collapsing in a series of ridiculous twists
The Car: Road to Revenge (2019)
The Car concerning a possessed car is one of the forgotten films of the 1970s. Why it has produced a sequel 42 years later is a scratch of the head. Not that the two films even resemble one another
Carnival of Souls (1998)
Carnival of Souls was rediscovered as a cult classic in the 1980s. Then there was this remake that misses all of the haunted mood of the original in favour of makeup effects jumps and reality blurrings that make no sense
Carnosaur (1993)
A Roger Corman produced cheapie about genetically engineered dinosaurs that was quickly rushed out to exploit the success of Jurassic Park. Corman went on to make two sequels
Carousel (1956)
A Rodgers and Hammerstein musical that has gained a classic status. On the other hand, it doesn’t resonate so well today in its story about the redemption of a wife-beater.
Carrie (2013)
Another pointless 70s remake that replicates the 1976 Carrie almost scene for scene but misconstrues the material by a mile. Crucially, it comes without the sensational casting that made the original, nor a Brian De Palma at the helm
Carry On Screaming (1966)
Twelfth of the popular British comedy series, here the Carry On team conduct a bawdy farce on the Hammer horror film that was all the in-thing at the time
The Case of the Whitechapel Vampire (2002)
One of a series of cheap Canadian-made made Sherlock Holmes tv movies featuring a wildly overacting Matt Frewer who makes possibly the worst screen Holmes ever
Casino Royale (1967)
During the James Bond craze of the 1960s, the only Ian Fleming novel not owned by Albert R. Broccoli was turned into a giant farce. The film has five directors, a host of stars (including three playing Bond) and is an incoherent mess
Casper Meets Wendy (1998)
The second of the video-released sequels to Casper where this time he crosses over to meet Wendy the Good Little Witch as played by Hilary Duff
The Castle of Fu Manchu (1969)
The fifth and final of the Fu Manchu films with Christopher Lee as the super-villain Fu Manchu. The last two were made by exploitation director Jess Franco and only worth watching for Lee’s icily autocratic presence
The Cat Creature (1973)
TV movie about an Ancient Egyptian cat vengeance curse. The cast was culled from 1940s genre films and the material feels just as old despite a script from Psycho author Robert Bloch
Cat Swallows Parakeet and Speaks (1996)
Baffling and pretentious Canadian-made surrealist film with Scheherazade (from Arabian Nights) in a psychiatric asylum making up stories all derived from tabloid headlines
Cat-Women of the Moon (1953)
Classic bad movie in which astronauts land on The Moon and encounter an all-female society. Some really datedly war of the sexes politics play out amid the laughably impoverished sets and effects
Catwoman (2004)
The long-planned Halle Berry-starring Catwoman movie proved a widely ridiculed bomb. The film throws out the comic-book Catwoman and instead opts for an approach the frequently collapses into the risible
The Cell 2 (2009)
Sequel to Tarsem Singh’s The Cell that feels made by people who haven’t even seen the original. The original’s fascinating journey into dream terrain is replaced by a dull psychic with a link to a serial killer plot
The Cellar (1989)
A low-budget 1980s film where a family buy a house in the desert only to find that there is a Native American demon imprisoned in the cellar
Chain Letter (2010)
Ridiculous film that seems to want to say something about modern technological interconnectivity but has simply grafted it onto a slasher formula. while being bsurdly ill-informed about its subject
Chances Are (1989)
From the director of the hit Dirty Dancing, an inane romantic comedy in which Cybill Shepard thinks her daughter’s boyfriend Robert Downey Jr is her reincarnated husband
Chappie (2015)
Neill Blomkamp’s film about A.I. turns into Short Circuit dropped into the militarised future of RoboCop. Of all the rich possibilities in the idea, all we get is a goofy comedy with a pimped-out carjacking robot
Charlie Charlie (2016)
Charlie Charlie was supposedly an oracular game that made headlines when a satiric site claimed that teenagers were being killed playing it and some news sites took this seriously. This is a pathetic and feeble film made exploiting the game’s five minutes of notoriety
Childhood’s End (2015)
Arthur C. Clarke’s book is one of the all-time SF classics; this mini-series adaptation counts as one of the biggest book-to-film abortions in the SF genre handled by people who know nothing about SF