Rock-a-Doodle (1991)
Boy's Animated Adventures/Singing Rooster
The worst of Don Bluth’s animated films in which a young boy is sent on a quest to find a rooster that does Elvis impersonations
Music
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978)
Gonzo Beatles-Adapted Musical/Classic Bad Movie
A real what-were-they-thinking turkey where someone had the idea of turning the Beatles’ album into a disco-era film starring The Bee Gees … In trying to contrive a plot around the songs and their surreally psychedelic lyrics, the film frequently makes no sense
Blues Brothers 2000 (1998)
Gonzo Road Movie
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
Jem and the Holograms (2015)
Girl Pop Band/Animation in Live-Action
The original animated series was one of the pop oddities of the 80s – part teen pop fantasy, part superheroics and secret identities. This live-action remake is an object lesson in how to strip all the fun elements out a series
Phantom of the Opera (1943)
Disfigured Madman Beneath the Opera House
The second film version of the story, lavishly remaking the classic 1925 Lon Chaney version in sound and colour. Alas, all this serves to do is stuff and mount the story. With the addition of a sympathetic backstory and cast with a wimpily diminutive Claude Rains, Chaney’s magnificently mad Phantom comes across like an indignant fox terrier
Martians Go Home (1990)
Annoying Alien Invaders Comedy
A majorly unfunny film about the arrival of aliens in Hawaiian shirts that do bad stand-up comedy routines and tell everybody’s embarrassing secrets
Rocktober Blood (1984)
Psycho Rock Star Returns from the Dead
The first in a cluster of mostly terrible 80s films that tried to incorporate horror and rock music, this concerns a rock star sent to the electric chair after a killing spree who now appears to return from the dead
Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked (2011)
Singing Chipmunks
It may say how doomed the Western world is that people have paid to watch three films so far all centred around these annoyingly cutsie helium-voiced chipmunks. This is marginally less annoying that the preceding two
Alvin and the Chipmunks (2007)
Singing Chipmunks
The squeaky helium-voiced Chipmunks are brought to life via CGI in this live-action film, featuring the chipmunks causing chaos, cracking smart-ass one-liners and lots of pee and poop jokes. The results are excrutiating
Voyage of the Rock Aliens (1984)
Alien Visitors Musical Comedy
Forgotten 1980s obscurity about aliens come to Earth in search of rock music that feels like someone attempted to conduct a version of Grease for the Star Wars crowd. Filled with utterly excruciating slapstick humour and bland songs from bands that nobody has heard from again
Purple People Eater (1988)
Cute Musical Alien
An inanely awful film based on the Sheb Wooley song. This is a really lame copy of E.T. in which a young Neil Patrick Harris forms a band with the title alien
Born of Fire (1986)
Islamic Mystical Apocalypse
The world’s first Islamic horror film? A film filled with a constant profusion of weird imagery but otherwise baffllingly incomprehensible
Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel (2009)
Singing Chipmunks
The first of the sequels to Alvin and the Chipmunks. Marginally less grating than the first film but that’s being relative – all the things that one hated the first time are back
The Marvels (2023)
Marvel Comics Superheroes
This ended up being the lowest rated of all MCU films. One wondered whether this was just fannish hyperbole but no what we end up with is the Batman & Robin of The MCU, the single worst film that franchise has produced
Da Hip Hop Witch (2000)
The Blair Witch Project Spoof
One of the worst films ever made – a parody of The Blair Witch Project that mostly consists of various rappers (including Eminem and Vanilla Ice) incoherently improvising a series of monologues about said witch
Rock and the Alien (1988)
Rock Singer Meets Alien Girl
Completely obscure, this is fairly terrible on almost every level – an effort about a rock singer given the gift by an alien woman of a special frequency that creates peace when he sings. This would be a guaranteed bad movie classic if anybody else had ever heard about it
Rock’n’Roll Nightmare (1987)
Bad Movie Classic/Heavy Metal Star vs Demonic Forces
A bad movie classic. A vanity project for Canadian heavy metal star/bodybuilder Jon-Mikl Thor who plays a heavy metal star who takes frequently his shirt off to pose while his band are killed by demonic forces (represented by the screen’s maybe worst ever puppet effects) as they try to record an album
Rockula (1990)
Vampire Rock Star Comedy
Painfully unfunny vampire comedy from Cannon Films about a vampire teenager who becomes a rock star. This has one of the least credible premises I’ve ever seen in a film. Mostly it seems to have been conceived around placing various musicians of the day in acting roles with bizarre results
Hillbillys in a Haunted House (1967)
Country and Western Singers in a Haunted House Comedy
A film of legendarily bad proportions where a group of Country and Western singers end up in a haunted house. Despite casting some famous horror actors, this is more interested in its excruciating country performances
Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park (1978)
Rock Star Superheroes
A Hanna-Barbera film based around 70s rock group Kiss where they are cast as superheroes fighting a mad scientist who operates from an amusement park with an army of android duplicates