Movies

The 10 most entertainingly terrible movies

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Social Links for Reed Tucker
Published July 19, 2014, 10:39 a.m. ET

The “Sharknado” franchise is just the latest in a long tradition of entertainingly terrible movies. These 10 take the cake.

  1. 1. “They Live” (1988)

    It’s got magic sunglasses and stars a second-tier wrestler (“Rowdy” Roddy Piper) who was famous for wearing a kilt. And yet. This sci-fi film, about a construction worker who discovers that aliens disguised as humans run the world, has something that keeps viewers coming back.

    Despite the novelty casting and ham-fisted dialogue, director John Carpenter (“Halloween”) somehow pulls the whole thing together and delivers an entertaining B-movie with a message about ’80s excess and paranoia.

  2. 2. “Phantom of the Paradise” (1974)

    This movie, getting a Blu-ray release in August, has its fans — among them, Bret Easton Ellis and the guys in Daft Punk. That doesn’t make it any less ridiculous: Loosely based on “The Phantom of the Opera” and “Faust,” the movie stars Paul Williams as a record producer haunted by a disfigured singer in a cape, shiny pleather suit and silver helmet.

    This rock opera from Brian De Palma manages to outcamp even “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”

  3. 3. “The Room” (2003)

    Writer, director and star Tommy Wiseau sets out to make an emotional drama about a group of California friends.

    What he ended up with is an amateurish mess, full of dead-end subplots and unintentionally funny acting — the chief offender being the oddly accented Wiseau, who can’t even deliver a line like, “Oh, hi, Mark,” without launching a million snickering YouTube views.

  4. 4. “Spider-Man” (1977)

    This TV movie was an early attempt to produce a live-action story of the superhero — and it’s not pretty.

    Spidey’s costume looks like it was sewn in a home-ec class, while the wall-crawling effect involves camera trickery so basic, audiences will see right through it.

  5. 5. “Troll 2” (1990)

    So awful it spawned a documentary about its awfulness, 2009’s “Best Worst Movie,” which attempts to explain how things went wrong.

    It started when filmmaker Claudio Fragasso set out to make a sequel to 1986’s “Troll.” Only the two movies had no connection, and the follow-up didn’t even feature a troll. Instead, it was about a family terrorized by killer goblins. Most of the actors were amateur Americans; the crew, Italians who didn’t speak English. You can imagine how that went.

  6. 6. “Reefer Madness” (1936)

    The heavy-handed propaganda film tells the story of teenagers led down the path of “enslavement” by marijuana — the “burning weed with its roots in hell!”

  7. 7. “Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla” (1952)

     While stuck on an island, two comedians (Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo, imitating Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis) mingle with the natives and run afoul of a mad scientist (Lugosi) — who cooks up a potion that turns Mitchell into a gorilla. Yep.

  8. 8. “Cobra” (1986)

    As a cop versus a murderous cult, Sylvester Stallone is a tough guy with mirrored sunglasses and a toothpick hanging out of his mouth. It’s like an action movie parody, with such one-liners as, “You’re a disease, and I’m the cure.”

  9. 9. “Manos: The Hands of Fate” (1966)

    You’ve got to laugh out loud as the story of a family stumbling upon a satanic cult unspools. Lighting that looks like it depended on two AA batteries? Check. Corny dialogue? Check. An incongruous jazz score? Check. Available on YouTube, if you dare.

  10. 10. “Road House” (1989)

    The story of a bouncer (Patrick Swayze) working at a Missouri bar hardly gets more magical than the scene in which Swayze visits a doctor to get patched up. The doctor asks if he wants an anesthetic. When he refuses, the doctor asks if he enjoys pain. “Pain don’t hurt,” Swayze replies.