How to Find Really Bad Movies

Note:  This review was originally posted to my Yahoo! Articles account.

Everyone has a list of favorite movies. Ask a friend and they can give you their top five or ten. Sites like NetFlix and Amazon have top hundred lists. But what do you do if you want to find a really bad movie? There are some that are known for being bad, like many of Ed Wood's films. Plan 9 From Outer Space has become famous just for being bad. After reviewing many, many movies on Epinions.com, I began to wonder where I could find the worst movies.

In case you're wondering, if I see a movie that is truly considered bad, I sometimes have to watch it just to see how bad it is. Some are considered entertaining while others are held up as an example of what not to do. Occasionally, I'll even take it as a challenge. I have to watch the movie just to know and even review, myself.

Neither Amazon nor NetFlix has an official bottom 100 list, which is understandable. Amazon sells movies and NetFlix rents them. I doubt that either site wants to waste their time compiling a list of movies that you probably wouldn't want to watch anyway. One user on Amazon did put together a list of their own, located here. This list doesn't seem to be endorsed by Amazon, though.

Rotten Tomatoes is a good place to start. It's technically a review aggregator, meaning that they compile reviews from other sites and give them a score based on the percentage of positive reviews. I've always had a hard time finding a bottom 100 list, although their Wikipedia page does have a list of movies with 0%, meaning that no one liked them.

One site that I really like is badmovies.org. One man has made it his quest to watch and review bad movies every so often. The reviews are well written and there's a wide variety of bad movies. Some, like Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe, I had already seen. Others, like Winterbeast, I had not and had only found out about through the web site.

Internet Movie Database does have a bottom 100 list of their own, located here. The list is the result of IMDb user ratings, so it will vary from time to time. Right now, the list doesn't seem to have many movies I've seen before, so I can't really attest to how good the list is, but I may get around to renting a few if I run out of stuff from badmovies.org.

If you run out of movies from these sites, you can check Wikipedia's list. This has a few that are considered bad for various reasons, although I think a lot of them appear on other lists. With the Wikipedia list, though, you can get much more detailed information.

If that fails, one good way to get some bad movies is to check your on-demand selection if you have access to that. Check to see if there's a free section. A few of the movies are going to be good, but many of the movies in free section are there because your provider doesn't have to pay much for them if anything.

Likewise, you may also be able to find packs of movies ranging from 10 to 100+ movies. Again, these tend to be public-domain movies that the company selling the sets didn't have to pay for. If you can find one of these at a library or very cheap at a yard sale or thrift store, these may be a good idea. I'd use these if you absolutely have to get them or if you can find a collection of relatively decent movies.

If you're looking for bad movies, these ideas should keep you going for a while.

Jury Duty II

Well, jury duty wasn’t that bad. I didn’t get called until after lunch, but I did have to wait almost two hours to be called into the courtroom only to be told that our services wouldn’t be needed. The up side is that it fulfils my obligation for a year and, when it comes down to it, waiting is waiting. I think that all I missed was an animated film.

I got called in while a DVD was starting. It hadn’t even gotten to the feature yet; it was still showing the coming attractions when my number and name were called. The movie seemed to prominently feature cow tipping. I made a joke about cow tipping, asking the woman in front of me how much as appropriate to tip a cow. (Is 10% enough or should I go with 15%?)

She seemed to like the joke, although she didn’t seem to get it until I mentioned the percentages. It turns out that she was called for the same jury panel. (The panel is a group of about 20-30 people that a jury is selected from, for those that don’t know.) She as actually kind of cute. I should have asked for her phone number.

It’s just like me to meet someone and not think of something that simple. Given the low readership of this blog, I doubt very much that she’ll read this any time soon. However, if you know anyone who’s served today, please feel free to forward this post to them.

I had this overwhelming fear that I would be called at an inopportune time, like while I was in the bathroom. Fortunately, you’re not really allowed to go anywhere the PA system isn’t installed, but I did hear an announcement while I was in the men’s room. It’s kind of hard to hear the speakers while the water was running.

Anyway, I just wanted to get that in.