They say that 95% of all art forms are crap, and I believe this – especially as it applies to film. For every Halloween, there’s a movie about a man throwing deli meats to his cats. For every The Exorcist, there’s an overweight man stumbling around the desert, moaning at extras. The world needs this 95%, because it makes the other 5% so much better. I’ve seen a lot of horror films in my life, and for this list, I’ve narrowed it down to the 20 Worst Horror Movies Ever.
I’ll have you know that this is not a definitive list. But, considering that I own more horror movies than I do clothes, it’s as good of a list of the worst horror movies ever as any. You’re about to see what happens when a man rebels against the thing he loves most. Well, loves second most. I’d never betray you, hot women of the world. You’re all special to me.
No.20 Vampire Assassin – 2005
As soon as you see the title Vampire Assassin, you know you’re five seconds away from watching either the worst thing in the world or the best. The director did everything he could to limit your options when it came to ways that you could enjoy this film. I have more love for mall shooters than I do for this movie. This is one of two films on the list of the worst horror movies ever that feels like a blatant copy of another, more popular film. In this case, it’s Blade and that series. Now, I’m not saying that Blade 2 is gold, but it looks like a Da Vinci piece compared to Vampire Assassin, which comes across as an elephant painting. This film is the reason that the average movie watcher looks down on direct-to-DVD movies so much, and it just shows us that, in the future, we won’t be able to even download Vampire Assassin and we’ll simply be genetically predisposed to hate it from birth.
No.19 Undead Or Alive – 2007
Any film that stars Chris Kattan that isn’t A Night At The Roxbury is ignoring the laws of physics, so technically, my DVD shouldn’t even exist, instead replaced with a note from Newton that apologizes for the shame.
The box calls this film a “Zombedy” and unless the screenwriter’s family was murdered by other, worse writers, I consider this unforgivable. This is one of those films that people will call “corny” in lieu of “shitty,” as if we owe the film a passive-aggressive jab instead of just hauling off and calling it “offensively stupid.”
Undead Or Alive has a 5.1 (out of 10) rating on IMDB, meaning that for all the bad that Undead did, it also provided us with one great tidbit of information: wizards exist and they’ve taken control of our Internet. Also, over the credits, the bloopers play, as if to tell the audience, “Hey, we’re real people, just like you!” but it comes off as “Trust us, we bleed! We only did it in jest!”
No.18 The Beast Of Yucca Flats – 1961
If you were to view this as a documentary about people walking aimlessly through the desert and the futility of your own hopes and dreams, then I would nominate The Beast Of Yucca Flats for film festival awards that haven’t even been invented yet. The dialogue is so perfunctory in nature that it feels like the studio hired copy editors instead of screenwriters to pen the script.
Tor Johnson made a living at dropping his bottom jaw and looking bewildered, and if you boiled down every other film role he ever had into one, you would almost absolutely get something better than this. It’s often very subjective when you’re judging an actor’s performance in a certain film, but he is objectively bad in this movie. His part in Beast is so awful that it makes parts in other completely unrelated movies look terrible. Robert De Niro in The Deer Hunter? Yeah, he sucks, because Tor Johnson in The Beast Of Yucca Flats has seeped into that movie. For a long time I couldn’t look at acting the same way after I finished watching this movie, because The Beast Of Yucca Flats made me not want to enjoy movies at all anymore. If that’s not candidacy for a list of the worst horror movies ever, I don’t know what is.
No.17 The Lost Boys: The Thirst – 2010
The Lost Boys is a cult classic, and its sequels are the work of a cult whose only goal is to prove to you how much they hate the first Lost Boys movie. I understand that, at one point in time, people may have cared about the further adventures of the Frogs and their vampire-fighting crusade. However, the worst way to prolong interest about fictional characters is to wait 20 years to release both of its sequels.
The appeal of the Frog brothers was that they were young and funny in their zealous hunt for the blood-drinking undead. To see them middle-aged and continuing the struggle is more disappointing than anything. It’s kind of like when wrestling fans yell “One more match!” at Ric Flair and then shake their heads when he displays his drooping pectorals and increasingly sad falling techniques.
No.16 Hobgoblins – 1988
What do you get when you mix the plot of about three other, better, tiny creature movies, a ludicrous plot device, and the worst thing you can possibly form an idea about? If you guessed Hobgoblins, congratulations! You’re both perceptive AND you know how to read movie titles.
The film is about hobgoblins kept in a vault, that have the power to make a person’s wildest fantasies come true. If hobgoblins were real, at this point I would stop writing, because a naked Eva Mendes would have just appeared to come watch dinosaur documentaries with me. However, the horror part comes into play when we discover that the fantasies eventually kill you. Thus, in real life, this is the part where the dinosaurs come to life and devour me while Eva Mendes laughs and transforms into an apatosaurus.
At the end of the film, the hobgoblins get blown up and unlike the films it ripped off, Hobgoblins never got a sequel. I kind of wish it had though, as I’d like to pen at least one film in the series, entitled Hobgoblins 3: Daniel Meets Eva Mendes And NOTHING Goes Wrong.
No.15 Los vampiros de Coyoacan – 1974
This film, in Mexico, might be on par with The Godfather. But since all the Spanish I know coincides with whether I want a soft or hard taco, and my copy of Los vampiros lacks subtitles, I’m stuck wondering why this movie even exists. I’ll admit, there are good “luchador fights evil” movies out there, but this isn’t one of them. The best fight scene in the entire film is the opening wrestling match that takes up a third of the film’s running time. The rest of the fights look like the actors were asked to watch a Tai Bo class and then repeat what they saw in slow motion. Most of Los vampiros consists of Mil Mascaras and his buddy standing around, looking clueless in an apartment, and since I don’t know Spanish, I can only assume that they’re complaining to each other about how much the movie sucks.
I mentioned earlier that the opening wrestling match takes up one-third of the film and that would seem like an exaggeration to some. It’s not. Many times, pro-wrestling scenes in films are short because pro wrestling is, by nature, ridiculous, and most people would rather wonder how many ounces of butter you can put on popcorn before you can legally title it “heart attack” than watch an entire match.
I applaud you Los vampiros. You didn’t give a single shit about us. You’re the first film that I can put into the genre of “sociopath.”
No.14 Night Skies – 2007
Night Skies takes the alien abduction genre and, through blind luck, makes it as boring as possible. Viewing this is like repeatedly watching rubber cement dry, without all the fun of the fumes. The entire cast can be divided into two groups.
Group 1: They look like someone I hate.
Group 2: They look like someone I will hate.
I would make a joke about how the film ends oddly, with footage of John McCain talking about UFOs and their existence, however, I was asleep at that point. My body figured that since nothing had gone on for so long, it was time to let me rest.
No.13 Saw V – 2008
Horror sequels take a lot of flack because they’re often seen as just gorier remakes of the original. The makers of the Saw franchise took great pains to remedy this and created a series that is, at times, borderline inaccessible. I would gladly take a bloodier Saw 1 if it meant me knowing what the hell was going on. Saw V is the worst offender of this in the entire series. It’s such a mess that you’d think the script was written after the footage had been already shot.
The movie plays out like the worst video game ever, with the actors going from room to room, trying out the various traps, and hopefully dying along the way. With something this simple, I’m surprised that the movies come out looking so complex. I’d ask Jigsaw about this irony, but he’d probably give me some half-assed philosophical reason that I should try to live. As if I needed another reason to hate puppets.
No.12 Devil 2010
After the critical successes of The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, M. Night Shyamalan decided that the next best possible move would be to sabotage his own career. Just take a look at The Last Airbender, and you’ll see the work of a man who obviously hates both himself and children, except I don’t think he knows that yet. Though Devil isn’t directed by Shyamalan, the fact that he decided to plaster his name all over the posters and trailers for it means that he subconsciously wanted the film to fail.
I hate to spoil the film for you, but if you didn’t foresee the old lady being the Devil in the end, we’re obviously not watching the same movie. Anything would’ve been more surprising than the old lady. If Tony, the mechanic, had said, in the end, “My God, it’s the buttons” I would’ve been more satisfied. Making the old lady possessed proves that M. Night doesn’t quite grasp the art of the twist anymore. If Shyamalan remade The Crying Game, Dil would be a woman the whole time. If you saw his take on Psycho, Norman Bates’ mother would have been arrested and alive and Norman would’ve been left alone, thinking about stuffed birds.
No.11 The Giant Gila Monster – 1959
This film uses an actual Gila Monster, back in the time when you had to exterminate an entire species before you could call something “animal cruelty.” At one point, the filmmakers drive a toy car into its head, and the lizard has the same deathly bored expression that I had while watching this movie. To put it bluntly, if you can’t get a live animal to look excited when you’re about to crash a machine into its face, then the film transcends normal critical boundaries and enters a supernatural level of awful. Then again, it is a living, breathing creature, so technically this movie has the best special effects in history, because, when you think about it, nature is the world’s special effect. Sorry… I’m 10 horror movies into a 20 movie list and my brain is deteriorating. Giant Gila Monster rocks!
I’m convinced that the film has a secret, negative agenda against small town America, an assumption I came to after I heard one of the stupidest lines ever uttered by a human being. If I was to take an entire town and judge their intelligence based on a single piece of dialogue, I would say that I’d be surprised if this town’s citizens didn’t swallow rocks to help them digest food better. If the people in Gila Monster Attack, USA, can identify the numbers past one, consider me highly impressed.
The line? While walking through a destroyed part of the forest with her idiot boyfriend, a girl remarks that the destruction may have been caused by a cougar. It’s almost like a reverse lesson in biology, as if the teens in the town had one chapter in their science textbook and it was a single page long, labeled “Nope.”
