Bad films are a genre unto themselves. There are films that are merely mediocre — competent, forgettable, and gone — and then there are films that achieve a kind of transcendent awfulness, films so spectacularly misconceived, so gloriously inept, or so catastrophically misguided that they become essential viewing for entirely different reasons than their makers intended. Here are the 10 worst movies of all time — a celebration of cinematic disaster in all its magnificent forms.

1. Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957)

Ed Wood's science fiction epic is the most famous bad film ever made and the one that established the template for all subsequent celebrations of cinematic ineptitude. Aliens resurrect the dead to prevent humanity from developing a weapon that could destroy the universe, and Wood realizes this premise with cardboard sets, visible strings on flying saucers, and a cast that includes Bela Lugosi — who died during production and was replaced by Wood's chiropractor, who held a cape over his face for the remainder of the film. The dialogue is extraordinary in its badness: "Future events such as these will affect you in the future" is a sentence that has never been improved upon. Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994) is the definitive account of the man behind the masterpiece.

2. Battlefield Earth (2000)

John Travolta's passion project — an adaptation of L. Ron Hubbard's Scientology-adjacent science fiction novel — is the most expensive bad film ever made and the one that most thoroughly destroyed its star's career momentum. Set in the year 3000, when humanity has been enslaved by the alien Psychlos, the film is shot entirely in Dutch angles, features dialogue of staggering pomposity, and contains a plot so incoherent that it defies summary. It won nine Razzie Awards, including Worst Picture of the Decade, and is widely regarded as one of the most catastrophic studio productions in Hollywood history. Travolta has never fully explained why he made it.

3. Showgirls (1995)

Paul Verhoeven and Joe Eszterhas's follow-up to their collaboration on Basic Instinct is the most gloriously excessive bad film of the 1990s. Elizabeth Berkley plays a drifter who arrives in Las Vegas and claws her way to the top of the showgirl world, and the film pursues its melodramatic premise with a commitment to excess that is almost admirable. The dialogue is extraordinary — "I'm not a whore" is delivered with the conviction of a Shakespearean soliloquy — and the pool scene between Berkley and Kyle MacLachlan is one of cinema's great unintentionally comic sequences. The film has since been reclaimed as a camp classic, and midnight screenings remain a cultural institution.

4. The Room (2003)

Tommy Wiseau's self-financed melodrama is the greatest cult bad film of the 21st century and the subject of James Franco's excellent The Disaster Artist (2017). Wiseau wrote, directed, produced, and stars in this tale of a San Francisco banker betrayed by his best friend and fiancée, and every element of the production — the dialogue, the performances, the inexplicable subplots, the rooftop scenes, the framed photographs of spoons — is wrong in ways that are impossible to predict and impossible to forget. "You're tearing me apart, Lisa!" has entered the language. Midnight screenings, at which audiences throw plastic spoons at the screen, continue worldwide.

5. Cats (2019)

Tom Hooper's adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's long-running musical is the most disturbing mainstream studio film ever released. The decision to render the cast — which includes Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Jennifer Hudson, and Taylor Swift — as human-cat hybrids using "digital fur technology" produced creatures of such profound uncanniness that the film generated a wave of genuine horror on its release. The film was so poorly received that Universal issued a patch to theaters to replace the version already in cinemas with a corrected cut. It remains one of the most baffling productions in the history of the Hollywood musical.

6. Gigli (2003)

Martin Brest's romantic crime comedy is the film that coined the term "Bennifer" and then destroyed the careers of both its stars. Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez play a hitman and his minder who fall in love while babysitting a mentally disabled man, and the film's combination of tonal incoherence, witless dialogue, and complete absence of chemistry between its leads produced one of the most catastrophic box office failures in Hollywood history. It grossed $6 million against a $75 million budget and won six Razzie Awards. It is a film of almost archaeological interest — a perfectly preserved artifact of early 2000s Hollywood hubris.

7. Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966)

Harold P. Warren's regional horror film is the most technically incompetent film ever made by someone who genuinely believed they were making a real movie. Shot on a camera that could only record thirty-two seconds of footage at a time, with sound recorded separately and synchronized with visible inaccuracy, the film follows a family who stumble upon a cult in the Texas desert. The Master's servant Torgo — a man with inexplicably large knees who moves at a pace that suggests he is wading through invisible treacle — is one of cinema's great unintentional comic creations. Mystery Science Theater 3000's episode featuring the film is one of the greatest pieces of comedy ever produced.

8. Troll 2 (1990)

Claudio Fragasso's Italian-American horror film has no trolls in it — only goblins — and is not a sequel to Troll. It is, however, the subject of one of the greatest documentaries about bad filmmaking ever made: Best Worst Movie (2009), directed by the child actor who starred in it. The film's most famous scene — in which a boy discovers his family is about to eat food that will turn them into plants for the goblins to consume, and screams "They're eating her! And then they're going to eat me! Oh my GOOOOOOD!" — is one of cinema's great unintentional comic moments.

9. Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2010)

James Nguyen's romantic thriller about an eagle-and-vulture attack on a California town is the most technically primitive film of the 21st century. The CGI birds — which appear to have been animated in a program available on a 2003 home computer — hover stationary in the air while making sounds borrowed from a free sound effects library. The film's first forty minutes, which consist almost entirely of a man driving to work and a woman walking to her car, contain no birds whatsoever. It is a film of such pure, unself-conscious sincerity that it has generated genuine affection from the bad film community. Nguyen has since made sequels.

10. Godzilla (1998)

Roland Emmerich's American reimagining of the King of the Monsters makes its second appearance on our lists — having already featured at the bottom of our Godzilla rankings — because it deserves to be recognized in the broader context of cinematic failure as well. The decision to replace Godzilla's nuclear allegory with a giant iguana that lays eggs in Madison Square Garden, combined with Matthew Broderick's bewildered performance and a script of staggering witlessness, produced a film so comprehensively wrong that Toho refused to recognize its creature as Godzilla, naming it "Zilla" instead. It is a useful reminder that enormous budgets and famous monsters are no substitute for intelligence and craft.

Final Thoughts

The worst films in cinema history are, in their own way, as essential as the best. They remind us of how difficult filmmaking truly is, how many things must go right simultaneously for a film to succeed, and how spectacular the results can be when everything goes wrong at once. Whether you approach them as cautionary tales or as sources of pure, guiltless entertainment, these ten films deserve a place in every serious film collection — if only to remind you, after a long evening with Ed Wood or Tommy Wiseau, how much you appreciate the good ones.