8 films worth watching for the wrong reasons

Most bad films are just boring. The ones people still watch sixty years later are different. Somebody believed in them completely, had no money and no idea, and put every mistake on screen with total conviction.

That sincerity is the whole thing. You are not laughing at a cynical cash-in. You are watching a person try to make the greatest film in the world with a gorilla suit and a weekend.

What makes a film so bad it's good

• Total sincerity. Nobody involved is winking.
• Visible limits. A single set, one borrowed costume, dialogue recorded after the fact.
• A story behind the camera. The making of the film is usually better than the film.
• It is better with company. Every one of these plays best with friends and a running commentary.

8 so bad it's good movies

Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

The film that got Ed Wood named the worst director of all time. Aliens raise the dead to stop humanity building a doomsday weapon. Bela Lugosi died before production, so Wood used a few minutes of silent footage he had shot of him, then finished his role with a much taller stand-in holding a cape across his face.

The money came partly from a Baptist church, and the cast were reportedly baptised as part of the deal. Cardboard gravestones wobble, day turns to night inside a single scene, and the narrator promises future events will affect you in the future. Tim Burton made Ed Wood about his career, and it ends with the making of this film.

Sci-Fi

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Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966)

Harold P. Warren sold fertiliser in El Paso. He bet a screenwriter he could make a horror film himself, and did, on about $19,000. His camera could only shoot about 30 seconds at a time, and all the sound was dubbed later by a handful of people.

A family gets lost on a drive and ends up at a lodge run by Torgo, who has enormous knees and serves a cult leader called the Master. It premiered in El Paso and vanished. Mystery Science Theater 3000 brought it back in 1993. An original workprint turned up in 2011, and the restoration came out in 2015.

Horror

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Robot Monster (1953)

The last eight people on Earth are hunted by Ro-Man, an alien invader played by a man in a gorilla suit wearing a diving helmet with antennae. The director, Phil Tucker, shot it in about four days in Bronson Canyon in Los Angeles, and released it in 3D.

The score is by Elmer Bernstein, who went on to The Magnificent Seven and The Ten Commandments. The gorilla suit belonged to the actor inside it, which is the only reason the film has one.

Sci-Fi

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The Beast of Yucca Flats (1961)

Coleman Francis shot this without sound and added narration and a few lines afterwards. So characters only speak when their faces are off camera or turned away, and the narrator fills the gaps with lines that have nothing to do with the scene.

Tor Johnson, the Swedish wrestler from Ed Wood's films, plays a defecting scientist turned into a monster by an atomic test. It runs 54 minutes and opens with a murder that is never connected to the rest of the plot.

Horror

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Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964)

Martian children are glued to Earth television and miserable, so their leaders fly to the North Pole and kidnap Santa. That is the plot. The Martians have green faces and antennae on their helmets, the robot is a cardboard box with dryer hose limbs, and a young Pia Zadora plays one of the Martian kids.

It has a theme song, Hooray for Santy Claus, and it regularly turns up on worst-films lists. It also comes round every December, which makes it the most reliable seasonal film on this list.

Action/Adventure

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The Killer Shrews (1959)

A research team on an island is besieged by giant shrews during a hurricane. The shrews are coonhounds in shag carpet and fake fangs, with hand puppets for the close-ups. They still look like dogs.

It was made in Texas by a radio magnate and the actor who later played Festus on Gunsmoke, and it is played entirely straight. The escape plan, a walk across the island under upturned metal barrels, has to be seen.

Horror

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The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962)

A surgeon crashes his car, decapitates his fiancée and keeps her head alive in a tray of liquid while he goes looking for a new body. The head spends the film talking, mostly to plot revenge with something locked in the closet.

It was shot in 1959 and sat for three years. The head is the best thing in it, and the long scenes of the surgeon cruising strip clubs for a new body are what make it so strange.

Horror

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Eegah (1962)

Arch Hall Sr. made it as a vehicle for his son, Arch Hall Jr., a teen singer with a pompadour and a dune buggy. The son gets several songs. The plot is a giant caveman discovered in the California desert who falls for the son's girlfriend.

The caveman is Richard Kiel, who later played Jaws in two James Bond films. Hall Sr. also appears in the film under a different name, because he was the whole studio.

Horror

Where to go next

• The films that started as flops and became cult classics are in Cult Classic Movies.
• Why so many of these were made at all is explained in What Is a B Movie?.