Taste of Cinema's 2015 article, "The 20 Worst Movies Ever Made," highlights a curated selection of critically reviled cinematic failures, including Manos: The Hands of Fate , Plan 9 from Outer Space , and The Room . The list focuses on films marked by amateurish production, terrible acting, and incompetent writing that have earned lasting reputations as the worst of all time. Read the full article on the Taste of Cinema website.
A more modern entry, this film gained notoriety for its MS Paint-style CGI birds and stilted delivery, often compared to a digital-age Plan 9 .
In the vast, sprawling landscape of film criticism, few topics ignite as much passion as the "Worst of" list. While "Best of" lists often struggle to differentiate between distinct shades of brilliance, "Worst of" lists grapple with the spectacular failures of the medium—films that don't merely miss the mark, but offend the very concept of cinema. In 2015, the popular film blog Taste of Cinema published a list titled "The 20 Worst Movies Ever Made," a compendium that has since served as a dark tour guide for connoisseurs of catastrophe.
A high-profile studio disaster, this reboot was plagued by production issues and a final product that felt hollow and unfinished. taste of cinema 2015 20 worst movies ever made list
Unlike many clickbait lists from 2015 (which might have just named Transformers sequels), this one reaches back to obscure, genuinely inept films like Monster a-Go Go and Robot Monster .
Ed Wood’s magnum opus is famous for its visible boom mics, cardboard sets, and the use of a "body double" for Bela Lugosi who looked nothing like him. It is often cited as the quintessential "so bad it's good" movie.
While the all-time list looks at decades of failure, the year 2015 itself was particularly "fruitful" for bad cinema. Critics and publications like Taste Of Cinema and AV Club identified several contemporary movies that they argued deserved a place in the pantheon of failure. Taste of Cinema's 2015 article, "The 20 Worst
In 2015, the film site Taste Of Cinema published a definitive look at cinematic failures with their list of the "20 Worst Movies Ever Made." This collection remains a benchmark for cinephiles who find fascination in the absolute bottom of the barrel—the films so technically inept, narratively incoherent, or conceptually baffling that they transcend mere "badness" to become legends of disaster. The Hall of Shame: Top Highlights
Johnny Depp’s quirky action-comedy was widely dismissed as a "blight on the face of cinema" due to its forced humor and lack of charm.
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However, the list does not shy away from the grandfather of all bizarre disasters: Troll 2 (1990). Often cited as the "best worst movie," Troll 2 is a masterclass in mistranslation and incompetence. Directed by an Italian filmmaker who didn't speak English well, starring a cast of amateurs, and featuring a plot about vegetarian goblins (despite the title), the film is a surreal nightmare. By including these films, Taste of Cinema acknowledges that "worst" is a subjective term; for many, the sheer entertainment value of these disasters excuses them from the bottom tier, yet objectively, they are structurally broken narratives.
What makes this specific list fascinating is not just the films it includes, but the scope of its ambition. Unlike typical year-end "worst" lists that focus on recent commercial duds (like Transformers sequels or Adam Sandler comedies), the Taste of Cinema list attempts to curate the absolute bottom of the barrel across the entire history of the medium. The resulting collection presents a taxonomy of failure that ranges from the accidental to the cynical, and from the boring to the bizarre.