5. Batman & Robin (Joel Schumacher, 1997)
Most Batman fans hate Batman & Robin, and for good reason. It ruined the serious and gothic take Tim Burton had on the dark knight’s adventures, and made the Caped Crusader become more like the Camp Crusader.
Joel Schumacher’s second Batman movie ruined his reputation as a director, as his name is now synonymous with campiness and killing superhero franchises. However, with no one on Earth being able to possibly take this film seriously, once you get past what an awful Batman movie this, it’s actually hilarious.
While the superheroes are whiny and have bat nipples, the over the top villains are great for a laugh (at their expense, of course). The campy acting from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Uma Thurman is a delight to watch.
Although Thurman has plenty of sexual innuendos and plant related puns as Poison Ivy, Batman & Robin is truly Arnie’s show thanks to his character Mr Freeze’s constantly citing cringe worthy ice jokes. Arnold Schwarzenegger is known for making cheesy puns in his action movies, but his jokes normally vary in their content.
So imagine two hours of ice related jokes; it got an “icy” reception from audiences. But if you enjoy Arnie’s one liners, you are in for a treat. Poison Ivy’s henchman Bane is a mindless and grunting henchman, especially when he grunts “Bomb” after placing every individual bomb in the observatory building towards the end of the film. This Bane is a world away from the Bane who terrorised Gotham City in The Dark Knight Rises.
Screenwriter Akiva Goldsman must have been giggling away when he wrote the numerous puns in the script. Let’s hope his personal amusement was worth all the flack he has copped in the following years due to this film. The film had a budget of $125 million, and this is the result?! Wow. At least there are some cheap laughs on offer here, and the Joker had nothing to do with this Batman tale!
4. Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven, 1995)
One thing that will always get people giggling is sex, or more specifically a movie that tries to be sexy but does it completely wrong. After director Paul Verhoeven and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas struck gold with their erotic thriller Basic Instinct, they paired up again to create Showgirls, which was supposed to be a sexy but dark look at the sleaziness of Las Vegas and show business.
Showgirls was trashed upon its release and is often labelled as one of the worst movies ever made. However, the film has since become a cult classic and for good reason for all the wrong reasons, so much so that one DVD release of Showgirls included shot glasses and instructions for a drinking game for all the nonsense that happens in this film.
The overtly sexual dialogue that tries to be titillating really fails, and tickles the funny bone rather than being arousing. With horrendous dialogue like, “Everybody’s got AIDS and shit”, “I liked it when you came, I liked your eyes”, and “It must be weird, not having anyone come on you”, no one could take this movie seriously. It must have been hard for the actors to say these lines with a straight face.
The tackiness of Las Vegas is the perfect setting is the perfect setting for a story this sleazy. With pretty much everyone hitting on the protagonist throughout the movie, there is no escaping the sleaze. Even the film’s main antagonist cannot help herself around the lead actress; Gina Gherson is a delight to watch as the bitchy lead showgirl who is both trying to seduce and destroy Nomi at the same time (mixed feelings much?).
From the over the top strip teases to the campy dance show and costumes that leave little to the imagination, which was meant to titillate male audience members, it is very amusing that the film has a gay following. In a way, Showgirls could be considered a female and ‘90s version of the aforementioned Staying Alive, except with a Las Vegas setting and far more nudity.
Despite all the hilarity throughout Showgirls, the funniest scene is by far the sex scene in the pool. Elizabeth Berkley gyrates like a fish out of water flopping up and down to survive, her and Kyle MacLachlan’s groins are too far away from one another to actually be having sex, and their moaning is just lame. This scene is comedy gold!
3. Birdemic: Shock And Terror (James Nguyen, 2010)
You know how annoying it is when a bird poops on your car? Well, imagine a bird doing that onto a reel of film and the result is basically Birdemic: Shock And Terror. The most shocking and terrifying thing about it is both how bad it is and the notion that it ever got made. However, that does not mean you cannot laugh at it.
Birdemic was inspired by the Alfred Hitchcock classic The Birds, but unlike Hitchcock’s film, Birdemic does not soar like an eagle. The film starts off with long and awkward driving scenes that are uneventful and go nowhere, showing a lack of editing involved. Then the “actors” speak, and it is the most cringe worthy performances you may ever see.
There was no effort from the actors to emote and actually try to be sound convincing, especially when the birds finally attack and the characters show how “scared” they are. The dialogue is also atrocious with the characters’ blunt and boring conversations about work and love.
However, what makes Birdemic especially amusing are the titular birds themselves. They are some of the most unconvincing CGI ever shown on film and are not scary in the slightest. When the actors try to interact with these birds, it is just goofy. To be fair, the film only had a budget of $10,000, which did not allow for convincing special effects. However, that does not make the movie any less bad or hilarious.
2. Battlefield Earth (Roger Christian, 2000)
Although much of the flak Battlefield Earth gets is because of its association with the Church of Scientology, Battlefield Earth is in itself definitely a bad movie. This movie is often on bad movies lists, but no one seems to talk about how hilarious and entertaining it actually is.
While the actors playing humans are not particularly interesting, the hammy acting from both John Travolta and Forrest Whitaker playing the lead evil aliens is simply grand entertainment (although that was not their intention). Travolta’s performance is very much the “mu-ha-ha-ha” type of villainy, very theatrical; he is so much fun to watch.
Surely the scenes with the Psychlos (itself a very unsubtle version of the word “psycho”, as in “psychiatry”, which the author L. Ron Hubbard was very against) were meant to be funny. The comedic timing, and them acting like arrogant and blundering idiots is surely intentional. If it wasn’t, then wow!
A great example is when Terl (Travolta) is drunk after learning he will be stationed on Earth forever, and goes on a drunken rant saying, “While you were learning how to SPELL YOUR NAME, I was being trained to CONQUER GALAXIES!”
There are many comical misunderstandings on the Psychlos part, from thinking dogs were the masters of humans (despite dogs not being very useful for manual labour), thinking humans enjoy raw rat meat.
The over the top evilness of the Psychlos is shown throughout the film, such as when Terl promises that he will not detonate the bomb attached to a human’s neck, but then he hands the detonator to another Psychlo to press the button, emphasising, “As I said, I won’t kill him”.
The plot holes and lack of logic in the story is astounding, as the military jet planes the humans discover surely would have disintegrated over the thousand years of just sitting there. The humans could not just simply learn how to fly these planes in a week, when it takes people actually in the air force years to learn. This lack of logic makes it funny and lets you go along for a silly but wild ride.
The ending is open ended and the filmmakers obviously wanted to make a sequel, one that unsurprisingly never got made after Battlefield Earth’s failure at the box office. If you enjoyed Battlefield Earth, then it is actually a shame no one will get to see what other nonsense the Psychlos get up to next.
1. The Room (Tommy Wiseau, 2003)
Of course The Room was going to be number one on this list! How could it not be? This is the mother of so bad it’s good movies. The Room is in a league of its own. There’s something almost hypnotic about The Room and its poor production.
It’s a bad movie that you actually want to watch over and over again. It’s quotable, and its plot, and subplots that go nowhere, are ridiculous. It was intended to be a serious romantic drama, but is regarded as a hilariously awful unintentional comedy masterpiece. If you have not seen it by now, then you really have missed out and need to see it.
The lack of logic from the characters, the bad acting, and the plot is absurd. A group of men play football while wearing tuxedos, although it’s never explained why they are wearing tuxedos to begin with. Despite overhearing a conversation where Lisa (Juliette Danielle) tells her mother Claudette (Carolyn Minnott) that she is cheating on him,
Johnny (Tommy Wiseau) still is not sure whether she is cheating on him or not, and starts to record her phone calls by attaching a tape recorder to the phone. Claudette also tells Lisa that she was breast cancer, but not only does Lisa not seem fazed by it, but this plot point is never mentioned again, as if it never happened. The same goes for the scene where the young man Denny (Philip Haldiman) is held at gunpoint by a drug dealer that is also never mentioned again once it is over.
There are technical issues throughout the film, such as the bad blue screen background of San Francisco background on rooftop scenes. The bad lip synching of dialogue happens many times in The Room; this is most notable in the flower shop scene seems to be out of order, and the lip synching is out of place, giving the scene a disorientating feel.
Despite all of those factors, it is the film’s star, writer, producer and director Tommy Wiseau is both what makes and breaks this movie. The scenes without him are not usually as funny as the scenes he is in. Wiseau’s heavy accent and bad inflections of his dialogue is brilliant, and The Room would not be the same without this madman at the helm.
His “acting” is truly out of this world, and the delivery of his most famous lines “Oh, hi Mark” and “You’re tearing me apart, Lisa!” are too funny to be really captured in words, which sums up the whole movie really. The Room has rightfully become a cult classic since its brief 2003 release, and if you are looking for a film to make you laugh really hard at its stupidity, then look no further than The Room.
Author Bio: Matt Wilson is a professional writer from Melbourne, Australia. His passion for cinema has always been a part of him and he aspires to be a screenwriter or a novelist. He particularly enjoys the films of Michael Cimino, Oliver Stone, Stanley Kubrick, Paul Verhoeven, David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino.