Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
When I read the Worldnutdaily I am often reminded of Joe Queenan's brilliant book Red Lobster, White Trash and the Blue Lagoon (see excerpts here). In that book, the author goes on a tour of the worst of American popular culture and becomes addicted to it. Each chapter is devoted to a different subject -- books, music, movies, etc. -- and if he'd done a chapter on political websites, he would surely have rated the Worldnutdaily as the best (and consequently the worst).
In the chapter on movies, Queenan decides that the worst movie ever made -- and hence his all-time favorite -- was Cannonball Run II, and if you've seen this movie it's difficult to argue with him. The secret, he says, could be found in director Hal Needham's understanding that a bad movie was like a shark; it had to keep moving or it would die.
Thus, he said, Hal Needham understood that if you were going to make a truly bad movie you had to keep bringing it from start to finish. If you were going to base the movie on Burt Reynolds and Dom Deluise, you had to surround them with even worse actors and you had to keep bringing them in to the movie so there's never a break in the mind-numbing badness of it all.
If you were going to have Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr impersonating priests then you had to follow up with Telly Savalas and Ricardo Montalban and Jim Nabors. And once you did that, you had to have Don Knotts and Tim Conway serenading an orangutan. And if you're going to go that low, you had to go even lower and bring in Charles Nelson Reilly to play the son of a mafia don named Don.
This is something that Joseph Farah clearly understands about the Worldnutdaily as well and he is as committed to bringing the crazy as David Vitter is to humping a box of Depends. If you're going to present Chuck Norris and Pat Boone as weekly columnists, how do you top that? By bringing in Michael Savage. Perfect. I can't wait.
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And something tells me that Savage will eventually get the boot from this position as well.
Posted by: Sadie Morrison | April 13, 2009 9:11 AM
Queenan is clearly nuts, the worst film ever was Air Force One with Harrson Ford. More than ten years later I still hate myself for actually paying money to see that abomination...
Posted by: Ramel | April 13, 2009 9:38 AM
Savage, Boone, Norris...throw in Vox Day and you've completed the line-up of the Four Horsemen of the Turdpocalypse.
Posted by: Wes | April 13, 2009 9:55 AM
Obviously neither Queenan nor Ramel have ever seen Howard the Duck.
Posted by: James Hanley | April 13, 2009 10:14 AM
What, no Battlefield Earth?
Posted by: MartinM | April 13, 2009 10:44 AM
No I have not, and if it's worse than air force one, or George Lucas' mistakes-that-shall-not-be-named I hope I never do.
Posted by: Ramel | April 13, 2009 10:46 AM
"Obviously neither Queenan nor Ramel have ever seen Howard the Duck."
HEY I have fond memories of that... it was a double feature with Heavy Traffic....
those were the days...
Posted by: Kevin(NYC) | April 13, 2009 11:12 AM
wait wait I take that back! It was a double with "Fritz the Cat".
That odd duck head is something I don't remember seeing before....
Posted by: Kevin(NYC) | April 13, 2009 11:17 AM
The Agony Boot has recaped Battlefield Earth for your entertainment.
Enjoy...
Posted by: Cookie M. | April 13, 2009 11:19 AM
Hey! I liked Howard The Duck! Bear in mind, I was eight years old at the time it came out on SuperChannel...
Posted by: sinned34 | April 13, 2009 11:23 AM
Well, bear in mind that Queenan's book was written in the mid 90s.
Posted by: Ed Brayton | April 13, 2009 11:40 AM
Carwash was the worst movie ever.
Posted by: King of Ireland | April 13, 2009 11:49 AM
All those movies pale in comparison to Troll 2. I actually saw this on HBO (for some reason) many years ago and rented it again years later just to see if it was really that bad (it was and more). Troll 2 can be summed up thusly. The box for the VHS shows a kid, who doesn't appear in the movie, running from a werewolf, that doesn't appear in the movie. The movie is called Troll 2 and *it doesn't even have any trolls*. It's called Troll 2 and *it's not a sequel to Troll 1*. The epiphany of the movie is when the main character, a kid, realizes that the town "Nilbog" is goblin spelled backwards. I rest my case.
Posted by: MyPetSlug | April 13, 2009 11:50 AM
Queenan should publish a revised edition. Will Ferrell is certainly the worst comedian there can be. I wish he had stayed on at SNL, a pretty hyped up show that can barely evoke a titter even with canned laughter and a cue card that says "laugh" for the audience. Instead he inflicts himself upon us with some terribly drivellous rubbish like Ricky Bobby, etc. Ferrell is the worst there can be. I am waiting for Hitchens to do a rip-up job on Ferrell like that unforgettable one he did on another mediocrity, the crashing bore Bob Hope
Posted by: rimpal | April 13, 2009 12:12 PM
Savage is no fan of Glenn Beck. It will be interesting to see if WND allows him to attack one of the current heroes of the wingnut movement.
Posted by: tacitus | April 13, 2009 12:14 PM
It's easy to figure out why Mikey the Weiner hates Glen Beck. Beck is everything he is not; urbane, sophisticated, well-read, tall, handsome and hetero. Well, Glen's tall and he might not be in the closet. Hey, two out of six ain't bad!
Posted by: democommie | April 13, 2009 12:24 PM
I still have a special place in my heart for Ravenous, as well as Wendigo terrible, terrible movies. To be fair, we only made through a half hour to forty five minutes of Wendigo and gave up because really, nothing had happened.
Posted by: dogmeatib | April 13, 2009 12:29 PM
The worst soundtrack of any movie for all time, surely.
Posted by: Gretchen | April 13, 2009 12:33 PM
Worst soundtrack has to be Titanic, Celine Dion urgh...
Posted by: Ramel | April 13, 2009 12:43 PM
My favorite stupid/bad movie of epic proportion is "Yor, the Hunter from the Future."
BTW, a local seafood restaurant actually used the nickname "Redneck Lobster" in one of its radio ads, and this is in Athens, Georgia.
Posted by: Jon Lester | April 13, 2009 1:25 PM
As bad as CB2 may be, it's the only chance to Jackie Chan and Richard Kiel playing buddies.
Similarly, one of my favorite cinematic moments in a less-than-great film is the knife fight between Kiel and Carl Weathers. Awesome.
Posted by: Jon Lester | April 13, 2009 1:29 PM
Sorry, I forgot to say that knife fight is in "Force 10 from Navarone."
Posted by: Jon Lester | April 13, 2009 1:32 PM
By far the worst movie I've ever seen is Manos the Hands of Fate, not even Mystery Science Theater 3000 was able to make that movie watchable. It's not campy bad like Cannonball Run 2 or Airforce One, it's painfully bad.
Posted by: Noadi | April 13, 2009 3:07 PM
Oasis of the Zombies
Just watch it - if you can afford to flush away ninety minutes of your life.
Posted by: Rob Jase | April 13, 2009 4:50 PM
"Ravenous" has an excellent soundtrack - it's actually one of only a few American movies from the last decade with a good soundtrack. Most high-budget Hollywood productions use third-rate, talentless notespinners like Zimmer or Williams or Shore, and while I guess we won't get anyone like Herrmann or Rozsa or Steiner to write music for films again that's no excuse for using those cheap, talentless, uninspired Korngold-plagiarists.
But the worst soundtrack of all time (apart from classics such as "Cobra Force") is probably "The Labyrinth" - which might also be the worst movie ever made by most other parameters. I watched it for the first time only a couple of months ago and it still has a tendency to ruin my day whenever I think about it. I agree that "Air Force One" is a good runner-up, though.
Posted by: G.D. | April 13, 2009 6:34 PM
If we're going to talk about good, the best ever soundtrack (and the only one I bought as a CD) was Reservoir Dogs.
Posted by: Ramel | April 13, 2009 7:36 PM
One of the worst movies I've ever seen (and I've seen a lot of grade-Z stuff) is – as far as I know – totally unheralded in "bad movie" press: 1974's "Pardon My Blooper". It's 75 minutes of amateurish reenactments of bloopers, including some that are obviously fictitious. Absolute agony to sit through.
Posted by: Michael Hoaglin | April 13, 2009 7:41 PM
The worst movie I've ever seen was Running Scared, which is a shame since it has an actress I normally like, Vera Farmiga. The portion of the movie (and it's a long portion) dealing with two child pornographers is especially excruciating.
Posted by: daniel rotter | April 13, 2009 8:52 PM
two words: Robot Holocaust
Posted by: Jib Halyard | April 14, 2009 5:49 AM
Megaforce
Posted by: Laen | April 14, 2009 6:37 AM
How about, "Heavens Gate," a movie so bad that it was not released upon its completion. I believe there was a limited showing in a few theaters a few years ago, long after it was in the can.
Posted by: SLC | April 14, 2009 7:02 AM
Tarzan the Ape Man. You know things are bad when nudity doesn't help...
Almost everyone in the theater cheered when the Richard Harris character was finally killed off.
Posted by: Ned | April 14, 2009 11:15 AM
I always put Caddyshack 2 as the worst movie ever made, but that's probably because of what a departure from the original it was.
Posted by: Rev. BigDumbChimp | April 14, 2009 12:15 PM
It is almost too easy to put any sequel as the worst movie ever. 90% of them are bad. Same for 'B' movies that are not expected to be any good in the first place.
In my opinion the correct answer is (tie) "Natural Born Killers" and "Batman and Robin."
Hands down the worst director of all time is Michael Bay. Give Roger Korman or Ed Wood the budget for movies he has, and they would have done a much better job.
Posted by: Ted H. | April 14, 2009 6:01 PM
I tried watching "Graffiti Bridge" on TV once, and the lighting looked cheap even for a TV movie, let alone something originally released in theaters on real celluloid.
Posted by: Jon Lester | April 15, 2009 1:57 AM
Which of the Christopher Reeves "Superman" films was it that had a villain who was tougher than Superman in daylight, but powerless in the darkness? I remember that the only way Superman could defeat him was by pushing the moon in front of the sun to create an eclipse, whereas earlier in the film Luthor had subdued the villain by throwing a coat over his head.
Posted by: Jeffrey Kramer | April 15, 2009 3:16 AM
Jeffrey, that would be Superman IV: the Quest for Peace, which Reeve reluctantly did as a tradeoff so he could do a film he cared deeply about (I forget which). That script was absolutely contemptuous of its audience: Superman carrying mere Earth humans through the vacuum of space, etc.
Posted by: Jon Lester | April 15, 2009 11:42 AM
Thanks, Jon. I've repressed most memories of that movie, but assuming your account of its origins is correct, Reeve should have considered funding his film project by making some less onerous bargain. Selling his soul to Satan, for example.
Posted by: Jeffrey Kramer | April 16, 2009 6:20 AM