The Bad Taste List. Weird, wild, psychotronic cult classics, so-bad-they're-good, and... some of the worst movies EVER.
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<p>(Last updated: 10/22/2026)</p><p>Feeling like your Letterboxd ratings graph is not evenly-distributed enough? Look no further, friends. Some of these films could help boost those numbers on the lower end of the ratings scale... enjoy! On the opposite end of the scale are some genuinely weird and wonderful films - by David Lynch, John Waters, Ken Russell, Anna Biller, Peter Jackson and others... as well as bad films by great directors, including Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen, and Ingmar Bergman, questionable Best Picture Oscar winners... but all interact with the hegemony of "taste" provocatively.</p><p>A friend asked why I would include genuinely great films like <i>Night of the Living Dead</i>, <i>Eraserhead</i> and <i>The Thing</i> in this list. The answer is simply that many of these films that are now considered great were once thought of as mere drive-in schlock, or at the very least (in the case of The Devils, surely) in poor taste. I think those films help complicate the notion of what makes a film good or bad... especially when one is looking at the technical side of a production. For instance, <i>Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close</i> (2011), a post 9/11 film directed by Stephen Daldry, featuring classy, top-of-the-line production credits, as well as a cast that included Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock, Max von Sydow and Viola Davis -- and nominated for Best Picture by the Academy -- how could THAT movie go wrong? But many critics at the time would argue it did, quite spectacularly.</p><p><i>Showgirls</i> (1995) might be the best example of a film that was pilloried during its initial release but over time has not only found a devoted cult following, but also a number of critics and filmmakers who feel its a good or even a great film, including the late Jacques Rivette, who called it a work of “great sincerity.”</p><p>Films fall in and out of favor, are disreputable one day, and find themselves on the National Film Registry many years later (<i>Night of the Living Dead</i>, <i>Eraserhead</i>).</p><p>Similarly, films that were once heralded as Best Pictures of their respective years by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences now seem painfully old-fashioned (<i>Cavalcade</i>, <i>Going My Way</i>), offensive (<i>The Birth of a Nation</i>, <i>Forrest Gump</i>) and just downright bad (<i>Broadway Melody</i>, <i>Crash</i>).</p><p>So, in the end, this list is a bit of a provocation, and may be summarized by the saying "one man's trash is another man's treasure."</p>
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<p>According to Susan Sontag in <i>Notes on Camp</i>, camp is a ‘sensibility that revels in artifice, stylization, theatricalization, irony, playfulness, and exaggeration rather than content’</p><p>(Note: Emilia Perez is on here begrudgingly)</p>
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<p><b>Rules:</b><br />Generate a number (from 1 to x) via:<br />www.random.org</p><p>See how many number of films there are in the sidebar</p><p>You can skip movies 10 times but never go back.</p><p>If you end up with a movie thats part of a series you can pick another movie in that series</p><p><b>Feedback & suggestions</b><br />Let us know which movie you got in the comments below.</p><p>And give suggestions to which movies to add to the list from cult movies to masterpieces.</p>