C.C.C. Issue #15: Top Ten Worst Direct to DVD Films

C.C.C. Issue #15: Top Ten Worst Direct to DVD Film

This list includes films released only to DVD, and films made for TV. Somehow, it ended up that all the movies here are in the sci-fi or horror genre. This is likely because those are my two genres of preference; while there are probably many, many, many other terrible straight to DVD movies from other genres, this batch are my personal top ten most loathed.

Something that is going to become important is identifying why one movie is worse than the last on this list—and that’s something that will become harder and harder as I get closer to number one, because the lines begin to blur. So, as a safety precaution, DO NOT watch ANY of these movies EVER, and do so in no particular order. 

10. Age of Dinosaurs

 

Dinosaurs get brought back to life and attack the city, that’s pretty much all you need to know. In fact, that’s pretty much all I could figure out from this movie. The finer plot details (if there even were any, perhaps I missed nothing) escaped me because my senses were repeatedly assaulted by the horrendous acting, dialogue, special effects, and incomprehensible character actions. It’s not worth your ninety minutes just to see some poorly rendered cgi dinos wreak havoc on a city, eat people, and stomp stuff. Obviously you’re much better off watching Jurassic Park. Hell, Land Before Time is more exciting than this.  Age of Dinosaurs is just a big waste of time, and a totally useless film. Wow, what a place to start. The fact that there are nine more movies worse than this means we’re in for a bumpy ride. “Hold on to your butts...”

9. Lake Placid 2

1998’s Lake Placid was a fun creature feature, with a witty cast of characters trying to capture (or destroy) a 30 foot crocodile lurking in Black Lake, Maine. There were three direct-to-DVD sequels made: Lake Placid 2, Lake Placid 3, and Lake Placid: The Final Chapter. I only had the displeasure of watching the first sequel. The crocodile effects for Lake Placid, done by Stan Winston Studios (responsible for Jurassic Park, Aliens, and Terminator, among others) were quite good. In the sequel, the cgi looks like it came from a PlayStation 1 game. The acting was mostly passable to good in the first film, here it’s ridiculously bad. So why is this movie worse than Age of Dinosaurs? Being an original film (if you don’t consider it a rip off of Jurassic Park, which it definitely is), there were no expectations, and only the feeling of a wasted ninety minutes is what you are left with in the end. With Lake Placid 2, not only is it a waste of time, it’s a waste of a potentially decent sequel. I won’t spoil the ending of the first movie for those who haven’t seen it, but the open ending left viewers who enjoyed it with hope of a fun continuation of the adventures in Black Lake. Instead, this less than half ass attempt was shoved into the home video market, and disappointed everyone who saw it. I bet the other sequels are even worse. 

8. Octopus 2: River of Fear

This one comes so close to the “so bad it’s good” status, it’s almost unfortunate. The first Octopus was also a film not theatrically released, and it too had bad effects, bad acting, and all around badness. Even with expectations already pathetically low, Octopus 2 dropped below them. I tried to watch this movie with a friend, and we ended up muting the TV and speaking for the characters, inventing improv dialogue a hundred times funnier than what was coming out of their mouths. Most of the movie is forgettable—typical low quality problems common in all the movies on this list—but one scene stands out as something so laughably bad, it will stick in my mind like one of the Octopus’ suction cups forever. In a dream sequence, the main character falls out of a building which the Octopus is attacking. The camera is below him as he is falling, though he appears to not be falling very far or very fast. On a green screen behind him is the Octopus attacking the building—a green screen, by the way, that may be worse than the one used in The Room. The whole image is just so over the top ridiculous you can’t help but laugh. 

7. Python 2

Continuing this train of shitty sequels to depressionville, up next is yet another killer animal film. The filmmakers behind the first Python knew what it was: a silly, made for TV movie, monster run amock mash, with some cheesy acting, bad effects, and purposefully over the top moments. I’m not sure what was being attempted with Python 2; a more serious story, perhaps, or an even cheesier one. Either way, it failed big time. With a movie like Python, there are certain expectations. Viewers want to see a big animal attack a bunch of people, decent violence, maybe even a few creative kills, some tits, swearing, gun fire, and one liners are always a plus. Python delivered on most of those, but Python 2 drops the ball in actually reeling back the ridiculousness. No tits, no creative kills, and not much of the snake’s presence. This time there are two snakes, but it’s less than half as entertaining. An absolute bore with no redeeming qualities, this sequel needs to slither back to whatever hellhole it came from. 

6. Sharknado

You thought I was done with killer animal films? Hah! Syfy’s preposterously popular summer shark TV movie got some major exposure when a Twitter craze had everyone talking about this purposefully cheesy, brainless experiment in taking things to a new level of bad. I mentioned in my Best Worst Movies list that a movie can’t try to be bad; it has to happen by accident, or at least become worse than what was intended (see Sharktopus) to become so bad it’s entertaining for a new reason. Sharknado’s creators knew their concept was stupid, they knew it was going to be bad, and that was what they wanted. Well guess what? There’s no better word to describe the events of this (loosely using the term here) “movie”, than Total Fiasco. Ok I guess that’s two words. Sharknado’s effects aren’t even the worst I’ve seen—they’re mediocre-ly terrible, in fact. It’s too painful to watch to be enjoyed, and I’ve seen too many low budget flicks to appreciate that it’s so bad it’s good, as many people have felt. It’s depressing that today’s entertainment has stooped to the new low of delivering poor quality on purpose, in hopes of being enjoyable. Instead of wasting all that money and time making something so dumb, they could have made a much smaller, more serious film with half decent actors and a half decent plot, not a guy killing a flying shark with a chainsaw. But what fun or sense would that have made? Sadly enough, Sharknado 2: The Second One, comes out this summer...

5. Ants 

This is probably the most obscure film on this list, and no, it’s not the animated one from the 90’s. What is most embarrassing is Ants was filmed in a town very close to the one I live in. It had a low budget and was a made-for-television movie, but that’s still no excuse for how terrible it is. This movie is practically unwatchable. It features sugar ants—probably intended to appear as another more voracious species—infesting a hotel and killing the occupants. One scene where they use rolled up magazines to breathe and avoid having the ants clog their throats is especially laughable. At the end they dig a tiny little trench around the entire hotel and fill it with gas, then set it on fire to contain the ants. There’s also this big concern that the ants can build bridges out of their own bodies to travel across water, and that’s why they need to fill in the trench with gas, I think. This movie really blows. It just begs the question: what were they thinking?  

4. The Black Hole

Finally, here is a bad sci-fi movie that doesn’t have killer animals in it. I’m not sure where to begin with this one. Let me start by saying this isn’t the 1979 Disney film of the same name. As for a plot, some scientists make a black hole in a laboratory, and it suddenly expands and threatens to suck in the city. Also, there’s some electric monster thing that also poses danger, or something. This whole thing is a giant mess. Honestly, the biggest problem with this movie is it lacks any kind of oomph. The characters are thrown into the situation, we don’t get introduced to them properly, and the destruction the black hole causes is actually underwhelming. The characters don’t have much left to do for the rest of the movie’s run time (luckily not long) except try to survive the black hole, except these characters act like the black hole is as dangerous as a snail that just woke up from a nap. The acting is atrocious to say the least, the pacing is problematic, and I won’t even worry about the plot because, let’s face it, would anyone watch this type of movie for the plot? This disaster flick is indeed just that: a disaster. Not only is it a disaster, but it’s a huge bore. 

3. Avalanche Sharks

Before I get into this one, I want you to know a super depressing fact: this was literally the first movie I watched in 2014. With that said, I shall continue...

I think it’s unfair that sharks are the main villains of all these crap films. I really pity them. The apex predators of the sea get reduced to shit cgi monsters time and time again, but never in a way more colossally repugnant than Avalanche Sharks. If you thought I hated Sharknado, you were right, but I detest this cringe causing, vomit inducing, eye gouging atrocity even more. I watched all of Sharknado once, for real. I tried to watch Avalanche Sharks on several separate occasions and got about thirty five minutes in to it each time before throwing the remote down and leaving the room. I did finally watch it all, and I’m not sure which scene is more baffling, a scene depicting sentient sharks flying away from their home planet towards earth or one of the sharks swimming through the snow, breaking through the bottom of a hot tub, eating two girls, and then going back into the snow all without disturbing the water or making it leak out. I cannot fathom what the creators of this movie were thinking. Do I even need to explain the plot? I’ll sum it up for you in four words. Snow sharks attack skiers. Just reading that sentence makes me want to hurl. Don’t say I didn’t warn you if you do decide to try and watch this. Apparently there’s another film with a similar premise called Snow Shark. You probably want to avoid watching that one, too. 

2. Alien 3000

 

Coming in at a frighteningly close second is this little known, difficult to find straight to DVD film that nearly caused me to die. No joke. I watched this movie, and became so depressed afterwards, I suddenly didn’t want to be alive in a world where this film existed. Why didn’t I turn it off if it was so bad, you ask? Scene after scene, I kept watching, saying to myself: “Ok, it can’t get any worse than this...” and every time, I was proven wrong. How bad is it? Right from the get go, the title is wrong. What do I mean wrong? Everywhere on the internet it’s labelled as Unseen Evil 2, but on the DVD it’s called Alien 3000. Why would they change the title? Was there actually a first Unseen Evil? Does it have anything to do with this movie? I don’t care. The plot is about this invisible alien that hides gold in a cave, which a team of marines are trying to get. While watching, I got the impression that the filmmakers started out by sitting in a room and saying: “hey, let’s copy all the great alien movies we’ve ever seen and put them all into our own movie! Yeah, like Predator, Alien, Independence Day, all those ones!” And they did. What bothered me the most were the characters. These “marines” are the most incompetent people I have ever seen in a movie ever. They actually shoot at the alien with a giant paintball gun which allows them to see it. Every line of dialogue spewed from everyone’s mouths made my ears want to seal shut. The only saving grace in this movie, if I could even call it a saving grace, is some of the gore effects are practical rather than computer generated, and some of them aren’t terrible (though the terrible ones are more entertaining). It’s the only aspect worth mentioning that isn’t complete garage, everything else is downright dreadful. Look up the trailer for Unseen Evil 2 on YouTube. It’s about two and a half minutes, and showcases some of the highlights (or lowlights, rather) from this abomination. If you still feel the need to watch the whole movie after seeing that, then good luck and Godspeed, I tried to save you. 

1. King of the Lost World

Here is my all-time most loathed film, ever. I have only seen it in its entirety once, and never plan to ever again. It’s from the studio The Asylum (of course), which is infamous for making terrible, low budget movies, including Age of Dinosaurs, Sharknado and a host of “mockbusters” designed to rip off popular Hollywood films. This movie, if you could even call it that, is their golden turd. I can’t even accept that it’s intentionally bad, because it seriously seems like they thought this was going to be a decent, entertaining movie despite being obviously cheap. The story (according to the cover) inspired King Kong and Jurassic Park. WRONG. The novel The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle inspired those films, and this piece of shit obviously steals from all three of those works. There’s a plane crash in the Amazon, a giant cgi gorilla (the effects for which were done in someone’s basement, seriously), flying dragons for some reason, perverted natives, and a dozen other atrocities. The acting is painfully horrific, the dialogue even more so, and the whole movie is just torturous. It’s so appalling I can’t even give away the DVD because I would feel bad for whoever got it. I also can’t destroy it because I feel the conflicting need to preserve this, to remind me that, even when I see a bad movie, that there’s always something worse. The main reason I think this is more appalling and unwatchable than any other movie ever made is it has absolutely zero redeeming qualities, and it actually pisses me off. Unlike Python 2 or Sharknado or even Alien 3000, which I can eventually shrug off and just not think about, King of the Lost World instills hatred in me because it, is, so, terrible. Maybe it’s because I got this as a birthday present, maybe because I don’t like seeing my favourite movies being blatantly ripped off, or maybe all that and more, but King of the Lost World earns the place of my most hated film. I’ve already talked enough about this movie turd at length, so what is there left to say? Fuck The Asylum and all the shit they produce. I’m done.