Beasties (1991)

How bad is it? The video box says "Worst movie ever made?" It's bad, but not THAT bad.
Should you see it? Yes, if you can find it now that it's been re-released.

Like most people, I thought this was going to be in the Critters and Ghoulies category, by the title, but the monsters are secondary to the plot about an anarchistic punk cult. There's a bad girl fight with a knife-with-blood-cartridge involved and later there's a scene where someone loses an eye when they actually encounter the aliens, who just leave for no more reason than they arrived - but not before one gets beaned with a frying pan! There's a bad goth-rock band, there's WAY too much talk (the hero's pseudo-scientific talk is fun), and then there's a twist ending that will make your head ache.

Bad Girl Island (2007)

How bad is it? It goes nowhere and doesn't know what it wants to be.
Should you see it? Not really. Attractive people do not a film make.

A guy rescues an amnesiac woman who washes up on the shore and then, of course, has sex with her rather than trying to find out who she is. She might be a voodoo witch; I think that's where the story goes. People on a party boat disappear and then, near the end, when the film starts trying to fill all the plot, it suddenly becomes a film about immigrants on rafts fleeing to America. AnnaLynne McCord, James Brolin and Antonio Sabato Jr. star - and one of them obviously is reading cue cards. There are underwater scenes that show the walls of the pool which is supposed to be ocean. Ed Wood's blending day and night scenes gets repeated 50 years later, as well.

Axe Giant: The Wrath of Paul Bunyan (2013)

How bad is it? It combines the badness of giants and killer beasts without adding anything.
Should you see it? No.

I come from the land of the Paul Bunyan folklore, so this film's badness is personally offensive. Adolescents sent to a work camp take some bones they find, which just happen to be from Babe the Blue Ox and that causes a rampage by Paul Bunyan, who is nothing like the legends, but just a typical homicidal maniac that happens to be quite large (creating questions of how he stays hidden, a problem noted in another SyFy film about Bigfoot I reviewed earlier). Dan Haggerty and Joe Estevez go slumming in this, where the CGI is poor (but not terrible), the acting is poor (but only reflects a bad script and direction) an the only thing not completely predictable is how a legend gets trashed - next time, perhaps Cinderella will be an unemployed steamfitter trying out for the NFL before going on a rampage.

The Alternate (2000)

How bad is it? It's a very shoddy by-the-numbers thriller.
Should you see it? It's a bit high budget for my taste, but it has its moments.

This film came to my attention when it was released because some of the advertising misidentified Ice-T as the only other black actor in the film. The film itself is just as careless. It stars Eric Roberts and Michael Madsen, as well as Ice-T, all of whom have made some clinkers in their careers. There's a fake abduction of the President of the USA done to boost popularity before an election that's made real and then the rest of the film is trying to make things right.Thousands of bullets are fired, with nothing getting hit. "Crowds" of maybe 10 people protest with identical signs. An extra flashes the "loser" sign to the camera. Repeated footage shows some guys dying twice. The final sequence has Roberts being asked who he is and saying, "I'm the replacement," which makes me think this film was intended to be called "The Replacement," but got retitled after shooting.

Abduction (2009)

How bad is it? It's a 1970's grindhouse movie made much too late.
Should you see it? Nope.

The film's about a town in New Jersey that's left off the map and whose economy is based on abducting people who wander in by accident and selling them into slavery, harvesting their organs, forcing them to have babies to sell at adoption, etc. A Brazilian pop star is one of the victims, but her fans and modern technology (such as the GPS on her phone) bring unwanted attention and droves of people to investigate. The film exists solely to show unclothed women being humiliated, which was a staple of exploitation cinema, but the women in this aren't attractive (physically or by personality) and seem to have all had the same poor breast enlargement surgery, causing me to think this was cast at the cheapest of strip clubs. The movie's dull, poorly filmed and has a music score that gives me a headache.

Delinquent School Girls (1975)

aka Delinquent Schoolgirls, aka Carnal Madness, aka Delinquent College Girls, aka The Delinquents, aka Love Maniacs, aka The Sizzlers, aka Scrubbers 2 

How bad is it? It's brainless and extremely sophomoric.
Should you see it? I loved it (though it's slow), but only recommend to sexploitation fans.

Those aren't the biggest stars of this film.

The plot has three escaped convicts terrorizing a girls' school. When anything plot-related happens, though, the film bogs down; that's not why anyone would watch this. The movie has every possible exploitative cliche imaginable and it's fun to see how they manage to work into the plot, say, a girl bouncing on a trampoline - twice. My favorite line runs something along the lines of, "We're not going to take it any more. Let's show them! Let's not wear our bras today!" This is the only film of Roberta Pedon, who was young, slender and pretty and had enormous breasts (that were actually appealing); that her accent is so thick one can barely understand her lines explains why Russ Meyers never used her in a film. The IMDB bio of Pedon appears to be at least 80% fabricated, but she disappeared in 1977 and generally is believed to have died soon after.

Update: I believe Pedon's still alive. Here's a photo of her in 1974 and one of someone I think is her more recently:

 

Alien Beasts (1991)

How bad is it? It's on of the two or three worst-structured films ever made.
Should you see it?  Yes. It can be a chore to watch, but I think it's rewarding.

This film is essentially plotless, but I think it's about aliens trying to move a macguffin (as defined by Hitchcock) from one place to another, but being thwarted by battling humans. The film just starts, in the middle of an uncoreographed fight scene involving people in costumes; I think you can hear them laughing at one point. There's a monotonous narration of things like "I remember. I remember." The narration continues over intertitles. There's an interminable scene of a topless woman in a mask. There's repeated still shots of bad art. The film goes back to the fight scene repeatedly. The last part of the film switches from videotape to film for a lengthy stop-motion sequence that looks like a teenager's experiment and which has no obvious connection to the rest of the film; the most memorable shot of this is a blue modeling clay hand having its fingers cleaved and dribbling "alien blood."

I've said before that I think "Samurai Cop" and "Birdemic" were made intentionally bad, but I honestly can't say with this one - it's either phenomenally bad on purpose or it's almost impossibly inept, a case of outsider art on film. Deciding between these is more fun than watching the movie!

One possibility is that two guys working in a video store talked about bad movies and decided they could make a movie as good (or as bad) as what they're renting; one of them mentions having made a short film - the stop motion sequence - and they view it, laughing at how bad it is and decide to pad it. They get their friends together, probably involving drugs (there's a large mortar and pestle on a coffee table in the scene where we see the narrator) and then stitch together the footage they have in the worst way they could.

The alternative is that this is the "Kung Fu Bicycle" of film. "Rolling Stone" magazine used to run ads in the back for Song Poems, where, if you sent lyrics and a check, studio musicians would compose music for, record and press a copy or two of your song. Some people intentionally sent impossible lyrics. One collector of these found a copy of a song called "Kung Fu Bicycle" and believed it to be intentionally bad (it starts about the joy of riding a bike and, apparently forgetting how it starts, then rambles about kung fu) until he met the guy who wrote it, who very earnestly had tried his best.

In this scenario, a guy of slightly diminished capacity tried to make a film. A friend of his then told him that he needed sex and violence to sell it, so the friend made the fight and topless scenes and they got edited into the film. The need to repeat sentences, the lack of affect, the disorganization of thought, all give credence to the idea of outsider art.

Remarkably, the film has parallels to the experimental short film "La Jetee" by Chris Marker, as it could be seen as narration of memories over essentially static shots, with a science fiction storyline. As director Sukenick has made three more films after this, it looks like this was all intentional.