There was merchandise all over the place when it came out (and still easily found on Amazon and Walmart). Clothes, backpacks, funko pops, action figures. 14th-highest-grossing film of 2012, fourth-highest-grossing 2012 animated film, biggest opening for Disney Animation Studio up to that point, 7.7 on IMDb, 87% on RT, the critics loved it, and there’s a sequel coming out in November.
You may have been surprised to like it, meeting half of the OP’s criteria, but it does not belong in the category of “worst movies” unless you have a very strange definition of such.
Little Nicky. It doesn’t have a great reputation, even for an Adam Sandler film, but I found a lot of it clever, and thought Sandler was very convincing as someone who genuinely has no experience with life on planet Earth.
They actually did make one or two Wreck It Ralph arcade video games. Pjnball Wizard in New Hampshire has one of them (not the better known Funspot, up on Lake Winnepesaukee). You’d think that they’d make more o them, or at least a home game version of it, since we’re past the era of stand-up video games, supposedly.
In any case, I agree that Wreck it Ralph doesn’t belong in a list of Bad Movies. It’s undeniably a Good Movie, especially if you get all the gaming in-jokes.
I love Nothing But Trouble! It’s so weird! And it randomly has Digital Underground for no real reason, including a very young Tupac sporting a Yankees jersey.
And on the other end of Johnny Depp’s career, I’ll nominate Nightmare on Elm Street. It’s a horror classic, absolutely, but watching it today it’s pretty bad. I still like it, but it was a low-budget mid-80s film and it really shows.
This one is on my bucket list. I am given to understand it is an iconic ‘terrible movie’ but its cult following suggests there’s a redemptive nugget of gold in there somewhere. I keep forgetting to give it the screen time, however.
I’ll throw in another vote for Flash Gordon. My lady & I were watching Ted and they kept banging on about the movie, and she got curious. I hadn’t seen it but warned her it was rumored to be truly awful. Going into it with that mindset, we really enjoyed it for all it’s campiness–cheap sets & effects, campy acting, cheesy script–cinematic alchemy. Ted sucked, though.
Ishtar. Far better than its reputation indicates, with some great comic scenes.
The Doberman Gang. People training dogs to rob a bank. Overall a charming caper film with a clever ending.
Twins with Danny Devito and Arnold Schwarzenegger as the title characters. A one-joke premise, of course, but overall pretty entertaining. Schwarzenegger was a pretty good comic actor throughout his career.
The Last Action Hero. Case in point. I’m a sucker for metafiction, and the movie reveled in it.
I have fun watching a lot of Bad Movies. For years I had a Bad Film Festival just to revel in the awfulness. as I’ve said elsewhere, I grew up on Plan Nine from Outer Space and Robot Monster and From Hell it Came and Caltiki, the Immortal Monster and the like.
But the one that I am surprised that I like is Starship Troopers. Never have I seen a movie so much at odds – philosophically, thematically, intellectually, any other way you want – with its ostensible source material. Heinlein’s book is controversial, but it’s not dumb, and I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read it.
The movie may have started life as something else, but when they discovered they were duplicating Heinlein they didn’t just slap different names on characters (as in I, Robot), but ty embraced the book, taking incidents from it and twisting it all out of shape.
Make no mistake, this is a dumb movie, even while it’s being satirical and all. The military tactics are unbelievably insane – sending lightly armored down onto planets literally swarming with organic killing machines, having the soldiers get in a complete circle around the “bugs” they fire on (not a chance of Friendly Fire there!), ignoring or forgetting the various “nonstandard” bug forms (flyers, bombardier bugs, fireball-shooting bugs) and wasting manpower as if people cost nothing. Not even paying lip service to basic physics – a starship can nit notice a flying boulder until it almost hits it? And detects its presence by the gravitational pull of water in a freakin’ CUP? Or The Bugs fire asteroids at earth from another star system and they travel at sublight speed through space? In the first place, that’s outrageously accurate; in the second, this might be a problem about the time our sun goes cold. The movie is also pretty blasé about the source material, turning Sergeant Zim’s lecture about the importance of knowing how to use all sorts of weapons (including a throwing knife) into a sadistic exercise, making Johnny Rico – a Filipino, as it’s revealed at the end of the book – into a painfully Anglo character, and having Rico’s home town Buenos Aires, when it’s clear in the book that his mother was just visiting there. And Johnny looks pretty Anglo for an Argentinian, too.
But the film has gorgeous special effects, and its so lovingly dumb, I find it fascinating, despite all the stupidity and gore. It’s hard to tel which there’s more of. But I’ve watched it countless times. I’ve even seen all the sequels, animated and live action. Casper von Dien got a career boost out of it, appearing in a couple of these and producing the most recent.
I go to a sci-fi film marathon every year and I get to watch a lot of terrible movies in a crowd, but they’re supposed to be terrible (well, many of them) and the crowd yells at the screen so it’s fun. I’ve seen Flash Gordon, Plan 9 from Outer Space and The Postman that way. Made them much more enjoyable. Last year we saw Deep Blue AND Superman IV. Holla!
I saw *Sharknado *and The Room as Rifftrax events. So those kinda don’t count either.
One of the ultimate “worst movies ever” aside from The Room is Troll 2. I watched that this past winter, from my couch with no riffers around. Definitely a “so bad it’s good” film!
I guess the worst movie I paid to see at a theater that did the worst at the box office and I didn’t go just to laugh at it was Dudley Do-Right, starring Brendan Fraser. I enjoyed it and it was classic Bullwinkle humor!
There’s also a movie with Natalie Portman and Ashley Judd called* Where the Heart Is* that I happen to like a lot, which for some reason get 1 & 1/2 stars in the TV schedule. I have no idea why. I mean, it’s not an Oscar-getter, but I’d easily give it three stars. I don’t know why it gets panned, or people consider it on the level of Plan 9 and Robot Monster. By the way, I have a special spot for Robot Monster because it’s in 3D.
Also, I tend to enjoy anything by William Castle.
Then, there is the cheesiest movie of all cheesy movies, which is so good in its own special way, I can barely contain myself when it comes on TV. I even spent money getting a DVD of it, which had to be specially made from a 16mm print, because it’s to obscure a film to have been produced for DVD. It’s called Two on a Guillotine. I think anymore, you can find the whole film online, because you can find most things online now. It’s a whole lot of fun-- it’s a haunted house movie from the 60s. It was probably a great drive-in movie.
I’ll also own up to being a fan of* The Manitou*, speaking of drive-ins. That’s where I originally saw this one. Great movie for a drive-in.
