If only they’d gone with the title of the Israeli film it was based on: Lemon Popsicle.
Pootie Tang, followed closely by Snatch
Gleaming the Cube.
Christian Slater is a skateboarder that takes on Korean gangsters to solve his brothers murder. I just looked it up, “gleaming the cube”, is/was a skateboarding term.
Stupid movie, but i loved it as a kid.
Perhaps not a bad title; if “gleaming the cube” is a skateboarding term, the target audience may not be confused?
IIRC, it wasn’t real skateboarding slang, it was made up by the movie.
TreacherousCretin likes this.
(A “like” button would have saved me eight seconds of my precious time.)
Some movies titles are good in English, but stupid when promoted in another language. Jaws in Spanish-speaking countries is Tiburón, which just means “Shark” — idiotic.
There are probably many wondering what was so scary about “Mandible”
I understand the translation of the Spanish title of “Airplane!” is something like “Where is the Pilot?”.
Ha! That’s actually better, IMHO (but doesn’t capture the parody of the Airport movies.)
And there were a lot of countries where Alien (1979) was known as Alien: the Eighth Passenger or simply The Eighth Passenger. Not a bad name, considering, especially if your language doesn’t have a word for “space alien”, but things got silly with the sequels, which were given nonsensical names like Return of the Eighth Passenger and The Eighth Passenger Versus the Predator.
This is reminding me of the comedy name for Grease
Isn’t it translated as ‘lubricant’ or something like that somewhere?
A lot of these titles are simply long, which isn’t necessarily bad.
My nomination: Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever (2002)
The title implies that we know who the hell Ecks and Severs are, or why bother naming them? It’s like a sequel that we never got the original movie of. And why “Ballistic”?
And just to add to this:
Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever received overwhelmingly negative reviews from critics and is considered to be one of the worst films ever made. It is the lowest rated film of all time on Rotten Tomatoes, holding a rare 0% rating with 117 reviews, the most out of the 44 films to hold this distinction with over 20 reviews as of August 2025. It was also a box-office bomb, grossing $20.2 million on a production budget of $35 million.[3]
And some suggestions are just bad movies, whether or not the title was bad.
Definitely up there in the running.
Not only doesn’t it make sense as written (“Ballistic”? WTF does that mean?) it was supposed to be X, not Ecks. I forge what “Sever” was originally, but it was something different.
I don’t see what’s so bad about that.
I agree. Can we just restrict this to bad movie titles, and leave the bad movies and strange translations to other threads?
Another example of this is Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn (1993).
We all remember when Jared-Syn was built, right? Except that Jared-Syn is a person. And what “Metalstorm” means. It’s as if they just played around with words from their magnetic poetry kit on their refrigerator until they came up with something that sounded impressive, and as if it actually meant something.
the only thing interesting about the film is that it’s in 3D. And has Richard oll.
I Love You, Alice B. Toklas. Only Peter Sellers could get me to watch a movie with this title!
The Russian title of the WWII naval classic In Harm’s Way (John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Patricia Neal) was In the Manner of Mr Harm.
I swear, Russian translators are among the world’s worst! 