While browsing YouTube, I found this atrocity. It’s a duet between Patsy Cline and Jim Reeves
…from 1981. Yup, record execs manufactured a duet between two dead legends and backed with Casio worthy piano. A little digging and I found out this was a top 10 country hit that year! What other posthumous releases stand out due to their embarassing, exploitive nature?
There are some Jeff Buckley demos that degrade his legacy, in my opinion. Never meant to see the light of day.
Side note: I’m sure Jimi Hendrix will be releasing albums well into the 2100’s. As long as there is anyone left alive to suck that tit dry. :rolleyes:
There was a Douglas Adams collected volume where his literary executors just upended two decades of his old hard drives, shook them hard, and published what fell out. Utter rubbish.
If you’re talking about Salmon of Doubt, I quite liked it. It didn’t pretend to be anything other than what it was, and it was an interesting insight into Douglas Adams’s process and what could’ve been.
Jules Verne’s Paris in the 20th Century is at least a contender.
Trail of the Pink Panther? The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu? Tough call.
Without scouring IMDb for titles, I’d nominate the dozens of things like The Crow (1994) where they had to resort to look-alikes in dimly lit (more so than the entire movie) shadowy scenes with some obvious voiceovers to get the story to make a modicum of sense.
James Dean’s banquet scene in Giant had to be voiced by (depending on the source) either Dennis Hopper or Nick Adams. That was barely tolerable.
I know they have to recoup their investment money and untimely deaths are a bitch, but the quality tends to suffer in most cases.
I’d suggest trying to address the flip side of the question: Best Posthumous Release.
Heinlein’s For Us, The Living, written in 1939 and posthumously released in 2003. It is, objectively, a VERY early Heinlein story, and rightly rejected originally.
The Crow was 95% completed at the time of Brandon Lee’s death and was a commercial and critical hit.
Of course you’re right. I must have mixed some of those other posthumous fixes in with Brandon’s work. It was a good movie, as I recall.
Livia Soprano’s posthumous scene in the Sopranos, creepy as fuck.
Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight?
Hard to beat!
Worst posthumous release
You could make a good case for Plan 9 from Outer Space, if only because it was so awful in every conceivable category. But using footage of Bela Lugosi, then substituting Ed Wood’s much taller chiropractor holding a cape across his face seems to be not just amateurish, but actually insulting.
In literature, A Confederacy of Dunces.
There’s a lot of stuff that has been filmed or recorded before death and just happened to be released after death. “The Dark Knight” would have been released whether Ledger died or not. Posthumous releases that were released or altered without the artists’ consent has a much lower chance to be any good.
I don’t think the Crow is an amazing movie, but nothing much in it makes it clear that Brandon Lee had died. As already stated, the movie was nearly finished and for the vast majority of people, if you hadn’t been told he died, you can’t tell. I can’t tell and I knew he died.
Is there any other way? 
Edited or not, the work has to be at least partially completed before the artist’s death. Unless you know something about the afterlife no one else does.
I was expecting much worse, the way you sold this. I thought the piano was fine. 1981, I’d rather listen to this than the Oakridge Boys or some other shite.
I think the “Beatles” 1997 song where they took John Lennon’s demo for* Free as a Bird* and McCartney added some crappy lyrics to try to make it about their career, was much more exploitative, and a much worse song.