The Worst Movie Ever Made! Maniac

And Ed Wood Wasn't Involved in Any Capacity

Don't believe the hype. For all the fame (infamy) and notoriety that Ed Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space has received over the last thirty years, it's not the worst movie ever made. Whatever the inimitable Mr. Wood may have lacked in technical skill, he made up for with determination. There really isn't anything in Plan 9 that's any worse, when you objectively look at it, than the excruciatingly extended dinosaur attack sequence in Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong. Honestly, can you really justify that the computer effects in that scene were any more believable than Wood's pie-tins on a string flying saucers?

Generally speaking, I don't really like it when the term worst movie is applied to an obviously bad movie. Whenever I think of really rotten films, I tend to bestow the honor upon movies that really should have been good: movies with budgets, good actors, good directors, etc. It's very easy to slam a low-budget quickie with actors never seen again, but if you want to talk about bad movies, you should really go after the big fish. At the top of my worst movie list would be, in no particular order: Conan the Barbarian, Face/Off, "10", The Fellowship of the Ring. Recent additions would include the almost universally bad The Brothers Grimm (read my article devoted to why it's so awful), and The Sixth Sense.

But I'm willing to make an exception for a movie I recently watched that is included in the 50 Horror Classics boxed set of DVDs. The film was made in 1934 and in no way resembles anything that should have been a good movie. This movie is not just bad, it's bad in every conceivable way, but one. I must say that on a level equivalent to watching a horrific NASCAR crash, it is far more entertaining than of the scenes in Peter Jackson's remake that doesn't include King Kong himself.