The 2015 list highlights some of the most notorious titles in film history. These movies often share common traits: non-existent budgets, wooden acting, and directors who seemed to be working in a vacuum.
While a massive box office hit, critics at Cinephiled and elsewhere labeled it a horrendous and exploitative adaptation. Why We Watch Them
The list’s inclusion of this film highlights a key criterion for "worst ever" status: pretension. A bad movie made by people trying to make a quick buck is annoying; a bad movie made by people convinced they are making high art is excruciating. The Dutch angles, the baffling plot, and the melodramatic acting in Battlefield Earth serve as a warning that ambition, without the talent to execute it, results in cinema’s most expensive wreckage.
At the very summit of the Taste of Cinema ranking sits John Travolta’s pet project, Battlefield Earth (2000). It is a fitting champion for such a list because it represents a specific, intoxicating kind of bad movie: the blockbuster failure. Unlike low-budget schlock, Battlefield Earth had millions of dollars and a genuine movie star behind it, yet it failed on every conceivable level.