Like anyone else, we love good movies, but truly terrible films hold a special place in our hearts as well, reminding us that for all of cinema’s high art merit, there are few things more fun than settling in for 90 minutes of pure schlock. While the landscape of Hollywood and beyond is scattered with bad and so-bad-it’s-good movies here and there uncovered occasionally by the real purveyors of terrible taste, there’s something to be said for those directors who can pretty reliably be expected to churn out nonstop slop.
You would think that a “bad” director would be immediately blacklisted from the industry, but the overwhelming evidence shows that this is not so. Maybe it says something about the lack of oversight in Hollywood, or perhaps the indomitability of the human spirit, but all of the directors on this list have managed to make more than one movie, so congrats to them (and woe to the rest of us). Some of these directors are bad at it on purpose, or at least didn’t exactly set out to make the next Citizen Kane. Some of them are truly sincere in their pursuit of art, yet something perpetually stands in their way.
Whatever the case, we love to hate these guys — or at least the work they produce. But that disdain is also tinged with a little bit of love, because it does take a certain amount of talent to make something really, really, really bad. Maybe art doesn’t need to be good to be “good.” Maybe it just needs to entertain our lizard brains.
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Gallery Credit: Emma Stefansky
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