5 of the best worst movies to destress with during finals week

A group of miners mining for Iridium blast open a cave containing still-living dinosaurs, unleashing them upon the small town nearby. Nonsensical plot elements, horrendously bad practical and CGI effects, and characters with as much depth as a puddle leave the movie’s attempt at being a serious action movie just as extinct as the dinosaurs in it should be.

Despite that, however, it is still enjoyable to watch, if only to laugh at the absurdity of everything and everyone involved. For example, apparently, the dinosaurs here are vulnerable to fire: extended time spent in the cave has filled their blood with methane, making them explosive. Somehow.

Rating: 6/10. Not even The Dinkster can save you from this movie

This cult classic from 1964 is more outright weird than bad; for the time period it was created in, it’s not much worse than most of its contemporaries. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians was created to fill a perceived market gap of holiday sci-fi films for children; a market gap that, in the end, was fiction as well.

Here, the two leaders of Mars(“Momar” and “Kimar”) are concerned that the Martian children are watching too much Earth TV. For reasons that are barely related to this, they kidnap Santa Claus in order to let the children have fun…but they can’t tell which of the Santas is real, so they decide to also kidnap 2 children in order to figure out which Santa is the real one.

Despite the title, there is no actual conquering to be found here; it’s just a cheesy, low budget holiday film whose flaws are worth watching over the rest.

Rating: 5/10, disappointingly misleading title.

You’ve probably heard of this one if you spent any time on the internet in the early 2010s, but if you haven’t, Birdemic is a unique example of independent low budget film. Created by James Nguyen(who was writer, director, and producer) in 2010, Birdemic: Shock and Terror was inspired by two completely dissonant sources: Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and an environmental documentary called An Inconvenient Truth.

The movie follows two protagonists and their romantic journey through California for nearly the entire first half of the film, as they blissfully ignore the world(and the movie’s flagrant lack of audio mixing) collapsing around them. Then, birds(mutated to explode and spit acid by…global warming?) attack, until doves appear and they very suddenly stop attacking.

The first attempt to tie into the famous video game franchise, 1993’s Super Mario Bros(featuring Dennis Hopper, surprisingly) can perhaps be most generously described as an interpretation of the game in live action form. Whatever it is, its certainly not an adaptation.

The film centers around an alternate Manhattan where the dinosaurs survived the meteor impact 63 million years ago(creatively called Dinohattan). Mario and Luigi here live in Brooklyn, and their plumbing business is having trouble with the mafia(no, seriously, I’m not making this up). The rest of the movie is just as much of a mess; the box office thought the same, as Super Mario Bros. lost over $10 million and single-handedly destroyed the possibility of live-action Nintendo adaptations until 2019’s Detective Pikachu.

Rating: 2/10, as appetizing as day old spaghetti.

This is the best movie ever and I have nothing bad to say about it. Go watch it as soon as possible. I will say nothing about this perfect diamond of film in order to preserve its viewing experience, except that everyone needs to watch it at least once.


Rating: 11/10. Perfection. Never again will humanity reach such heights of cinema.