From Martin Scorsese‘s legendary neo-noir character study Taxi Driver to the Oscar-winning Rocky, many great films are turning 50 years old in 2026. It’s a big milestone, and that makes it also worth looking back at the worst films achieving said milestone this year. From terrible horror movies to embarrassing indie productions, these 50-year-old films are proof that no year is without its fair share of duds.
Some of these trainwrecks have become underrated so-bad-they’re-good cult classics, while others have understandably faded into relative obscurity. Whatever the case, each one of these movies shares lots of things in common with the others, from lackluster writing to unappealing directing. Whatever it is that makes them awful, they were the talk of the town (in as negative a sense as possible) half a century ago.
10
‘Eaten Alive’
In 1974, Tobe Hooper revolutionized the slasher genre forever, releasing in the form of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre one of the most groundbreaking horror movies of all time. The ’70s, the age of New Hollywood, were the perfect time for American directors to experiment and tell darker, more personal stories than had ever been told before. Alas, Hooper followed his masterpiece up with something far less exceptional: Eaten Alive.
This puzzling movie is the story of a Texas hotel owner who murders people who upset him or his business, and the story’s just about as shallow as it sounds.Far from the ominous atmosphere and powerful social commentary of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Eaten Alive only provides pointless sexual scenes and gratuitous violence that lead nowhere, never redeemed by its strong visuals.
9
‘Grizzly’
In 1975, Steven Spielberg practically invented the summer blockbuster, delivering with Jaws one of the greatest horror masterpieces ever. Following the movie’s massive success, countless rip-offs were released during the rest of the decade. Case in point: Only one year after Jaws, one of the worst horror movies of the ’70s came out, Grizzly. In it, a park ranger tries to halt the wild rampage of a giant man-eating grizzly bear.
It’s a simple concept, the same kind of simple concept that Spielberg managed to turn into one of the most successful horror movies of all time, but this misguided effort is no Spielberg picture. The only redeemable aspect of Grizzly is the cuddly Kodiak bear Teddy, who portrays the title creature. Everything else, from the haphazard plotting to the virtueless production values, is nothing short of a failure.
8
‘Cannonball!’
Shaw Brothers Limited was the largest film production company in Hong Kong during the 20th century, and it primarily produced iconic martial arts films. They also made some Hollywood stuff in other genres, though, which includes the racing comedy Cannonball!, starring David Carradine. In this caper, a plethora of exotic cars carry contestants hoping to win a very large sum across the country.The movie was inspired bya real illegal cross-continent road race that took place for a number of years in the U.S., the same race that inspired later movies like The Cannonball Run. But while the cars are undeniably cool, there’s no energy or passion in the way the movie is shot or directed, which is pretty much the worst sin that a racing movie could possibly commit.
7
‘At the Earth’s Core’
Based on Edgar Rice Burroughs‘ 1914 fantasy novel of the same name, the fantasy sci-fi flick At the Earth’s Core may be one of the worst things that has ever happened to the author’s work, depending on who you ask. The ’70s are full of obscure sci-fi gems to discover, but this adaptation is one whose obscure status is probably for the best.
Sometimes, a budget on the lower end can play to a film’s advantage if it’s made with enough passion and inventiveness. Sadly, At the Earth’s Core is full of creatures that look ugly and unconvincing, sounds that grate the ear, and acting that’s more embarrassing than it is charming. It may be a colorful and mostly inoffensive movie, but that doesn’t make it decent.
6
‘Island of Death’
It wasn’t only Hollywood that produced terrible horror films during 1976. For proof, one needn’t look any further than the Greek exploitation film Island of Death, also known as Devils in Mykonos and A Craving for Lust, which tells the story of a man and a woman who visit Mykonos and go on a rampage, killing everyone they believe to be sinful or perverted.
It’s a blood-soaked parade of empty shock value and gratuitous violence, offering poorly-crafted scene after poorly-crafted scene to weave a narrative that’s both senseless and pointless. Island of Death, AKA Devils in Mykonos, AKA A Craving for Lust, is one of the most widely banned horror movies in the world, but aside from morbid curiosity, there’s absolutely no reason to check it out.
5
‘Ilsa: Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks’
Women-in-prison exploitation movies surged around the 1930s, and they evolved throughout Hollywood’s Golden Age as one of the most notorious genres of B-pictures. Ilsa: Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks, a sequel to Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, came pretty late into the genre’s life, but it would have probably been best if it hadn’t even come into existence at all. This horror thriller about a woman joining the sex-trafficking ring of a maniacal sheikh is as offensive as it is awful.
Ilsa: Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks is not camp enough to be entertaining nor transgressive enough to make anyone who respects their time curious.
Ilsa: Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks includes one of the worst movie prisons ever, but that’s purely a product of how poorly-made the movie is. It’s not camp enough to be entertaining nor transgressive enough to make anyone who respects their time curious,and it doesn’t even work as half-decent softcore porn. It’s the kind of movie that fails on virtually every level it sets out to work on.
4
‘Squirm’
Based on a childhood incident of director Jeff Lieberman in which his brother fed electricity into a patch of earth, causing earthworms to rise to the surface, Squirm is a B-horror flick where a storm drawsmillions of man-eating worms out of the earth. It’s the kind of premise that may sound like a passion project for its director, but there’s very little actual passion here.
Squirm isn’t particularly scary. In fact, much more often than not, it’s remarkably boring. Indeed, Squirm is perhaps best known for its inclusion in Mystery Science Theater 3000, and even then, it’s one of the dullest films ever featured on the iconic show. It’s cheesy, it’s horribly paced, and it fails to offer anything of interest for fans and connoisseurs of so-bad-it’s-good horror.
3
‘Blood Sucking Freaks’
There are plenty of criminally underrated splatter horror movies out there. The exploitation flick Blood Sucking Freaks certainly is not one of them. This splatter satire follows a human trafficking ring masquerading as an experimental theater group, who present a show involving the torture and mutilation of young women.At least the fact that the movie is presented as a comedy makes it slightly less intolerable, but it’s still horribly misogynistic and entirely pointless. It’s gratuitous violence just for the sake of it, true bottom-of-the-barrel stuff that gives gross-out horror a bad name. There’s some “sicko” cinema that’s actually worth checking out for those with the stomach for it, but this revolting movie has such contempt for women and for its audience that it’s best left in oblivion.
2
‘The Food of the Gods’
Based on H. G. Wells‘ novel The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth, the American-Canadian sci-fi thriller The Food of the Gods is an insult both to Wells and to high-quality science fiction. In it, a group of friends travel to a remote Canadian island to hunt, only to be attacked by giant killer animals that have populated the place.It’s one of the most clichéd movies of the ’70s, and certainly of 1976, a disaster movie that leans closer to “disaster” than to “movie,” where the only highlights are the memorable special effects that bring the story’s colossal rats to life. Despite that, the writing is so terrible, the acting is so stiff, and the general quality of the film is soschlocky that Food of the Gods ends up distancing itself from true entertainment as much as it possibly can.
1
‘Track of the Moon Beast’
Though it’s responsible for one of the funniest episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000, the atrocious sci-fi horror film Track of the Moon Beast is otherwise best left forgotten. It’s one of the worst movies of the 1970s, about a mineralogist student being struck in the head by a tiny shard of a meteor, which causes him to transform into a bloodthirsty reptilian creature.Track of the Moon Beast is a ridiculous failure in every possible sense of the word, the kind of movie so preposterously awful that your mind ends up forcing you to forget almost everything about it just hours later, purely as a self-defense mechanism. Its visuals, its music, its writing, its acting, and its directing are all some of the worst of the decade, and as such, save when it’s watched within the hilarious constraints of MST3K, it’s better to avoid it like the plague.
Source link
