Putting together this list was more challenging than you’d think. There are almost as many different ways for a title to go wrong as there are for movies to go wrong, and so we opted for an educational smorgasbord: no two movies on this list are bad in quite the same way twice
To be clear, we’re not really interested in the “so-bad-they’re-good” titles like Attack of the Killer Tomatoes and The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies!!? Unless, that is, they were aiming for “so-bad-they’re-good” and still fell into the “so bad they’re bad” camp.
40. Alvin & the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel
There is precisely one time in the history of movies that “The Sequel” was a funny subtitle for a sequel, and that was when Airplane II did it in 1982, simply because no one had done it before. Since then, titling your work “Anything 2: The Sequel” is like shorthand for “Maybe if I put some kind of subtitle in here people won’t realize how unimaginative I… oops too late they did.” The pun was probably meant to save face, but it just ended up making it worse, especially since the producers were so proud that they used it as the tagline too.
See also: The upcoming Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip, with its roadkill connotations; Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, which has nothing to do with water, Speed 2: Cruise Control, for its two phrases that don’t go together at all; and 2 Fast 2 Furious.
39. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
Quibbles about “v” vs. “vs.” aside, the real problem with Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is that it takes what should be a hugely exciting idea - two of the all-time greatest superheroes fighting each other onscreen for the first time ever - and spoils the ending. See, because DC wants to be like Marvel but has less patience, this film is also a prequel to Justice League, in that it’s the DAWWWWN of the Justice League, get it? So one way or another, this is going to end in a handshake, followed by a group hug with all the freakin’ guest-star heroes who’ll be crowding into this one like cheating tag-team wrestlers.
In case you missed it, the latest trailer more or less confirmed this’ll happen.
38. Blackmale
Yes, the movie does involve blackmail and a black male, but that doesn’t really make calling it Blackmale a good idea. Racial insensitivity might get a pass if this movie were from earlier in film history. (there are film titles from 1898 and 1904 that use the N-word in some pretty chilling contexts.)
Plus, the “blaxploitation” pictures of the 1970s and occasional revivals also had plenty of titles questionable to modern ears - Blackenstein, Scream Blacula Scream, Soul Man, Coonskin, The Black Godfather, Disco Godfather, The Black Gestapo, Black Samurai and Black Mama, White Mama. But Blackmale came out in 2000 and manages to be both offensive and boring.
37. $
Credit goes to this 1971 film for proving that a title does not have to be long to be utterly confusing. How do you say that? “Cash?” “Dollar sign?” “Cha-ching?”
The UK marketed this typical heist film as The Heist (not particularly imaginative, but hey, it gets the job done) and in the US, sometimes, as Dollars, but even Warren Beatty and Goldie Hawn near the height of their popularity had an uphill struggle selling American audiences on a movie that was represented by an unpronounceable symbol of its own choosing, much like The Artist Now Known Again as Prince during his really weird period.
36. Bride of Killer Nerd
Killer Nerd might have been a semifinalist for this list but the sequel title really puts it over the top. The whole nerd-revenge fantasy epitomized by Revenge of the Nerds reached its sell-by date in the late 1990s, as tech geniuses started to make mad loot and gain more power. We’re sure there are still plenty of big dumb bullies in school picking on the smart kids, but the rise of cyberbullying, to say nothing of actual mass shootings, makes the idea of a “killer nerd” painfully unfunny today.
The sequel’s basic joke, that har-har, someone might marry a nerd!, doubles down on the whole ugly mess.
35. Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?
Long titles can occasionally be fantastic, especially when they sort of tell us how to shorten them, like Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. But it takes a really great title idea to justify our patience, and when you ask us to take characters like “Hieronymous Merkin” and “Mercy Humppe” seriously, you– oops, we’re running out of room–
See also: The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent, 30 Nights of Paranormal Activity with the Devil Inside the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood.
34. Curse of the Queerwolf
In the filmmakers’ defense, this is another of those titles that got worse with age… well, actually, it was always pretty bad. But at least the movie made the homophobes the bad guys, despite a title that more or less conflates homosexuality with being a hairy, freakish monster that prowls the city late at night to feast upon flesh.
It also leaned on the sort of stereotypical humor that made Will and Grace look like The L Word, but you know, we couldn’t expect that enlightened an approach to sexuality in… 1988? Wait, screw that, yes we could and this movie is terrible.
33. Death Bed: The Bed That Eats
The idea of our household items turning into (or always really being) possessed monsters is a solid source of horror: what’s scarier than something coming for us in our homes, when we are at our most vulnerable yet think we are safe? But being a “death bed,” in addition to the terrible pun, sounds really inconvenient.
Once you’ve eaten your owners, you pretty much have to wait until somebody forecloses on the house and sells all the contents to people who don’t care that the old homeowners died under mysterious circumstances, and does an evil entity really have that kind of time?
32. Don’t Worry, We’ll Think of a Title
Wait, we kind of lost the character motivation there. Let’s try again: “Don’t worry your pretty little heads, moviegoers! We know having a title that isn’t a title just BLOWS YOUR LITTLE MINDS, but it’ll be okay. We’re just TOO RAW, TOO REAL for you!” Closer?
31. eXistenZ
Random capitaliZation of uncommon letters gets old pretty Quick… so Quick that eVen one eight-letter title can’t really get away with it. The ’90s saw a lot of this blatant caps abuse, from all the Internet companies that tried to make themselves cooler by calling themselves eSomething or iWhatever (we still don’t know if you should call it “eBay” or “EBay” when beginning a sentence) to the chat room conversations generally all in lowercase or ALL IN UPPERCASE.
eXistenZ,a movie about VR, is probably trying to channel some of that with its title, only with extra-edgy “Z” zpellingz.
30. Fat Guy Goes Nutzoid!!
This movie has two other titles, almost as bad: Troma originally tried to call it Fat Boy Goes Nutzoid, but changed their minds after the lawyers for the then-popular music group, the Fat Boys, sort of dramatically cleared their throats. Later, Troma marketed the film as Zeisters, which means nothing as far as we can tell.
At any rate, Fat Guy Goes Nutzoid!!, in addition to two exclamation points nobody really needed or wanted, isn’t even an accurate title: the “fat guy” is an escaped mental patient, so if you want to go ahead and use a blatantly offensive made-up word to describe his condition, he already is “nutzoid.”
29. feardotcom
Along with the tendency to slap a lowercase “e” in front of eVerything and capitalize accordingly, the Internet era also gave us a period of about five years where it was cool to add “.com” to the name of your company, signifying that you could be found online, because you were hip with the kids and their computers and the HTMLs.
Toward the tail end of that trend came this film, which somebody probably wanted to be called Fear.com but somebody else decided should look like an e. e. cummings poem title instead. Rule of thumb: a horror movie that uses slightly outdated tech like The Ring is scary. A horror movie that seems inspired by your grandma complaining about “these kids and their iPads,” not so much.
28. Fertilize the Blaspheming Bombshell
This can’t be right. According to our notes, this title was actually used in the marketing copy for this movie, but it is clearly a phrase generated by one of those “translate from English to a foreign language then to another foreign language and another and then back into English” programs. The original title probably used a few words we can’t say in polite company.
The movie concerns a bunch of Satan worshippers who try to get Shiela Caan to carry the devil’s spawn.
27. Hell Comes to Frog Town
Is this movie a mix of horror and cartoon innocence? Should we feel revulsion that Satan’s power now extends even to this bucolic Wind in the Willows-esque land of talking frogs and lily-pad housing? Or should we condemn the denizens of Frog Town, amphibians who have somehow mastered municipal administration but still haven’t made any time in their lives to read the Good Book? Well, it’s neither.
In one of the most disappointing fake-outs in movie history, “Hell” is just the name of the series’ protagonist, and “Frog Town” seems to be an ironic name for a land of mutated giant green monsters.
26. How the West Was Fun
Let’s ignore the fact that this is an Olsen twins film and is therefore going to creep us out no matter what. Let’s even ignore the fact that this is the laziest pun imaginable for a Western movie, so lame that it seems to be written by people who’ve never seen a Western.
When you have to tell your audience that your movie is fun, it’s not fun. You’ve become that poor guy at the party (usually the host) who walks around and asks “everybody havin’ a GOOD TIME??” while everyone else checks their watches and tries to calculate how early they can leave before it becomes a whole thing.
25. I Still Know What You Did Last Summer
Although it wasn’t a theatrical release, this title was followed by the even more nonsensical I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer, in which the “you” wasn’t even the same person.
24. In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale
Can you get four key words related to fantasy into one title and still make it boring? What do you know, it looks like you can (it helps if you wait six words before using any of the four interesting ones, and make sure those four don’t really make much sense together).
The creative process for this title makes a little more sense if you know about the role-playing video game Dungeon Siege, but turning video games into movies is so rarely successful that slapping the name of one into your subtitle isn’t really worth it. And when you get right down to it, who lays siege to a dungeon anyway?
23. It Happened One Night
What happened? Something happened! We’re just not going to tell you what. We know, we know: this movie is an inarguable classic, a screwball romcom with Frank Capra and Clark Gable at their very best and Claudette Colbert in her defining role. It also got great reviews and absolutely swept the Academy Awards, and you can see traces of its DNA in many romantic comedies today.
But it did only so-so box office in its initial release, maybe because its title says almost nothing about the story and what it does say (“One Night”) isn’t even true. Even the shooting title, Night Bus, would’ve been an improvement.
22. John Carter
Generally speaking, naming your movie after your main character is a bad idea unless that character has a really evocative name, like John Wick, or is famous enough that the name is a draw, like Robin Hood or Sherlock Holmes. John Carter is one of those generic names that protagonists tend to have to emphasize how normal they are compared to the bizarre circumstances they’re in, like the title of the original character, John Carter of Mars.
This film was never going to be a success, but it might’ve at least done better if Disney hadn’t tried to be coy about the Martian setting, having been spooked by the poor performance of movies like Mission to Mars and Red Planet. (This was some years before The Martian.)
21. Life Stinks
And then you die. But somewhere in between those two things, you watch movies. Usually movies with titles that promise to make life interesting for a while, or at least not so pointlessly nihilistic. It’s interesting to see Mel Brooks working out of his comfort zone in a film that’s not a parody of anything, but the prince-and-the-pauper plot he’s using could have inspired a dozen titles about wealth and poverty, all of which would have been more interesting than this tired old Yiddish shrug.
Studio interference softened Brooks’s original idea: Life Sucks.
