The Mt. Rushmore of Bad Filmmakers

I'm not sure if former ESPN commentator Bill Simmons invented the idea of a "Mt. Rushmore" of ranking things or if he just popularized it but it's something that's been used a lot since the 2000s on social media and such.

For those who don't realize it Mt. Rushmore is a monument in South Dakota (almost literally in the middle of nowhere about 30 miles from Rapid City) with four presidents carved into the side of a mountain:  Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and T. Roosevelt.  So the idea in creating a "Mt. Rushmore" of something is to pick four things like the four presidents.  So a "Mt. Rushmore of Basketball Players" you might have Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, Michael Jordan, and LeBron James.  Or you might have some different people.  The thing about it is you only have four slots so it can create a lot of debate in comment sections.

Spoiler alert!

So at one point when I was bored I got wondering, who's the Mt. Rushmore of bad filmmakers?  Well I suppose you have to have Ed Wood, right?  Plan 9 From Outer Space, and so forth that were so cheaply and incompetently created as to be laughable.  I think you also have to have Roger Corman who's made like 400 low-budget movies, though slightly more competently.

As someone who obsessively watched Rifftrax movies I have to put James Nguyen on there.  I mean Birdemic and Julie & Jack are as cheap and incompetent as anything Ed Wood ever made.  The only knock against putting him on there is the quantity isn't as large as others like Bert I Gordon or other schlock-mongers who put out dozens if not hundreds of crappy movies.  Still, there's something to be said for quality over quantity; the sheer awfulness of those movies makes up for the lack of quantity.

I wasn't all that sure about the fourth slot until one weekend when on a lark I rented three Rifftrax movies all written, produced, and directed by Greydon Clark.  To that point my experience with him had been relatively benign.  Mostly the 80s "thriller" Final Justice where a bloated Joe Don Baker plays a Texas deputy who loses a prisoner in Malta and has to track him down on the island.  It wasn't great but not on the same par as a Plan 9 or Birdemic.  Then there was the 70s Charlie's Angels/After School Special ripoff Angel's Revenge where a schoolteacher recruits a group of women to take on Joey Bishop, Jack Palance, and some sitcom has-beens from Gilligan's Island and Beverly Hillbillies.  That one was pretty bad.  But not bad enough.

Then came that weekend I mentioned.  One movie was bad but not completely awful.  Dark Future was shot on the cheap in post-Cold War Russia in 1994 but it looks more like it was made in the late 80s.  The story is fairly confusing too as it's sort of a reverse Westworld/Futureworld where androids stock a theme park with humans to amuse them by recreating past locales like a 30s Chicago speak-easy.  One of the humans has a baby, which is the first in decades so they have to keep the child alive.  Then there are all these old guys who control the androids and want to do something with the baby so they can live forever...or something.

The "horror" movie Uninvited was pretty ridiculous.  Our auteur shows up as a scientist who's so stupid that he doesn't close the door when injecting a cat with an experimental drug.  The cat gets away from him to terrorize people.  The ridiculous thing is the cat looks like a normal orange cat but then a "monster" comes out like a hairball or the small mouth of the xenomorph in Alien.  Somehow it gets on a boat and starts killing people.  It takes the whole rest of the movie then for these idiots to realize they could just GET OFF THE FUCKING BOAT to escape the thing.  Duuuuuuh.  And of course the cat washes up on a beach where it's picked up by a little kid who happens to be one of the director's sons.

Which I mention because the same kid is one of the "stars" in Greydon Clark's magnum opus Star Games.  If I had never seen another Greydon Clark movie I'd still put him on my Mt. Rushmore of bad filmmakers because holy shit is this movie bad.  It's easily on the Plan 9 and Birdemic level.  Except that Clark by that point should have been a little more competent than Nguyen and probably had a slight bit more money than Ed Wood.

What makes it so bad?  First it "stars" both of the director's sons.  One is a human and one an alien prince who crashes on the planet to escape an evil alien warlord who looks like a bad cosplay of a Power Rangers villain.  The prince's people, led by a decrepit Tony Curtis cashing a paycheck, have an impenetrable shield around their planet.  But for inexplicable reasons the prince is on another planet that isn't shielded so the bad guy plans to capture him and ransom him.  Wait, if your shield is impenetrable why wouldn't you have the prince living under it?  It makes no sense!

But the prince escapes to Earth in a ship piloted by an AI resembling a clown.  An actual fucking clown.  Gah!  The prince meets a human kid on Earth and they have to fight off evil henchmen in a variety of annoying ways.  One way is the prince creates the illusion of dinosaurs that use really bad claymation like something from the 50s.  There's also a bear sometimes chasing them that at least doesn't look like a guy in a bear suit most of the time.

Between the nepotism, horrid effects, and incoherent story it's one of those that's almost too bad to be so good it's bad.  For that and decades of crap Greydon Clark gets on my Mt. Rushmore of bad filmmakers.

I'd ask you, Phantom Readers, for your recommendations but I know you don't have any.  But maybe you can make your own Mt. Rushmores of things good and bad.  Trying to distill something down to only 4 options can be pretty tough.