Cool as Ice: In 1991 Universal thought they'd cash in on the Vanilla Ice phenomenon. Since it's a big studio movie and has the cinematographer who went on to do Schindler's List and most of Spielberg's movies after that the production values are professional quality. It's just everything else that's terrible. The thin excuse for a story is that Johnny (Vanilla Ice) and his three black friends end up in a small town when one guy's bike breaks down so they go to the shop of an elderly couple that looks like a reject from PeeWee's Playhouse. Johnny meets a plain, smart girl whose parents are in witness protection and yet are dumb enough to go on local TV, where a couple of gangsters or whatever see them and hassle them. They kidnap the girl's brother, but Johnny uses his powers of deduction to find them and stop them, so the girl decides to screw college and follow Johnny around. The most unintentionally hilarious part is when Johnny and his friends roll into town and everyone stares at them with slack jaws. I guess they never saw black people before. And then later Johnny and his friends go to the local hangout to school a band that is playing some undefineable type of music that no real band would ever play. It's just to make Vanilla look cool. Really the movie lays it on so thick that they might as well have text at the bottom of screen saying, "Look how cool this guy is!"
Reefer Madness: There are educational films and then there are propaganda films. This definitely falls into the latter category. It starts with a whole bunch of text on the screen to read and follows it with a 5-minute lecture by a stern-faced guy. Then the story itself is so over-the-top it's ridiculous. This kid starts smoking pot and blacks out and gets framed for murder. Only after he's convicted does the girlfriend of the dealer tell the cops what happened. Then she jumps out a window to her death. Because death is preferable to a couple of years of probation. To close the movie they bring back that wonderful stern-faced guy to lecture us again. The message is clear: smoke a joint and you'll go to jail or die! Um, yeah, not really.
To Catch a Yeti: This could have been in the X entry but it's also a movie intended for kids so it can go in here too. This isn't quite as bad as Mac & Me but it's not a lot better. Yetis or Bigfoot have been sought for decades but you know why no one's found one? Because they're looking for huge monsters instead of tiny, googly eyed puppets with huge feet they can use as skis. And they didn't look in
The Fairy King Ar: From South African schlock filmmaker Paul H Williams goes this incomprehensible story of fairies that are trapped in a mine. A family led by Corbin Bersen moves into a house in
The Little Unicorn: Also from Paul H Williams comes another kid's movie set in
Merlin: The Return: Another wonderful Paul H Williams epic. [Eye Roll.] So somehow Merlin, Mordred, Mordred's mom, Mordred's minions, Guinevere, and Lancelot have been in stuck in some other dimension for hundreds of years. Meanwhile Arthur and his dumbass knights have been asleep somewhere else, I guess. But thanks to a scientist played by Tia Carrere and a psychic medium in
The Sorcerer's Apprentice: Paul H Williams stepped back from directing to produce this but it's pretty much the same sort of movie as the two previous ones. There's the same boy from those other two movies and Merlin the Return who like Fairy King of Ar moves to
It is funny though that Merlin and the kid have the same relationship as Luke and Rey in The Last Jedi: I won't teach you! OK, I'll teach you a little. You're a natural so...I won't teach you anymore! Go away! OK, I've accepted things and reveal myself in all my glory. And now I disappear.
A Talking Cat!?!: If James Ngyuen of Birdemic infamy made a Paul H Williams movie, this is what it would look like. Bad actors, cheap sets (one of which was the setting of a porno movie according to IMDB), music that sounds like a keyboard demo, production values like an early 90s camcorder, and gaffes a-plenty mar this dumb "family" movie. Though if you show this to your family they probably won't speak to you anymore. A muffled, boozy Eric Roberts (according to IMDB he literally filmed his lines in his living room in 15 minutes) is the voice of Duffy the cat who's a "human whisperer." For...reasons he helps two families get together by...telling an old guy who looks like age progressed Patton Oswalt to take a walk in the woods to a woman's house. And telling the daughter of the woman who lives in the woods to check her laptop. For...reasons the cat can only talk to humans one time each--and when he does his "mouth" looks faker than the puppets on Robot Chicken.
There's a lot more talk about cheese puffs and burning waffles (after which you have to buy a new waffle iron apparently) and coding a program to catalog clothes than talking cats, just like in Birdemic there's more talk about stock options and solar panels than shock or terror. So it's really, really bad. Probably why the director used a pseudonym. If you watch not all that carefully you can see visible boom mikes, cat food/laser pointers used to get the cat into position, and at one point a woman reaches into a "hot" oven to take out a tray with her bare hands without suffering any burns! You barely need any riffing on it, but it does make it even funnier.
Rollergator: This mid-90s "movie" was shot on an old camcorder and stars a purple rubber alligator puppet as the "Rollergator" who is rescued by a bimbo and is pursued by an evil carnival owner played by Martin Sheen's brother Joe Estevez, a female ninja, and a "karate" instructor whose headband clearly says tae qwon do. At the same time they hope to reunite the annoying, wisecracking gator with the "Swamp Farmer," because there are tons of swamps in southern California, right? The whole thing looks worse than a high school AV club could have made. The saving grace is the soundtrack is so loud that you can barely hear the dialogue. For the soundtrack the director used Preston Reed's album "Metal" pretty much in its entirety; he probably got it for like $5 on clearance or something. On Facebook one time I pointed out the similarity between this and The Mandalorian with "Baby Yoda" as it's about someone protecting a talking baby amphibian from harm. Clearly Jon Favreau ripped the idea off from this. (Not.)
Rescue Me: In 1991, troubled studio Cannon Films thought it'd be a good idea to cash in on that whole brat pack thing of the mid-80s. This is probably why they went out of business. Anyway, Stephen Dorff plays a high school senior with an obsession over the head cheerleader. He finds out about her meeting with her boyfriend at a lake or something and so decides to stalk her there, but there's some bad guys there making a deal for stamps (not the postage kind, the kind you put on cigarettes and stuff, I guess) and the bad guys kidnap her. So her stalker springs into action! He blackmails the guy selling the stamps to help him find the other two guys, which involves driving from "Nebraska" to LA. But really it's all California, explaining why Nebraska has so many mountains. In the end the girl outwits her kidnappers, who then kidnap the next-door neighbor to take her place, so at least our "hero" rescues someone. It's definitely not the worst movie on this list, but it's pretty dumb. And we're supposed to root for the stalker? It really needed to develop a counter-love interest more, like having her go with the stalker and the other guy. This movie was riffed by the B-team of Mary Jo Pehl and Bridget Nelson, who both wrote and appeared on MST3K back in the day. A Fun Fact is that while the movie was shot in 1991 (and really if IMDB had said 1987 or 1988 I wouldn't have been able to tell the difference) it wasn't released until early 1993 in the US and late 1992 in Germany, probably due to Cannon Films's difficulties. Another Fun Fact is the cheerleader was played by Ami Dolenz, daughter of one of the original Monkees and one of the kidnappers was played by Peter DeLuise, the son of Dom DeLuise, proving that talent is not genetic.
Fun in Balloon Land: This is a bizarre "movie" that's one part fairy tale madness and one part a mid-60s Philadelphia Thanksgiving Day parade. It starts with a little boy dreaming he's visiting various balloon sets like Old McDonald's Farm and the underwater kingdom of Atlantis where he wears tiny gold shorts that are super creepy. Then it cuts to a parade where a drunk-sounding woman describes the floats and balloons as weirdly as possible. For some reason though when marching bands come on the screen there's no narration at all. It ends with a bizarre "quiz" where the rules keep changing. I'm not sure who made this or why but it is definitely weird.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: The director of Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny made this equally awful sequel to the Wizard of Oz. There are really cheap sets, including a bizarre "cow" that can only move its head. On a farm run by a witch, a little boy named Tip (the director's son in his only acting role--for obvious reasons) uses magic powder to bring a pumpkin-headed man to life. The witch is going to turn him into a statue so he and Jack the Pumpkinhead run away to the Emerald City (or Green Cardboard City) but along the way they meet an army of spoiled girls in drum major uniforms who take the city from the Scarecrow. The Scarecrow and Tip flee to the Tin Man's city for his help, which doesn't really help and they have to put together a really weird "bird" to fly away. They meet Glenda the Good Witch who takes them back to the witch's place and gets her to confess that Tip is really the princess Ozma but the witch made her into a little boy and wiped his memory. That's not weird at all, right? I should probably use that for a gender swap story. lol
Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders: What if you took a horror anthology like Creepshow and used the framing device of The Princess Bride? You'd have this mish-mash of a movie. The framing device is that a grandpa (Ernest Borgnine) tells stories to his grandkid when the power goes out. The grandpa used to write horror stories for TV or movies or whatever, so he tells the kid two "thrilling" stories that have their own framing device in the eponymous Merlin who along with his chubby wife have decided to open a magic shop in 1990s California. The first story is of a childless couple who visit the shop. The wife really wants a kid while the husband is a jerk who has somehow made a living reviewing businesses. The wife is charmed by Merlin but the husband is skeptical, so Merlin gives him a book of spells. The husband tries the spells out and discovers they really work. But as he uses the magic, he gets older and older. So he uses a spell to restore his youth--and turns himself into a baby. So his wife finally got a baby. Hooray?
The other story involves an evil toy monkey. Every time it crashes its cymbals, someone dies. The monkey is stolen from Merlin's shop and then sold to a woman who gives it to her nephew, because what would a kid want more than some mangy old toy? Then the evil monkey starts killing things starting with a plant and moving up to the family dog. Then it starts trying to kill the boy's father. He tries to throw it out and then bury it, but it keeps coming back. In the end Merlin takes the toy back. The funny thing is that while the rest of the movie takes place in the 1990s, most of this story is from about a decade earlier. You can tell by the hair, clothes, and that the kid wears a Return of the Jedi shirt and gets 80s Star Wars toys for his birthday. They splice in some Merlin parts shot in the present day of the movie to tie it together. Seamless!
This isn't extremely scary and yet the second story especially is probably too scary for little kids. Yet it's not really scary enough for adults; it's too cutesy and goofy for grown ups. So it's not really clear who they thought the audience for this was: tweens maybe? In the intermission sketches of this MST3K episode, Crow and Tom write reviews of each other; Tom uses a spellbook and accidentally turns Mike into a baby; and Mike and the bots create some other creepy children's books by Ernest Borgnine.
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