One Awful Subgenre Completely Dominates IMDb's Worst Movies List

The list of the IMDb's 250 top-rated films is an interesting peek into the minds of IMDb users. The people who log onto IMDb to give ratings seem to be, collectively, very fond of movies about criminals, prisoners, or war. There is also a heavy violent-fantasy contingent. Almost all the films on the list are about men, masculinity, and male concerns. The ten highest-rated films on the top-250 list include titles like "The Shawshank Redemption," "The Godfather," "The Lord of the Rings," "Pulp Fiction," and "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly." 

Of course, the 100 worst-rated films on IMDb is more of a mixed bag. Great films tend to be the movies that many audience members and critics agree are great. Bad films tend to be individually uncovered discoveries, oddball outliers that no one wants to talk about. Classics bring communities together. Bad films feel deeply personal. 

Films can be bad for many, many reasons. Some are bad because they are sloppy, unprofessionally made, and didn't have the budget or the talent to communicate their stories or themes effectively, like "Manos: The Hands of Fate" or "Birdemic: Shock and Terror." These types of bad movies can be immensely entertaining, however, as one might become fascinated by the mindset of the filmmakers. Other movie are bad because they are inspired by a terrible core idea; they may be competently acted and filmed, but they exist in service of an unsavory notion or stupid concept, like "Saving Christmas" or "Battlefield Earth." 

And then there are the commercially cynical movies. The studio films that are made for mercenary, financial reasons. The ones that never bothered to put thought, energy, wit, or humor into their own making. "Son of the Mask," "Alone in the Dark," "Foodfight!" ... these films are just insulting. 

Repeatedly insulting to audiences are the Friedberg/Seltzer spoof movies of the late 2000s. The comedy duo's movies occupy multiple spots on the bottom-100. No one — no one — likes these movies. 

To remind readers, the late-2000s spoof movies of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer were plentiful and crass. They tended to serve as slapstick parodies of particular genres, just with dumb fart jokes inserted. Their 2006 film "Date Movie" mocked then-recent romcoms like "Hitch," "The Wedding Planner," "Meet the Parents," and "The 40-Year-Old Virgin." Their 2008 film "Meet the Spartans" was a pointed sendup of Zack Snyder's overwrought war epic "300" (to be fair, "300" warranted parody), and their 2010 film "Vampires Suck" took specific aim at the "Twilight" movies. 

Other spoofs of theirs were hitting in all directions at once, spoofing everything that happened to be in the pop consciousness at the time. 2007's "Epic Movie" spoofed everything from "Snakes on a Plane" to "Rocky III," and 2008's "Disaster Movie" included parodies of stuff like "Kung Fu Panda" and "Sex and the City" among its spoofs of actual disaster movies like "Twister" and "Armageddon." But the Friedberg/Seltzer movies aren't making any kind of comment on the state of pop culture, and don't seem to have any positive or negative feelings about what they are parodying. They are merely refracting popular cinematic images through a fart-joke lens. In a weird way, what they are doing is unintentionally genius. They are boiling cinema down to its core components: mere images on a screen. Disconnected moments lingering in the mass consciousness. There is no feeling in the cinematic image. It is mechanical. We may as well put a fart joke in there. 

Critics and audiences hate these movies with a passion. "Disaster Movie" is at the very bottom of the IMDb's rating list, having dropped there only days after it was released. It has a score of 1.9 out of 10. "Disaster" also has a 1% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 72 reviews. Only critic Jim Schembri, writing for the Australian newspaper The Age, admitted that "Disaster Movie" made him giggle. 

Also scraping the bottom of the barrel was "Epic Movie," which came in as the 10th lowest-rated film on the list with a score of 2.4 out of 10. "Epic Movie," frustratingly, doesn't lampoon actual epics, otherwise we'd be looking at a slapstick satire of films like "Ben Hur" or "Lawrence of Arabia." Instead, "Epic Movie" is a mishmash of sendups, spoofing just about everything. When Friedberg and Seltzer were co-writing films like "Spy Hard" and "Scary Movie," they at least had a target (James Bond movies and slasher films, respectively). With "Epic Movie," their target was everything from the last few years. One might wish Friedberg and Selzter had more of a punk sensibility; at least they could have been screaming, angrily, at a world where everything sucks. 

Their "Date Movie" is ranked at #24 on the bottom-100, with a score of 2.8. As these things go, "Date Movie" is the best of the lot, although that's not saying much. It's worth noting that "Superhero Movie," "Spanish Movie," and "Not Another Teen Movie" are merely following the same trend as Friedberg/Seltzer, and were not written by the notorious duo. As such, the very lowly rated "Scary Movie V," "Fifty Shades of Black," and "The Hungover Games" are not their responsibility. Those films are ranked at #62, #78, and #94, respectively. After the year 2000, spoof movies have been badly received in general. A genre that once included classics like "Airplane!," "Blazing Saddles," and "Top Secret!" is now relegated to the dregs of cinema.

"The Starving Games" and "Vampires Suck" are the doing of Friedberg and Seltzer, however, and they come in at #54 and #55, respectively, both barely nosing out "The Emoji Movie." Few filmmakers are as widely hated as this pair, and the trend they dominated infected theaters for years. They haven't made a movie since 2015's "Superfast!," a spoof of the "Fast & Furious" franchise. It seems that, for spoofs, the bloom is off the rose.