The 15 Worst Movies On Amazon Prime Video, Ranked

There are tens of thousands of movies available on Amazon Prime Video, and, when you're talking about such an ample offering of titles, it's statistically inevitable that a few dozens or hundreds of them will be less than stellar. But what are the absolute worst movies you can cue up on Prime Video right now?

To answer that question, we've carefully scoured the streaming service's U.S. catalog to find the most dreadful, obscene, unwatchable garbage currently floating about in it. A vanishing few of these are at least entertaining for their ridiculous trashiness, but, for the most part, these are movies that will most likely either bore you to death or send you into a stunned, horrified stupor, with that likelihood increasing exponentially as you move down the ranking. Don't say we didn't warn you.

We begin our inventory of Prime Video's most dreadful offerings with "Swim," a 2021 sharksploitation flick whose main — or better yet, only — claim to history lies in being the first-ever Tubi original film. As shrug-inspiring as that economic tidbit might sound, it is also the most interesting thing about "Swim," a film that only really commands attention as an utter failure of a calling card, unable to assert anything about its streamer's brand other than "They make joyless bad horror movies."

Emphasis on "joyless" — "Swim" hails, after all, from The Asylum, the infamous direct-to-video production house that sometimes manages, once in a blue moon, to offer up some hokey fun with its ludicrously cheap mockbusters. The problem is not so much that "Swim" is bad; that's to be expected. The problem is that, unlike previous The Asylum hits like the "Sharknado" movies, "Swim" is miserably dull, utterly lacking in campy gusto or any sense of playfulness about its own premise (which isn't a terribly original one to begin with — a family is stuck in a storm-flooded basement with a killer shark, "Crawl"-style, but without any of "Crawl'"s, well, quality). If you're looking for entertaining Z-grade shark cinema, there are about 100 better places to look.

It's often said that bad comedies are the worst kind of terrible movie, in that they can't even offer the pleasure of unintentional humor. Few movies out there demonstrate this conundrum as ably as the annoyingly-titled "The 41-Year-Old Virgin Who Knocked Up Sarah Marshall and Felt Superbad About It," a 2010 movie that puts several Judd Apatow-produced studio comedies into a blender, processes them until they're a murky jumble of signifiers, and then scatters them about randomly on screen.

If you've ever found yourself wondering what a 2000s Seltzer/Friedberg parody would look like with the added benefit of unflattering comparison, look no further. "The 41-Year-Old..." takes several movies that did a great job of scoring laughs upon laughs, and "parodies" them so mirthlessly and incompetently (most of the gags consist of "that one thing from that one movie, but shoddier") that its main driving force comes across as resentment — as though the filmmakers were trying to bring down better comedies as revenge for not being able to match their sharpness. Thankfully, they fail even at that.

Does 2020 seem early enough to you in the timeline of 21st century cinema for a "Finding Nemo" knockoff? No? Well, the makers of "Finding Jesus" didn't let that stop them. This fresh 17-years-later attempt to cash in on the secular popularity of Pixar's 2003 classic does, in fairness, deviate significantly from "Finding Nemo" in terms of storytelling, beginning with the fact that it doesn't have a story per se: Its two main "characters" just swim around having conversations about Biblical values, with no conflict in sight other than the implicit threat of damnation.

But the fact that "Finding Jesus" is so disinterested in imitating "Finding Nemo," barring superficial allusions meant to confuse parents browsing streamer catalogs, arguably makes its visual riffing even more insulting — not least because, where "Finding Nemo" consisted in a gorgeous magic trick for CGI animation, "Finding Jesus" may be one of the ugliest films of all time. It's hard to understand what it's even doing on the Prime Video menu; its only redeeming quality is the occasional comedy gold of watching the fish heroes' mouths move with no connection whatsoever to the increasingly uncanny dialogue. At least "Ratatoing" had the decency of actually coming out in 2007.

Misogyny was the unspoken prima materia of a lot of 2000s American studio comedy, including several movies that were well-written and well-directed enough to disguise their own fundamental reactionarism. But, like a washed-up funny guy killing the mood on dudes' night by yelling slurs a bit too eagerly, 2008's "The Hottie and the Nottie" sank so low as to leave everyone embarrassed.

Just take a gander at the premise: Generic guy Nate (Joel David Moore) travels to California in pursuit of his childhood crush Cristabel (Paris Hilton), who is fiercely protective of her best friend June (Christine Lakin); Cristabel demands Nate find a suitor for June if she's to go on a date with him. The kicker, and the entire source of the movie's would-be humor, is that June is meant to be so ruinously, objectively ugly that men cower in horror at the mere sight of her. Would you believe it if we told you that June gets a makeover, and that it saves her from abjection by making her desirable to men? Watch "The Hottie and the Nottie" for this and other dispiriting non-surprises.

Steven Seagal has made many movies throughout his career, a couple of which were watchable. Such is not the case of the 2016 war actioner "Sniper: Special Ops." Unrelated to the (also bad) "Sniper" film series, this Fred Olen Ray-directed DTV release stars Seagal as a U.S. Army sniper on a mission to retrieve an American congressman being held hostage by the Taliban.

"Stars" may be too strong a word, actually: Seagal certainly appears in some scenes throughout the film, and his character is ostensibly the protagonist. But the whole movie is edited around the fact that its top-billed star is barely there, hardly ever interacting with his fellow castmates and relying on stunt doubles to replace him in even the simplest scenes.

Given the customary level of Seagal's acting chops (and his reputation as the "biggest jerk" in "SNL" hosting history, per Lorne Michaels), that near-absence wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing — but the film around him is similarly lazy. In a way, "Sniper: Special Ops" is an epistemologically fascinating contribution to the canon of post-9/11 war cinema: If other films in that niche have been criticized for using technical proficiency to normalize American jingoism, this film is what it looks like when said proficiency is nowhere to be seen.

"Objectively" speaking, "Birdemic: Shock and Terror" is probably the worst movie on this list. It's certainly the most technically unaccomplished and unrefined, to the point that its mere presence on the Prime Video catalog merits some fascination. But there's a reason this 2010 low-budget "The Birds" rip-off became a cult classic in the years since its release: It is simply too entertaining to entirely dismiss as "bad."

Cobbled together by writer-director-producer James Nguyen on a shoestring budget out of sheer love for the craft, "Birdemic" tells the story of a strange phenomenon in which mutated acid-spewing vultures and eagles start attacking a small Californian town. Catastrophic filmmaking ensues, complete with trashy VFX (somehow more dated-looking than the titular terrors of "The Birds" 47 years earlier) and constant mishaps in editing and audio mixing. It may be the closest the 21st century has gotten to its own "Plan 9 from Outer Space" — and, if we can't promise much in the way of blockbuster thrills, we can certainly guarantee that it will make for an entertaining viewing experience for so-bad-it's-good connoisseurs.

Of all the shoddy, hacky cash grabs in the interminable wave of Disney-skewering horror of the 2020s (of which you'll find another, even worse representative further down this list), it should have been particularly not-that-difficult to mine good horror from "Alice in Wonderland." But, in addition to being utterly amateurish on a scene-to-scene basis, 2023's "Alice in Terrorland" is also utterly bereft of ideas for how to wring scares out of Lewis Carroll's trippy oeuvre.

To an even greater degree than any other "Disneysploitation" effort, it's a movie that just smacks of wasted possibility: There's so much you could do with a straight horror take on Alice's trip down the rabbit hole, but the movie contents itself with just shrugging and throwing around first-draft concepts like "The Rabbit is a masked dude, apparently," or "The Walrus is a creepy child killer, I guess," or "This is not your grandma's Mad Hatter." As for actual scares? Fewer than zero — in that even "neutral" scenes get bogged down in the unintentional hilarity of the over-the-top nu metal video aesthetics.

This is not the typically excruciating 2013 Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer parody of "The Hunger Games," mind you. This is the other one — there is another one. And it's somehow even worse. "The Hungover Games" pushes the usual bad-spoof formula that has come to dominate IMDb's worst movies list — either Referencing Things or Referencing Things But With Naughty Stuff Thrown In, rinse, repeat — to the point of mind-numbing absurdity.

The movie's central idea alone — half-assedly crossing the plot of "The Hunger Games" with a similarly limp parody of "The Hangover" — is so senseless as to genuinely raise the possibility that the whole thing was reverse-engineered from the title pun. Who was asking for a parody of "The Hangover" in 2014? Then again, given what the writers do with then-recent titles like "Ted" and "Django Unchained," perhaps urgency was irrelevant to the inevitable failure of the whole enterprise. The whole ethos is just getting viewers to go "Hey, it's that thing from that movie!" over and over; the filmmakers could just as well have gone all the way back to Abbott and Costello and it wouldn't have seemed strange.

Twelve years on from the horrid spectacle of its waltz into being, the best way to describe "Movie 43" would be as a vulgar display of power. Sure, the 2013 multi-director anthology comedy certainly proved that its producers could, if so inclined, tap any number of busy A-listers for the most puerile and demeaning skits imaginable. Good for them. What "Movie 43" didn't prove is that its makers could harness the star power at hand to make said skits actually funny.

To their credit, Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, Halle Berry, Emma Stone, Naomi Watts, Anna Faris, Kieran Culkin, Uma Thurman, Bobby Cannavale, Patrick Warburton, Stephen Merchant, Kristen Bell, Liev Schreiber (...) largely seem to be having fun letting loose and leaning into the crudeness of the gags, which involve everything from coprophilia to incest to ethnic plastic surgery to a man with testicles hanging from his neck (?). But a movie with that much wild stuff going on shouldn't be so utterly dull (and surprisingly non-scandalous) to watch. It constantly feels as though we're supposed to be impressed that the film is having that actor do or say that thing — but, extending that concept to its logical conclusion, it means the joke's on us for watching.

At this point on the list, assume that the difference between placements is infinitesimal. There isn't much of a functional criterion that can be used to separate out different degrees of bottomless badness. 2012's "Sir Billi," for instance, is pretty much a platonically awful movie — boring, grating, horribly-crafted in every respect, aesthetically nightmarish, and impossible to watch without questioning the life choices that led one to this moment. But it's not as actively infuriating as other movies further down this ranking, so it's going at #6. Yay?

If you've heard of — or, God help you, actually seen — "Foodfight," widely considered one of the worst movies ever, you'll have an idea of the kind of critical cinematic failure at hand. "Sir Billi" is a similarly hideous-looking what-were-they-thinking-fest of uncanny CGI designs and disturbingly salacious gags shoved awkwardly into a nominal family comedy context, telling the story of a veterinarian in the Scottish Highlands who embarks on a James Bond-inspired adventure to save a beaver from a government banishment of beavers to Norway (we're not making any of this up). Somehow, the film is also notable as the very last role of Sean Connery's career. Also, Alan Cumming voices a queer-coded goat. Why is this on Prime Video?

In the same way that all modern philosophy is indirectly citing Hegel and all pop divas are drawing from Grace Jones, when people talk about how awful video game film adaptations tend to be, they're all, consciously or not, referring back to the collective trauma that befell gamers the world over upon the release of Uwe Boll's "Alone in the Dark."

In fairness, the 2005 film deviates so completely from the eponymous survival horror game series that it barely counts as an "adaptation" at all, save for a handful of character names. But that's part of why it's so maddening. In fact, film's paranormal investigation plot is so messy and incoherent that it feels less like Bowe mishandling a beloved property and more like him mishandling cinema itself, seemingly not quite aware of what story he's supposed to be telling. But of course, the world's worst movie director doesn't let that — or his utter, complete, irredeemable absence of any filmmaking talent or technical competence — stop him from carrying the movie through to the finish line. The end result is a film that technically exists, but only barely.

The killer wears a Mickey Mouse mask. That's it — that's the whole movie, and the entire extent of its claim to "subversion" of the Disney iconography. A mask, and a cheap-looking one at that. "The Mouse Trap" would almost be a little interesting as a case study in the use of timing as a springboard towards cultural notoriety; the only reason anyone is aware of it is the quickness with which it took advantage of "Steamboat Willie" entering the public domain.

But the movie's sheer, depressing, enervating laziness makes even metatextual appreciation impossible. It's the blandest, most sophomoric, most hilariously inept possible version of a standard-issue slasher: A deranged man, a group of friends trapped in an arcade, et cetera, et cetera. It all just prompts a feeling of "Why bother?" If you're going for cheap attention-calling defilement of the Disney brand, why not really go for it, really try to make something scary and messed-up and revolting? This is just a hack job about a hack job. You've seen it before, just not with a Mickey Mouse mask.

The whole debacle of Sia's less-than-gallant response to critiques of "Music" has passed into the pop culture hall of infamy at this point, and there's little reason to re-litigate it four years later. You don't need to know about any press cycle shenanigans, after all, to understand just by looking at the torch singer's 2021 directorial debut that it is an awful movie. In fact, with or without foreknowledge, you might be hard-pressed to even manage to sit through it.

Maddie Ziegler stars as Music, the autistic equivalent of a minstrel show character, who engages in every grossly stereotypical marker of neurodivergence as her neurotypical sister Zu (Kate Hudson) learns from her to be a better person. All of this is told through the world's most bombastic and twee musical numbers — each very much the cinematic equivalent of a kitschy Sia empowerment anthem playing cacophonously over a cursed Instagram reel. "Offensive" and "revolting" don't begin to cover it; "Music" is an outright endurance test.

The Paul brothers made a movie, and wouldn't you believe it, it's bad. 2019's "Airplane Mode" was co-written by Logan and Jake Paul alongside directors David Dinetz and Dylan Trussell, and stars Logan (Jake was apparently busy doing whatever it is that he does) as — what else — a fictionalized version of himself.

Paul, who became notable for parlaying a successful run as a six-second Vine star into lengthy YouTube content he never had any ideas for how to fill, here ports over the same insufferable, racy-yet-infantilized humor of that content to feature length, thereby spreading it even thinner. The slapped-together story about a disastrous flight from Los Angeles to Sydney, in which Logan must overcome his fear of flying to save an influencer-filled airplane from crashing, features approximately zero jokes that will even scan as jokes — let alone risk being funny — to anyone whose brain isn't rotted by hundreds of hours of consumption of Paul's videos and those of other YouTube upstarts circa 2016. It's Seltzer/Friedberg for subcelebrities.

There are lots of things a director can specialize in, and Daniel Farrands specializes in desecrating graves. The same tactful and respectable auteur who — also in 2019 — turned real-life tragedy into the nauseatingly exploitative "The Haunting of Sharon Tate" (one of Metacritic's lowest-rated horror movies) also applied the same treatment to the 1994 murder of Nicole Brown Simpson in, well, "The Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson."

The movie's main crime is not even that it abides by the controversial theory that serial killer Glen Edward Rogers was Simpson's true murderer. Regardless of what Farrands and writer Michael Arter's personal thoughts about the O. J. Simpson trial may be, the problem, here, is that they turn Nicole's actual, real suffering into schlocky home invasion thriller fodder, complete with sub-Lifetime production and aesthetic choices. The fact that Mena Suvari turns in a pretty decent performance as Simpson only makes the unrepentant horror show of her dehumanization all the harder to stomach. Bad movies are one thing, but this is a truly vile piece of work.