movies

Here are the lowest-rated movies on Rotten Tomatoes that are so bad they're good.

Not all movies can be good.

And while great films are, well, great, sometimes there is equal entertainment value in something you can guffaw over for all the wrong reasons. Terrible script? Great. Cringe dialogue? The cornier the better. Bad effects? Kind of adorable if I'm honest.

So, we've turned to Rotten Tomatoes – the Internet's favourite barometer in film – to see what they'd recommend in the highly specific 'really bad but entertainingly' genre.

If you're interested in some of the platform's zero per cent rated films: there's Left Behind, a film about a locus plague starring Nicolas Cage and Chad Michael Murray, a Jon Voight vehicle about super babies and THREE John Travolta films (Staying Alive, Look Who's Talking Now and Gotti, if you'd like to skip them during your next Travoltathon).

A rotten rating doesn't always automatically mean avoid, however. Here are films that got low critical scores but are still worth a watch.

Material Girls - four per cent.

Image: MGM.

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FOUR PER CENT.

That's abysmal. But Material Girls is hilarious, in an utterly 2000s, 'yeah sure, let's cast sisters' kind of way.

The Duffs, Hilary AND Haylie, star as two out-of-touch heiress sisters who lose all of their money and are forced to grapple with everyday tasks such as taking public transportation and wearing last year's clothes while working to save their father's company.

The horror.

It's so unfunny and lame that it's actually hilarious and incredibly cool.

Showgirls - 23 per cent.

Image: MGM.

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Showgirls is universally regarded as one of the worst films ever made. And is also a cult classic, so it is basically the Queen of So Bad They're Good Movies. 

The film is about a drifter named Nomi (Elizabeth Berkley), who moves to Vegas to make it as a showgirl. The film was instantly controversial, because of its bad dialogue and poor performances... but mostly because of its nudity and how sexually explicit it was. 

It was a box office bomb, but became an absolute runaway success when released on video... which tells you that not a lot of people wanted to be seen watching it publicly, but in private? Hell yeah.

The best part of Showgirls is that it clearly set out to be deliberately bad, and ironically, it is really, really good at that. It's high camp.

LOL - 14 per cent.

Image: Lionsgate.

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You'll want to seek out the American version for a bad, but fun, time. The French film this is based on is just good good, and its Wikipedia entry sums up the American remake as "a critical and commercial failure".

But don't let that stop you! Miley Cyrus plays a school-aged girl who got cheated on over the summer, only to realise she likes her best guy friend anyway. He is a misunderstood musician, of course, who plays in a band called No Shampoo. No word of a lie. 

Anywho, he loves music, his parents don't support him, they all go on a school trip to Paris and various misunderstandings happen because teenagers are terrible at miscommunication.

It's basically every terrible teen drama, but with Demi Moore as Miley Cyrus' mum and the River Seine.

Batman & Robin -  11 per cent.

Image: Getty.

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It's worth turning on 1997's Batman & Robin for two reasons: George Clooney making a huge and ridiculous career miss-step, and to ponder how the heck this thing cost US$125 million in the late '90s. 

It's gaudy, clunky and honestly, a rollicking good time... if you love mess and Arnold Schwarzenegger speaking in almost exclusively cold puns.

Howard the Duck - 13 per cent.

I truly think an image of Howard the Duck is the best way to get you on board here:

.....Yeeeah. Image: Universal Pictures.

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Howard, a duck, is a sarcastic bird that has to save the world from a bad guy named Dark Overlord. It's as batsh*t crazy, and terrible, as it seems, but actually has an important place in movie history: it's technically a Marvel film, George Lucas was an executive producer and it actually originated the digital erasure technology that was later used for special effects in things like The Maxtrix.

So even Keanu should thank this weird creepy anthropomorphic duck.

What's your favourite 'bad but good' film? Let us know in a comment.

Feature image: MGM.

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