Badmovies.org Forum

Here's a topic that I doubt we've ever covered before (Man, I'm on a roll with posting tons of new topics lately!), bad documentaries.  Now a bad one, I'm thinking they would have bad editing, the person who made the film has no idea what they are talking about, lots of the facts they use are incorrect or can be proven wrong with credible sources, it's really a propaganda film in disguise, information is manipulated or edited to the creator's own opinion, or similiar.  I don't watch documentaries that much, so I can't say for certian what makes a bad one, but I figure things like would be the problem.

Now, what are some of the worst or most poorly made documentaries you've seen?  I've heard stuff like The Other Side of AIDS, What the #$*! Do We Know!?, or America: Freedom to Fascism are among some of the worst.

The Legend of Bigfoot (1976)

One of the worst documentaries I've ever seen. It's so bad its not even funny.

you really want me to answer that? I think The Jonas Brothers #-D Concert is the lowest documentary on IMDb

Yup.  And Mill Creek put it in more than one of its 50 Movie Packs.  Oh, the pain!

ZEITGEIST: THE MOVIE.  Here was my original short review: "Watch this documentary and learn: 1. that the New Testament is an astrological parable and Christianity is identical to Egyptian paganism; 2. the United States government blew up the World Trade Center to get the Patriot Act passed, and 3. the Federal Reserve Bank has manipulated America into entering every war since 1915 on its way to creating a One World Government where we'll all be implanted with microchips. But hey, the news isn't ALL bad--at least there's no law that says you have to pay income tax! Note to future cranks with video editing suites: your nutso pronouncements will have more 'zing' if you limit yourself to one goofball conspiracy theory at a time."

I think this would pretty much encompass anything made by Michael Moore. I'd also add in the Al Gore's A Convenient Truth. And, just to show I'm not only including political propaganda, I'll add in the "documentaries" about UFO rods that I addressed in another thread (they're really just poorly filmed insects that the "filmmakers" claim are minuscule ufos)--bad, bad, bad "fact checking."

Michael Moore would be among my least favorite as far as documentary filmmakers go. I don't have a problem with him being a liberal. Have at it. But he is such a freaking pipsqueak about it. What little of his documentary work I've watched, he's like the fat kid in school who got bullied and now makes documentaries out of revenge. The man has serious issues. As a kid who was bullied a bit myself, I can identify one several miles away. Get over it.

That having been said, pretty much ANY documentary that is so biased as to have no objective merit get on my nerves, and that goes for you righties too.

WEIRD WORLD OF LSD (1967)

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJ8hN2j9PNE

 :bouncegiggle: :bouncegiggle: :bouncegiggle:

When I saw the topic title this was the first movie I thought of.

brilliant. the bird!!!!

I haven't seen a bad documentary before. I've seen a parody of bad documentaries on the show Monk though. It was on an episode about the murder of the oldest man in the world.

Two words: Jesus Camp.  :thumbdown:

Crazy Legs Conti: Zen and the Art of Competitive Eating


  I haven't seen it but it sounds really bad.

Ringers - the documentary on the Lord of the Rings phenomena is awful.  They couldn't get the rights to ANYTHING so it was funny how they talked about all this stuff and never showed it - dumb and boring.  And I loved Trekkies 1 and 2.

rofl! sounds like a real winner. I once bought a Disco documentary on DVD and apparently they couldn't get the rights to 90% of the most important disco songs, including songs by Donna Summer. Super-fail.

rev- I agree with most of your assesment but the federal reserve stuff is mostly accurate, factually. Not their intentions of microchip bearing one world government but the how and why of when it was set up on jeckyll Island .


some choices, not really "bad" actually pretty good but less consequential

1. Waiting for Nesara (2000's) about A bunch of people meet in a rented room in a KFC to discuss the obvious fact that Jesus Christ is going to return on a spaceship to restore consitutional democracy to the US. They actually incorporate the KFC logo with the colonel into their iconography if I remember correctly. There appear to be elements of far right federal reserve as illuminati type conspiracy theory, mormonism and scientology, many were ex mormons. It's not just these people though, at the end they show an Iraq war proest somewhere with a "nesara " sign. yikes. The director made this and also "Elevator Movie" , a very divisive balck and white low budget student type  feature that earned 5 stars from me and 1 from many.

2. Chi guy: weapons of MAss decibels - This guy is a fixture at a bar called the SMiling Moose in Pittsburgh. He claims that by using his amazing Chi, the chinese concept of energy, he can yell louder than anyone in the world or something. He's loud but not really all that loud. He's pretty annoying too. He kind of grows on you though. The approach is appropriately low key and I had never really seen Pittsburgh before so that was interesting.

3. Pornstar pets - AS you would probably guess this doc humanizes adult film stars somewhat. Ron Jeremy has a tortoise and a hare. Taylor wayne makes a plate of spicy shrimp for her dog. Some of them have like alot of pets. Though dealing with porn stars it's actually pretty mundane but 52 minutes isn't too long.

I agree it's by far the least crazy part of the documentary, but the guy takes a reasonable theory and pushes it so far outside the realm of possibility that it's worthless to listen to him.  What stinks about the documentary is that maybe 10% of it is accurate but people shouldn't have to go fact checking every single outlandish claim. 

I hope to see "Waiting for Nesara" someday.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7KodQEoWYI

if you look on the right on the page you can see there is a bunch of Nesara stuff.

Another poster mentioned "Weird World Of LSD" [1967]  earlier in this thread and that link is dead

But this one isn't in case anyone needs it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUX9bXzSBoM (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUX9bXzSBoM)

this must have been the thread that gave me the idea to write that {too lazy to find link} article

Ever wonder what LARPing is?  Monster Camp will help you with that. I think it was filmed in/near Portland Oregon. I used to work with a guy in this.

Monster Camp - The Original Official Trailer: http://youtu.be/tobGvjez9x0 (http://youtu.be/tobGvjez9x0)

Waiting for Superman wasn't the worst but it was much too one-sided in its argument.

OVERLORDS OF THE UFO (1976)
Now-I believe the fact that someting strange has been going on in our skies for centuries...but this is INSANE!  :buggedout:
And hilarious!  :bouncegiggle:

http://youtu.be/dUhoeZi9nek (http://youtu.be/dUhoeZi9nek)

I'd say any and all of the Sunn Classic "documentaries" would qualify. 

I saw IN SEARCH OF NOAHS ARK (1976) at the movie theater!  :buggedout:
I paid real money! all of 50 cents!

http://youtu.be/saHma7CAbSw (http://youtu.be/saHma7CAbSw)

I actually liked Sicko [2007], the documentary film of Moore...
I mean, I know the US is a all-for-yourself swim-or-sink country, but still seeing the hospital throwing people outside in the middle of a patch-up for lack of money was quite impressive. Of course, as European I am biased, I guess it looks normal to US citizens.

About the topic, do parodies count? The UK's "Look around you"[1] series is fairly bad, in a similar vein "the Japanese Tradition"[2] series is equally preposterous... but funny in "bad movie" sense.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4CRCJUmWsM (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4CRCJUmWsM)
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKChClRgI7c (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKChClRgI7c)

Yeah-America is a sink or swim counrty-but we are also a very prosperous country-and poor people get sick too.
I have over 10,000 dollasr hospital bill-I make $11 an hour. They garnish my wage-I take home $280 for a 40 hour week.
It would have been cheaper to die.
Micheal Moore s a very irritating man-but he does know his s**t-I saw BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE-I didnt realize Charleton Heston was such a dick. He had a painting of himself as Moses hanging on his wall!
What a self important ass.

anything with alex jones.

Charleton Heston was given that painting as a gift as he was the original actor for the "Moses" movie back in the days of Sword&Sandal movies in the sixties and seventies.

It's been provided in pretty accurate detail that Moore fudged most of his "facts" in "Bowling" and straight up made up a good chunk of them. Some of the stuff to make Heston look "awful" involved piecing together clips from two different presentations to make them seem like one speech. The "interview" he wrangled with Heston was obtained when Heston was fighting Alzheimer's.

mooreexposed dot com

It's an older site, but it neatly breaks down most of Moores films. I would even go so far as to say that Moore shouldn't be considered a "documentary" film director on account of how little fact is actually documented in his films.

I know he played Moses-it doesnt give away from the fact that he is a MORON.
f**k Micheal Moore-I could give a flying fig about his fat ass! I care that there are guns floating around this country in the hands of IDIOTS.
The NRA blocked a bill for backroundchecks and gun show sales-just selling to anybody-any body-that means terrosists and psychos.
I believe in the Right to Bear Arms-I own a 12 gauge shotgun. Do YOU feel safer knowing that?
Yeah-I seen that site-aint my first day here...Micheal Moore is very far left-but that site is very far right. I take the middle ground....and the fact is-there are WAAAY to many guns in the hands of idiots-I hope you have a gun. I really do-Because you will need it. Because people like you are asking for it. You WANT it to happen so you can use your f**kING GUN.
I saw my brother in law murder somebody with a gun he bought at a flea market-my brother killed himself with a gun from the same place.
You love guns-I love people.
Wayne La Pierre-NOT a gun freak-he wouldnt know how to shoot a gun if it was up his ass-is a paid proffesional loud mouth. His solution to the murder in schools? Security guards with GUNS!!!!
What?  :buggedout:
That aint the America I wanna live in.

Backround checks wouldnt solve the problem,but it wouldnt hurt. What are the NRA afraid of?
They are afraid of losing POWER. They dont wanna be WRONG. Hunters and law abiding citizens would not have to worry. WTF is the problem?

I must say, when I agree with you, when I admire your writing, it is 100% and because you are the man.   :thumbup:

I must say that was quite a bit more vitriol than I would have expected for something like that.

I won't fault you for the "idiots" comment. The U.S. is chock full of idiots in all walks of life. To try to blanket-statement or make a sweeping handwave that somehow the majority of firearm owners in the U.S. are "idiots" is, well, naive.


My primary point in the first place to highlight that I wouldn't consider Moore a "documentary" film director.
Maybe "fauxumentary" perhaps?

I don't post often on these forums as I've been away for a while, but something tells me this isn't the thread to get into a random gun debate in any regards.

Anything made by a two-bit hack with a YouTube account.

Yeh, after yer few postings 4 and a half years ago, you suddenly pop up... reactionary dope. 
You neither understand and maybe didn't even read what RCMerchant wrote.  He is a gun owner.  He is also an individual AMERICAN.  He has also been a member and contributor to this forum a long time. 

I was forward deployed out of Japan for the last three and a half years.

+1 on the two-bit hacks with YouTube accounts.  The number of so-called 'documentaries' that are really rambling conspiracy mishmashs is constantly growing. 

I love good documentaries - the Australian TV channel ABC has a series called Four Corners that has been producing high quality, incisive and fascinating documentaries on local and international issues for decades.  But the conspiracy weirdos on YouTube who drone on and on about reptilians and the world banking system while close ups of the US dollar bill pan across the screen are just cringeworthy.

The thing that Bowling for Columbine didn't explain was why when he went up to Canada and they also had guns was there not the same level of violence there?

Agree with others that some of the youtube stuff is really low grade. There is a kind of nexus of insane conspiracy stuff that starts somewhere around the part of Genesis when giants walked the earth and ends up with lizard people and stuff.

The plethora of conspiracy documentaries comes to mind (illuminati, fake moon landings, and UFOs, for example) are some of the worst.

Michael Moore's bulls**t is right up there, too (and I'm pretty left of center). Lying and misleading is unforgivable. Not necessary to make a point.

And, most especially, the Kubrick documentaries that focus on cover-ups (Room something or other, for example). There is so much depth to Kubrick's work that those kind of BS documentaries are unnecessary.

My two copper pieces.

Yeah ROOM 213 is...goofy. You can read religious overtones in a comic book if you look for it. I like the SHINING because its fun and scary.Period. I bought a book about Tod Browning-the author does all this psycho babble about the author-and than says HORROR OF DRACULA (known just as DRACULA in the UK) was made by AIP. And all horror fans know its a Hammer film.
Critics are not horror film fans. That is like having Paul Anka comment on the Dead Kennedys.

You don't have the concentrated poverty like you do the US.  Zoning in Canadian cities spreads out the low class housing so there aren't low class neighborhoods or 'ghettos'.  Its the concentration of poverty that leads to crime.  People that grow up in those neighborhood look around and the only successful people they see are criminals.  It only makes sense they turn to crime to try and make ends meet as well.

ROOM 213, though, isn't a bad documentary, even though the theories it explores are crazy. The movie doesn't actually support any of the theories, the point is to show how far-out fans can get when they fall in love with something and start over-analyzing it, laying their own agendas over someone else's work.

rebel - gentrification, of all things, is actually helping to overcome this problem in NYC and LA

That was the really infuriating thing about BfC for me - he'd raise an interesting question and then immediately drop it to go into heavy-handed rhetoric mode.



Surprised nobody's brought up Morgan Spurlock and his "ermagahd look at this amazing revelation that surprises absolutely nobody outside of Hollywood which I'm bravely bringing to light!" schtick.

The Culling comes to mind, and that horrible AIDs denialist movie House of Numbers. ....Oh...I've gone and depressed myself. Thanks a lot stupid terrabad documentaries.