(Last updated: 6/11/2022)

Feeling like your Letterboxd ratings graph is not evenly-distributed enough? Look no further, friends. Some of these films could help boost those numbers on the lower end of the ratings scale... enjoy! On the opposite end of the scale are some genuinely weird and wonderful films - by David Lynch, John Waters, Ken Russell, Anna Biller, Peter Jackson and others... as well as bad films by great directors, including Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen and Ingmar Bergman, questionable Best Picture Oscar winners... but all interact with the hegemony of "taste" provocatively.

A friend asked why I would include genuinely great films like Night of the Living Dead, Eraserhead and The Devils in this list. The answer is simply that many of these films that are now considered great were once thought of as mere drive-in schlock, or at the very least (in the case of The Devils, surely) in very bad taste. I think those films help complicate the notion of what makes a film good or bad... especially when one is looking at the technical side of a production. For instance, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2011), a post 9/11 film directed by Stephen Daldry, featuring classy, top-of-the-line production credits, as well as a cast that included Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock, Max von Sydow and Viola Davis -- and nominated for Best Picture by the Academy -- how could THAT movie go wrong? But I would say it did quite spectacularly.

I find it interesting how films fall in and out of favor, are disreputable one day, and find themselves on the National Film Registry many years later (Night of the Living Dead, Eraserhead) -- and conversely, how films that were once heralded as Best Pictures of their respective years now seem painfully old-fashioned (Cavalcade, Going My Way), Offensive (The Birth of a Nation, Forrest Gump) and just downright bad (Broadway Melody, A Beautiful Mind, Crash).