10 Dumbest Movies of All Time, Ranked

While highly intelligent and multilayered achievements in filmmaking will always garner respect and praise from critics and awards bodies, there will always be an ingrained audience for those looking to let loose and enjoy a dumb, mindless film. Being an unintelligent film is far from a sign of low quality, as many films embrace their chaotic, nonsensical sides to become wildly entertaining and effective in their own right. Films like the Jackass franchise and the Fast and the Furious franchise are key examples of films that use their stupidity as a tool for exceptional and entertaining filmmaking.

However, some films manage to be so moronic and unintelligent that it baffles the mind, with a concept so absurd it’s impossible to take seriously. There is a fine balancing act between the stupidity of a premise and the well-crafted and impactful filmmaking chops to make such a wild premise work, making it all the more notable when a film is simply so dumb that it sets off the balance. It’s certainly possible to find entertainment within these unbelievably dumb films, yet it would be much more difficult to find any intelligent or nuanced takeaways from them.

10

‘Beastly’ (2011)

Directed by Daniel Barnz

Beauty and the Beast has been a story that has been adapted to film a multitude of different times to various success, whether it be classic fantasy films from 1940s France or the instantly iconic animated Disney film. However, Beastly stands head and toes above other adaptations of the fairy tale as one of the dumbest and most overly complicated takes on the story, completely floundering its potential as a modern-day version of the story.

As opposed to a classic version of the story where the arrogant prince is transformed into a hairy beast, New York teen Kyle Kingson (Alex Pettyfer) has his body transformed with an array of Gothic tattoos, scars, and a balding head. He is forced to somehow find true love as he hides in his apartment out of fear of persecution from his peers. The movie doesn’t nearly go far enough in making the beast look all too unappealing, along with other strange and moronic changes to the story, such as the entire generic high school teenage backdrop of the film.

9

‘Red One’ (2024)

Directed by Jake Kasdan

Dwayne Johnson has found a great deal of success in creating bombastic blockbusters that were more focused on spectacle and visual effects over an intelligent story, yet Red One goes above and beyond in terms of being bafflingly moronic. The film takes the generic buddy comedy action film setup that has found success in Johnson’s previous outings and gives it a Christmas theme, complete with all the classic holiday characters in a cardboard blockbuster venture.

It’s one thing to create a painfully generic action comedy that does very little to distinguish and improve upon previous efforts, but Red One goes well beyond the point of acceptability. The array of strange winter iconography like evil snowmen, the importance of the naughty list, and a beefed-up J.K. Simmons as Santa make the whole film a spectacularly dumb time. The comedy rarely comes from the absurdity and nonsense of what’s on-screen, but instead the same quips and dialogue-humor present in Johnson’s other blockbuster action films.

8

‘Gymkata’ (1985)

Directed by Robert Clouse

Some films’ plots prove to be so chaotic and nonsensical that they garner laughter and unintentional comedy by simply stating the given story and sequence of events. Gymkata proves to be one of these cases, creating a shocking, strange, and unintentionally hilarious so-bad-it’s-good action-adventure film through its attempts to blend a foreign political action film with the beauty of gymnastics. The film’s primary selling point of martial arts mixed with gymnastics is already hilarious enough, yet the film proves to get even more chaotic as it goes on.

The film’s plot is the type that grows more chaotic and nonsensical the more you think about it, as an all-star gymnast is trained to be an effective martial artist so he can be sent to compete in a deadly game held in a fictional foreign country, Parmistan. Any political, 80s-soaked messaging is completely drowned out by strange sequences where the hero uses a pommel horse that is miraculously in the middle of a foreign village. The icing on the cake is that the hero is played by Kurt Thomas, a real-life U.S. Olympic gymnast who is using the film to capitalize on his relatively recent gold medal win.

7

‘G-Force’ (2009)

Directed by Hoyt Yeatman

A secret agent team composed entirely of guinea pigs sounds like the type of chaotic fever dream that a 1st grader with too much sugar in their system would come up with, not a Disney-led blockbuster with a $150 million budget. Nevertheless, G-Force is a film that does in fact exist, fully living up to the moronic concept of secret agent guinea pigs, and even including an array of great vocal talent like Sam Rockwell, Penélope Cruz, and Nicolas Cage.

While the premise is enough to please the youngest of children, the atrocious CGI, middlingly generic story, and overall lunacy of secret agent guinea pigs cause the entire film to crumble in on itself. If the film had taken a more tongue-in-cheek and satirical approach to its comedy, playing into the clichés as a parody of spy films, it could have worked, but it plays its premise completely straight, to a point of absurd lunacy.

6

‘Night Swim’ (2024)

Directed by Bryce McGuire

Thanks to the low budget and inherent shock value of many horror movies, the genre lends itself to creating more nonsensical concepts as a way to garner attention and notoriety. However, even compared to the vast array of other dumb horror films, Night Swim is a special breed of stupid filmmaking for just how much it takes its premise seriously and acts like it has something important to say. The film sees a former baseball player’s family moving into a new home, not aware that the backyard swimming pool harbors a vicious history of paranormal deaths over the years.

If Night Swim were made in a different era of horror, it certainly would have had all sorts of chaotic, over-the-top fun with the concept of a killer swimming pool, yet Night Swim botches the concept to tell yet another story of the horrors of familial abuse. Its grandiose messaging and themes completely fall flat when they are presented through the terror of a swimming pool, with laughably bad kills and a lack of any real tension or scares, making the film hilariously misaligned.

5

‘Balloon Farm’ (1999)

Directed by William Dear

Family movies have more creative liberties to create moronically nonsense premises due to the younger age audience who doesn’t worry about realism or comprehension, leading to strange, nonsensical stories like Balloon Farm. The film sees Rip Torn as a quirky, nonsensical farmer who miraculously appears to a drought-stricken farmland with hopes of starting up a new, successful farm. However, instead of any normal crops, the farmer begins growing a crop of balloons, leaving the town mesmerized by his abilities while leaving some critics to uncover the trickery behind his supposed magic.

It’s much more than simply the concept of growing balloons on a farmland that makes Balloon Farm an exceptionally dumb film, but it’s that the act of growing balloons proves to lift an entire struggling town out of poverty and sadness. Even if helium-filled rubber balloons could be grown from the ground like a plant, the film makes no effort to explain how the revelation of growing balloons can actually create a positive impact, it simply does it out of pure lunacy. There’s an unexpected charm that comes from such brazen stupidity that makes the film a fun watch, but it’s the furthest thing from intelligent cinema.

4

‘The Emoji Movie’ (2017)

Directed by Tony Leondis

When it comes to soulless and corporate animated films that only exist to distract children with bright colors and a jaded attempt to appeal to the digital generation, The Emoji Movie is about as egregious as it gets. The film attempts to give the classic Toy Story formula of inanimate objects brought to life and living their own secluded life through emojis, although the film fundamentally overestimates the appeal or interest in emojis as a brand.

Even outside its painfully uninspired premise, the wide array of product placement, lackluster comedy, and phoned-in vocal performances make the entire film a mind-numbing experience to get through. The Emoji Movie has the same level of artistic merit and excitement as a spreadsheet, feeling simultaneously corporate and unfeeling as well as aimless and moronic in its approach to storytelling. It’s easily one of the worst animated movies of all time and has garnered an infamous reputation for just how intrinsically brainless the entire experience is.

3

‘Frogs’ (1972)

Directed by George McCowan

Creature features are one of the signature staples of horror ever since the beginning, finding terror and excitement from a mysterious creature or a vicious animal turning upon humanity for its negligence. While all the pieces are present within Frogs to make for a fun, swampy twist on the classic concept, it’s all in the misfired execution that makes Frogs such a hilarious disaster. The film follows exactly the premise one would expect, with various swampy creatures like frogs, snakes, and spiders taking revenge upon a wealthy millionaire and his family for ruining the swamp’s ecosystem.

It’s already silly enough to have characters meet their end from even the most non-dangerous of animals like butterflies, but as for the titular amphibians themselves, they miraculously take a backseat to the entire film. While there are a bunch of different shots of the aquatic croakers looking menacing, the majority of these establishing shots aren’t even frogs, but in fact toads. Even then, they don’t get a kill until the very end of the film, where the death happens mostly off-screen.

2

‘Tall Girl’ (2019)

Directed by Nzingha Stewart

Persecution and bullying continue to be a painful yet prominent trend in high school life, yet Netflix’s attempts to comment on the issue with Tall Girl prove to be some of the dumbest, most tone-deaf messaging imaginable. The film follows the high school experience of Jodi (Ava Mitchell), a girl who has constantly been picked on her entire life for being much taller than the rest of her fellow students. However, when a foreign exchange student from Sweden arrives at the school, Jodi begins to find the strength and bravery within herself to be happy with her own appearance.

Tall Girl‘s very premise completely falls apart before it can even attempt to form a cohesive message, as being bullied and made fun of for being “too tale” is simply too ridiculous and moronic to take seriously. Made worse is the film treating Jodi’s height as similar in stature to other major acts of persecution, making it wholly difficult to care or root for Jodi’s success, as she doesn’t have many struggles outside of her height. The film quickly became a punching bag scapegoat for the worst Netflix original movies, yet all the vitriol and hate watches managed to make it enough of a success to garner a sequel.

1

‘Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2’ (2004)

Directed by Bob Clark

Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2 is the type of obviously dumb piece of filmmaking that takes no shame in the stupidity on display, actively playing into the most mind-numbing filmmaking imaginable. The original film was already dumb enough as is, yet the implementation of superheroes manages to make all the terrible visual effects and moronic attempts at humor that much more painful and ineffective. The film makes no effort to be anything other than a brainless piece of cinematic slop, made to appeal to children whose brains haven’t fully developed and nobody else.

While one would assume that the appeal and dumb nature of the film would simply wear off, it constantly one-ups itself and gets dumber and dumber over the course of the film. It makes for a special type of idiotic filmmaking where one actively feels themselves getting dumber while watching the film, as one would be better off watching anything else, even watching paint dry. The only thing worse than this film’s very existence is the fact that this franchise would somehow continue after this, receiving three additional installments in the 2010s.

NEXT: The 10 Worst Family Movies of the Last 5 Years, Ranked