The vast possibilities of storytelling and technical craft in creating a sci-fi film has made the genre one of the premier avenues for truly great and groundbreaking filmmaking throughout film history. From all-time classics like 2001: A Space Odyssey to modern hits like Avatar: Fire and Ash, the sci-fi genre continues to be an institutional staple of great cinematic experiences. However, there have also been a select share of notoriously awful sci-fi movies released over the years.
Even among the terrible sci-fi films, many of these films, at the very least, have a few redeeming qualities that allow them to be more than the bottom of the barrel. This serves to make the absolute worst that sci-fi has to offer that much more shameful by comparison, with these complete disasters of sci-fi being near unwatchable due to their complete lack of any positives. It’s truly hard to get much worse than these films in terms of brainless and painfully ineffective sci-fi filmmaking.
10
‘iBoy’ (2017)
A jarringly brainless attempt at providing a sci-fi coming-of-age edge to the overwhelming superhero movie trend of the 2010s, iBoy‘s grounded, thriller approach to an overly absurd superhero concept makes it an unintentional laughingstock of narrative failures. The terrible Netflix original movie sees Tom (Bill Milner) awakening from a coma to learn that he has developed superpowers and the ability to control electronic devices after an accident had fragments of his cell phone lodged into his head.
While this type of overly-absurd premise could have found some success in the realm of comedy or satire of the superhero genre, iBoy instead plays it completely straight, making a point to even cover some unnecessarily dark and uncomfortable subject matter. This mismatched balance of tones between the goofiness of its concept and the seriousness in which it takes said premise makes this one of the most dull, mind-numbing experiences that Netflix has ever released.
9
‘Jurassic World Dominion’ (2022)
The Jurassic franchise as a whole has massively diminished in quality since the exceptional days of Steven Spielberg‘s original blockbuster masterpiece. The absolute worst of these sequels, though, has to be Jurassic World Dominion, which simultaneously relies on nostalgia pandering and callbacks to previous films while also completely missing the point of what people liked about these films. There’s no soul or passion put into this lazy excuse for a blockbuster, simply going through the motions and entirely relying on name-brand recogintion.
One would assume, at the very least, that a modern entry in the blockbuster franchise all about dinosaurs in the modern age would actually focus on dinosaurs, yet these prehistoric titans, for some reason, play second fiddle to a generic evil corporation and swarms of uninteresting locusts. The story is also needlessly complicated, attempting to balance so many different characters across the franchise’s history only to absolutely waste their talents by giving them nothing to do.
8
‘Monster a Go-Go!’ (1965)
One of many cheesy, nonsensical sci-fi B-movies of the 50s and 60s, Monster a Go-Go! has achieved an infamous stature over the years not just as one of the worst sci-fi movies of all time, but also one of the worst horror movies of all time. All the overwhelming clichés that made up the failures of sci-fi and horror B-movies of the era are at some of their absolute worst in this film, from jarring editing and visuals to comically inept performances and dialogue.
Even when compared to many other B-movies of the era, which at the very least feel entertaining and fun to watch thanks to their inherent goofiness, Monster a Go-Go! prominently fails even in this regard thanks to its sluggish pacing and failure to create any entertaining elements. It goes about its basic monster story without any actual care or passion, with the only enjoyment to be derived from watching the film is just how little there is entertaining about it.
7
‘Aliens vs Predator: Requiem’ (2007)
While the original Alien vs. Predator was far from a great sci-fi film, it had its moments of sheer dumb fun that allowed its crossover story to work for many audiences. However, the sequel, Aliens vs Predator: Requiem, completely abandons any good-will that the previous entry established in making one of the worst sci-fi sequels of all time and easily the low point of both the Alien and Predator franchises. One reaches a point of pure anger by watching the film, seeing what has proven to be a half-decent idea completely butchered due to sheer ineptitude.
While its bland story and incredibly forgettable characters are bad enough aspects of the film by themselves, the true culprit of this film’s constant and overwhelming failure is its lighting (or lack thereof). So much of the film is shrouded in darkness and dimly lit setpieces that one genuinely never even gets a chance to look at the design of this fabled Predator-Xenomorph hybrid that the entire film centers around. It makes so many of the action scenes completely unwatchable and only amplifies the worst aspects of its story and filmmaking.
6
‘Mac and Me’ (1983)
An icon of terrible 80s sci-fi and often considered to be one of the worst ripoff movies ever made, Mac and Me‘s blatant copying of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial proves to be only the beginning of the film’s overwhelming problems. From alien designs that look like they were ripped straight out of a child’s nightmares to the overwhelming abunddance of cheap product placement, the film’s chaotic flaws and failures constantly rear their ugly head.
Especially for a film attempting to recreate and buy into the family-friendly brilliance of Spielberg’s masterpiece, Mac and Me has little to no actual heart or emotional pull to even speak of, simply going from ineffective setpiece to setpiece before acting as if there was any real emotional throughline. The only true lasting legacy that the film has maintained since its release is that of an entertaining running gag between Paul Rudd and Conan O’Brian on his various talk shows.
5
‘The Amazing Bulk’ (2012)
While a film like Mac and Me at least set itself up as a quirky, family-friendly experience for those who enjoyed E.T., The Amazing Bulk is surrounded by an aura of overwhelming cheapness that only makes it appear as a joke to those who enjoyed The Incredible Hulk. From an overabundance of lazy green screen effects to computer animation that would look dated if it came out in the 90s, the film feels like it’s intentionally creating a lackluster experience from start to finish.
There’s a sense of enchantment and fun that can be had from watching a film that is so blatantly playing into its own failures, yet a film that’s trying its best to be a 0/10 is still a 0/10 at the end of the day. It especially reaches a breaking point during the film’s infamous finale chase sequence, where it feels like the filmmakers simply threw as much prerendered animation that came with the software they were using just so they weren’t wasteful.
4
‘Atlantic Rim’ (2013)
Easily standing as one of the most morally corrupt mockbuster experiences of modern cinema history, Atlantic Rim‘s blatant ripoff of Guillermo del Toro‘s Pacific Rim has made it an icon of egregiously bad mockbusters ever since its release. A major source of the film’s issues comes from the fact that, due to its nonexistant budget as a mockbuster, the film simply isn’t able to create giant kaiju battles on the same scale or consistency as Pacific Rim.
While it might sound somewhat fun to see a bad film hilariously failing to recreate kaiju battles throughout its runtime, Atlantic Rim takes the lazy approach and decides to simply not include on-screen kaiju battles for the majority of its kaiju battle story. The actual bad-CGI battles that it tricks the audience into seeing only take up about 1 minute of screentime, with the rest of the film focusing on boring human characters and the most uninteresting plot imaginable.
3
‘2025: The World Enslaved by a Virus’ (2021)
One of the most blatantly nontransparent pieces of cinematic propaganda to be released in recent memory, the egregious fearmongering and political messaging of 2025: The World Enslaved by a Virus has made it an incredibly polarizing film since its release. However, the film isn’t inherently bad because it has a right-leaning political message, but because it goes about telling this message in the worst, most ineffective way possible that feels like an insult to the artform of cinema.
There is little to no care about actually telling a compelling story, as the film fundamentally believes that it can get the job done simply by repeating then-relevant political talking points and treating them as a wild, dystopian truth. Now, almost five years since the release of the film, and with 2025 having ended, it’s clear to see the film as nothing more than a piece of political drivel meant to stir up anger and maintain a baseless agenda.
One of several asset-flipping disasters of cinema from BC Fourteen that serves little purpose other than clogging up the catalog of streaming sites like Tubi, Bigfoot vs the Illuminati is just as brainless of a film as its title suggests. The film constantly finds ways to one-up itself in terms of idiocy in regard to its filmmaking, stilted animation, and some of the worst storytelling in sci-fi film history. It’s the type of nightmare fever dream that could only have been created in the modern age of digital filmmaking, for better or for worse (and in this case most definitely worse).
It balances out its mixture of constantly repeated models and publicly free assets with some of the most uncomfortably cringe dialogue one can imagine, with each character feeling like a parody of the genre coated with layers of raunchy 12-year-old humor. At least the film is never boring with its painfully ineffective antics, as it’s certainly memorable in the worst ways possible. While the film has largely gone unknown to those who haven’t delved into the depths of modern trash filmmaking, Bigfoot vs the Illuminati easily deserves to be among the worst sci-fi movies.
1
‘War of the Worlds’ (2025)
While films like Atlantic Rim and Bigfoot vs the Illuminati may be worse films in a technical sense, War of the Worlds easily has them beat due to actually having expectations and a reputation that it has gloriously smashed into millions of pieces. The original H.G. Wells novel is still one of the most important overall stories in sci-fi storytelling history, with this laughably bad screen life adaptation completely removing anything positive about this landmark sci-fi tale.
The entire film has the energy of a chaotic, non-stop train derailment, as if it’s trying it’s very best to recover and make the most out of an unmitigated disaster, only to plunge itself further into failure and mediocrity. The performances are stilted and laughably ineffective, the editing is jarring and takes the audience out of the film, and the story can’t go 10 minutes without featuring a distracting product placement on-screen. Despite only being released this year, War of the Worlds has already cemented itself as one of the all-time biggest disasters, not just in sci-fi filmmaking, but overall movie history.