The Strangest Movies In Existence

Movies have existed in some form for more than 100 years, so it's daunting to definitively list the strangest movies ever made. Besides, one person's Videodrome might be another's Pretty Woman. Nevertheless, these films are such objectively strange movies they'd probably make any reasonable moviegoer's list. For instance:

Before Peter Jackson brought the Lord of the Rings to the big screen, he got his start with a low budget splatter movie about man-eating aliens called Bad Taste. Jackson and his friends shot Bad Taste over the course of four years and partially financed it with help from the New Zealand Film Commission. New Zealanders should truly be proud that their tax dollars went to funding such a gruesome spectacle.

The heroes of the movie — one of whom, the chainsaw-wielding Derek, is portrayed by Jackson himself — are a group of government agents from the Astro Investigation and Defence Service (yes, AIDS) sent to investigate the disappearance of villagers from a small New Zealand town. They soon discover that an alien named Lord Crumb and his minions are responsible for the missing townsfolk. Crumb's goal is to turn human beings into the latest delicacy for his fast-food chain, Crumb's Crunchy Delights. The movie's over-the-top, cartoonish gore and charming amateur feel make it a must-watch for aficionados of weird cinema. It also contains the most random, unnecessary scene of violence against a sheep in film history.

What better way to follow-up a gruesome alien invasion movie than with a dirty puppet film? That's what director Peter Jackson decided to do with his sophomore effort, Meet the Feebles. This dark comedy can be best described as The Muppet Show meets Requiem for a Dream. The performers of the Meet the Feebles variety show have a litany of problems. Heidi the Hippo is the aging, overweight star who is ignorant to the fact that her drug dealer boyfriend — a walrus named Bletch who is also the show's producer — is cheating on her with a cat named Samantha. Harry the rabbit thinks he may have contracted bunny HIV from his philandering. Wynard the Frog, the show's knife-thrower, is a drug addict who is haunted by flashbacks of his time in Vietnam.

These are just the icing on top of the cake of insanity that Jackson baked to make Meet the Feebles. If you like the puppet-fueled ribaldry of the musical Avenue Q, then it's time to graduate to the harder stuff by watching Meet the Feebles.

The late wrestler "Rowdy" Roddy Piper starred in two low-budget science fiction movies in 1988. Many people remember the cult classic They Live, directed by John Carpenter, in which Piper plays a wisecracking, blue collar action hero who makes it his personal mission to rid the world of incognito alien invaders. Piper's second cinematic outing of 1988, Hell Comes to Frogtown, is arguably an even stranger movie.

The title literally tells the tale of this flick. Sam Hell (Piper) is one of the world's last fertile men following a nuclear war. A female paramilitary force representing the vestiges of the U.S. government captures Hell to use his potent DNA to repopulate humankind. First, they force Hell to rescue a group of fertile women being held captive in Frogtown. Why is it called Frogtown? Because it's populated by mutant, humanoid frogs! Apparently frogs that are attracted to human beings. Go figure, it's the apocalypse.

Oh yeah, and Sam Hell is forced to wear a codpiece that shocks his fertile "equipment" if he doesn't do what he's told. The movie is like Children of Men meets Mad Max meets Escape from New York, but with mutant frog people. Such an odd combination creates a movie that must be seen to be believed.

Everyone remembers the day in high school when they learned about the Nazi plot to spawn the master race by breeding Aryan virgins with elves. Wait, you don't remember that history lesson? Then clearly you need to catch up by watching Elves.

This 1989 flick purports to be a horror movie, but anyone who has actually seen Elves probably classifies it as a comedy. The title alone is laughable, because there is only one elf in the movie, not the several that the plural "elves" implies. Dan Haggerty, one-time star of the popular movie and television series Grizzly Adams from the 1970s, must have fallen on some hard times to take a role in this disaster. In Elves, he plays a former police detective named Mike McGavin who lost his job in law enforcement due to alcoholism and now works as a mall Santa Claus. McGavin uncovers a Neo-Nazi plot to force a young woman named Kristen (Julie Austin) to breed with a hideous elf. We're just scratching the surface of insanity with that plot summary.

The movie also includes such disparate and bizarre elements as a group of anti-Christmas teenagers performing a ritual, a barely mobile elf puppet crotch-stabbing a mall Santa to death, and a family more inbred than the McPoyles from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. The most laughable scene in Elves — perhaps in cinema history — is when McGavin bursts into a professor's' home on Christmas Eve to question him about the Nazi-elf legend. The expert then explains his theories on elf assassins and elf-virgin hybridization in front of his two young children. You can see Haggerty die a little inside when he mutters the phrase, "I want to know the connection between the elves and the Nazis." Don't we all, Dan. Don't we all.

John Dies at the End is a mixture of the science fiction, horror, and fantasy movie genres. It's an adaptation of an even stranger book by author David Wong. The story begins with Wong (Chase Williamson) meeting a journalist named Arnie Blondestone (Paul Giamatti) at a restaurant. Wong then recounts to Arnie how he became a low-rent exorcist, along with his friend John. The story Wong tells is so strange it's almost impossible to summarize, but suffice it to say that the plot begins after John and David take a drug called Soy Sauce that gives them mystical powers. They must use these powers to defeat an inter-dimensional, organic supercomputer named Korrok that has plans to destroy Earth — or at least the duo's version of it — through the use of small white insects that possess their victims and ultimately cause them to explode. Did you get all of that?

Oh, and John Dies at the End also features a vicious slug with teeth, man-eating spiders, a psychic dog, and inter-dimensional travel. The plot of doesn't make a lick of sense, but it's somehow self-aware of this fact and revels in it. The end result is probably the closest approximation of a LSD trip you can achieve without failing your employer's drug screening test.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension is the first and only entry in what the filmmakers clearly hoped would be a superhero franchise. A sequel never materialized after this first movie failed at the box office, but it nonetheless later gained a cult following on home video, cable, and DVD. The titular Buckaroo Banzai (Peter Weller) isn't a superhero in the traditional sense. Spider-man can climb walls. The Flash can run faster than light. Buckaroo Banzai is just good at stuff. He's an adventurer, scientist, rock star, and neurosurgeon.

In the movie, Banzai and his team, the Hong Kong Cavaliers, must contend with an group of evil aliens called the Red Lectroids that are led by Lord John Whorfin (John Lithgow). The Lectroids aim to release their comrades from their imprisonment in the 8th Dimension and then wreak havoc upon the galaxy. It's a convoluted story, but that doesn't detract from the film's entertainment value. All of the aliens are inexplicably named John. Our hero's teammates include similarly oddly named individuals like Perfect Tommy, New Jersey, Rawhide, and Reno Nevada. The movie stars several notable actors in "before they were super-famous roles" including the aforementioned Peter Weller of Robocop fame, Ellen Barkin, Jeff Goldblum, Clancy Brown, and Christopher Lloyd. If you've seen and enjoyed the equally goofy Big Trouble in Little China, then you will probably appreciate The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, since W.D. Richter, who directed Banzai, wrote Big Trouble in Little China.

Like the fable of the tortoise and the hare, the 1964 so-bad-it's-good classic, The Creeping Terror, goes to show you that slow and steady can win the race ... at least when it comes to eating witless townsfolk. The titular Creeping Terror is a slug-like alien monster the size of a truck that moves as slow as molasses, but somehow manages to eat several people during the course of the film. Bravo, sir.

He/she/it most infamously turns a dance hall into a veritable buffet. We're not usually apt to blame victims, but if you get eaten by a such a plodding monstrosity, then it's your own fault. The monster's appearance adds further hilarity to this ludicrous concept. It's basically a collection of rugs with a head attached. Observant viewers will see the puppeteers' feet in some scenes. Also, the creature is so inarticulate that its victims must literally climb their way inside its mouth to get eaten.

If all of this wasn't bad enough, director Vic Savage either shot the movie without sound or damaged the soundtrack because 90% of the movie's dialogue is one narrator telling the audience what is going on. The Creeping Terror came to prominence in the 1990s after being featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Watching Mike and the Bots riff on this stinker is truly the best way to view The Creeping Terror.

Director David Cronenberg has certainly made some bizarre films over the course of his career. Among his strangest movies is 1983's Videodrome, starring James Woods and Deborah Harry (of Blondie fame). Woods plays Max Renn, the president of a Canadian television station who stumbles upon the signal to a mysterious show called Videodrome. The show is basically snuff footage that depicts victims being tortured in an orange room. Uncovering the truth behind Videodrome leads Max down a rabbit hole of conspiracy and insanity.

Max learns that the Videodrome broadcast contains a signal that causes viewers to hallucinate. The nature of the footage that accompanies the signal determines the type of hallucinations. In Max's case, the hallucinations are often of a sadomasochistic, sexual nature. As the movie progresses, we begin to only see reality from Max's hallucinatory perspective. This means means people may explode, for example, without a concrete explanation. Oh yeah, and Max also grows a yonic opening in his abdomen that he uses to store his gun. Believe us, it's even stranger than it sounds. If it's there, why not use it, right? Videodrome is indeed a weird movie, but that's also what makes it an effective horror film.

Like David Cronenberg, it's hard to pick which of director David Lynch's movies is his weirdest, but Mulholland Drive is definitely high on the list. The movie was originally a pilot to a television show. After the major television networks passed on the series, Lynch shot more footage and released the movie theatrically.

Mulholland Drive starts out simple enough. It seems to be the story of a young actress named Betty Elms (Naomi Watts in her breakout role) trying to make it in Hollywood. Her world is thrown into disarray shortly after meeting and befriending a woman with amnesia who calls herself Rita (Laura Elena Harring). The movie is ostensibly about their relationship and unlocking the mystery of Rita's lost memories, but interspersed with this story are bizarre scenes like a hitman botching an assassination. In another, one man meets a friend at a diner called Winkie's and recounts a dream he had where he saw a creepy bum that lives behind the diner. Later they go to investigate and encounter the terrifying bum that he dreamed about. Presumably these random segments were subplots that Lynch would have expanded upon in the planned television show.

Later, the movie switches focus to a different character name Diane (also Watts) who looks exactly like Betty and is in love with an successful actress named Camilla (also Harring), who looks just like Rita. Are you confused yet? If so, then that's the point. Mulholland Drive functions less as a straightforward narrative and more of an allegory about the loss of identity caused by Hollywood. At least that's one explanation. Did Lynch make a modern day, surrealist masterpiece with Mulholland Drive or is it just a pretentious mess that he cobbled together using existing footage? Was the whole experiment just to make something for people to analyze and talk about with their friends over dinner? The speculation is half of the fun.

Practitioners of Hinduism believe that one's soul is reincarnated into another body after death. The Indian movie Eega takes this premise and uses it as the template for a truly absurd revenge tale.

Nani is a young man in love with his beautiful neighbor Bindu. A rich industrialist, Sudeep, also has his eye on Bindu. One night, a jealous Sudeep kidnaps Nani and kills him. Some time later, Nani is reincarnated as a housefly and sets about on a path of revenge. This includes learning how to fight with small blades attached to his insect appendages.

Eega features many of the hallmarks of Indian cinema, such as catchy musical numbers that serve as romantic interludes. Eega is more light-hearted than your typical revenge tale, but it's nevertheless entertaining and undeniably original. Come on, what other movie can you name that concludes with a housefly dance number?