Movies You Won't Believe Actually Exist

Everyone loves a good movie, and sometimes, even a bad one can wind up being fun to watch. There are some films, however, that exist in that hazy gray area outside those two extremes, where they're not defined by quality as much as the fact that they somehow manage to exist in the first place. These are the weird movies: the forgotten or ill-advised sequels, the offbeat ideas that were stretched out to feature length, and the obscure but secretly awesome cult classics that are exactly the kind of strange that you'll want to watch them right now.

Read on to find these movies. You might not believe these are real, but trust us: They actually exist, and they're every bit as bizarre as they sound.

To say that Pottersville is a bad movie is sort of like saying outer space is cold. It is, and extremely so, but it's far better defined by the sheer incomprehensibility of it all, and no one is quite sure how and why it came to exist. Plus they both have their share of stars.

Based on the title and the otherwise irrelevant Christmastime setting, Pottersville seems like a weird sort of sequel to It's a Wonderful Life, except that it takes place in the bad timeline where George Bailey was never born. There's even a scene at the end that mirrors the heartwarming bit in the original where the citizens of Bedford Falls show up to help George with the kind of friendship that makes him "the richest man in town." The thing is, Pottersville's version involves one of the characters essentially having to call a town meeting and browbeat everyone into doing it — and that comes after about 80 minutes of a plot based around a man getting blackout drunk dressing up as a sasquatch because he finds out his wife is a furry and has been hopping her bunny-costumed self over to the local sheriff's.

The weirdest thing about it, and the reason it got a little more attention than most other Christmas movies that are released straight to Netflix, is how much star power it has. Academy Award-winner Michael Shannon, Mad Men's Christina Hendricks, Reno 911's Thomas Lennon, Deadwood's Ian McShane, Archer's Judy Greer, and former Hellboy Ron Perlman all show up in this thing. And since they all seem like they're getting there scenes done in as few takes as humanly possible, it's hard to shake the feeling that the whole thing is a weird combination of a fever dream and a Producers-esque tax dodge.

Despite the title, Rubber is not a horror film about a condom that kills people. Instead, it's an 82-minute French movie, filmed in English, about a tire named Robert that comes to life, gains psychokinetic powers, and then goes on a killing spree. Because really, what else is a tire going to do when it comes to life and gets psychokinetic powers?

There's a weird metatextual element to the film, too. It opens with a crowd of people in the desert being gathered together and told that things in movies often happen for no reason, which filmmaker Quentin Dupieux said in an interview was less of a commentary on other films and more because he didn't want to explain how or why a tire could come to life. For the record, the crowd is also murdered over the course of the film, but not by a tire. They get taken out with poisoned turkey.

Beyond that, Rubber seems to draw its inspiration from some pretty weird places. At one point, there's a scene where a sheriff tries to blow Robert the Tire up by dressing up a mannequin as the woman that the tire's been trying to kill for a whole movie and then loading it up with dynamite, in the style of Wile E. Coyote. The most direct influence on the tire's character (which has no dialogue but still has motivations and thought processes), though, according to Dupieux himself, is Pixar's Wall-E.

TV specials like The Cat In the Hat and How the Grinch Stole Christmas! are among the most well-known and beloved television programs of all time, but there's one piece of the Dr. Seuss canon that's rarely discussed: The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, a 1953 live-action journey into a mind-bogglingly bizarre look at the horrors of piano lessons. It might be so obscure because it was such a dismal failure that Seuss made no mention of it in his autobiography and once compared its brutal critical reception to a moment on set when one child actor got sick and led to a chain reaction of 150 boys all vomiting at once.

But here's the thing: This movie is absolutely worth watching. In The Guardian, Danny Leigh wrote that it's a "delirious, surrealist tale" that "deserves just as much praise as Pixar," and despite the fact that it was a huge flop at the box office, he's not wrong. Set in a strange, fever dream fantasy world, the story follows 10-year-old Billy as he's menaced by a nightmare version of his piano teacher, Dr. Terwiliker. In the dream world, Terwiliker's strict music lessons — loosely based on Seuss' own experiences with a grumpy piano teacher as a child — are twisted into a mad plot to enslave 500 children (with 5,000 fingers) to play a gigantic piano. If that wasn't enough, the hallucinatory Terwiliker also wants to brainwash and marry Billy's mom, keeping her from hooking up with Billy's preference, a neighborhood plumber named Abner Zabladowski.

It's a truly strange film — and was a lot stranger and darker before half the musical numbers and Terwiliker's tendency to decapitate his henchmen were all cut out at the studio's request — but it does an incredible job of translating Seuss' signature visuals into live-action with dizzying set designs and beautiful matte paintings. The results are as disorienting as you'd expect, but Dr. T has managed to become a cult classic after its more recent video release.

Given its tendency to produce movies like the body-swapping martial arts classic Ninja III: The Domination and American Cyborg: Steel Warrior, we could probably fill an entire list of unbelievable movies with the output of the Cannon Group. Even on that list, though, Going Bananas would be at the top. Heck, its very existence is so difficult to believe that it would probably make it on there two or three times.

In terms of plot, it's actually pretty basic. A shockingly intelligent orangutan named Bonzo befriends a young American boy named Ben who's inexplicably touring Africa — referred to as "the darkest and cruelest" of all continents because movies were still pretty racist in 1987 — alongside Dom DeLuise and Jimmie "J.J." Walker. Actually, we should probably clarify that DeLuise and Walker are playing characters in the film, but it wouldn't actually make much difference if they were starring as themselves. Either way, hijinks ensue that range from staggeringly awful to uncomfortably racist, including Bonzo being kidnapped by and escaping from a circus, flying an airplane, and straight up speaking English to Ben and singing songs about how much he loves him. And yes, in case you were wondering, Bonzo's screeching, falsetto voice is among the worst pieces of audio ever committed to film.

What really makes this movie so strange, however, is how it came to exist in the first place. According to the documentary Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films, the original plan was for the film to star Clyde, the orangutan that had co-starred with Clint Eastwood in Every Which Way But Loose. When Clyde was brought in for a meeting, studio head and screenwriter Menahem Golan actually began pitching the movie to Clyde, who (and we cannot stress this enough) was actually an orangutan and therefore probably not interested in movie pitches. In the end, though, Clyde dropped out, probably because the role would've required him to speak English and fly an airplane, and the part went to famous little person actor Deep Roy and a truly terrible ape costume instead.

Of all the films on this list, House is the one that you need to see immediately if you haven't seen it before — and actually, even if you have seen it, it's never the wrong time to watch it again. It's also the one that's probably the most well-known. A high-end Criterion Collection version was released in 2010, and it's become a cult favorite for fans of Japanese cinema and surreal horror flicks.

Also known by the Japanese pronunciation of Hausu to avoid confusion with the American horror flick of the same name, House tells the story of a group of schoolgirls, with each one named for their defining trait. There's Fantasy (who's always imagining things), Prof (the smart one), Mac (who's always eating), Melody (the musician), the kind-hearted Sweet, and Kung Fu (the tough one) who at one point gets into a fistfight with a severed head. The leader of the clique is Gorgeous, and when she gets angry at her father for coming home from his vacation with a new wife, she convinces the other girls to go for a vacation at her aunt's house in the country. The problem, as you might've gathered from the whole "severed head" thing, is that the aunt is actually a witch who absorbs the girls' youth by murdering them in increasingly bizarre ways. Sweet, for instance, is attacked by a possessed futon, and Melody is eaten, piece by piece, by a grand piano.

It's a strange film, but it comes by its strangeness honestly. Tasked with making a horror movie, director Nobuhiko Obayashi based the story on nightmares and fears of his 10-year-old daughter Chigumi, and intentionally avoided making the special effects look realistic in order to underline the dreamlike quality of a story that bounces between characters drowning in a house full of blood spat from the mouth of a demon cat, and a man turning into a pile of bananas for no particular reason. It's amazing, in every sense of the word.