14 Filmmakers Whose Entire Filmographies Are Rotten

For many directors, a single critical failure of a film can be disastrous for their career. Other directors manage to repeatedly churn out critical duds as their bread and butter. After all, financial success counts for a whole lot more than critical success in the film industry. Money and quality don't always go hand-in-hand, and sometimes the critical reaction to a film can be a world apart from the general audience reaction to it. From low-budget, straight-to-video horror and action schlock to big-budget comedies that aim for the lowest of the low-brow, these filmmakers never stood — and probably never will stand — a chance with Rotten Tomatoes critics.

Here is a rogues gallery of filmmakers who have managed to get numerous films made but have never managed to impress the critics over at Rotten Tomatoes even once. They say a broken clock is right twice a day, but these filmmakers prove that expression wrong in the eyes of the vast majority of critics.

Rob Zombie first rose to fame as a heavy metal musician, both as frontman and founder of the band White Zombie, named after the 1932 Bela Lugosi horror film, and then later as a solo artist. Zombie cut his teeth as a director by creating his band's music videos before eventually making the leap to feature filmmaking. His love of horror was apparent from the get-go, so it was no surprise that his directorial career has been focused on the horror genre. Though he has made nine films at this point, including the recent Netflix release "The Munsters," every single one of them has been given a rotten score on Rotten Tomatoes.

Despite the total critical derision, Zombie does have a loyal cult following of hardcore horror fans on his side. His first two films, "House of 1000 Corpses" and "The Devil's Rejects," both impressed enough general moviegoers to earn fresh scores on the audience end of the scale. Unfortunately, everything else he has directed over the course of the following 17 years has failed to impress either camp.

Uwe Boll has a formidable reputation among many media outlets as the world's worst director, with Vanity Fair calling him "something like the Donald Trump of directors, a brutish bully inclined to lash out against his detractors," while pointing out his Razzie win for "Worst Career Achievement." Though he's occasionally dabbled in other action or horror fare, Boll's bread and butter has been video game-based movies, with his adaptations of "House of the Dead," "Alone in the Dark," and "BloodRayne" permanently damaging the genre's already poor reputation.

Needless to say, all of Boll's movies are rotten on Rotten Tomatoes. What's actually a bit impressive in its own backwards way is that he managed the stupefying feat of getting four — count 'em, four! — of his movies onto the Rotten Tomatoes "Worst Movies of All Time" list. It's a bit baffling that Boll has been able to make so many movies, with large enough budgets to afford stars like Jason Statham and Christian Slater, given that all of them met with abysmal receptions. He directed a total of 32 feature films before announcing his retirement in 2016. The retirement proved temporary, and Boll has already returned with "Hanau (Deutschland im Winter – Part 1)," a tasteless film exploiting a real-life mass shooting.

Outside of his films themselves, Boll is an easy figure to hate. He infamously challenged his critics to boxing matches and was openly inflammatory towards other filmmakers, calling himself "the only genius" in the entire film industry. A lack of talent so extreme and an ego so large rarely co-exist in the same individual.

Brian Robbins has a strong reputation as a producer, working regularly in both film and television and in both scripted and unscripted content often related to sports. When it comes to directing, however, Robbins's reputation is far from sterling. While all of his directorial efforts have received rotten ratings from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, he has a couple of movies that performed well with general audiences, namely "Varsity Blues" and "Hardball." Everything else, on the other hand, has fared extremely poorly.

"Ready to Rumble" and "The Shaggy Dog" all see Robbins in rough shape in the director's chair, but even they are a step up from the bottom tier of his filmography. Robbins' worst three movies were all Eddie Murphy vehicles, and were his final three feature films as a director before retiring in 2012 to focus on producing exclusively. "Norbit," "Meet Dave," and "A Thousand Words" were all obliterated by critics. "A Thousand Words" really struck the bottom of the barrel, landing a 0% score with 59 rotten reviews and not a single positive one.

The same year he stopped directing, 2012, Robbins founded AwesomenessTV, a company focused on producing original YouTube content as the platform attempted to compete in the streaming space with YouTube Red. He wound up leaving the company in 2017 (per The Wrap) and recently became the new head of Paramount in 2021, according to Variety. Directing might not have been his strong suit, but his producing projects continue to find major success.

After spending the '90s and 2000s working both in the camera department and as a production designer, while directing a number of low-budget short films on the side, Travis Zariwny finally got the opportunity to make his feature film directorial debut in 2013 with "Scavengers." This indie sci-fi action film attempted to bite off far more than it could chew with its meager budget, and was given an abysmal 2.8-out-of-10 rating on IMDb. His debut was too small to catch the attention of Rotten Tomatoes critics, but that all changed with his second feature.

Zariwny moved into the horror genre for his next film, "Cabin Fever." This gory 2016 movie is a remake/reboot of Eli Roth's horror pic of the same name from 2002. Audiences weren't exactly clamoring for a remake, especially since the original film was still generating sequels as recently as two years prior to the remake's release, with "Cabin Fever 3: Patient Zero" released in 2014. The original film managed to just barely earn a fresh score from critics, but the remake was trashed as thoroughly as possible, earning the disreputable 0% score and landing at number 15 on the Rotten Tomatoes list of the 100 worst movies of all time.

Zariwny's subsequent movies haven't been quite as brutally ravaged by critics, but have either been rated rotten, like "Intruder" and "The Midnight Man," or have failed to find distribution and were not reviewed, as happened with "Punk Rock Cannibals," "Lensface," and "Savage Valley."

Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer comprise the directing duo behind some of the worst and most obnoxious movies of the past 20 years. Not only have all of their movies been given rotten ratings, but they have never made a movie that made it out of the single digit percentage range on Rotten Tomatoes. Out of their eight feature films, only one has managed to score above 5%, that being their first movie as co-directors: the 7%-scoring "Date Movie."

All but one effort from this pair follow the same formula as reference-packed parody films, including "Date Movie," "Epic Movie," "Meet the Spartans," "Disaster Movie," "Vampires Suck," "The Starving Games," and "Superfast!" Their one attempt to ditch the parody genre and create an original comedy — the 0%-scoring "Best Night Ever" — was just as much of a failure. As Variety critic Joe Leydon put it, "Serial spoofers Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer hit a new low with their first 'original' comedy." Leydon accused the film of replacing parody with shameless rip-off, as the movie stole its ideas from "Bridesmaids" and "The Hangover" while making them as unfunny as possible.

John Suits entered the film industry by way of the advertising world. As the founder of the advertising production firm Natural Selection, John Suits has directed commercials and video content for brands like Goodyear, Microsoft, and the NBA. But Suits wasn't just interested in advertising, he also wanted to make feature films.

Since 2008, Suits has directed seven features, all of which have either been rated rotten on Rotten Tomatoes or have not been covered by enough critics to earn a score, as his movies often go straight to video or Redbox. His films have shown a steady decline in quality as both the budgets and the amount of effort put into them seem to be shrinking with each movie. His latest effort, 2020's "Breach," blended into the endless sea of recent Bruce Willis-led straight-to-video schlock. Suits and Willis have also collaborated on ads for brands like Advance Auto Parts, utilizing the "Die Hard" imagery, with Willis reprising the John McClane role and De'voreaux White returning as Argyle the limo driver. But the same shoddy production values and haphazard editing are present in all of Suits' work, whether it's a commercial or a feature film.

Whatever factory pumps out interchangeable, low-budget, straight-to-video action flicks starring Bruce Willis tends to rotate through a handful of different directors. One of the key players in that system is Matt Eskandari, who has made four of these disposable Bruce Willis flicks in the last couple of years alone with "Wire Room," "Hard Kill," "Survive the Night," and "Trauma Center."

Before being tapped to helm these action quickies, Eskandari was working in the low-fi indie horror field with movies like "12 Feet Deep" and "Victim," which lacked the reach to get enough critical attention on Rotten Tomatoes. Miraculously, Eskandari is doing enough to earn good reviews from many general viewers, and several of his films have positive audience scores. His work highlights the occasional divide between critics and average moviegoers, with "Hard Kill" in particular demonstrating the widest gulf with a 60% audience score and 0% critic score. Arkansas Democrat-Gazette critic Karen Martin summed up the film by saying, "All you need to know about this lame actioner is that it was filmed in 10 days. And it shows." The audience review section for the film is also loaded with countless pages full of nothing but one-star and half-star reviews, so even the 60% score seems a bit dubious.