The Most Ridiculous Movie Titles Ever

Choosing a solid movie title is an important part of the business of Hollywood. Filmmakers and marketers need to find the few words that capture the essence of their story and entice people to see it and steer clear of being too hokey or derivative or plain. Sometimes, it can be as simple as finding an impact word that weighs enough to work, like Jaws or Alien, or slightly lengthier descriptive titles like Back to the Future or When Harry Met Sally.

Every once in a while, though, a filmmaking team will throw caution to the wind and just go with whatever word salad strikes them in the moment. When it comes to these films, the titles are far too long or winding or just plain strange, and yet, somehow most of these movies managed to survive their terrible titles and fare just fine with audiences and critics. With all that in mind, here's a fond look back at a few of the most ridiculous movie titles ever.

Most fans of this 2006 mockumentary probably refer to it as Borat, but the full title is quite in keeping with the eponymous character's conversational style. The second of Sacha Baron Cohen's Da Ali G Show character movies, Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan features its titular faux journalist traveling to the United States to learn about American culture, and it's a complete mess.

Baron's in-character crudeness and overt misgivings about modern society make for hilariously uncomfortable interactions with very real people — most have no idea that this is all pretend and politely try to go along with his odd asides, but it always spirals right out of control. In the end, it's pretty clear that Borat has learned nothing "for make benefit" of his glorious nation (which, by the way, has nothing to do with the real Kazakhstan) and has instead exposed some unsettling things about the underbelly of America.

Smack dab in the middle of Hugh Grant's mid-'90s heyday as a romantic comedy king came The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain, a British dramedy about a cartographer who has to tell a proud town their "mountain" is actually just a hill. Since it's only a few feet shy of the technical requirement to make it a mountain, the villagers try to keep the mapmaker around long enough to tack on an extra mound for good measure; of course, hijinks ensue.

It's not the weirdest-named movie Hugh Grant ever starred in — he also starred in Lord Elgin and Some Stones of No Value and The Lair of the White Worm — but it did have a bigger impact on pop culture. VeggieTales even named an episode in its honor, except the title man came down with bananas instead of a mountain in their version.

The length of this title is owed to the literal translation of its original Italian version — La fine del mondo nel nostro solito letto in una notte piena di pioggia translates to The End of the World in Our Usual Bed in a Night Full of Rain — but the film is more commonly referred to as A Night Full of Rain in the US.

The romantic drama features Candice Bergen as an American photographer who meets and falls in love with an Italian journalist, played by Giancarlo Giannini with an arresting haughtiness. The Lina Wertmüller-directed narrative features flashbacks to the couple's earliest days falling in love and chasing each other across the world, from Italy to San Francisco. In addition to showcasing the couple's romance in bloom, though, things come to a terrible head as they engage in a fight on, you guessed it, a night full of rain. And to them, indeed, it does feel like the end of the world — their world, at least.

To be fair, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask) is simply a big screen adaptation of a 1969 guidebook of the same name, but it's still the filmmaker's fault that they committed this moniker to the marquee, with the asterisk untouched. Shortly after the book's release, Woody Allen adapted Dr. David Reuben's text to script and then directed the film adaptation in 1972.

Everything features a series of seven vignette chapters and covers all manner of risque material — "What Are Sex Perverts?" and "Do Aphrodisiacs Work?" are some of the more family-friendly chapters — and stars Allen as well as Gene Wilder, John Carradine, Louise Lasser, Jack Barry and more in a series of increasingly lewd and ludicrous substories. It wasn't Allen's most celebrated effort, as critics were less than impressed with the limper jokes of the raunchy film.

The name of this movie might seem more normal now that the film has found its way into the mass of cinematic best-of lists, but when it was released, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind's title sounded like gobbledygook (and if you think about it, it still kinda does). The romantic drama, co-written by Charlie Kaufman and director Michel Gondry, features Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet as a couple whose happiness has waned but are too attached to each other to endure being broken up.

Instead of getting over it in the usual way, they decide to have their memories of one another erased from their minds, and as they journey back to some of the sweeter and softer spots in their history, they start to have second thoughts about letting go of them for good. It's very sweet and strange and creative, but the title could have still been halved and still had the same effect. In fact, if you happen upon a film buff and talk about this one, chances are they'll refer to it simply as Eternal Sunshine.

This 1964 satire from Stanley Kubrick gives zany cinematic life to the long-standing fears that the United States of America and the Soviet Union might accidentally engage in a full-on nuclear conflict that wipes out all life on Earth. The character featured in the title is a German ex-Nazi recruited by the President of the United States as a scientific adviser in the War Room, and he has some disturbing intel about the Russians' capability to render the world uninhabitable at the click of a button with its so-called doomsday machine.

The movie is really centered on someone else, though. General Jack D. Ripper, who has clearly gone insane, is the one to watch, as he sends the order to bomb an ICBM station knowing good and well what will result from it and gleefully follows his bomb to its bitter end. Simply calling the movie Dr. Strangelove might be catchy enough, but it would be pretty duplicitous, as he's definitely not the central figure of the film.