Actors In The Most 0 Percent Rotten Tomatoes Movies
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Rotten Tomatoes has attracted controversy in Hollywood because of the way it reduces movie reviews to numbers, then calculates those numbers to create a percentage that's meant to tell the reader how good or bad a movie is. Some critics and filmmakers dislike the reductiveness of this method, feeling that it lacks nuance. That may be true, but it's still a useful tool to grade how movies were received by the critical community and the public. With that perspective in mind, we've assembled a list of movie stars who have appeared in a surprisingly high number of movies that received a 0 percent score.
These aren't necessarily bad actors. In fact, most of them are quite talented—their careers have just led them down strange and occasionally unfortunate paths. But it's still interesting to look at who has the most terrible movies under their belts—some of these stars will surprise you, while others...won't.
Corey Feldman
It's not easy being a grown-up child star. As a teenager in the 1980s, Corey Feldman was in movies that are still considered classics, like The Lost Boys, Goonies, and Stand By Me. Of course, even then, not every movie was a hit. For example, Dream a Little Dream, a sort of Big in reverse in which Feldman's body is possessed by the mind of a much older man, was a disaster. As he got older, good roles were much harder to find, but Feldman was determined to keep working, even if it meant playing a character named Phlegm in a terrible movie like Stepmonster. He's also reprised his Lost Boys character in two poorly received sequels, The Tribe and The Thirst. But the important thing is that he's still in the game, and not doing too badly for himself. He gets a lot of work as a voice actor these days, and seems to have his life much more together than he did in his youth.
Corey Feldman's 0 percent movies
Dream a Little Dream (1989)
Stepmonster (1993)
Lost Boys: The Tribe (2008)
Lost Boys: The Thirst (2010)
Cary Elwes
Cary Elwes is a talented and handsome actor who made a big splash as the male romantic lead in the 1987 comedic fantasy classic The Princess Bride, but somehow his career never quite got off the ground. He seemed too good-looking to be a character actor, but never established himself as a leading man. That's led to a long career of taking whatever parts he can get. He's been the dad in a sex comedy, and the district attorney in a crime thriller. He's played a creepy theatre owner and a creepy doctor in B-grade horror movies. He's had a multi-decade career as a working film actor, and that's nothing to sneeze at, but it's been a long time since he was in a mainstream project that drew much in the way of positive attention; his most high-profile release in recent years is arguably his Princess Bride memoir, published in 2014.
Cary Elwes's 0 percent movies
Edison Force (2006)
Behaving Badly (2014)
A Haunting in Cawdor (2016)
Don't Sleep (2017)
John Candy
The late John Candy is one of the all-time great comedic performers, but the sad truth about comedy is that while some things land and make everyone laugh, some attempts are inevitably going to miss. For every Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, there's a Wagons East. For every Stripes, there's a Once Upon a Crime. Sometimes you get to play an over-the-top radio DJ in Little Shop of Horrors, but then you end up voicing a horse opposite Bobcat Goldthwait in Hot to Trot. And appearing in the first National Lampoon's Vacation movie gets balanced out with a role in the third installment in the Cannonball Run series. John Candy always gave it his all, but some projects just can't be saved.
John Candy's 0 percent movies
Hot to Trot (1988)
Speed Zone (1989)
Once Upon a Crime (1991)
Wagons East! (1994)
Christian Slater
Christian Slater was a teen actor in the '80s, but while he's remained consistently famous in the decades since, he's also made some pretty questionable choices along the way. Run for the Money, for example, is a bomb of a crime thriller that's also known as Hard Cash (a movie having two completely different titles is always a bad sign). Then there's Basil, an unsuccessful costume drama in which Slater plays second banana to a young Jared Leto. In Assassin's Bullet, Slater is an FBI agent who uncovers a nearly nonsensical assassination plot. And in the horror film Playback, he plays a lecherous cop who helps set the plot in motion without being central to it. More recently, Slater has found a home as the title character on the acclaimed TV series Mr. Robot, which is working out better for him than most of the movies he's made in the past couple of decades
Christian Slater's 0 percent movies
Basil (1997)
Run for the Money (2002)
Playback (2002)
Assassin's Bullet (2012)
Danny Trejo
There aren't many true B-movie actors on this list, because if your whole filmography consists of little-seen low-budget films, not many will even be reviewed by enough critics to receive a Rotten Tomatoes ranking. But Danny Trejo is a special case—a true cult actor who's gained a surprising amount of mainstream fame thanks largely to his working relationship with director Robert Rodriguez, who's given him parts in movies like From Dusk Till Dawn and Spy Kids, as well as the lead in Machete and its sequel Machete Kills.
Along the way, Trejo has also lended his uniquely grizzled appearance and voice to some pretty questionable projects, such as the Charles Bronson vehicle Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects, Jean-Claude Van Damme's Desert Heat, and the Michael Madsen vehicle The Killing Jar. He also appeared in the fourth Crow movie, The Crow: Wicked Prayer, as well as the Los Angeles-based drama Living the Dream and the Los Angeles-based satire L.A. Slasher, neither of which won over critics even a little bit. Most recently, Trejo was in the Adam Sandler comedy western The Ridiculous Six, which is somehow less funny than most westerns that aren't comedies.
Danny Trejo's 0 percent movies
Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects (1989)
Desert Heat (1999)
The Crow: Wicked Prayer (2005)
Living the Dream (2006)
The Killing Jar (2010)
The Ridiculous Six (2015)
L.A. Slasher (2015)
Donald Sutherland
The only real reason Donald Sutherland makes this list is the length of his career. Sure, he's starred in well-reviewed movies from 1970's M*A*S*H to 1993's Six Degrees of Separation and 2012's The Hunger Games, but when you make movies nonstop for 50 years, you're bound to end up in some duds along the way. Sutherland costarred with Christian Slater in the aforementioned Assassin's Bullet, but that wasn't even his first disastrous assassination thriller—he'd already been in Shadow Conspiracy with Charlie Sheen. In 1984, he appeared in Crackers, a crime comedy that had been written for John Belushi, who died before he could make it, and which never really worked without him. He was the bad dad in the deeply unpleasant thriller Benefit of the Doubt. And he also appeared in the weird and widely disliked Nicholas Roeg effort Puffball. With a career like Donald Sutherland's, there's no reason to dwell on the bad stuff, but there's certainly plenty of it there if you look.
Donald Sutherland's 0 percent movies
Crackers (1984)
Benefit of the Doubt (1993)
Shadow Conspiracy (1997)
Puffball (2008)
Assassin's Bullet (2012)
Christopher Lambert
Remember Highlander 2: The Quickening? In case you don't, it's the ridiculously convoluted sequel to the pretty good sci-fi movie Highlander. Both films, and several other Highlander sequels, star Christopher Lambert. And of course, starring in a reasonably popular sci-fi franchise means getting cast in a bunch other sci-fi movies. Fortress 2 was also much worse a movie than Fortress (but probably still better than Highlander 2). Adrenalin: Fear the Rush sounds like the title of an extreme sports movie, but it's actually about a dystopian plague. And then there's Beowulf, an adaptation of the Old English epic poem which is set in the future for some reason, and stars Lambert in the title role. This is the sort of movie you end up in when you were the Highlander.
Christopher Lambert's 0 percent movies
Highlander 2: The Quickening (1991)
Adrenalin: Fear the Rush (1996)
Fortress 2: Re-Entry (1999)
Beowulf (1999)
Heather Graham
Heather Graham is a beautiful, charismatic, and talented actress, but her career has undeniably had its ups and downs. For one thing, Hollywood has a problem with both sexism and ageism. And while she'd been working since the '80s, she didn't really become a movie star until she was in Boogie Nights and Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. By then she was 30, and the film industry was unfortunately more interested in beautiful blondes who'd yet to reach that age. She kept working, of course, but she wasn't always offered top-level material. She starred in Killing Me Softly, which wanted to be an art film but was mostly just a mix of trashy and confusing. Father of Invention wanted to be a quirky dramedy, but had nothing going for it. She joined Cary Elwes as a token adult in the teen sex comedy Behaving Badly, and more recently starred in My Dead Boyfriend, an indie comedy that got lost in its own attempts at quirkiness and just came out unlikable. Heather Graham is an actress worth watching, but the same can't be said for all of her movies.
Heather Graham's 0 percent movies
Killing Me Softly (2003)
Father of Invention (2011)
Behaving Badly (2014)
My Dead Boyfriend (2016)
Gina Gershon
Gina Gershon also appeared in My Dead Boyfriend with Heather Graham, and is another actress who was aging out of ingenue roles by the time people noticed she existed. And anyway, playing a bisexual stripper in Showgirls and a butch lesbian ex-con in Bound, while getting her some considerable attention in the mid-'90s, was never going to lead to massive mainstream stardom. She's appeared in the incomprehensible arthouse noir film Lulu on the Bridge as well as Beer for My Horses, a movie written by and starring country singer Toby Keith, based on his song of the same name that glorifies vigilante violence. In 2017, she was in Bad Kids of Crestview Academy, which could best be described as an attempt to a do a horror version of The Breakfast Club, but with a much less impressive script. Gina Gershon is one of those actors who will try just about any sort of project, a bravery that only sometimes works out in her favor.
Gina Gershon's 0 percent movies
Lulu on the Bridge (1998)
Beer for My Horses (2008)
My Dead Boyfriend (2016)
Bad Kids of Crestview Academy (2017)
Tom Arnold
If you know who Tom Arnold is, there's no way it's surprising to find him on this list. After all, he's still most famous for marrying Roseanne Barr, and they were only married for four years—and have been divorced for more than 20. But that marriage came at the height of her fame, and so it lended him some fame of his own. That and a well-regarded performance in the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle True Lies led to starring roles in films like Big Bully, a lackluster buddy comedy co-starring Rick Moranis. Arnold built on that persona to play the mythical Boogeyman himself in the deeply weird children's fantasy Hansel and Gretel. In more recent years, he's mostly been cast as an inside joke, like in Dax Shepard's vanity project Brother's Justice. He teaches Sean Bean (TV's Ned Stark) to make pizza in the indie bore Any Day. If there's one thing you can say for Tom Arnold, it's that his career has at least been unusual.
Tom Arnold's 0 percent movies
Big Bully (1996)
Hansel & Gretel (2002)
Brother's Justice (2011)
Any Day (2015)
Steve Guttenberg
Thanks to movies like Cocoon, Three Men and a Baby, and Short Circuit, Steve Guttenberg was one of the most popular movie stars of the 1980s. He was probably most associated with the Police Academy movies, the first of which has the highest Rotten Tomatoes score of the series, at 41 percent. Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol earned a goose egg—and once the 1980s were over, Guttenberg's star also fell quickly. He starred in The Big Green, Disney's failed attempt to do a soccer version of the The Bad News Bears, and appeared in Casper: A Spirited Beginning, the decidedly unspirited prequel to the 1995 Casper film. In 2011, he returned to romantic lead territory in A Novel Romance, and it didn't go well.
These days a lot of younger people only know Steve Guttenberg's name as a punchline in the Simpsons episode "Homer the Great," and even that episode is more than 20 years old. That just demonstrates how fickle fame can be, and how nobody really gets to choose what they're be remembered for. Some stars shine bright enough to overcome the shadows of their worst projects, but others, no matter how hard they try, will be remembered for the bad choices they made.
Steve Guttenberg's 0 percent movies
Police Academy 4 – Citizens on Patrol (1987)
The Big Green (1995)
Casper: A Spirited Beginning (1997)
A Novel Romance (2011)