10 Greatest Guilty Pleasure Movies of the Last 100 Years, Ranked

A Century of Cringe — The 10 Greatest Guilty Pleasure Movies of the Last 100 Years, Ranked Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart in TwilightImage via Summit Entertainment By  Luc Haasbroek Published 11 minutes ago Luc Haasbroek is a writer and videographer from Durban, South Africa. He has been writing professionally about pop culture for eight years. Luc's areas of interest are broad: he's just as passionate about psychology and history as he is about movies and TV.  He's especially drawn to the places where these topics overlap.  Luc is also an avid producer of video essays and looks forward to expanding his writing career. When not writing, he can be found hiking, playing Dungeons & Dragons, hanging out with his cats, and doing deep dives on whatever topic happens to have captured his interest that week. Sign in to your Collider account follow Follow followed Followed Like Like Thread Log in Here is a fact-based summary of the story contents: Try something different: Show me the facts Explain it like I’m 5 Give me a lighthearted recap

Guilty pleasures are the movies we shouldn’t love, but do anyway. They’re campy, chaotic, overacted, overscored, and occasionally nonsensical, but damn, are they entertaining. Something about them just works, proving that movies can be trashy and fun at the same time.

The ten titles below represent some of the most ridiculous movies ever made, but ones that are oddly entertaining in their own right without ever abandoning what makes them so spectacularly trashy. They span a range of styles and subgenres, from cult trash and neon-soaked melodrama to pure action-movie delirium. However, they're all impossible to look away from, for better or for worse.

10 ‘Showgirls’ (1995)

Elizabeth Berkley dances on stage with a pole in Showgirls.Image via MGM

"It must be weird..." Few films have been more critically annihilated (and more passionately reclaimed) than Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls. The plot (such as it is) follows Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley), a drifter with a volcanic temper and even sharper dance moves who arrives in Las Vegas determined to become a star. Her story is a gaudy climb up the strip-club–to–showgirl ladder, complete with betrayals, catfights, suspiciously slippery swimming pools, hammy acting, and dialogue that feels like it was transmitted from an alien planet.

Audiences hated all this on release. The movie was a box office bomb and critical Kryptonite, and poor Berkley's career was pretty much derailed as a result. That said, Showgirls has since developed something of a cult following. Fans enjoy its operatic camp, bizarre sincerity, and general excess. Some would even argue that it's an effective satire of show business and the commodification of bodies.

9 ‘Road House’ (1989)

Patrick Swayze smiling in the bar in Road HouseImage via United Artists

"Be nice… until it’s time not to be nice." Road House is a bar fight stretched into a feature film. Patrick Swayze stars as Dalton, a "cooler," the classier term the movie invents for a bouncer philosopher who practices tai chi at dawn and beats thugs unconscious by night. He's hired to clean up the Double Deuce, a Missouri roadhouse overrun by corruption and chaos. Soon, he’s battling a local crime boss, falling for a doctor named Doc (Kelly Lynch), and ripping out at least one man’s throat with his bare hands.

Hand-to-hand combat, monster trucks, cheesy one-liners, and a villain who owns everything in town. The film is so macho it frequently verges on self-parody, but Swayze’s earnestness keeps everything anchored. Ultimately, Road House thrives on its own absurdity. It’s loud, silly, and, in its own way, wildly entertaining, proving that sometimes all you need is roundhouse kicks and sincerity.

8 ‘Point Break’ (1991)

Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze outdoors with a surfboard in Point Break.Image via 20th Century Studios

"I’m not a crook, Bodhi! You are!" Undercover cops and philosophical surfers shouldn’t mix, but in Point Break, they collide in electrifying fashion. Keanu Reeves plays Johnny Utah, an FBI agent investigating the "Ex-Presidents," a group of bank robbers led by charismatic surfer Bodhi (Swayze again, at his most spiritually chaotic). Utah infiltrates their circle, torn between duty and the seductive freedom of Bodhi's worldview. From here, the plot devolves into pure pulp, replete with skydiving bromance, zen lectures about the sea, and a heist gone spectacularly wrong.

Nevertheless, director Kathryn Bigelow elevates this trash into a kind of kinetic poetry. The movie is a guilty pleasure because it’s both ridiculous and genuinely moving, an action movie with soul. The chemistry between Reeves and Swayze is its secret weapon: half rivalry, half love story, all adrenaline. For all these reasons, Point Break remains the high-water mark for bro-mysticism and surfer-criminal cinema. Admittedly not a very big subgenre, but still.

7 ‘Flash Gordon’ (1980)

"Flash! I love you! But we only have fourteen hours to save the Earth!" Imagine a comic book, a glam rock opera, and a Halloween store exploding at once. That’s Flash Gordon. Based on the classic serial, it follows football star Flash (Sam J. Jones), who’s abducted into outer space with journalist Dale Arden (Melody Anderson) and mad scientist Hans Zarkov (Topol). Their mission: stop Ming the Merciless (Max von Sydow, magnificently committed) from destroying Earth.

Everything in this movie is Technicolor insanity, including neon costumes, rubber monsters, melodramatic line readings, and a killer Queen soundtrack. The plot is almost irrelevant; the point is spectacle. Hawkmen shouting "DIVE,” Ming seducing and threatening everyone in sight, and Flash winning battles by playing space football. It all adds up to joyful nonsense, a sugary overdose of retro sci-fi. Flash Gordon embraces its camp so wholeheartedly that it becomes impossible not to enjoy.

6 ‘Mommie Dearest’ (1981)

Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford in Mommie DearestImage via Paramount Pictures

"No… wire… hangers! Ever!" Truly one of the hammiest movies ever, so much so that the production company tried to market it as a comedy despite its incredibly dark content. Based on Christina Crawford’s memoir, Mommie Dearest dramatizes her (Mara Hobel and Diana Scarwid) abusive childhood under Hollywood icon Joan Crawford (Faye Dunaway). The plot explores Crawford's violent perfectionism, her volatile relationship with her adopted children, and her crumbling career.

In the role, Dunaway delivers one of the most unhinged performances ever captured on film. She's intense, larger than life, terrifying, and unintentionally hilarious. In other words, the movie attempts serious drama but lands somewhere between surreal melodrama and midnight-movie spectacle. Its cringe is Shakespearean. Christina Crawford denounced Mommie Dearest, calling it "grotesque," and Dunaway laments its negative impact on her career, but a small cult fanbase enjoys the movie as a kind of misguided pantomime.

5 ‘Face/Off’ (1997)

Wide-eyed and mouth ajar, Castor Troy (Nicolas Cage) wears a priest outfit and stands amid a swarm of white-clothed churchgoers in 'Face/Off' (1997).Image via Paramount Pictures

"I want to take his… face… off." A masterpiece of ridiculousness. The plot: FBI agent Sean Archer (John Travolta) switches faces with terrorist Castor Troy (Nicolas Cage) to infiltrate his organization, only for Troy to wake up and steal Archer’s life. What follows is two hours of slo-mo shootouts, doves flying in churches, and Cage playing Travolta playing Cage. The stars give dueling performances, each seemingly trying to out-ham the other, even if trying to be more melodramatic than Nic Cage is always a bad idea.

It's over-the-top mayhem, nonsense, executed with complete commitment by director John Woo. The emotional scenes are overwrought, the action scenes spectacular, and the premise scientifically impossible, yet that's the beauty of it. Face/Off is essentially a live-action cartoon where passion and chaos make up for a glaring lack of logic. The recipe paid off: Face/Off grossed a whopping $245m, despite (or because of) its myriad flaws.

4 ‘Con Air’ (1997)

Nicolas Cage with long hair stands in front of an airplane and smiles and looks off camera in Con Air.Image via Buena Vista Pictures Distribution

"Put the bunny back in the box." Cage strikes again. If you distilled the 1990s into one movie (abs, explosions, power ballads, and flowing hair), it would be Con Air. Cage leads the cast as Cameron Poe, an ex-Army Ranger jailed for defending his wife. On his release day, he’s put on a prisoner transport plane full of dangerous criminals, including Cyrus "The Virus" (John Malkovich, icy genius). Naturally, the inmates take over the plane. Airborne insanity erupts, jam-packed with shootouts, hijackings, sandstorm crashes, and one of the most excessive Vegas finales in action cinema.

Con-Air is loud, goofy, and unbelievably fun. The enjoyment comes from the exaggeration. Every villain has a gimmick, every line is quotable, and Cage delivers his heroic quips with gusto. Nobody takes themselves seriously, nor should they. Con Air is popcorn cinema at its most shameless, and that shamelessness is exactly why it endures.

3 ‘Twilight’ (2008)

Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart in Twilight (2008) as Edward and Bella. Bella is standing closer to the screen, looking concerned, while Edward is standing behind her, looking at the back of her headImage Via Summit Entertainment

"Hold on tight, spider monkey." Twilight is definitely not good, but it's not quite as abysmal as its harshest critics make out. It's a straightforward teen romance with supernatural tropes sprinkled on top: shy high schooler Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) falls in love with the broody, sparkling vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson). Their forbidden romance unfolds among trees, rainstorms, baseball games in thunder, and melodramatic declarations of eternal love. It's all moody and stylized to the max.

The awkwardness is part of the charm. This is adolescent yearning turned into myth, very much a time capsule of the late 2000s. The special effects wobble, the dialogue is famously stiff, and the tone is unintentionally hilarious, but the atmosphere is intoxicating. Twilight became a cultural phenomenon for a reason: it understood what its young target market was looking for, and delivered it in spades. Compared to the tepid romances that would follow (see: Fifty Shades of Grey), it's practically high art.

2 ‘Flashdance’ (1983)

jennifer beals in flashdanceImage via Paramount Pictures

"When you give up your dream, you die." Flashdance is a decidedly 1980s blend of sweat, ambition, dance montages, and the greatest leg warmers ever captured on film. Jennifer Beals has top billing as Alex Owens, a welder by day and nightclub dancer by night who dreams of becoming a professional ballerina. She trains, romances her boss (Michael Nouri), and fights for her shot at a prestigious dance audition. However, all these story beats play second fiddle to the vibes.

The film is a music video stretched over 95 minutes, awash in neon lighting, synth-pop anthems, and triumphant slow-motion choreography. It’s emotionally simple but visually irresistible, embodying the optimism (and kitsch) of its era. Whether Alex’s final audition makes you weep or laugh, Flashdance remains a time capsule of pure feel-good spectacle. It connected with viewers on release, bringing in $201m against a budget of just $7m.

1 ‘The Room’ (2003)

Image via Wiseau-Films

"You’re tearing me apart, Lisa!" The Room is it, the anti-Citizen Kane, the zenith of so-bad-it's-good. Often called the worst movie ever made, The Room has transcended failure and become a cultural phenomenon. Written, directed, produced by, and starring Tommy Wiseau, it tells the story of Johnny, his fiancée Lisa (Juliette Danielle), and his best friend Mark (Greg Sestero), though that summary barely matters, because the film follows no coherent logic.

Scenes start and stop without explanation, characters appear and vanish, and the dialogue is totally unlike normal human speech. Yet, its honesty and heart make it all hypnotic. Wiseau tries so hard to make a serious drama that the film becomes an unintentional comedy genius. Football tossing in tuxedos, flower shops, rooftop green screens; every moment is unforgettable. The Room is now a rite of passage, a midnight-movie miracle, and the ultimate guilty pleasure. It’s awful. It’s amazing. It’s iconic.

The Room R Drama Romance Release Date June 27, 2003

Cast Juliette Danielle, Robyn Paris, Greg Sestero, Kyle Vogt, Carolyn Minnott, Tommy Wiseau, Dan Janjigian, Philip Haldiman, mike holmes Runtime 91minutes Director Tommy Wiseau Writers Tommy Wiseau Genres Drama, Romance Powered by Expand Collapse

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