Web Video / Best of the Worst

"So we're gonna watch some movies today..."

— Jay, at the very beginning of the first episode

Best of the Worst is a regular online show from RedLetterMedia in which a few members of the production company will watch and review several obscure and terrible direct-to-video films. After a rousing discussion, the cast votes on which movie is the "Best of the Worst" and which is just the worst. At the end of each episode, the physical copy of the worst movie is (usually) destroyed in some inventive way.

Regular episodes feature three movies picked by the staff beforehand. Several spin-off varieties of episodes feature different methods of video selection:

• Wheel of the Worst uses three spins of a Wheel of Decisions to randomly select the discussion material. Videos in these segments are not movies but an assortment of "weird" videos such as Instructional Films, promotional videos and live event recordings, mostly acquired by viewer contribution.
• Plinketto: Three B-movies are randomly selected by a giant plinko board.
• Battle of the Genres: The gang watches one video from three different genres.
• Black Spine Edition: The gang selects unlabeled videos so they don't know what they'll be watching. This has since evolved into a game, Junka, where two members play a form of Jenga with the VHS cassettes. The group is then forced to watch every single tape pulled by the winner. Only a few of the tapes are actually reviewed during the roundtable.
• Spotlight: Mike, Jay, Rich and an occasional fourth man/guest focus an entire episode on a single, pre-selected film that, while terrible, is something they enjoy watching. The episodes are typically shorter and, since there's only one film, it's the best of the worst "winner" by default.

The cast of each show is typically composed of four variable members, including Mike Stoklasa, Jay Bauman, Rich Evans, Jack Packard, Josh "The Wizard" Davis and, in more recent years, Tim Higgins. Early episodes often included Mike's girlfriend Jessi Nakles. Some episodes feature special guest members, such as actress/comedienne Gillian Bellinger (co-star of Red Letter Media's feature film Feeding Frenzy) and Canadian visual effects artists Colin Cunningham and Jim Maxwell (both of whom worked on Space Cop); further, celebrity guests of varying degree have included screenwriter Max Landis^note Whose appearances have since been scrubbed from the channel due to several sexual abuse claims against him, comic book artist Freddie Williams II, actor/fight choreographer/Giftedly Bad director Len Kabasinski, actor/writer/director Simon Barrett, actor Macaulay Culkin (alongside Shawn DePasquale of Bunny Ears in most of his appearances), comedian/actor Patton Oswalt, and actor Jack Quaid.

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Best of the Worst gives examples of:

A - D

• Accent Upon The Wrong Syllable:
  • The crew gets a lot of mileage on the actors of Russian Terminator clearly reading all their English lines phonetically, leading to hilarious line reads like, "That's what friends are for?"^note It wasn't a question — the line reading made it sound like it was a question.
  "Kenny Rogers": What the hell is this?
  Phil Davis: I['ve] SEen one of THOse beFOre.
  • A video featured in the sixth Wheel of the Worst episode is called "Kids and Airbags"; one of the guests, however, pronounces it "Kid Sand Airbags". This pronunciation continues in the seventh "Wheel of the Worst."
  • As with Half in the Bag, Mike likes to intentionally mispronounce names and words as a joke.
  • Invoked by Rich who claims that if the videos were edited to remove his frequent mispronunciations, they would have to splice seven different takes together simply to allow him to say "fire extinguisher", resulting in this trope.
  Rich Evans: FIre exTINGguiSHER.
• Accidental Innuendo: invoked The crew got some mileage out of an old man describing how he got hurt in Hands of Steel.
  Professor Olsen: It wasn't especially large, but it felt hard.
  [Mike and Rich crack up.]
  Jay: What?
  Jack: He fucked his spleen...
  • When they're watching Randy Butcher's Backyard Stunting in Wheel of the Worst #9, they make a few jokes about the Ho Yay going on. Afterwards, everything in the video starts sounding like gay euphemisms to them.
    Randy Butcher: Here, Neil's not ready, and I won't move into the kick until we make eye contact.
    
    Randy Butcher: (on safety mats) If you don't happen to have one, don't be shy about approaching your local YMCA.
    
    Randy Butcher: The knee-strike to the head requires that your partner bend over on his own.
  • More often than not, the grappling demonstrations in "Kimo's Fierce Fighting: No-Holds Barred" look an awful lot like gay sex; it doesn't help that the camera holds on each position for an uncomfortably long period of time. Like with the Randy Butcher example above, the Ho Yay doesn't escape anyone's attention:
    Rich: This guy [Kimo] is going to pound you. He's on top of you, he's going to give you a severe pounding.
• Actor Allusion: In episode 101, Rich dons the ape costume he wore in Gorilla, Interrupted.
• Actually Pretty Funny: Occasionally, the crew will laugh at the parts that they were supposed to laugh at, and take the time to congratulate the film when this happens. A notable example occurs in Low Blow, when Leo Fong spends the entirety of the film's ending credits trying (and failing) to start his car.
• Advertised Extra: A frequently seen and discussed trope. Low-budget movies will often lure out a faded celebrity with name recognition for a single, low-effort scene so they can put the celebrity's name at the top of the box.
  • The two top billed actors in Bigfoot vs D.B. Cooper (Eric Roberts and Linnea Quigley) don't physically appear in the film at all. Eric Roberts only narrates the movie as the main character's older self, and Linnea Quigley has one voice-only line as the stewardess D.B. Cooper hands the note to.
  • The crew's disgust at The Tomb was in part because top-billed Sybil Danning and Cameron Mitchell appeared for two and eight minutes respectively.
  • The gang is often disappointed by the short screen times given to Cameron Mitchell, a favorite of the show. They often joke about how Mitchell usually appears in only few scenes and is usually sitting down, giving the minimal effort possible.
  • This is what they thought happened with Robert Z'dar in Future War, as his character gets defeated in a seemingly lethal manner mere minutes after he's introduced. He does, however, return for the climactic fight.^note Robert Z'Dar was hired for the final fight, then the producers decided to insert him into the earlier scene.
  • Top Slots - Spotting The Best has possibly one of the most extreme examples of all time. The box advertises a "celebrity cameo", which turns out to be a seconds-long still shot of a magazine cover with Jay Leno on it.
  • A*P*E advertises that the giant ape will fight a giant shark and a giant snake; in the actual movie, the fight against the shark is hilariously one-sided because they just had the actor wrestle with a real dead shark, and the "fight" against the snake consists entirely of the ape finding the snake clung to a tree, picking it up, and tossing it at the camera.
• The Alcoholic:
  • Mike's love of booze is Played for Laughs.
  • Jack sadly was a real life example of one, though he was fairly good at hiding it for the most part. Thankfully he's been a recovering alcoholic for two years now.
  • The crew speculates Cameron Mitchell was one late in life, as his characters have a tendency to drink a lot; he also seems to have a problem with slurred speech and staying alert. His worst showing is in Low Blow where he barely moves and seems to have trouble staying awake the entire time.
  • They also speculate that Dan Haggerty is an alcoholic as well. He also tends to slur his words as well, which is prominently shown in The Christmas Light where it sounds like he's struggling to narrate what's happening.
• The Alleged Car: Leo Fong's car in Low Blow, which repeatedly refuses to start during the movie.
• Alternative Character Interpretation
  • In-Universe, Gary Coleman is thought to be an "all-powerful deity" in his own safety video, spying on and magically tormenting a pair of children for the sake of his own amusement and impressing a hot nurse.
  • The crew discuss the possibility that "Backdoor Mayor", from the same video, really did have a legitimate UPS package for the boy's mother, and the kid screwed up the shipment by not letting him inside.
  • Though the protagonist of Exterminator 2 is meant to be a straitlaced, sympathetic hero, he is agreed upon by the crew to instead be an Asshole Victim, the Designated Hero, a complete simpleton, and even a Villain Protagonist. Rich also speculates that the one scene in which the actor portraying the Exterminator actually tried to act was filmed first, immediately after which the actor was diagnosed with MS.
  • The ninja master in How To Be a Teenage Ninja is interpreted as a pedo because he trapped children in a cave and had them do weird exercises.
  • In Black Cougar, due to fact that the old man creator of the titular superhero is the only established creator of androids in the movie and the villains have at least one human-looking android just like Cougar whose origin is never explained, they theorize that either the villainous android is one of his creations that went rogue, or that he's actually The Man Behind the Man.
  • Kevin in Home Alone 4: Taking Back The House is thought to be a sadist, considering how much he enjoys watching the invading crooks being tortured by his traps in the movie, and Marv is thought to be a masochist who keeps invading wherever Kevin is because he wants to be tortured by him.
  • The gang theorizes that the eponymous star of Christmas With Dennis is in fact a serial killer/kidnapper who tortures his victims with horrible Christmas music before disposing all evidence of his crimes.
• Amusing Injuries: Rich will get horribly hurt or maimed almost every episode.
• And Starring: Not only does Rich Evans get this treatment, but he's also the only cast member credited by his full name.
• Angrish: A memorable example by Rich during the screening of Ryan's Babe.
  Rich: WHADDAHELLYOUWHANOHEDONTEVENLOOKLIKEHE GIVES A SHIT!!!
• Angst? What Angst?: invoked
  • The crew got very impatient with the protagonist of Ghetto Blaster getting ticked into revenge mode, even as he reacts with little emotion to his father getting shot and killed in front of him and his Token Black Friend being set on fire by thugs.
  • Carmen from Action U.S.A. doesn't seem to be concerned about her own well-being despite the many attempts on her life.
    Carmen: You guys gotta learn to relax.
    Jack: Miss, you were almost killed this morning. Twice.
• Anthropic Principle: After watching the movie Cyclone, Rich points out how nonsensical it was for the evil corporation to murder the titular motorcycle's inventor to get their hands on it, when he was working for them, and as such they already had full ownership of the technology. Jay flatly explains that they did it because otherwise the rest of the movie wouldn't happen.
• Anti-Humor: The opening vignettes in which the cast announce the videos they're about to watch are often filled with intentionally stilted acting and terrible jokes.
• Anyone Can Die: Discussed as part of the unusual charm of Surviving Edged Weapons. While the fictional segments are otherwise absurdly overdramatic and encourage killing civilians as the very first resort, not the last, they are realistic in one way — a situation can turn deadly when a blade is involved, and since you're not Murtaugh and Riggs, you're not immune from the consequences. Nearly every scenario is guaranteed to end in some kind of casualty or serious injury, if not one or more deaths, and Rich mentions that he was on the edge of his seat during them.
• Anything but That!; Jay and Jessi's reaction to The Dance of Birth being the third pick on The Wheel of the Worst:
  Jay: Aaaaaah. Fuck you, The Dance of Birth!
  Jessi: (horrified) Can we do this over?! Please, I don't want that one!
• The Artifact: Jay admitted in episode 76 that Battle of the Genres has become this: In the early days of the show, they did way more themed episodes, such as dinosaur movies, but now almost every episode has movies from different genres. They still use the gimmick in the episode anyway.
• Artistic License – History: Bigfoot vs D.B. Cooper is supposed to take place immediately after the D.B. Cooper incident in November 1971, even though it makes no attempt to present it as taking place place any time other than 2014, when it was filmed (and it doesn't look like it was shot in November either for that matter).
• Asshole Victim: The crew describe the protagonist of Exterminator 2 as this, pointing out that "he set people on fire first."
• Atlantis: Gets risen in Raiders Of Atlantis and apparently has people that dress like Mad Max-wannabes and use technology like katanas, bows and arrows, motorcycles, and cars.
• Author Appeal:
  • The gang identifies the author appeal in a number of videos:
    • The Killer Eye has many, many shots of shirtless beefcake in their underwear with their crotches thrust toward the camera and rubbing their chests when they see the monster. The crew accuse the director of getting off on the male flesh. It's not a surprise David DeCoteau is an openly gay horror film director.
    • Bigfoot vs D.B. Cooper, another of David DeCoteau's films, doesn't even bother setting up the fanservice shots of shirtless men hanging around with each other and jogging through the woods. In fact, the actual plot involving Bigfoot and D.B. Cooper is practically a footnote and the blatant and unsubtle fanservice takes up most of the movie's run time.
    • The guys are particularly hard on director Donald Farmer for having a fetish for young women suffering seizures on dirty ground and vomiting. This becomes blatantly obvious over the course of Shark Exorcist, where this scenario plays out repeatedly. When watching his Dorm of the Dead, the gang brace themselves for more. Sure enough, the plot finds a way for a young woman to have a seizure and collapse onto filthy ground.
  • Members of the gang have their own examples:
    • Rich bemoans that Jack wasn't present for the viewing of Hospital Clowning, as (in his words), "Jack is a fucking clown weirdo" and could've provided valuable insight regarding the video's "advice."
    • Mike has a fondness for the elderly, even though he makes the majority of old jokes. In one episode, for example, he praises Christine Hamilton for starting the Geritol Follies and refuses to let the anniversary tape be destroyed, even though he was leading the charge on the riffing during the actual viewing ("Even our old jokes got old.") During the "Junka" episode, Rich warns Mike that he's going to be old soon and he's going to get major Laser-Guided Karma. Mike agrees, then claims to have invented "The Osteoperosis Dance."
    • Everyone in the gang loves veteran B-movie actor Cameron Mitchell, causing them to celebrate whenever he's in the cast. When discussing him, they'll often cut to his best sequence, shouting, "Will ya close the fucking door?" in Terror in Beverly Hills.
    • The gang loves the works of Neil Breen, to the point that they had one of his movies encased in glass "for emergencies."
    • Jay's love of Giallo and similarly hyperviolent and sexually charged European horror films really comes into play with some of the horror movies featured on this show; notably, he's the only one not Screaming at Squick during the infamous Body Horror scene from Faust: Love of the Damned.
• Author Tract:
  • Neil Breen gives a long, rambling and disturbing screed in a news station set, saying he'll kill 300 million people who have angered him in Pass Thru.
  • The beginning of Twin Dragon Encounter asserts that its heroes are "real men," not like those "plastic heroes" from Hollywood.
• Awesome Mccoolname: The protagonist of Turbulence 3 is named Slade Craven which amuses the crew so much they reference the name in other movies that have amazingly named characters..
• Awful Truth: In Wheel of the Worst #5, The group slow realization as to what the mysterious SOS tape is: A compilation of Christian music videos by the fundamentalist cult the Children of God, covering women in the workplace, abortion, the rapture and barcodes. To add to it, it's in Japanese.
• Back for the Dead: The Wheel of the Worst returns for a 14th episode... and is promptly split in half by Mike.
• Back from the Dead:
  • Despite a rather horrific fate in Half in the Bag, George Lucas shows up at the end of the ''Star Wars Holiday Special Part 2" review.
  • Rich Evans is mauled to death by the Showbiz Pizza Bear and returns as a ghost at the end of the 2015 Halloween special. He returns exactly one episode later. He tries to explain how he revived, but he is bluntly told that nobody cares. Max Landis even tells him he should have stayed dead.
  • The Wheel of the Worst is unceremoniously dumped after Wheel of the Worst #4. It comes back a few weeks later. it returns as the Wheel of Misfortune in Wheel of the Worst #15 after Mike knocks it over and splits it in two at the end of #14.
• Bad "Bad Acting": A fade-in of a Christmas Special of the Best of the Worst has the crew seated at a table and "discussing" amongst themselves, a la daytime talk shows. Rich is clearly looking at no one, moving his mouth without speaking, and absurdly gesticulating with his arms.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • At the beginning of R.O.T.O.R., "Back Problems" spends several needless onscreen minutes preparing coffee, retrieving carrots from his fridge, and walking across his front lawn to his horse. When he finally gets there, he gives the horse the coffee and eats the carrots himself. Rich is not amused.
  • In Plinketto #8, Jay and Mike nervously wait for their special guest star to emerge from the door they've built. Finally, he arrives. It's the star of The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Rich Evans! Rich then walks up to Patton Oswalt and instructs him to read the name of the first tape.
  • For the 100th episode, every slot on the Plinketto board is filled with a copy of Nukie. They watch a Neil Breen film instead.
• Bait-and-Switch Comment:
  • Done when discussing the crew's motivation for destroying their copy of Ninja Vengeance.
  Mike: We need to get vengeance on[...] this movie.
  Jay: Oh, I get it.
  • As Jack is about to spin the wheel for the third tape after they've already watched How to Seduce A Woman Through Hypnosis and How To Get Revenge:
    Mike: Jack, it's time for you to spin the wheel, and you better land on something good. Cause I've just learned plenty of ways to get revenge on you! I'm going to hypnotize and rape you... 'cause I really didn't learn anything from the last tape.
• Beam Me Up, Scotty!: invokedInverted in the Spotlight episode on Hollywood Cop. Jay quotes Cameron Mitchell's character ("Every day ends with a Tums festival!") and Rich believes Jay is mixing it up with Dale Cummings' character from a later Amir Shervan film, Samurai Cop. Rich got it wrong, as repeated inserts of the "Tums festival" line hammer home.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: This is pretty much the standard for the series: Whatever tape the gang shows the most interest in watching will turn out to be the worst, and the tape the gang shows the most hatred and disdain for will turn out to be the best thing they watch that episode.
  • Ever since the Wheel of the Worst was introduced, the crew have waited for the chance to watch Tree Stand Safety. When it finally happens the video switches between their excitement before watching it and their bored reactions watching it.
  • It happens again on "Wheel of the Worst #6" when Jessi moves the wheel secretly so it lands on American Flatulators, which turns out to be god-awful.
  • Inverted. Rich clearly didn't want to watch Dog Sitter. But he and the rest of the crew find it more entertaining than the other VHS tapes they watched in "Wheel of the Worst #7" because of its bizarre scenes and chaotic editing. Of course, that isn't saying much, considering its competition.
  • invokedDisappointed with their previous draws in "Wheel of the Worst #10", the guys rig the wheel to consist solely of Exploding Varmints, Vol. 1. While the sick novelty of it is hysterical at first, it turns out the entire thing is indeed just a snuff film of gophers and prairie dogs getting blown up with rifles, despite its pretense of being an instructional video about safely hunting on other people's property. The footage soon cuts to them looking extremely bored and sullen.
  • After four previous episodes in which Jack never gets to drop the Plinketto ball, he's finally given a chance. When the ball lands on Princess Warrior, everyone immediately berates him and treats him like a jerk who ruined their night.
  • While preparing to view Pocket Ninjas, Josh notes that they have two versions of the film, one of which is from Universal Studios. Rich claims that he doesn't want to watch the Universal version for fear that they may have tried to improve the film through editing and that he wants to watch the worst version possible. The viewing of the film ends with a frustrated Rich throwing furniture around the room.
• Better than a Bare Bulb: They frequently make jokes about the video's production and how the context of shots will change in the edit. For example, all of their skits introducing the movies they're watching are filmed before they see the actual movies, resulting in the guys giving vague, generic opinions on a movie they haven't seen yet.
• Better than Sex: The alien drug in Alien Private Eye is said to feel almost as good as sex. Rich wonders why anyone would want to take the drug, since the drug seems extraordinary painful, with the users grabbing their head and screaming in agony.
• invoked Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • In described movies:
    • The climactic battle with the snake in Hard Ticket to Hawaii, which has no relevance to the rest of the film's plot. The scene earlier in the movie involving an assassin riding a skateboard while carrying a blow-up doll also gets this reaction.
    • The ending sequence of The Amazing Bulk, which features the Bulk jogging through a disjointed multitude of stock CGI locales populated by a leprechaun, a kid playing soccer during a helicopter air strike, and a hostile, lightning-hurling Zeus. The crew declare it the most baffling thing they've ever watched.
    • The five-second shot of the creepy birthday clown in Bloody Birthday, who has no significance to the plot but provides the movie's only genuinely frightening moment.
    • From Crazy Fat Ethel II, the lengthy scene of the spider-guy erratically moving around a small section of the backyard. The group speculates that, during filming, the camera was pointing in the wrong direction and filming the director instead of the actual scene.
    • The scene from Psycho From Texas in which the titular psycho forces a young female bartender to strip naked and dance as he pours beer all over her. The crew explains that, though it could have been a genuinely well-done piece of disturbing character-building in a different context, it comes out of nowhere, clashes wildly with the rest of the film, and gives the impression that the director made the whole movie out of a Sick and Wrong urge to film that one scene.
    • Near the end of Johnson Family Christmas Dinner, everyone decides to go to bed after having an argument. Jay points out that they're apparently sleeping during the day, and Rich jokes that they're actually a family of Blaculas. Right after he says this, one of the family members is shown to be sleeping in the corner standing up with his arms folded over his chest like a vampire. It comes out of nowhere and there is no explanation for why he's sleeping like this.
  • Whole described movies in context of the show:
    • Miami Connection, to such a degree that it wins the title of Best of the Worst on this basis alone.
    • Not only does The Aftermath's tone and content shift wildly between family-friendliness, gut-wrenching violence, and nihilistic despair, but all of the film's darkest content is set to music reminiscent of Looney Tunes.
    • The Dance of Birth, a.k.a. "the greatest movie that David Lynch never made."
    • Shapeshifter is described as at least five completely separate movies (or potential elements of one miniseries) packed into a single, incomprehensible children's film.
    • The Item. A movie made almost entirely out of meaningless stylistic gestures and failed attempts at Rule of Cool. And then there's the sex scene between a woman and an alien slug at the end.
    • Double Down, where director/writer/star Neil Breen portrays (in Rich Evans' words) "the world's greatest secret agent/soldier/hacker/computer scientist/biotechnology-developing terrorist with magic cancer powers." The plot only thickens from there, with magic rocks, ghosts of dead wives and parents, cryptic messages written in blood, deadly invisible force fields, Neil Breen's ballsack, cans of tuna, and other "meaningless, empty stuff with no purpose" leading the group to agree that it's the weirdest movie they've ever seen. invoked The next film the crew review, Pass Thru, is more disturbing than random, but they still find it incomprehensible.
    • Deathstalker is considered this due to the constant Gratuitous Rape and Soundtrack Dissonance in the Sword and Sandal Heroic Fantasy.
    • Pocket Ninjas not only consists of six long Training Montages, but it seems to have been completely edited way out of order. In addition, Robert Z'Dar's scenes consist of him completely making a fool of himself, such as acting like one of The Three Stooges or bouncing on balloons.
    • Dangerous Men is directly compared to Double Down in terms of incomprehensibility.
    • Ryan's Babe baffled the panel with its plot of utterly random events to such an extent that the pre-discussion movie montage is limited to shots of the panel exclaiming, "Wait, what?" over and over and over again.
    • Shark Exorcist ends up being an incomprehensible mess that consists mostly of women writhing on the ground, subplots that go nowhere, and a Gainax Ending only about 45 minutes into its 70-minute runtime. What follows that are two completely unrelated scenes in the Leave the Camera Running variety, one of a random woman sunbathing, being creeped on and photographed by a pervert, and then suddenly stabbed to death by the nun from the intro; the second cuts in halfway through the credits and is just an adolescent girl wandering around a public aquarium, playing with plush sharks from the gift shop, and then leaning against the wall while rubbing a plastic shark all over her face and kissing it. They end up calling it the creepiest movie they've ever screened, just not for the reasons the creator probably intended.
    • Diamond Cobra vs The White Fox is so incomprehensible that Mike and Jay end up making it a Spotlight Episode just to spring it on Rich, who had never seen it. The bizarre plot about two cursed necklaces and aliens is impossible to follow because of how little explanation there is for what's going on and the terrible audio work rendering a good chunk of the dialogue unintelligible anyway. That's not even to mention the fact that the movie also has at least a few specific examples in it, like a scene in a prison where a female guard accuses a male inmate of being her baby's father (and apparently phasing through the bars to appear inside the cell with him in the process), when neither character appears before or after this scene.
  • Otherwise in context of the show:
    • Jay, for no apparent reason, wears a tuxedo during the discussion segments of Episode 4. No one addresses it in the video. It was apparently in response to fan criticism of his wardrobe in previous episodes.
• Big "NO!":
  • First, while watching Xtro when that scene of a woman giving birth to a fully grown man Jessi combines this with Rapid-Fire "No!". Then, all six members of the group when they watch the scene where the grandma smashes the pet snake into bloody pieces. Jessi even gives a high-pitched scream to complement the guys' visible revulsion.
  • The crew all say "Oh, NO!" in reaction to the opening flashback murder in Crazy Fat Ethel II — due not to the murder itself, but the cheap VHS production value.
  • Rich's reaction to the wheel of the worst landing on Dog Sitter, in contrast to Jay's enthusiasm.
  • Screamed by the entire crew when Lisa starts to have sex with the alien slug in The Item. Jack is particularly loud when Lisa exposes her breasts for it.
    Jack: Oh, honey, no! Not for this movie! Don't do it for this movie — NO!!!!!!!! YAAAAAAAAAAAGGGHHHH!!!!
  • Rich's general reaction to Pocket Ninjas, especially when yet another Training Montage begins is: "NO! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!"
  • Mike's reaction to a random passerby getting stabbed in The Sweeper.
  • The entire crew's general reaction to the lions in Roar.
• Big "WHAT?!":
  • Yelled aloud by the entire crew during The Item when the characters start rolling across the screen as if they were on roller blades.
    Josh: (laughing hysterically) What the shit?!
  • Again yelled by the entire crew when The Johnson Family Christmas end credits roll without any warning or build-up.
• Black Comedy:
  • The crew surmises that the people in the audience in The Shoji Tabuchi Show would be so old that by the end of the show, there would be a slideshow memorial showing the people that died in their chairs that day.
  • Mike stated that the entire audience of The Geritol Follies were comprised of paramedics.
  • Mike found The Osteoporosis Dance so incompetently done that he thinks that the video went through a Troubled Production invoked of six months like Apocalypse Now with old people dying on set and new ones replacing them right after.
• Black Comedy Rape: The gang makes plenty of rape jokes for comedy, though often to criticize the use of Rape as Drama.
  • Invoked when the protagonist of Deadly Prey, just after his wife's murder, tells the Big Bad to take off his shirt.
    Rich: "You're gonna have to take my wife's place!"
  • The crew surmises that Key Matters was made for kids like Mike who, as Jack outlines, would otherwise probably have been kidnapped, raped multiple times, and had their body dumped. Mike claims that this would have been the best outcome for him.
    Hispanic Father: Excelente.
  • In Deathstalker, with heavily dollops of Soundtrack Dissonance.
    Rich: Look at this whimsical rape riot!
    Jack: The Merry Olde Land of Wizards, Warriors and RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAPE!
  • The crew is thoroughly disgusted with How to Seduce a Woman Through Hypnosis because it's clearly a manual on how to stalk and rape women. Creepy isn't a strong enough word for the tape. It turns out the tape is not an actual manual, but a softcore porno for hypnofetishists.
  • During Scavenger Hunt, the first scavenger description pulled is a movie depicting a rape on the cover of the tape. Rich is less than amused, then cracks that it leaves out looking in the Children's Film section.
  • In Bad Movie Scavenger Hunt Too, the crew is amused by the scene in which a character that looks like "Dracula combined with a magician" rapes the female lead.
    Mike (in an eastern European accent): I will make your virginity disappear!
• Bland-Name Product: In episode 3 of the Black Spine Edition, Mike introduces a Jenga stack of tapes with the prize being forced to watch the tapes pulled out by the winner. Mike is aware that calling it Jenga might cause trademark issues.

  Mike: We'll call it Junka. BECAUSE THEY'RE ALL JUNK.

• *Bleep*-dammit!:
  • Patton Oswalt's time-stopping rant in Plinketto #8 is almost completely censored, except for a few random words and a single "fuck".
  • Inverted with Mike saying "You're God da*beep*n right" to Rich Evans in "The top ten things YOU didn't know about Darth Vader's suit!".
• Bookends: Clearly unintentional, but the screening of Tammy and the T-Rex is very nicely bookended by Rich Evans. His Catchphrase of "Oh my god!" is heard often enough on Best of the Worst, but the two that he gives at the very start and very end of the screening are dripping with disgust, befuddlement and/or shock. Nothing like either variant has been heard before or since from Rich.
• Boring, but Practical: While admitting that Let's Rap About Fire Safety is horribly out of date, Rich Evans says that the information on the video is useful because it would have helped him when he was younger^note Most people assumed he was a child when this happened, but Rich later revealed that he was 22; a dramatized incident in the video where somebody started a grease fire while trying to cook French fries actually happened to him once in real life. Though not for the same reasons, Mike comes to the same conclusion.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: Shows up during the description of Cynthia Rothrock's Undefeatable:
  Wizard: Rated R for adult situations. Like college.
  Rich: Boobs.
  Wizard: College.
  Rich: Boobs.
  Wizard: College boobs.
• Breakout Character: Rich Evans is treated as a parody of this in-universe; receiving an And Starring credit in the cast list and often being greeted with greater fanfare than the actual guest stars, all because an embarassing picture of him was featured on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. Out of universe, while Rich arguably is the most popular of the hosts and the source of much of the fanbase's in-jokes, he is not featured on the show particularly more prominently than anyone else and is even occasionally excluded from the panel.
• Broken Aesop:
  • After the heroes of Miami Connection have graphically and brutally killed a band of ninjas (in a severe Mood Whiplash from the rest of the film which the crew says resembled a college edition of Saved by the Bell), the end card says, "Only through the elimination of violence can we achieve world peace." This earns perhaps a bigger laugh from the crew than any other they had while watching the film.
  • Ryan's Babe at least appears to be (the bizarre way the story is presented makes it unclear if it was intentional or an Accidental Aesop) partly about how Ryan shouldn't enable his Stalker with a Crush Love Interest, portraying her willingness to do extreme things for him since they were children and her suicidal depression after he runs away during the film's events as extremely unhealthy for both of them. This is abruptly thrown out the window when Ryan suddenly has a Love Epiphany and returns to his hometown to be with her despite everything.
• Broke the Rating Scale:
  • Mike cannot vote for Undefeatable as best of the worst, because it's simply not bad enough to even be on the show.
  • Same thing happens with Thunderpants, which the crew liked so much they outright removed it from the voting.
  • For Rich, the last 15-20 minutes of Lethal Ninja were so bizarre and unintentionally funny that he picked it as his Best of the Worst for that episode. However, the rest of the film was so boring and bad that he also picked it as the film to destroy.
• Brother–Sister Incest:
  • The crew accuse Justine and Jason Bateman of this in How Can I Tell If I'm Really In Love?
  • The crew react in horror during White Fire when it becomes apparent that Robert Ginty's character not only wants to fuck his in-movie sister, but strips her naked at one point, tells her he wishes she weren't his sister so he could "date" her, then gives a hooker plastic surgery to resemble his sister. Creepy isn't the word here.
    Rich: I fucking told you this was the theme and nobody believed me.
• Brown Note: Every time the cover of Rainbow's Remedy is shown, haunting horror music plays.
• Buffy Speak: Rich Evans when desperately attempting to explain the plot of Double Down, when asked how much stock footage was in the movie he gave us this gem.

  Rich: "This movie is nothing but stuff! It's meaningless empty stuff that has no purpose! But it's the best stuff! It's the best stuff that has ever been; because Neil Breen is the best at stuff and Neil Breen is the best person who has ever eaten TUNA!"

• The Bus Came Back:
  • The Wheel of the Worst made a comeback after being tossed in the trash. In case you're wondering, it was apparently so embarrassing that even the Milwaukee Sanitation Department didn't want it.
  • Parodied in the Twin Dragon Encounter episode. The Teaser features Jack writing a journal log explaining his extended absence from the series, but the audience doesn't get to hear the explanation.
• Busman's Holiday: Lemro is on vacation in Alien Private Eye, but he still starts a business on Earth as a private eye.
• But Thou Must!: When Jessi's spin lands on Kitten Kommotion she's so disappointed she tries to spin the wheel again, so of course it lands on Kitten Kommotion twice.
• Butt-Monkey: Poor Rich Evans is pretty much the very definition of this trope, although it's mostly limited to when Mike is present.
  • During the review of Double Dragon (1994), Mike keeps interrupting him, leading him to shout that he's not going to kick that football or fly the kite anymore. He falls for it anyway the third time.
  • Jack during Plinketto episodes which go out of their way stress that Jack doesn't get a chance to play. When he does drop the ball the others berate and insult his random choice.
  • The Wheel of the Worst itself. Following its first destruction, it gets immediately broken by Mike again after painstaking reconstruction by Rich.
• Buxom Beauty Standard: Defied. While the crew is impressed with the size of Kitten Natividad's breasts in The Tomb, they're not turned on by her "flopping those things around."
  Jack: Shit, girl! I bet you got back problems.
• Call-Back:
  • Episode 27 has Jack mentions the Rich Evans Reacts To Star Wars The Force Awakens Trailer, notably a infamous scene involving a droid. Rich attempts to changed the subject, but the rest of the guys keep on talking about it.
  • In "Wheel of the Worst #26", after Colin and Jay land on Surfing for Seniors, Colin sings "Senior Surfin'!" to the tune of "Skeet Surfin'!" from their Top Secret! re:View''.
• Calling Your Attacks
  Rich: Gymkata!
• The Cameo: The RLM guys apparently love Macaulay Culkin. In Episode 35, Max Landis mentions Culkin when he brings up his father's film Home Alone, and Mike proclaims the show's fondness for him. At the end of the episode, Culkin appears in the featurette that Landis made of destroying How I Saved the President. Culkin would later cameo in Half in the Bag, and appear in episodes of both Best of the Worst (featuring Home Alone 4: Taking Back the House) and Re:View (discussing The Warriors).
• Can't Hold His Liquor: Pretty much everyone except for Rich Evans, who doesn't drink, but Jack was the most notorious lightweight. Especially on Halloween episodes. Behind the scenes, however, this sadly wasn't true at all. Jack was said to be the heaviest drinker of all of them, and could hold his liquor better than anyone. The reason it didn't take much to make Jack shitfaced is because he would often drink heavily before taping.
• Can't Take Criticism: Averted with Len Kabasinski, who appeared on the show as a special guest and became a good friend of the crew despite them making fun of his movies.
• Card-Carrying Villain: In Pass Thru, the Corrupt Corporate Executives make the ones from Captain Planet and the Planeteers look understated and subtle. Literally every conversation they have involves them smugly gloating about the ways they screw people over.
• Cat Scare: Quite literally in Psycho From Texas, as a cat is literally thrown at an actor in an attempt at a Cat Scare. Doubles as That Poor Cat.
• Catchphrase:
  • The constant refrain for choosing which movie is the Best of the Worst is "Most entertaining, for whatever reason."
  • As with his appearances in other RLM videos, Rich Evans often gives a high-pitched shriek of "Oh my gaaaawwwwwwd!"
  • Jay puts special inflections on his otherwise flat "Oh, no!" that's unique to his character.
• Censor Box: Aside from standard censorship practice, this has been used as a gag a couple times.
  • Exaggerated with The Tomb where a middle-aged stripper has the censor bar over her jiggling breasts. The bar then goes on to cover the entire bottom half of the screen.
  • Whenever Neil Breen is in a pool in Double Down, the censor bar covers up his manboobs. At one point, it even covers his crotch as if he had a boner.
  • In They Bite!, they have a large censor bar emanating from Ron Jeremy's crotch to make it look as if he's masturbating.
  • A topless woman in Night Beast has her boobs covered with a censor bar that has the word "Censored" on it. Fade transition to the schlubby policeman she's about the make love with and the exact same censor bar covers his manboobs.
  • During the discussion of Wormmania, Mike pulls out a huge, two-foot-long gummy worm and begins "tenderizing" it with his hands and nibbling on both ends. Pixelation over his hands and mouth, along with Jay's appalled reaction, makes it look far more sexual than it should be. It even goes so far as to censor his entire face during the act.
• Chandler's Law: Multiple scenes in Blood Street end with masked men bursting into crowded rooms, firing guns and then leaving, each time with no explanation given. Rich theorises that Leo Fong simply didn't know any other way to end a scene.
• Chekhov's Skill: Averted in Little Bigfoot. Lanya, the big sister in the film, is both a veterinarian and an environmentalist; a skill and a mindset that together would make a perfect setup for when Mama Bigfoot get shot in the leg by some hunters. She disappears in the middle of the movie, which opens up a Plot Hole on how Mama Bigfoot was able to walk normally during the ending since she was laying on the ground beside a log before that. They notice that the actress was visibly uncomfortable during one scene with a pawing guy, leading to speculation she quit the production because of sexual harassment.
• Chewing the Scenery: The crew felt that Gene Simmons was by far the most watchable aspect of Never to Young to Die due to his playing up the camp value of being a villainous, glam hermaphrodite. Same goes for Mario Van Peebles in Exterminator 2 and Robert Axelrod in Repo Jake.
• Christmas Episode:
  • Episode 14, featuring Elves, Santa Claus (1959), and National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation 2.
  • Episode 27. They dedicate a two parter to The Star Wars Holiday Special.
  • Episode 36, "A Very Cannon Christmas", featuring Death Wish 3, The Christmas Tree, and Invasion U.S.A. (1985).
  • Episode 47, "Christmas or Crocodile", featuring RepliGATOR, Johnson Family Christmas Dinner, and Alligator.
  • Episode 61, "Merry Kick-mas", featuring Karate Cop, The Christmas Light, and Night of the Kickfighters.
  • Episode 73, "Christmas or Cats", featuring Two Front Teeth, Uninvited, and Christy: Santa's First Female Reindeer.
  • Episode 86, "A Very Scary Christmas", featuring Santa Claws, Iced, and Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2
  • Episode 96, "Christmas 2020", featuring a selection of black spine tapes.
  • Episode 107, "Christmas 2021", featuring Feeders 2: Slay Bells, Fay's Twelve Days of Christmas, Safety Awareness for Forklift Equipment (a single black spine tape), and Santa with Muscles
  • Episode 116, "A Very Cannon Christmas II", featuring Avenging Force, The Barbarians, and Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo
  • Episode 127, "Christmas Plinketto", featuring Cancel Christmas, Silent Night Deadly Night 5 The Toymaker, and Mee Christmas
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome:
  • Jessi stops appearing on the show after the first couple years. Red Letter Media has never given an official explanation for why, evading the question whenever it has been asked (even the fan-run Reddit has banned people from asking). Interestingly Jessi can still be heard laughing off-screen in episodes after her departure, though this too would eventually stop happening.
  • Len Kabasinski collaborated several times with the RLM crew during the show's early years but has not appeared on Best of the Worst since 2017.
  • Jim Maxwell, one of Those Two Guys with Colin Cunningham (ironically enough), hasn't appeared since 2019. Colin also stopped appearing for a two-year span, but there were valid logistical reasons for that, and he resumed appearing in 2021 and has returned to semi-regular status.
• Cliché Storm: A great number of the movies they watch. Deadly Prey, for instance, is considered by the group to be filled with nothing but stock 1980s action movie cliches with little to no plot or character development. Even more so by its sequel, The Deadliest Prey, which reuses all the same cliches the previous movie had until the twist ending.
• Cloud Cuckoo Lander: Billy from Playing Dangerous 2, a Motor Mouth who seems to be intrigued by the "live Jell-O" he eats and the piggy bank he was saving pennies in.
• Commander Contrarian: Jack had this role, such as picking Theodore Rex because it made him "feel" things; Jay mocked him by first Flipping the Bird at him then saying Jack was the Hipster among hipsters. Mike later picked up the mantle by selecting unpopular films, usually one the rest of the panelists hated, rationalizing his choice with some Insane Troll Logic. This is directly addressed in the 2019 "Very Scary Christmas" episode, when he picks Santa Claws over the consensus Silent Night, Deadly Night 2, causing Jay to respond with a deadpan, "Your antics have become predictable." In mock outrage, Mike responds, "No! I'm not being a contrarian!" By "Wheel of the Worst #23," Rich accuses Mike of not even trying to sound like he believes his own arguments.
• Comical Overreacting: The third Wheel of the Worst episode ends with an attempt to burn the video that was deemed to be the worst, but it is interrupted by Rich Evans barging in with a fire extinguisher, while screaming "FIRE! FIRE!"
• Complexity Addiction: The only logical explanation for Mike Stoklasa adding a raffle tumbler to a Black Spine episode, given that the tapes were already being picked at random.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Rich Evans with a Bandage over his hand after the ending to the Halloween episode.
  • In episode 101, when Mike is forced to make his selection first (so he can't play Commander Contrarian), Rich asks him which film feels "new to the palate," which was Mike's justification for his much-reviled selection of Shark Exorcist. This time, Mike's selection of Honorable Men for being fascinatingly creepy was the unanimous view.
  • The After Last Season spotlight has Rich snark that the movie had to be hooked up to life support via an aquarium, a reference to the Eloise Cole Rainbow's Remedy video featured in "Wheel of the Worst #9" from over seven years earlier. Mike lampshades this by calling it a deep cut.
• Cool and Unusual Punishment: Becky's torture by the gang leader in Wired To Kill, which involves her being tied up and forced to read Shakespeare against her will. Rich dubbed this type of torture as "plaype".
• Cool vs. Awesome: The crew are evenly split over whether Blood Debts (with a man getting gibbed by a hand-held rocket launcher) or Undefeatable (guy gets hoisted by a hook through both eye sockets and carried away) had the best ending.
• Country Matters: The gang is not shy about swearing, but Jack's sudden usage of the word in the 2014 Halloween episode gets bleeped.
• Covers Always Lie: The gang comments on the movie covers before watching the film and assemble all the movies on a table during their discussion, so they often comment on inaccuracies in the cover art, to the point that they'll often anticipate shenanigans before even watching the film.
  • Ninja Vengeance, Never Too Young to Die, Playing Dangerous, Shapeshifter, Thunderpants and Bloody Birthday. By far the biggest offender is Playing Dangerous, with Never Too Young to Die's tantalizing claim of "one-against-a-hundred bazooka battles" in a close second.
  • Perhaps the most disappointing example of this for the team was "Tree Stand Safety": The cover promises spectacular safety film injuries, with a man or dummy falling out of a tree. That scene, nor any other mishap, aside from a brief slip off the bottom rung of a ladder, never appears, and 60 minutes of the video's 75 minute runtime is a stealth advertisement for a new type of tree stand that requires none of the preceding safety tips, and allows an old lady to kill and puppeteer a deer. Jessi moans that all she wanted was one dummy falling off a tree stand.]]
  • The Tomb is probably the most insulting example, with the entire VHS sleeve promising good top-billed actors and a movie akin to that of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Those actors barely appear in the movie, there's only two big action scenes, and the rest of the film is just a load of back and forth conversations over telephones. What really made it cross the line for the crew, however, is the lengths the distributor took to make the cover look like it's showing a big studio film and going beyond mockbuster territory.
  • Johnson Family Christmas Dinner is a pretty blatant example. The cover makes it look like a small-budget family comedy featuring a large group of actors, some of whom being recognizable. None of the people on the cover actually appear in the film and the movie looks to have been filmed by amateurs on a camcorder over the course of a day or two.
  • Bear Attacks is similar to Tree Stand Safety. The cover and title sounded promising, and they went in hoping to at least see a bear mauling a dummy to reenact an actual attack. Instead, it's mostly just talking and stock footage of bears wandering around.
  • Ryan's Babe has a cover making it look like a wacky Road Trip Plot Sex Comedy in the vein of Road Trip. Instead it's a Random Events Plot about Ryan running away from his hometown and Walking the Earth with tones ranging from crime thriller to Hallmark Movie-esque Glurge, with nothing in it really being Played for Laughs.
  • Silk features the main heroine wearing no shirt and a see-through bra, has the tagline of "She bangs 'em, breaks 'em and books 'em" and promises "steamin' non-stop action". The first minute or so of the movie delivers, with Silk shooting at an escaping criminal's car from a train, leading to the car exploding. The rest of the movie, however, is extremely slow and boring, to the point where the whole crew just gives up on it and decides to watch Pass-Thru instead.
  • The 2014 Halloween episode calls out The Item as having the most inaccurate cover of the night, featuring a scaly snake eye peaking out of "the item," when the actual monster is a rubber, flesh-toned caterpillar thing with eyes that are the same texture as its body.
  • The gang calls out the cover of Playing Dangerous for trying to make the film look like a whacky, Home Alone-style comedy when it's actually a fairly adult Die Hard-style thriller, though the film was obviously cut down after the fact to make it more family friendly.
  • Both The Skateboard Kid and The Skateboard Kid 2 are called out for featuring their male leads riding skateboards with a dog. Neither film features a dog.
  • Shark Exorcist looks like it's going to be either an attempt to mix a Jaws-style shark attack movie with an on-land slasher flick, or an intentionally bad cheese-fest in the vein of Sharknado. It actually ends up being a bizarre, fetishistic mess that if anything looks like a cheap Porn Parody with the sex scenes cut out.
• Crazy Is Cool:
  • invoked The crew considers Miami Connection to be this as one massive Non-Serial Movie.
  • The Killbike sequence from The New Gladiators, wherein, among other things, all the vehicles are Made of Explodium.
    Jay: I want this for ninety minutes.
  • The scene from Deadly Prey where Danton chops off The Dragon's arm and beats him to death with it, which causes the group to burst into laughter and applause.
    Jay: The movie really should have ended right there.
    Josh: You know, fine if the colonel gets away, I don't care — because that happened.
  • Playing Dangerous spends nearly thirty slow-motion seconds building up to the kid firing a Super Soaker filled with gasoline at a Mook trying to light a cigarette, with the crew on the edges of their seats all the while. It turns out to be an unintentional subversion; when it finally does happen, the film awkwardly cuts to a brief shot of the mook screaming and falling out of frame with only a weak smoke effect to suggest that he was even lit on fire. The entire group simultaneously gives an identical dejected groan at this.
  • The ending of Blood Debts gets this reaction when, in the final seconds of the film, the protagonist produces a derringer-sized rocket launcher from his sleeve and blows the villain to hell, with the movie ending on a freeze frame with the villain mid-Ludicrous Gibs. Mike and Jack's immediate reaction (in between bouts of hysterical laughter) is to declare this "the best ending ever" and that the ending redeemed the entire rest of the film.
  • The protagonist of Order of the Black Eagle has a baboon sidekick for no apparent reason. Said baboon flies a plane and later drives his own personalised tank into battle against the Nazis. The baboon was by far the crew's favourite character in the movie.
  • Double Down, which the reviewers find so hilariously over-the-top and incomprehensible that guest reviewer Max Landis said the movie felt like watching a dream somebody else was having.
  • Their reaction to Raw Force, especially Len Kabasinski, which stuffs kung fu, zombies, guns, explosions, kung fu zombies, Hitler, gratuitous nudity, and cannibal monks into one movie.
  • Surviving Edged Weapons an over the top police training video which features cave men (in flashback), shuriken, machetes, and a Satanist cult all trying to stab, slash, and gore ordinary Milwaukee cops.
• Creator Provincialism: The gang is quick to point out when films were shot in their local area. One of the (many) reasons they loved Surviving Edged Weapons was because it was filmed in Milwaukee and featured many actors with thick Milwaukee accents. They also did a spotlight episode on Twister's Revenge!, which was filmed in Gleason, Wisconsin.
• Cult: The origin of SOS. More specifically, the Children of God.
• Cynicism Catalyst: In Blood Debts, the crew notice that Mark's wife's name is... Mark's wife. Her sole purpose to get blown up in a car to fuel his revenge.
• Damned by Faint Praise:
  • Jay's example of "something good" about Lethal Ninja.
    Jay: The fact that the boom mic showed up a few times, means they bothered to use a boom mic.
  • Mike describes Freddie Williams' picks for the 50th episode as "two pretty close to darn good gems."
    Freddie: There were so many qualifiers to that!
    Jay: "Pretty, almost, kind-of, sort-of, almost-"
    Rich: Like sandpaper, shaving off the compliment!
  • In his next appearance in episode 74, Freddie claims that the best thing about Cybernator was its' cover art. He then quickly clarifies that he was being sarcastic, for fear of ruining his reputation as an artist.
• Darker and Edgier: Surviving Edged Weapons is probably the darkest entry in the Best of the Worst canon, since it deals with the real-world problem of knife crime. While the RLM crew found some laughs from the tonal shifts of the tape (Lethal Weapon-style gunfights erupting out of nowhere, or baseball caps fitted with razor blades on the back), there's a somber tone to it all, from the sad interviews with stabbing victims to graphic autopsy photos of real stab wounds.
• Dawson Casting:
  • Invoked with Black Roses, as all of the "students" seem to be the same age as the teacher (who is "older" because he has a beard). They're amused by an actor who looks like he's in his 30's who's constantly gesticulating to make him seem like a teen.
  • Another obvious case shows up in Spookies, where the (supposed) main protagonist is visibly so much older than the teenagers he's hanging out with that at first the crew assumed he was supposed to be a chaperone at the Halloween party they were introduced coming from, and they spend the rest of the review calling him "Uncle Tony".
• Deadpan Snarker: Snark is inevitable due to the general quality of the videos they watch, but Mike and Rich are the undisputed kings of this trope.
• Decoy Protagonist: They've watched many films with this trope in play.
  • The hero of "Terror in Beverly Hills" just disappears with no explanation to make way for Frank Stallone's character to save the day near the very end. The gang theorized they were supposed to be the same character but they could only afford Stallone for so long, so they made a new character to stand in for almost all his scenes.
  • "Uncle Tony" is The Hero of "Spookies", but thanks to obvious reshoots, he's killed to make way for "Dr. Acula's" bride, with Jay noting that the audience doesn't meet the true protagonist until 80 minutes into the movie.
  • The summary on "Action USA's" box goes so far as to spoil the death of the apparent main character, then abruptly mentioning the new protagonist's plot.
• Designated Hero
  • The protagonist of Exterminator 2 as described by the crew for setting people on fire.
  • Gary Coleman's safety lessons might be a little easier to swallow if he wasn't the one repeatedly putting the kids in danger with his divine powers.
• Diabolus ex Machina/Troubled Production: An audio issue forced the crew to re-record Episode 6, and because The Vindicator turned out to be too mediocre to derive much entertainment value from, the group decided to try and watch a different movie in its place. Their second pick, Class of '99 II, had a promising premise and positive word-of-mouth, but their copy broke the moment they tried to play it. Only after attempting to watch a third movie, Cyber Tracker, and finding that it was somehow duller than The Vindicator, to the point where they had unrelated conversations and left the film on as background noise. They eventually gave up on finding a third film worth talking about and resigned themselves to discussing only the two remaining films. Of the two, Robot Jox turned out to be a legitimately good B-movie and thus ill-suited to the show, while R.O.T.O.R. may have proven too good a fit for the show.
  Jay: So, what started out as an innocent attempt to watch some bad movies with robots in them has turned out to be the most miserable experience in any of our lives.
• Didn't Think This Through: In "Black Spine Edition #3," Mike and Jay establish the rules of playing Jenga with VHS cassettes: Each tape pulled from the stack gets added to the player's total, and the gang will watch all of the videos in the loser's collection. As the tapes begin to mount in the players' collections, a worried Rich can be heard off-screen asking if they'd thought the rules out properly. Ultimately the gang watches about a dozen videos in one sitting, though they turn off several prematurely and select only a handful to actually discuss.
• "Die Hard" on an X: Playing Dangerous is "Die Hard with a Kid," though you'd never know it from the cover.
• Disproportionate Retribution: R.O.T.O.R.
  Rich: R.O.T.O.R. is about a police program to create a robotic policeman who will execute people for minor traffic violations.
• Distracted by the Sexy: In Terror in Beverly Hills, the crew finds two FBI agents in a helicopter tracking a terrorist in a white limo being distracted by two topless girls in a pickup truck hilarious - even more so as that's why the terrorist gets away.
  Rich: There should have been a scene in the police chief's office. "How did you lose track of the limo?" "There was this pickup truck! There were boobs!"
• Does This Remind You of Anything?
  • The Heimlich maneuver scene from Gary Coleman For Safety's Sake, which includes a close-up of the girl making an... interesting face while rhythmically performing offscreen abdominal thrusts on her brother. The group later comments on the fact that there's no logical reason for that shot to exist in a scene meant to teach children how to perform the Heimlich maneuver.
  • The glass harmonica from Shapeshifter.
    Sorcerer: You caress the lips.
    Mike: He's teaching him something else...
  • From Playing Dangerous's back-of-the-box summary:
    Mike: "When his mom said to go outside and play... she didn't exactly have this in mind." Well, that sounds like—
    Rich: Sounds like a porno.
  • The first 30 minutes of The Photon Effect has the crew remarking multiple times that it looks a lot like a gay porn movie. None of them would have been surprised if hardcore sex had happened by that point.
• Don't Explain the Joke: Played straight by Rich and subsequently parodied by Mike when discussing Backdoor Mayor's claim that he has a "package" for the child's mother in Gary Coleman For Safety's Sake.
  Rich: "If you know what I mean." ...Sorry.
  Mike: Oh, you mean, like... his penis.
  Jack: No, no, like a parcel.
• Downer Ending:
  • Not Exterminator 2, but the review of it, which ends on the note that the lead actor may have spent all but one scene of the movie having been diagnosed with MS. This provides the perfect segue into the discussion of...
  • The Aftermath, which ends after a killer climax with a shot of a young child, who has just murdered an adult, walking down a highway by himself with a revolver in hand. Jay is visibly the most disturbed by the ending.
• Driven to Suicide: Invoked by Rich Evans.
  Rich: I had to call the suicide prevention hotline last night because of R.O.T.O.R. [sic] They told me to do it.
• Dude, Not Funny!:
  • Mike and Jay were shocked when Jack unwittingly made a Casting Couch joke in a line of jokes involving kids trying to impress their friends with the fact that they were in a video.
  • Despite laughing at it, Jack is quick to call out Mike for thanking God that Larry, the creator of ”Motherlode” passed away.
• Dull Surprise:
  • The way the crew describes Robert Ginty's acting "talents". During the review of White Fire, they mock him with a quiz show style question "What is Robert Ginty feeling here?" It's very reminiscent of the Trope Namer Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode of Alien from L.A..
  • This is also used to describe Dan Haggerty and Leo Fong, where their lack of acting ability adds to the lazy charm of the movies they're in.
  • Vampire Assassin has two of these.
    • The title character generally has a dull, blank reaction to everything except when his master dies. There, he chews the scenery like there's no tomorrow.
    • His love interest delivers her lines in such a monotonous and almost emotionless manner that the crew believed that she was dubbed by a text-to-speech program.

E - H

• Early-Bird Cameo:
  • In Half In the Bag #21 (Jack and Jill), Mr. Plinkett angrily states he wants to be able to watch his VHS copy of Russian Terminator.
  • During Colin's first appearance, they decide the third film with a spin on the Wheel. On the Wheel are future reviews including Crazy Fat Ethel II and Terror In Beverly Hills and two films which would get their own Best of the Worst Specials: Hollywood Cop and Partners (the latter of which Mike stated the crew had been trying to work into the show for years.)
  • Mac Culkin's cameo during the closing of the Max Landis episode has become one with Mac having several episodes with him as a judge.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • At the beginning, Rich and Jay are missing their beards while Jack actually has hair. It's very off-putting.
  • Sometimes during the discussion section, the camera will physically zoom on the person speaking to get a close-up, and the first episode begins with odd upward-facing camera angles rather than the flat side-on tracking shot that usually opens the program.
  • The first few episodes are only about 30 minutes long, but the show quickly stabilized into a 50-60 minute range. ^note  Jay revealed in podcast that this was because initially the film viewings and subsequent discussions were filmed on separate days, which lead to the group having less to talk about since they'd forget most of the details of the films.
  • Jessi is a regular cast member in the first season or two before dropping out of the show.
  • The first episode doesn't list the film titles in the title. Pre-selected films would be listed in the title for most future episodes, with only the random selection gimmick episodes and surprise reveals omitted from episode titles.
• The '80s: Embarrassingly so for How Can I Tell If I'm Really In Love?
• Eldritch Abomination: The "Grief Clown" in Wheel of the Worst #9, Eloisecole. Its venom turns you into an immortal grief clown doll.
• Ending Fatigue: Invoked, as Pocket Ninjas has clearly worn out its welcome when it reaches the virtual reality sequence.
• invoked Ensemble Dark Horse
  • Gene Simmons's character in Never Too Young To Die is said by the group to light up the film whenever he's onscreen.
  • The crew mentions that they'd like to watch a film entirely about the Exterminator's jovial best friend going to bars and picking up ladies - or, better yet, that he was the Exterminator.
  • Robot Cop from R.O.T.O.R. is rightly described as the film's only interesting character. He has a delightfully silly design, his vocal performance is hilarious and oozing with personality, all of his lines are gold, and the movie is just begging for him to face off against R.O.T.O.R. in the climax. invoked Alas, he disappears halfway through the movie, though the method by which he does so goes a long way toward making up for it.
    Coldyron: R.O.T.O.R.'s out.
    Willard: Ah, I see. Well, sir, I would like to take this opportunity to resign my position in the company, and— (Coldyron hangs up)
  • Crazy Fat Ethel II has Granny, who is charming not only on the basis that her home, colleagues, and actress are seemingly those of the director's actual grandmother, but also because of her flawlessly condescending delivery of the film's best line — her response to Ethel's demand "YOU GIVE ME THOSE PRETZELS, GRANNY!": "I will not." The man who thinks he's a spider is also highlighted.
  • Cameron Mitchell in general. Any time he gives a sincere performance, chews the scenery, improvises, or is a visibly drunken wreck, the crew are delighted. Deadly Prey, Terror in Beverly Hills, Low Blow, and Hollywood Cop are his most memorable appearances to them. They like him so much that they decided to watch Space Mutiny solely because he is in it.
  • The crew took an immediate liking to Colonel Grandpa from Alienator, owing to his hands-on and practical approach to problems (to quote Rich, "shit gets done" in his presence), his hilarious dialogue, and his surprisingly reasonable demeanor overall.
  • Nighthawk from Kill Point, The Dragon to Cameron Mitchell's character, who they think just keeps getting cooler and cooler as the movie goes on because of how efficient and implacable he is. He effortlessly sniffs out Richard Roundtree's character as a cop with The Schlub Pub Seduction Deduction and starts shooting as soon as he knows for sure, responds to a woman shooting him in the gut by briefly clutching the wound, then standing up straight and shooting her back like nothing happened, and once it's clear Mitchell's character has lost it, he just kills him and tries to run off with the loot himself. They liked him so much that at some point they started actively rooting for him to get away with everything.
  • The main character of Curse of the Black Eagle's baboon sidekick was a huge hit with the crew. In fact, they went so far as to say every moment with the baboon worked, especially when he commandeers a baboon sized tank to mow down the bad guys. This continued when they watched the series' first film Unmasking the Idol, where they realized the baboon's name is Boon. Despite enjoying this movie far less than it's sequel, they agreed that Boon is still the best part of it, and that he should've had more to do. They then note that the baboon did go on to do a far better film than any of its castmates — The Fly (1986).
  • Monique Gabrielle (of Deathstalker 2, Silk 2, and Evil Toons) seems to be becoming one as of the 2022 Halloween episode, at least according to Jay and Tim (albeit for different reasons ). Also helping is that two of the three movies of hers they have watched were Surprisingly Improved Sequel's to two of the worst films they ever watched (Film/Deathstalker with its gratuitous rape and Silk which was so boring they abandoned the movie halfway through).
• "Eureka!" Moment: Rich and the crew realize that the Japanese SOS tape (which they misidentify as Chinese after correctly doing so) is a series of European produced religious music videos. (Aurora Productions is a Switzerland-based Christian Fundamentalist group.) It goes so far as to have Jesus doing a take to the camera while flying to Heaven on a cross during The Rapture.
• Europeans Are Kinky: The gang's only explanation for the utterly depraved, Spanish-made Mad Foxes.
• Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting: This trope gets pointed out by Jack while discussing Undefeatable.
  Jack: In the universe of Undefeatable, every man, woman, child and therapist knows kung-fu.
• Every Car Is a Pinto
  • The crew gets a lot of mileage out of the easily exploding motorbikes in The New Gladiators, including one that explodes when it touches the base of a ramp.
  • A car at the end of The Exterminator explodes for almost no reason.
  • A truck in The Vindicator goes off a cliff and explodes before it even falls, let alone hits the bottom.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • During their review of Low Blow, Jack, Jay, and especially Rich are shocked whenever Colin makes a racial joke. Albeit quite flat, sarcastic outrage.
    Rich: Check your privilege.
  • Mike forgoes his usual Commander Contrarian shtick in the case of Robowoman; he considers it so bad that he won't nominate it even as a joke.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin:
  • The crew gets mileage out of the girl in The Family Guide To The Internet who doesn't know what an Internet Service Provider is.
    Jay: It's... an internet service provider.
  • Exploding Varmints Volume 1. Yes, a 30 minute video of animal cruelty, giving the viewer over 500 prairie dogs being shot into Ludicrous Gibs by a chuckling psychopath. The crew was shocked that the video's title wasn't a euphemism.
• Excuse Plot
  • Gymkata's Game of Death-esque plot is only there so that Olympic gymnast Kurt Thomas^note Technically an Olympic-level gymnast. His one shot at getting a gold medal was forever sidetracked by the US boycotting the 1980 Moscow Olympics can show off his gymnastic skills.
  • Blood Debts has these in spades, only using plot points so that action scenes can happen and disregarding continuity from those plot points so that other action scenes can be set up.
• Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong: Featured prominently in Xtro.
• Face Palm: Whenever someone (particularly Rich) does this during the discussions, the camera tends to zoom in on them.
• Failure Hero: Rich complains that the protagonist of Parole Violators is this, complete with a extended montage of him getting his ass kicked.
  • They also thought the main protagonist of American Rickshaw (who they simply dub "Rick Shaw") was nothing but a useless idiot that couldn't do anything on his own, was only tangentially connected to the plot, and was ultimately nothing but a delivery boy in someone else's story.
  • While he was certainly written as cool, they also thought the main character of Stone Cold ended up being a failure, since he doesn't save anybody. The feds tasked him with infiltrating a Nazi biker gang because they were planning on assassinating the state's government, but their plan works, and all of the targets are already dead by the time he gets to the scene. He doesn't even get the girl because when a female member of the gang starts having doubts about her involvement with them, he tells her not to leave, which ends up getting her killed.
• Fake Shemp:
  • The crew quickly points out that the final fight between Frank Stallone's character and the terrorist leader in Terror In Beverly Hills is obviously done with stand-ins since both of their faces are never in the same shot.
  • They estimate Robert Z'Dar appeared in 4 or so brief face shots and had a body double to the rest in Future War.
  • In Carnivore they notice a lot of scenes featuring the female FBI agent where she's either awkwardly facing away from the camera or is suddenly asleep with her face covered, leading them to think she was played by a different actor in a wig for those scenes. Rich speculates it was because the actress was in a Crest toothpaste commercial and was thus too big a star for the film to afford.
• Fakeout Opening: Black Spine Edition starts with Rich and Jack prepping their Previously Recorded live stream for Into the Breach.
• Failed Pilot Episode: They speculate this was the origin of Creating Rem Lezar. They also theorize that Black Cougar was intended by its creator to establish a major superhero franchise that simply never materialized.
• Fan Disservice
  • The shot of the pregnant woman with the hairy armpits in The Dance of Birth.
  • Kitten Natividad in The Tomb (whom the crew somehow didn't recognize), who was censored by the crew by blacking out nearly half the screen.
  • Almost every sex scene in Mad Foxes, including one that takes place in a bathtub where the main character appeared to be bathing in piss^note actually champagne and another that focuses heavily on his ass crack and makes it look like he crapped without wiping. They even begin to wonder if the movie is actually some kind of fetish porn.
  • The nudist colony in Experience The Freedom of the Naturist Lifestyle consists of little more than "a bunch of gross old people", as Mike puts it.
• Fanservice:
  • As discussed above, The Killer Eye arguably panders more to viewers attracted to males than it does viewers attracted to females thanks to its openly gay director.
  • David A. Prior's Killer Workout has numerous shots of women doing fake aerobics (splaying their legs, thrusted their chests out, humping the ground).
    Mike: They don't call him "David A. Pry Your Clothes Off" for nothing.
  • Princess Warrior devotes almost a third of its screen time to a completely irrelevant wet T-shirt contest and requires its female characters to strip naked before entering into the teleporter that takes them back and forth between Earth.
  • Mankillers is another David A. Prior film that is full of this and it's even less subtle about it compared to Killer Workout. All the action girls wear torn tank tops and very short shorts so skimpy that one of them even suffers an unintentional Wardrobe Malfunction. Not only that, but none of the girls in this movie wear bras and their nipples visibly poke through their clothing. This makes the jumping jacks scene where they're all bouncing their chests even more blatant. They even go so far as to say that the level of effort that went into this fanservice actually made it somehow come off as even sleazier than if they'd just been topless the whole movie.
  • California Big Hunks exaggerates this by virtue of being an anthology of male exotic dance routines. At least, in theory.
• Fantastic Drug: The alien drug in Alien Private Eye, the effects of which are highly detailed in the movie.^note If you take the drug at least five times, you're addicted for life. Try and go cold turkey after that and you'll die from withdrawal. Take the drug a couple hundred times and you'll die. The only way to get off the drug without dying at that point is with a complete blood transfusion.
• Fetish Retardant:
  • invoked Curette and her female henchman standing shirtless together in the teleporting tube in Princess Warrior, which Jack describes as "the unsexiest nudity you'll ever see" and which Mike and Josh likened to them getting a clinical.
  • The cast of California Big Hunks is far more attractive on paper than in practice. To wit: we have a cop with a bad case of Kubrick Stare and a metallic Speedo, a fisherman in a Village People getup getting it on in a swamp, a cowboy in a garish costume covered in glitter, a Michael Jackson impersonator, and a businessman who tries (and fails) to invoke Risky Business while in a locker room.
• Fetus Terrible: The monster from The Suckling, which was created when a aborted fetus was flushed down the toilet into the sewers and came into contact with toxic waste, which mutated it into a monster that attacks everyone.
• Fight Scene Failure:invoked
  • Pointed out in Killing American Style where one of the villains manages to knock out the protagonist by flicking his gun a few inches above his head.
  • invokedThey also point out an inversion in Twin Dragon Encounter. The McNamara twins use well-executed kickboxing moves in their fight scenes, but the fights are over so quickly (along with bad shot composition and unnecessary slow-motion) that it looks terrible on camera. The twins seem to have realized this, as their next film, Dragon Hunt, opted for Rule of Cool over realistic martial arts.
• Fist Pump: Watching They Bite!, the crew guffaw at a porn film producer's exclamation complete with fist pump, "WHAT A GREAT IDEA! FISH MONSTERS!"
  Jay: He's so excited! They want to make a monster porno!
• The Film of the Book: Inverted with The Last Vampire on Earth. The book is really just a 99 page novelization made to exploit this trope and copy Twilight even more.
• Flat "What": The crew's most frequent reaction to Ryan's Babe. Other times, they just give one Big "WHAT?!".
• Flipping the Table: The gang will sometimes start flipping tables and couch cushions around (or miming doing so) when they're particularly sick of a film. Examples include American Flatulators◊, Pocket Ninjas, Tammy and the T-Rex and Dangerous Men (where Rich tosses practically the entire room).
• Flyover Country: RedLetterMedia is stationed in Milwaukee, and they both have a sense of humor about it and are somewhat protective of it. They'll often point out landmarks when movies are shot there. In one episode, Mike complains that movies will often use Milwaukee when they need to name some podunk nowhere location.
• Follow the Leader: invoked
  • Deadly Prey is such a carbon copy of Rambo that it drifts into mockbuster territory.
  • Just as the crew speculates, the movie Russian Ninja was retitled Russian Terminator to cash in on Terminator's popularity.
  • Never Too Young to Die aggravates Mike because it comes off as a studio-driven combination of then-popular elements: John Stamos and Vanity as the leads, a plot straight out of a James Bond movie, and inexplicable Mad Max villains.
  • Not only is Playing Dangerous an uninspired Die Hard-style action movie, but it's packaged and advertised as a shameless Home Alone ripoff.
  • The New Gladiators is described as The Running Man "shot cheap and Italian."
  • Cyber Tracker is a blatant ripoff of various other movies (most notably Terminator), and ends up being so boring that the crew are incapable of even paying attention to it as it's playing.
  • Though Shapeshifter is actually a Non-Serial Movie, its cover is clearly designed to suggest that it's a straight imitation of Animorphs.
  • The Family Guide to the Internet was a combined attempt to cheaply cash in on the home movie and internet crazes.
  • As with Russian Terminator, V-World Matrix was probably originally titled "V-World" after Westworld, with the Matrix part added for a few extra sales.
  • The Amazing Bulk is a mockbuster of The Incredible Hulk (2008). ...We think.
  • The crew almost watches the renowned mockbuster Transmorphers.
  • Bloody Birthday features deceptive packaging meant to look subtly reminiscent of a Nightmare On Elm Street movie, despite containing no such content.
  • The crew speculates that Len Kabasinski adds techniques he's just seen or gotten access to - with no skill, of course. Such as using shaky cam and Dutch angles for no reason at all.
  • The Item tries very hard to be like a Quentin Tarantino movie but with a horror twist.
  • Mutant Species is Predator with elements of Aliens and the ugliest monster costume ever.
  • Alligator heavily follows the formula of Jaws.
  • Karate Cop tries to take elements from popular films like Raiders of the Lost Ark and Escape from New York but does them much worse.
• Forced Meme: Invoked and parodied. When Josh catches Rich Evans wearing a "Rich Wants That Juicy Shaq Meat" T-shirt, he turns to leave and has to be persuaded to stay — until Rich tries to get him to watch Steel. Josh promptly chucks the VHS into a lake.
• Foreshadowing
  • One of the crew describes How Can I Tell If I'm Really In Love as though it were directed by Salvador Dalí. The end of the episode references Un Chien Andalou, which was partially made by Salvador Dalí.
  • In the Halloween episode, in reference to the end of the episode where Rich Evans accidentally cuts his finger off with a saw trying to destroy "Night Beast".
    Jay: The Movies just sorta end. And you're like, "I Guess the Movie's over"
  • In the Clash in the College episode, the camera suddenly zooms in on Mike's hands wildly gesticulating near a beer bottle set beside their prop gremlin, with "whooshing" sound effects added in. Several minutes later, Mike starts waving his hands around again and knocks the bottle over, spilling beer on the gremlin.
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: A moment of sheer panic sets in during the Halloween episode when the crew spots Billy Bob, the Showbiz Pizza Place bear mascot from Rich's "Dick the Birthday Boy" photo in Trick or Treat.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • The panelists announce which movies they're going to watch while standing in front of their vast bad movie archive. If you freeze the frame, you can read the silly titles behind them at your leisure. It got to the point where they released a 30 minute video of Mike announcing the title of every single one in his Mr. Plinkett voice, with an added "It happened again?!" for every single sequel.
  • In Wheel of the Worst #15, Rich is inexplicably fascinated by the cassette tape of "Telepathic Communications with Animals". It's not explained why or even commented on. But later, when Jim is messing with it, if you pause it you can just about make out that it's actually a VHS copy of The Return of the King that was either taped over or used for ballast.
• Fridge Logic: Brought up by the crew in Deadly Prey when they see the protagonist walk home from the mercenary camp and note that he could have done this at any point during the movie, does so in the middle of the night while half-naked and covered in blood, and doesn't inform the police of his abduction or the camp's existence. invoked
• Full-Name Basis: Rich Evans is always credited with his full name, and is the only one of the hosts that this applies to. The other hosts also often address him by his full name when speaking to or about him, though they occasionally just call him Rich.
  • When reviewing Cyborg (1989) they make a point of always referring to Van Damme's character by his full name, Gibson Rickenbacker, complete with a cutaway with his name in text.
• Funny Background Event: During the April Fools' Day episode with Jack and Josh talking to themselves, Rich is seen on the couch on the left side view and standing still in the hallway on the right side view.
• Fun with Acronyms:
  • A*P*E stands for Attacking Primate monstEr, to the delight of Rich Evans.
  • RepliGATOR has the Sexual Hologram Interface Terminal.
• Fun with Subtitles: The crew theorize Let's Sing and Dance™ Music Video was written by lawyers. Cue the songs with legal disclaimers under the videos.
• Gambit Roulette
  • Hands Of Steel has Raul pulling off a plan of revenge against Paco that, as pointed out by Jay, would require certain things to happen that he has no chance of foreseeing, such as Paco coming alone to rescue a girl that supposedly in danger and how he attempts to rescue her.
  • A consequence of Partners (2009) trying to fill up a feature length runtime is its main villain pulling off one of these. In preparation for the cops that will try to take him down, he hopes that they will non-fatally shoot him and leave him with a wound that can easily be patched up by an EMT. To fulfill this, he buys out an EMT and an ambulance himself. Should the cops shoot him like he planned, he hopes that said EMT can get to the scene in time to rescue him before the cops find out he's alive and get patched up as quickly as possible before they notice. All of this goes off without a hitch.
  • Easy Kill tries to be a conspiracy thriller, but it fails partly because pretty much the couple's entire plot (faking the husband's death by killing the main character, since both are played by Frank Stallone) is initiated by the main character himself, meaning there's no way they could've actually planned any of it.
• Gender Bender: In Deathstalker, one of the Big Bad's mooks is turned into a woman against his will to seduce Deathstalker.
  Rich (as the Big Bad): I'll give you your dick back.
• Genre Savvy
  • The crew are familiar enough with bad movie tropes that they can often predict what's going to happen in the movies they watch, but Rich's savvy borders on precognition. He's often able to predict tropes, story beats and even specific events in the plot just by reading the back of the movie's box.
    Mike: Rich, I think you're getting a little too creative here... I do not think we're going to see a cartoon about an octopus smoking eight cigarettes.
    (Smash cut to a clip from "Octopuff in Kumquat", where the cigar-smoking octopus is singing his Villain Song)
  • Mike can spot an impending car explosion whenever a really old car is used by a character on the basis that blowing up a junk car is cheaper for the production than a more recent model.
  • Jack's immediate reaction to the opening of The Jar is to assume that this is someone's college film-school project, on the basis that it's trying to be deep by opening with poetry read over a black screen. His position is instantly bolstered when the opening credits turn out to be set in really bad, cheap video titles, the kind you'd get from the Chyron at the production facilities of a 1980s college TV station.
  • Played for Laughs when the gang decides that the titular monster from A*P*E has seen monster movies before and has a perfect sense of dramatic timing.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: In-universe when Rich reminds Mike that he made Space Cop, Mike defends himself by noting its popularity in Uganda and showing a clip from Wakaliwood.
• Giftedly Bad:
  • The reason the crew loves Len Kabasinski.
  • This is also one of the reasons Monique Gabrielle is becoming a favorite of theirs, as they are incredibly amused by how she doesn't seem to have any control over her eyebrows while delivering her lines.
• God-Mode Sue: Indie auteur Neil Breen loves casting himself in this role.
  • Double Down: The entire segment goes on about how awesome Breen's character is (and his love of tuna as well.) invoked
  Rich: Neil Breen stars as Fantasy Neil Breen, who is the World's Greatest Secret Agent/Soldier/Hacker/Computer Scientist/Bio-Technology Developing Terrorist with... magic cancer powers...
  • Exaggerated in Pass Thru, where he plays a godlike alien being who can kill hundreds of millions with a thought.
• Gone Horribly Right
  • The crew watches Xtro expecting it to be a bad movie. It isn't.
    Jay: We have a problem. This movie is actually interesting.
  • The New Gladiators was directed by Lucio Fulci. The crew only find out once the opening credits end.
    Josh: What?
    Jay: "Directed by Lucio Fulci!"
    Josh: Holy shit, okay!
  • Happens once again with Robot Jox, although Jay is quick to point out that it was suggested by fans.
    Rich: I don't know why people recommend this. This is not a bad movie. It's a B-movie, but it's not... bad.
  • And again with Thunderpants, which was so good they took it out of the judging section of the show.
  • R.O.T.O.R., in an episode where two sci-fi robot films proved to be terribly dull, one broke before they could watch it, and another one (Robot Jox) wasn't a bad film at all, wound up singlehandedly saving the day with its pure astounding awfulness.
    Jay: I never thought I would say this in my life, but thank God for a little movie called R.O.T.O.R..
  • The Pit was pretty thoroughly enjoyable for them, with Rich and Jay saying it was almost as good as Xtro.
• Gory Discretion Shot
  • Used a lot in Playing Dangerous, which the crew concludes was done to drop the film's rating from an R to a PG-13.
  • Completely averted in The Aftermath, as noted by the crew, even when the movie is depicting children being massacred (when, up to that point, the movie has been corny, '60s-style science fiction.
  • Used a couple times in The Exterminator, which made Jay think the VHS copy they had was an edited version when it was actually the theatrical cut they had. ^note  A Director's Cut exists on both DVD and blu-ray.
  • Subverted in Future War. The camera cuts away as Robert Z'dar's cyborg character explodes, which annoys the crew, only to immediately cut to Robert Z'dar engulfed in flames, which improves their mood quite a bit.
• Gratuitous Ninja: Len Kabasinski sure thinks so. He expresses a desire to watch all nine ninja movies, and Squees about the martial arts. Naturally, there's a bit of Author Appeal considering the content of his movies. He even admits to being an expert on The '80s ninja movies and having been inspired since a child to go to martial arts because of them.
• Gratuitous Rape: The guys actually led off one show saying that it isn't their fault that a lot of the bad movies they watch use Rape as Drama, usually as an excuse to show off tits, shock the audience, or establish a character as evil - rather than actually having something to say on the subject. It's one of their least favorite tropes, since scenes like this tend to suck all the fun out of the movie and instead make the viewing experience rather uncomfortable.
  • They reviewed Dangerous Men poorly because it started off as something of a Rape and Revenge story, but was basically Gratuitous Attempted Rape: The Movie, including the film ending with the villain stopping to try to rape a random woman while being chased by the police.
    Rich: (when a blind woman pulls a gun on the villain) This is a universe where every man decides to rape every woman. Of course she has a gun under her knitting!
  • Deathstalker is literally Gratuitous Rape: The Movie. The film's opening scene is a bandit attempting to bind and rape a woman, only to be ambushed by a pack of goblins. The goblins begin to rape the woman, when Deathstalker shows up; he fends off the goblins and the bandit to save the woman, only to rape her himself.
    Jack: For some reason, everyone in this film, including the hero, rapes. Rape is a sport, rape is a pastime, rape is a reward, rape is a punishment...
    Josh: Right, so are you saying that rape is part of their culture ?
  • They've grown to hate this trope so much that they now react with open exasperation whenever they find out ahead of time that a movie will involve rape. This is best shown during Plinketto #5 where first the box of Nail Gun Massacre establishes it as a Rape and Revenge story and the movie opens in the middle of the gang-rape scene it centers on with no buildup, and then again when the sequel to the aforementioned Deathstalker comes up, which ended up being a surprising subversion since it was considerably Lighter and Softer than its prequel and didn't involve rape at all.
  • In "Best of the Worst: Bad Movie Scavenger Hunt," the first criterium that Rich randomly draws is "Depiction of rape on the cover." He cringes and tells Mike, "You son of a bitch!" Mike insists that he didn't rig the selection as a prank. Mike ultimately allows Rich to trade in rape for another criterium at the cost of $1.
• Gretzky Has the Ball: Jack receives A TON of flack from the rest of the crew for trying and failing to make a basketball reference.
  Jack: Isn't that the guy... He played for the Charlotte Hornets, right? Scottie Pippen?
  Mike: Scottie Pippen? Why would you pick the Charlotte Hornets and not the Bulls?!
  Jay: I was going to say, he was in the Bulls!
  Rich: You fucking idiot.
  • While it goes unnoticed, Jack also mentions seeing Patrick Ewing appearing in NBA Jam as a player for the Charlotte Hornets. He never played for the Charlotte Hornets. He played most of his career for the New York Knicks.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: In Deadly Prey, Danton cuts off The Dragon's arm (which doesn't spill a single drop of blood) and beats him to death with it. Happens once again to the identical brother of the very same character in The Deadliest Prey.
• Groin Attack: Rich Evans gets hit in the groin with a paint can in Plinketto #7, courtesy of Macaulay Culkin.
• Guilty Pleasures: Len Kabasinski films.
• Halfway Plot Switch: "The Black Spine Edition" edition, where they pick random VHS tapes with no labels. They have so little to work with that the second half of the episode turns into a "Spotlight" episode on Partners.
  • Silk proves to be so boring, they abandon it and do Neil Breen's Pass Thru instead.
• Hidden Depths: While primarily the Butt-Monkey, Rich reveals himself to be a surprisingly skilled handyman whenever the crew needs something built for the show; every incarnation of the Wheel of the Worst was made by him.
• Hidden Weapons: Blood Debts has its protagonist wield what looks like a cheap prop gun hidden in his sleeve that shoots a tiny powerful rocket that blows up people.
• Hipster: In the Dinosaur Episode, featuring Theodore Rex, Carnosaur, and Tammy and the T-Rex, they call out Jack on his potential hipsterism for his choice for Best of the Worst and his consistent devil's advocate approach. Even though he got to choose first this time, if only because he was the only one who understood the plot of the movies.
• Hilarious Outtakes: Thanks to the edit they sometimes leave in some behind the scenes reveals, showing, for example;
  • Violently knocking some of the tapes on the floor in one episode's intro will in fact break the mechanism inside one of the cassettes, resulting in the need for a 'tape transplant' between cases.
  • Some VHS tapes are so old and decrepit that they will get stuck inside the player.
  • Some people/everybody getting drunk can lead to belligerence, disagreements, loss of the thread, and even having to start over when everyone has sobered up.
• Hollywood Homely: Evil Toons tries to make Monique Gabrielle, a former Penthouse Pet, into "the shy nerd that doesn't know how beautiful she actually is" archetype. They do this by making her wear big Coke bottle glasses and putting her hair in a messy ponytail. Though Jay thinks the glasses were just there to hide her unique style of acting.
• Hollywood Satanism:
  • Surviving Edged Weapons features a segment where the cops bust in on a Satanic ritual and are attacked with a ritual dagger used for Human Sacrifice. The gang are utterly astounded by this development and begin cheering as soon as they realize what's happening.
  • The Law Enforcement Guide to Satanic Cults goes out of its way to describe firsthand accounts of the horrors of Satanism (child sexual abuse, murder, and non-heterosexual orgies), but undercuts its argument with footage that was clearly staged so as to confirm people's perceptions and convince them to reaffirm their Christian beliefs. The gang loathes the video's Blatant Lies and obnoxious agenda so much that they unanimously voted to destroy it.
• Human Popsicle: Hitler Popsicle, to be exact, in Order of the Black Eagle.
• Hurricane of Euphemisms: In Wheel of the Worst #8, Rich relates a story about a middle-aged man whom he knew from a minor league baseball stadium who took him to his place to show him a poster of himself in a Wendy's ad and who also owned Warhammer figurines. Mike, Jay and Jack just run with it, implicating the man was trying to seduce him ("Did he show you his balls? His baseballs, I mean..." "You and him shared a footlong...") It's followed by a still image of Rich masturbating.
  Rich: ... I hate you so much. I hate you.
• Hypocritical Humor:
  • In "Wheel of the Worst #3", Jay and Rich are excited when the wheel lands on Tree Stand Safety. Cut to everyone watching the film with a bored expression on their face. Also an In-Universe example, the boyfriend from Instant Adoring Boyfriend complains that "[he] doesn't understand why women feel the need to take their clothes off in movies" while wearing nothing but a towel. The reviewers find this amusing.
  • Invoked by Mike in "Wheel of the Worst #6". He and the rest of the crew make Black Comedy jokes and mock the elderly back up dancers from the Osteoporosis Dance video. He later criticizes Colin for laughing at them.
  • When the group is discussing an actor with a drinking problem, the camera zooms in on Mike and Jay taking sips of their beers.
  • Fun Tip: always remember to check your spelleng.[1]
  • In "Plinketto #2" Mike learns from Google Maps that several scenes in Repo Jake were shot in the parking lot right outside the production crew's own address. The team discusses with plenty of knowing winks to the camera what kind of lazy film-makers would do such a thing. This is immediately followed up by several clips from RedLetterMedia's own Space Cop, which were filmed right outside their own office.

I - P

• I Am a Humanitarian: While discussing the cannibals in Doctor Butcher, the crew gets into a long heated argument about what people to eat. Jack dismisses Louie Anderson because there's too much fat on him, and says muscle men like Arnold Schwarzenegger would be perfect because they have muscle. Rich argues that fat is what makes the meat juicy. They eventually agree on André the Giant and Shaquille O'Neal as the perfect human meals.
• invoked I Am Not Shazam: When they don't refer to generic action movie protagonists as "Action Man", they tend to call them by the name of the film. This was done in Gymkata, Low Blow and Blood Debts, and other films. They'll even sometimes do this in retrospect; they called the main character of Deadly Prey "Action Man" during the discussion of the film, but referred to him as "Deadly Prey" when they talked about Killer Workout, which featured the same actor. For Rickshaw, Mike proposed the twist of calling the protagonist "Rick Shaw."
• Improbable Aiming Skills: During the discussion of The Tomb, Mike expresses his displeasure with the movie by throwing his empty bottle in a high lob behind the table... hitting the broken top half of another bottle that flies in a perfect arc, landing directly on top of the fridge. The discussion is paused as the amazing throw is shown again in slow motion.
• Improv:
  • Jay likes to think of the pre-fight argument between the band managers in Miami Connection as this. A later scene, wherein the black character's friends repeatedly ask him to tell them what's wrong, provokes similar speculation.
  • Jay also points out that the "cancer-infected rats" line in Hard Ticket to Hawaii sounds like it was made up on the spot, both in terms of the line itself and how it was delivered.
  • Jay doesn't compare the submarine action sequence from V-World Matrix to a Let's Play for nothing.
• I Need a Freaking Drink:
  • After the Incredible Instant Adoring Boyfriend is chosen Jessi walks over and opens a beer.
  • During the episode with Future War, The Jar, and White Fire, Mike sports a giant hip flask and guzzles from it during the entire episode. Eventually, Mike and Rich fight over the flask.
    Rich: You're killing me, Mike! You're killing me!
• Informed Ability: Mike says that a better title for Ninja Vengeance would be "Somewhat Competent Yellow Belt."
  Rich: He's a terrible ninja!
• In Case of X, Break Glass:
  • Parodied in the episode where they reviewed Silk. The movie's DVD is inside a clear jewel case, which in turn s encased by a glass box on the wall. When they are about to review the film, Rich breaks it with a hammer.
  • A copy of Neil Breen's Pass Thru was held in reserve in a glass case with a note reading "In Case of Max Landis, Break Glass." However, once Landis became an unperson due to assault accusations, the label replaced "Max Landis" with "Emergency." The group did eventually break it when their scheduled film proved unwatchable.
• Incest Subtext: The crew could not interpret the McNamara twins' relationship in Twin Dragon Encounter as anything other than them being in love with each other, since they had way more sexual tension with each other than with their in-movie girlfriends, including refusing to go swimming with them so they can saw a log shirtless in a suggestive position, and at one point drive an ATV by having one of them sit in the other's lap. They theorize that since the movie is such a shameless Vanity Project, that they're so enamoured with themselves that they each can't help but be attracted to someone who looks identical to themselves.
• In Name Only: Lampshaded during the 2016 Christmas Episode, "Christmas Or Crocodiles". They admit they only had a couple of movies that actually had crocodiles and had to fill the rest out with films about alligators. Because of this, they jokingly update the title to Christmas Or Crocodiles^*oh and alligators as well.
• Insult to Rocks: During their review of the Roger Corman Fantastic Four movie, Jack describes the full-on "Flame On!" CGI effect of the Human Torch (which had not been seen before in the rest of the movie) as "ReBoot-esque". Rich Evans interrupts, saying "You are doing a disservice to ReBoot." Everyone else laughs uproariously.
• Insurance Fraud: The crew speculates that one reason RepliGATOR was made was because the writer/lead actor had previously injured his back and he wanted to fake a on-set accident to get his insurance company to pay for his treatment.
• Insurmountable Waist-High Fence: When they're watching the movie Black Cougar they show a clip where the hero jumps a small wooden fence using his supposed superhuman agility. The guys chasing him have to stop and go around the fence to keep chasing him when it's obvious they could jump the fence almost as easily.
• Interspecies Romance: The Item ends with Rita having sex with the title monster that has killed the rest of the cast.
• Irony: The gang can't help but dwell on the irony that Death Rider in the House of Vampires contains almost no music or any other ambient sound despite being directed by famous musician Glenn Danzig.
• It's the Journey That Counts: Why SOS was voted as Best of the Worst in episode 5.
• Jesus Was Way Cool: The group's incredulous reaction to a scene in SOS where a flying Jesus on the cross gives an Aside Glance and smiles at the audience.
• Jerkass Gods: Gary Coleman, according to the crew's Alternative Character Interpretation. In his efforts to amuse himself and impress a hot nurse, he chokes a boy almost to death, nearly gives him a concussion, and summons an attempted home intruder to rape the children's mother.
• Keet: Max Landis.
• Kill It with Fire: The M.O. of Exterminator 2's "hero"; the crew thinks he's an Asshole Victim though, because he's a Designated Hero who is actually a murderous thug.
• Know-Nothing Know-It-All: Melissa Michaels, the host of The Dance of Birth, who spouts completely insane New Age gibberish, to Mike's disgust.
  Melissa Michaels: Breathing in... and breathing out. Oxygenating our wombspace...
  (cue hysterical laughter from crew)
  Jessi: That's not your "wombspace," it's your womb!
• The Lad-ette/One of the Boys: Jessi. She knocks back brewskis, has a passion for flatulence-related humour, and enjoys gorier moments just as much as the rest of the guys.
• Large Ham:
  • Max Landis so far is probably the most hyperactive and loudest guest the crew has ever had.
  • Jimmy "The Scot" Jordan in Top Slots - Spotting The Best, a very expressive Motor Mouth who moves his hands like they have spiders on them.
  • Don Beveridge in his "Customerization Seminar", a Motor Mouth who loudly hollers and has his sentences Punctuated! For! Emphasis! a lot.
  • This is part of the reason for the gang's long-standing love Rudy Ray Moore, whose performances are always amusingly bombastic and over-the-top.
• Laser-Guided Karma: The means by which The Amazing Bulk and Psycho From Texas are destroyed parody contemptible aspects of the respective films themselves.
• Laughing Mad: Mike, while watching Christy during the 2018 Christmas episode, just starts laughing for no apparent reason. He would later admit that there was no context for it, and that he was just laughing like a person in a straightjacket would.
• The Leader: At the beginning of the discussion session, someone will seize the opportunity to assume the role of unofficial host and assign each member of the panel one of the movies to introduce. The benefit of taking the host position is that you don't get stuck trying to explain an inexplicable movie.
• Leave the Camera Running
  • One of the chief complaints about both The New Gladiators and Robot Jox was that the middle fifty minutes of the film between major action set pieces was this.
  • invoked During the opening, Rich Evans calls R.O.T.O.R. by a new title: Establishing Shot: The Movie! Even when it's not wasting time with establishing shots, it's finding astounding new ways to waste time with other shots.
    Josh: So then, finally, once it's established that he's a guy who lives in a farmhouse, and has a coffee cup, and pullin' some carrots out of the fridge, and then he goes to hang out with his friend the horse, and his horse is way the fuck over there, and he's gotta take his time just amblin' on over there, and we needed to see every goddamn step he takes to get up to the horse.
  • invoked Crazy Fat Ethel II, in a severe example of Padding. A notable instance is the creepy orderly serving dog food as "corned beef hash": he sets each of the six dishes, then scoops out servings for each dish in a meticulous fashion for an obscene amount of time.
  • Playing Dangerous 2 has its dialogue scenes be long takes framed with wide, flat shots and with the camera being a good distance away from the actors.
  • Fred Levine's Original Cleared for Takeoff is nothing but an extended home video of a vacation with two airplane rides. It even speeds up during the airplane ride, with the kids completely annoying the other passengers.
  • The Star Wars Holiday Special episode appears to be this trope incarnated... 40 minutes of seemingly unedited tangents about everything BUT the special.
  • Rock n' Roll Nightmare bafflingly begins with what is essentially two separate opening credits sequences, the first being rat's-eye footage shot inside the house, and the second being several minutes of establishing shots over music. Only the first actually has credits, leaving the second as nothing but wordless filler.
• Le Film Artistique:
  • The Jar, an experimental horror film that's basically 90 minutes of constantly pulling the All Just a Dream trope. The crew is convinced that it's somebody's crappy student film that somehow got released into the world.
  • The Dance of Birth has elements of this. The crew goes into it expecting it to be instructions detailing stretches and breathing exercises for pregnant women, but what they got was a bunch of pregnant and non-pregnant women flailing around while a Granola Girl narrator babbles on about incoherent new-age crap.
    Narrator: By releasing our throats, we support the softening of our pelvic floors.
  • Turtle Dreams is described by the crew as feeling like a parody of incomprehensible avant-garde films. The gang notes that the synopsis on the back of the box is such a surface-level description that the author must have been just as baffled as they are by what any of it is supposed to mean:
    Turtle Dreams (1983) was created by the dance/theater artist and composer Meredith Monk. The video is a collage-style work that juxtaposes minimalist movement phrasing and vocal work with images of a live turtle traversing various terrains. The turtle is pictured both in an outdoor natural habitat and roaming through constructed sets (the moon's surface, a city block), which play with scale to make the turtle seem gigantic. The performers execute shifting movements and sing repetitive sounds against a spare backdrop. Close-ups of their features and hands appear.
• Letting the Air out of the Band:
  • After a raucous celebration of Elves and Santa Claus — which reduces the whole gang to hysteria and causes Rich to break a rib from laughter — the gang has absolutely nothing to say about National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation 2: Cousin Eddie's Island Adventure. Jessi immediately swaps the DVD for the original Christmas Vacation, triggering loud Christmas Music as the gang happily reminiscences about that film... but a Drone of Dread sets in when the topic inevitably turns back to Island Adventure.
  • Rich and Jack's introduction of Supergirl (1984). They look like they just received sweaters for Christmas.
• Let Us Never Speak of This Again: The gang's reactions to Florence Henderson: Looking Great, Feeling Great. In Wheel of the Worst #4. They watch the video bored out of their minds before it cuts to Rich and Jay back at the wheel, implying that they found the video so dull that they turned it off and forced the duo to choose something else. They don't even mention it in the post-viewing roundtable discussion.
• Look Behind You: Len Kabasinski may be there.
• Lyrical Shoehorn: Let's Sing and Dance™ Music Video has awful songs with lyrics that were probably written by the kids themselves.
  He wants to take yo' money
  He don't care about you
  He might say you can fly
  You might fly out a window!
• Made of Explodium
  • The crew gets some mileage from watching a truck falling off a cliff in The Vindicator that somehow explodes in mid-air.
  • Let's not forget the exploding motorbikes from The New Gladiators!
  • The Grim Reaper in Spookies, who after being pushed from haunted house's second story, violently explodes for no clear reason. The panel then begins joking he was supposed to appear in following film, Action USA and that all the explosions in that film were caused by grim reapers.
• Mad Libs Catchphrase: invokedThe crew frequently refers to iconically bad moments from films they're discussing as "the famous _____ scene."
• Malaproper: Rich is infamous for his habit of stumbling over words, mispronouncing words and simply getting words wrong, such as saying "ambivalous" instead of "ambivalent." He sometimes accidentally creates a portmanteau. The other panelists never fail to call him out on it.
• Male Gaze:
  • Discussed by the crew with regards to the female lead's flat butt in Alien From The Deep.
    Jay: That's neither here nor there, though. The movie's not about her butt.
    Jack: No.
    Rich: It kinda is.
    [Jay and Jack stare awkwardly at Rich. Rich smiles as a picture of the female lead's butt is shown on the top right and an eerie sound effect plays.]
  • They note most of Double Dragon (1994) are the brothers staring at Alyssa Milano's butt.
• Making Love in All the Wrong Places: Mad Foxes features the protagonist having sex with a girl in what appears to be a bathtub filled with piss, as well as in the middle of the forest after apparently having taken a shit and not wiped.
• Make-Out Point: "Windy Point" in If You Love Me... Show Me, or as Tim calls it, "Fuck Butt Point."
• Mammy: Psycho From Texas has one of these in the movie and she has every characteristic that the trope describes. What really makes this noteworthy is that the movie was made - and probably takes place - in 1975.
• Manchild: The crew got some mileage out of a woman in The Nail Gun Massacre acting like a little girl just because she was left alone after the picnic.
• Marty Stu: invoked The crew has a real field day with any Neil Breen film due to the indie auteur's habit of making films that revolve around himself playing a character who is super-duper at absolutely everything. It progresses from Double Down, where he's a genius secret agent Omnidisciplinary Scientist, to Pass Thru, where he's an actual godlike being.
• Mathematician's Answer: In response to the question of whether The Amazing Bulk was a sincere filmmaking endeavor gone horribly wrong, an attempt to intentionally make the next Birdemic or The Room (2003), or a simple mockbuster:
  Jay: The answer is yes.
  Mike: Which one?
  Jay: [nods] Mmhmm.
• Meaningful Background Event: In R.O.T.O.R., while Coldyron brings the victimized Bait Lady beside a truck, the climactic fight scene is happening between Skunk Lady and R.O.T.O.R. not only in the background, but out of focus.
  Jay: It's like a Zucker Brothers gag!
• Mighty Whitey: Jack remarks that the moral of Ninja III: The Domination is that "white people ruin everything" in reference to the main character of the film, a white woman that only know aerobics, effortlessly defeating the villain when the experienced Japanese ninja struggled to do the same.
  Rich: White people ruin karate movies.
• Milking the Giant Cow: Doctor Doom in The Fantastic Four. As Jay points out, it's probably necessary, "otherwise this would just be a flat shot of his face."
• Mind Screw
  • The Aftermath's wild tonal inconsistency has this effect on Jay in particular.
  • The Dance of Birth, a supposedly instructional video featuring completely nonsensical narration and randomly-arranged shots of flailing pregnant women, husbands, and women dancing with their babies (much of which is against a green screen for no apparent reason).
    Jay: The Dance of Birth is the greatest movie that David Lynch never made.
  • The ending of The Amazing Bulk, which has the title character running through a CGI hillbilly town getting assaulted by stock CG entities and effects, including cars, random explosions, and the inexplicable lightning-hurling Zeus. The crew deems it the most confusing movie they've ever watched.
  • Double Down, which baffled the crew so much that Mike was on his knees just staring and Max Landis was reduced to just sitting on the floor without realizing it. Even Jack was unable to understand what was happening on screen. It unanimously won Best of the Worst because of this.
  • Pocket Ninjas is full of it, from the bizarre haphazard editing which goes back in forth in time, and Robert Z'Dar's scenes that are impossibly bizarre.
  • The premise of Ryan's Babe is actually fairly simple (Ryan runs away from his hometown, wanders from place to place encountering some strange and interesting scenarios along the way, eventually decides to go back home). The way it was presented, on the other hand, makes it one of the most baffling things they've ever screened. The movie appears to be attempting a Forrest Gump-esque Walking the Earth plot, but does so very poorly, introducing and then resolving subplots so quickly that it blends together into a sloppy Random Events Plot.^note For instance, one subplot about Ryan working at a restaurant, befriending a prostitute and her daughter, winning $20,000, and giving it to them after her husband takes them hostage and then kills himself (according to Rich) was introduced and resolved in about 1 minute Its tendency to use nested flashbacks that come out of nowhere and are about characters that haven't been introduced yet also leaves them baffled.
  • Turtle Dreams is a justified example, given that it's a taped performance by avant-garde composer Meredith Monk.
  • Diamond Cobra vs. the White Fox begins with a flashback to June 20th BC and only gets weirder from there. Its bloated cast gets caught up in a inscrutable plot involving cursed jewelry, serial killings, characters getting possessed, turf wars, and an ancient sorcerer/possible alien turning bar patrons into zombies and werewolves. The muffled dialogue renders some scenes completely incomprehensible, as do the horrid special effects. The only way the crew can begin to explain the film is by approaching it as a puzzle, and even that isn't enough to prevent them from going insane by the end of the episode.
  • Iced is a minor example. The premise is that of a pretty standard, even cliché, slasher movie, but the editing makes it very confusing. There are numerous scenes that seem to be inexplicable dream sequences or fantasies, including one where a couple are making out in front of a fireplace but are apparently fantasizing about doing the exact same thing in a bathtub instead, and another where an Attempted Rape is cut away from to a scene of the same woman who was being attacked almost cheerfully getting into a hot tub to take a bath, with the previous scene being left totally unaddressed.
• Missing Steps Plan: Rich describes the bad guys plan in Panther Squad to conquer the Universe as: Step 1: Sabotage Space Mission. Step 2: Kidnap June (The Backup Astronaut). Step 3: ??? Step 4: Profit!!
• Mockbuster: The crew points out The Last Vampire on Earth is a beat-for-beat copy of Twilight, only casting a bad actor who looks like Shrek than someone like Robert Pattinson. They even go so far as to create a book version of the movie, just so they can claim that the movie was based on a book.
• Mondegreen Gag: invoked
  • The way the little sister in Lost In Dinosaur World delivers the line about her brother's explorer costume "It's a park, not an African jungle" is so rushed and slurred that they all initially mishear her as saying "not a fucking jungle."
  • They spend the entire review of Diamond Cobra vs The White Fox calling Esaias the wizard "Egg Salad" because the audio editing is so garbled in every scene he says it in that they actually couldn't make out what his name was supposed to be.
• Monster Clown:
  • A bizarre party clown with a ratty t-shirt saying "I Can't Say No" appears briefly in Bloody Birthday for no apparent reason and is considered by the crew to be scarier than the psychopathic children. Jay and Mike identify him as Bagul from Sinister.
    Jay: This movie just got genuinely scary.
  • Rainbow's Remedy features grief counselor Eloise Cole dressed up as a clown in an attempt to cheer up her audience, but her clown makeup ends up looking incredibly creepy, particularly the heart drawn on her nose, which looks like the nostril holes of a skull during most far shots. When the gang first observes the box of the cassette, the camera lingers on her face while eerie music plays and both presenters just stare in silence. In a later episode, Rich calls her "Eloisecole" (one word) as if she's an Eldritch Abomination.
  • Jack himself is, as Rich Evans put it, "a fucking clown weirdo." Jack has appeared in full clown makeup and outfit on his and Rich's show Previously Recorded.
  • Downplayed with Dr. Bubba, the Christian hospital clown. Everyone agrees that they'd rather put up with his annoying proselytizing and terrible 'comedy' than the primordial terror that is Eloisecole.
  • Also somewhat downplayed with T-Bone from ''T-Bone's World of Clowning". Their main problem with him is they find his face too angular to look friendly, and instead they make more jokes about the unintentional Ho Yay they find going on.
• Mood Whiplash
  • In Russian Terminator, the protagonist tells his female accomplice that he got attacked by the Russian Ninja out of nowhere. In the very next scene, said man and woman are cozying around a pool in bathing suits with no sync sound, shot in what seems like home movie 8mm film.
  • In Exterminator 2: "Breakdancing may happen at any time." And it does!
  • Jay claims that the tone of The Aftermath "completely fucked with my brain," cutting back and forth between cheesy, family-friendly, B-movie sci-fi scenes and graphic sequences of mass murder (including that of children, without a Gory Discretion Shot in sight) and rape. What's worse, even the violent scenes seemingly can't decide on a coherent mood, as they're all set to "Looney Tunes music."
  • The scene in Deadly Prey where Danton beats The Dragon to death with his own severed arm comes just after his wife is killed, and is shortly followed by a Downer Ending that's horribly suited to the rest of the movie.
  • The black guy's monologue in Miami Connection, which the group agrees is the most awkward tonal shift they've seen in a long time.
  • The female bartender being forced to strip by the sadistic villain in Psycho From Texas comes right after a very long and invoked unintentionally hilarious chase scene.
  • Surviving Edged Weapons is fraught with this. It's an instruction video for police officers on handling people with cutting and stabbing weapons. It's opening scene involves one caveman stabbing another caveman for his food, complete with tunics, messy hair and over the top spurting blood. It also involves super thick Milwaukee accents, horror music where a cop's head is cleaved open with a butcher knife, a woman worshiping Satan, a man using a sword, and a shoot out scene in a bar that would be right out of an action flick. On the other side of the coin it shows real life officers show their scars from engaging perps with knives, actual graphic autopsies of people dying from wounds to the neck, chest, groin and even an arrow in the chest. In sharp contrast to the opening scene involving cavemen and gore it's finale scene is an officer becoming emotionally distraught and crying upon talking about a past experience.
  • A meta example occurs with Ryan's Babe. The cover makes it look like a raunchy Sex Comedy in the vein of American Pie or Road Trip and has them go into the screening expecting such a movie. This leaves them baffled when the very first scene opens with an Attempted Rape in the middle of the woods, whose victim then escapes and carjacks the titular Ryan at gunpoint, all played completely seriously.
  • Rocktober Blood is another meta example. The film ends with the slasher villain murdering victims onstage in the middle of a show before being electrocuted. The movie ends, credits roll, and then we are given a look into lives of the now elderly filmmakers as they talk about heart disease, greyhound rescue, and faith in Jesus.
  • Wheel of the Worst #18 has the crew watch a tape called Preventing Disaster At The Crossing, which is a serious and rather grim warning tape for bus drivers about the dangers of not taking railway crossings seriously. Not only is it competently produced, but the tape itself is serious Nightmare Fuel, discussing a real accident in which a bus filled with children was struck by a train and all of them were killed. The following video is Creating Rem Lezar, which is so utterly hilarious that every single one of them is filled with joy and laughter. The editor even highlights this, cutting between a shot of the crew listening to a mother describe the horrific experience of finding her own child's body in solemn silence, and another shot of the crew watching Rem Lezar and nearly crying with laughter.
  • Yello Dyno: Can't Fool Me! is a movie that attempts to warn children about "tricky people", or in other words, pedophiles. The problem is that it tries to be entertaining to kids as well, which results in the movie having both extremely uncomfortable scenes where little girls are photographed in Age-Inappropriate Dress by a predatory music producer, reducing them to tears and songs about their Innocence Lost, but it's also hosted by a Totally Radical yellow dinosaur with sunglasses and a voice like Chris Rock, includes wacky cartoon sound effects, and the previously mentioned predatory music producer also has a wacky, bumbling sidekick. The version that the gang watches is also the edited down version, with the other version having about ten minutes of even more disturbing footage that was removed.
• Mook Chivalry: While discussing The Instructor, Jay notes that movies usually has the bad guys run into frame and attack to avoid seeing the other mooks standing and waiting for their turn, but The Instructor used a overhead shot, so you can see the mooks standing in a circle and attack Burt Pesci (the protagonist) one at the time.
• Mundane Made Awesome
  • V-World Matrix has one of the protagonists reading very mundane things they could do in their cybervacation, which includes eating food and...
    "Hookers?" Hookers...!
  • Playing Dangerous 2 has Stewart enjoying a toast with his associates with juice boxes for what seems to be a minute.
    Associate Jack: Well, that was fun.
    [Cue to laughter from the crew.]
    Jay: Ah, the famous apple juice drinking scene.
    Josh: Well, that happened.
• N-Word Privileges: In the Christmas Plinketto episode, Mike Stoklasa (a Polish, or Czech, surname) takes a long, hard look at an extremely shitty-looking handmade wheelchair ramp and says, "It looks like ... like a Polack built it." Everybody then bursts out laughing, and Jack says it's been a "hot minute" since he's heard that word, to which Mike tries to clarify, "I can say it."
• Naked People Are Funny: Candid Candid Camera Vol. 6 sure seems to think so.
  Allen Funt: Our next segment may as well be called "Why I Like To Be Nude."
  [Cue chortles from the crew.]
  Jay: If it doesn't feature him being nude, I don't care.
• Narm:
  • invoked Invoked during Deadly Prey on the actor playing the Corrupt Corporate Executive.
    Executive: (monotone) I'm a businessman, Hogan, not a fool.
    Jay: (imitating) Actor-tron 5000. Generic Evil Businessman program running.
  • And again during Cyber Tracker.
    Wife: (overdramatically gesturing) No! You were an investigator when I married you, not... not a bodyguard.
    Jay: [mimics her gestures] She is acting!
  • "The world's silliest death truck," built by the Exterminator. It's said to be reminiscent of what would result from the Home Alone kid's efforts to build a death truck.
  • They repeatedly harp on the name HauntedWeen and seem to consider it one of the lamest titles they've ever seen. They also have a hard time taking the movie's slasher seriously because his name is Eddie Berber, which Jay says just makes him think of Gerber brand baby food.
• Narm Charm: invoked
  • The cast genuinely loved Hope's (aka Granny) line from Crazy Fat Ethel II.
    Ethel: You give me those pretzels, Granny!
    Hope: I will not.
  • invoked The reason the crew liked The Crawlers, due to its obvious No Budget.
  • Both Future War and Thunderpants were disqualified because the crew found them charming.
• Nausea Fuel: invoked Wormania! for Mike, who kept saying that he wanted to spill his guts multiple times during the viewing.
• Neologism:
  • During Playing Dangerous 2, Rich talks about "non-medy", in which an attempt at comic relief is so painfully unfunny it actually makes the movie less entertaining.
  • During the review of KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park, Rich blows an obvious chance to make a good pun, Mike tells him he "David Prior-ed" it, meaning he ruined the chance to make an easy score, as David Prior did nothing with a horror film set in a gym (Killer Workout).
• Never Heard That One Before: The number of "dropped the ball" jokes during Plinketto episodes is often mocked.
• Never My Fault: Mike has this attitude a few times. When asked who's idea it was to use short films on the Wheel, he guiltily changes the subject, this after screaming at Rich for the idea of the Wheel. He also claims it's not his fault for breaking the Wheel because Jack knocked it over before, even though he screamed "Oh, fuck!" when Jack did.
• Nightmare Fetishist: Jay. During the review of Faust: Love of the Damned, Rich, Mike and Jay noted that during the "tit puddle" scene, he was grinning avidly (while Rich was gob smacked with disgust). Jay also professes a love for giallo and the works of Frank Hennenlotter. That underscores just how much he had to be disturbed by Xtro to supply the quote below.
• Nightmare Fuel: invoked Invoked by the crew while watching Xtro. Jay is visibly disturbed and covering his eyes.
  Jay: This is like my worst nightmare!
• Nightmare Retardant: invoked The crew did not find the titular baboon in Shakma scary at all. In fact, they found it to be adorable.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: From Miami Connection:
  Rich: So, they're a kung fu band fighting a biker band, being pursued by ... the girlfriend's brother's drug lord ninja friends.
  Jack: Who, I'm sure, are also in a band.
  • Ninja Warriors.
    Jack: So, not only is it a ninja movie, it's a ninja zombie movie.
    Len Kabasinski: Everybody wins.
  • They immediately take a liking to Raw Force after the back of the box promises flesh-eating undead disgraced martial arts masters.
• No Animals Were Harmed: Occasionally averted and always causing the gang to comment.
  • Averted in Tree Stand Safety. Aside from a granny grinning over deer carcasses she just killed, the video shows a deer explicitly getting gut shot. Red Letter Media censor bars the actual bullet strike. The trope is invoked by Jessi, who sarcastically wonders if the "No animals were harmed" disclaimer will appear at the end of the video.
  • Averted again during Beaks, which features pigeons being thrown at actors. They also become concerned that for the shot of a falcon being blown up with a rifle, they may have killed a real bird. They aren't entirely sure, but after going over the shot they do conclude that it probably wasn't real.
  • Exploding Varmints Vol. 1 is entirely devoted to showing gophers being shot. The gang likens it to some kind of animal snuff porn.
• No Budget: invoked Most of the movies reviewed on the channel are independent films made with extremely low budget. Selections range from schlock B-movies made by professional filmmakers all the way down to amateur productions filmed with camcorders in the director's living room.
  • Presumably because The Killer Eye blew most of its money on the prop of the titular eye, its set is incredibly cheap-looking. The crew surmises that it's the basement of a Goodwill location.invoked
    Rich: They couldn't even afford to buy the junk at the Goodwill. They actually had to film it at the Goodwill.
  • Very clearly shown in V-World Matrix, which has Styrofoam cups used to drink beer in the virtual world and special effects that literally look like they were done in Microsoft Paint. The only remotely passable special effects sequence is lifted straight from another movie.invoked
  • Space Mutiny is an attempt to film a Space Opera on a very tight budget, forcing the filmmakers to design crappy sets with computer keyboards taped to walls, try to pass an industrial factory off as a spaceship in spite of the sunlight beaming in through the windows, reduce the action climax into a golf-cart race, and make extensive use of repurposed stock footage.
  • Crazy Fat Ethel II is even worse, in that it appears to have been shot with an old VHS video camera^note complete with audio bleed from the camera's motor and in someone's house, with the neighbors as supporting actors.invoked
  • Future War, which is best described by Josh as "a child's fight scenario shot on a $17 budget", exemplified by the infamous "cardboard video camera" which the crew did not fail to notice.
  • Traveling With Ooga Booga, which was described by Josh as "sub-Plan 9" and features bubble wrap taped to the walls and an Atari 2600 controller posing as one of the spaceship controls.
    Mike: This looks like a porno. A sick, sick porno.
  • Johnson Family Christmas Dinner appears to have been filmed in somebody's house with a camcorder and the cast just appears to be people the director knows. And even though it takes place during Christmas, there are barely any decorations around the house, not even a Christmas tree.
  • It seems like all of the money spent on Diamond Cobra vs. The White Fox went to paying SAG-AFTRA union actors their minimum scale. Not only are the production values so low with Off-the-Shelf FX and cheap video effects, the film has such locations as an Olive Garden. The film even showed that the lead actor/director/producer/singer's mother did some of the camera work — and it shows.
• No Ending:
  • Dangerous Men just stops on a freeze frame of one new character arresting another new character in front of another new character. It's especially egregious in that the film took almost thirty years to make.
    Jay: (utterly amazed) So... so.... so... this movie took 26 years not to finish, but to stop being made.
  • Johnson Family Christmas Dinner ends about as abruptly. After building up several family conflicts over the course of the movie and resolving a couple of them in the last few minutes, three more are built up to be resolved in rapid succession before an abrupt Smash Cut to the credits before anything is said.
  • Biohazard ends with the female lead suddenly revealing that she's actually an alien and was behind everything. She rips off her skin, reveals her true form, and cackles only for someone offscreen to yell cut and the film cuts to credits. The reminder of the runtime is just credits and outtakes.
• Non-Action Big Bad: The cult leader played by Cameron Mitchell in Low Blow is an extreme example to the point that he spends most of the film sitting in a chair and most of his dialogue is spoken for him by a minion.
• Non-Indicative Title/Secondary Character Title: Russian Terminator has no "terminator," and the character who is supposed to be a terminator is a ninja and is only a minor character.
  • They thought Honorable Men was an ironic title, since the main character instead came off to them as a sleazy Dirty Old Man who spends the movie basically two-timing two girls that are both young enough to be his daughters and eventually tells his friends that girls like them aren't good for anything besides sex.
• Noodle Incident:
  • It's revealed in Episode 15 that a lot of farting goes on during the Best of the Worst movie-watching.
  • In Jim's first episode, Mike tells Jay that, "The Canadian visual effects artists are multiplying again."
• "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer:
  • Miami Connection gets this twice during some weird scenes and edits.
  • Skull Forest gets this treatment thanks to Len Kabasinski's Leave the Camera Running directorial style.
  • Hell, just about any time they try to describe something incomprehensible, the line "this is a real thing that happens" is uttered by at least one of them.
• Off the Rails: The 2018 Halloween episode fell apart completely during the discussion of the first movie due to Mike, Jay, and Jack getting drunk. They talk about the movie normally at first, but then discussion devolves into being about two walls that kept popping up throughout the movie due to low budget, then after Jay makes them drink more shots, they just stop being able to focus at all, with a 30 minute time skip showing Mike and Jack accusing Jay of killing cats for some reason, with Jay cracking up and unable to defend himself. Rich, who doesn't drink, simply takes off his mic and walks away. Ultimately they had to stop there and waited two days before discussing the remaining two films, this time without alcohol of any kind.
• Oh, Crap!: Jack and Jay both give epic ones when Len Kabasinski punches their picture to retrieve a ninja film to review. Words can't describe their expression well enough. Rich, the third "punchee", merely faints (after having already gotten the living crap beat out of him by Len.)
• Once Done, Never Forgotten: During the The Star Wars Holiday Special, Jack brings up a video in which a guy in a Darth Vader mask pretended to jerk off with a robot toy. Mike and Jay express disgust as Rich sinks lower and lower into his seat guiltily.
• Once More, with Clarity:
  • After they introduce Dangerous Men, it cuts to the viewing, showing that whatever happens at the end causes Rich to continue his gag of throwing things at the TV. Then when they actually discuss the ending, it's because it ends on a freeze frame of two characters that have had barely any screen time and a woman who had just been introduced.
  • Done with the entirety of Ryan's Babe, where the viewing footage before discussion is just a compilation of every time they were confused at a scene, without showing the scenes themselves. Over the course of the discussion, they show the scenes they were reacting to.
• Only Sane Man: Jack takes on this role during the first part of the The Star Wars Holiday Special when the gang starts joking about 9/11.
  Jack: (begging the others to edit the 9/11 references out) No!
  Jay: Oh, this is staying in.
  Jack: No!
  • Averted with Pocket Ninjas, as he's the first to completely snap.
• Overly Long Gag:
  • Rich says that had he made High Voltage, he would had used one impressive stunt 20 times. The episode then proceeds to do exactly that.
  • The gag is repeated in their review of Order of the Black Eagle, showing an actor getting his head accidentally run over by an ATV. Rich points out that they only played the clip 19 times, prompting Mike to exclaim "One more time!" The clip is then repeated 20 more times. Given the arm and leg twitch when the "dummy" gets run over, they point out that it's most likely that this was a stunt gone horribly wrong that got used in the film anyway. ^note This was confirmed by a stunt man at this link.
  • The "Tums Festival" gag, where Jay brings up a character from Hollywood Cop saying "Every day ends with a Tums Festival," and Rich swearing up and down that that line is from a completely different movie. Cue the appropriate Hollywood Cop clip playing proving Rich wrong, dozens and dozens of times as Rich continues to deny it.
  • In Episode 29, Mike tosses a beer bottle over his head, and a large shard of the bottle lands on top of a nearby refrigerator. The episode treats it as a near-miraculous occurrence and replays it in slow motion over and over again.
• Overly Narrow Superlative:
  • Jay refers to Surviving Edged Weapons as "the Citizen Kane of 90s instructional VHS tapes".
  • Jack calls Black Cougar the greatest movie that the New Jersey Neighborhood Association has ever produced.
• Overshadowed by Awesome: The crew comments on this from time to time when an episode has one video that is so bizarre, interesting, or crazy that it completely overshadows the episode's other videos. Miami Connection, Ryans Babe, Surviving Edged Weapons, and A Robot in the Family are prominent examples.
• Padding: Conversed In-Universe.
  • R.O.T.O.R. was so full of it that they had to speed up the more egregious parts just to get their point across. And even sped up, it all still takes too long. invoked
    [after the crew watches an overlong opening crawl, separate opening narration, a series of increasingly specific establishing shots, and Coldyron making coffee, taking carrots out of his fridge, walking to his horse, and sharing the food and drink with the horse.]
    Jack: This all should've happened in thirty seconds!
  • The Family Guide to the Internet crams all of its potentially useful information into the first few minutes, then spends most of its remaining running time on montages of various website pages.
  • V-World Matrix. Not only does it have scenes go on long just to cover songs from beginning to end, but there's a ten-minute sequence of Stock Footage from another, better film, in which it sounds like the leads are providing improvised commentary from their couch like a Let's Play.
  • Somehow, someway, Crazy Fat Ethel II has tons of padding - despite a sixty-minute running time.
  • Psycho From Texas is even worse in the same episode - which features what's estimated to be a full half-hour of a dull chase on foot. Footage of the crew's reactions synced with sped-up clips from the movie drives the point home.
  • The crew's main complaint with Future Force.
    Rich: Everything in this movie takes too fucking long. Unnecessary shots of people driving cars, taking their time parking, backing out, parking a little bit better just to get more in-between the lines, opening the door, getting out of the car, closing the door, walking over to the building, opening the door's building [sic], and then they go in the elevator.
  • The granny shimmying up a tree in Tree Stand Safety is shown in its entirety.
  • Bigfoot vs D.B. Cooper consists almost entirely of shirtless men walking and jogging around the forest.
• Painting the Medium: The Spotlight episode on After Last Season is interspersed with random cuts to mundane objects in the BOTW set as a reference to the movie's editing style.
• Poe's Law:
  • This was the crew's main problem with The Amazing Bulk, as they found the film to be so bad that they couldn't decide on whether it was a sincere attempt to make a Sin City-esque stylized superhero film, a terrible superhero parody, an intentionally So Bad, It's Good movie with Stylistic Suck, or simply a cheap Mockbuster to The Incredible Hulk (2008).^note According to Director Commentary, they simply had no money — and simply gave up trying to put effort into it.
  • In "Wheel of the Worst 3", the crew can't decide whether Instant Adoring Boyfriend was meant for teenage girls, elderly gay men, lonely middle-aged women, or as a gag gift.
  • They couldn't tell what the creator's intent was, making Tammy and the T-Rex and weren't sure if it was supposed to be a light-hearted comedy with a silly premise or a serious horror movie.
  • Mike posits that American Flatulators might have been a gag gift much like Instant Adoring Boyfriend.
  • Rich was unable to enjoy two films fully, Dangerous Men and Suburban Sasquatch, because he was completely unable to tell if they were deliberate bad movies. The crew found the Making Of video diary of Suburban Sasquatch director Dave Wascavage sitting on a grandmotherly couch explaining his thought processes on the film to be far more hilarious than the film itself, because of its earnestness, especially costume designer Sarah Schneider beaming she'd "always wanted to work on a Dave Wascavage film", as if he were Orson Welles or Billy Wilder.
  • The crew remains unsure if Neil Breen (Double Down, Pass Thru) is a psychotic conspiracy theorist and a ticking time bomb, or an Andy Kaufman-esque Troll. They suspect the former, and wonder if the FBI is keeping tabs on him.
  • One of their main takeaways from A*P*E was that it felt like a parody of giant monster movies with most of the jokes cut out.
• Poetic Serial Killer: A non-murderous variation. The cast will destroy the video deemed the worst in a manner that they find befitting and clever (usually it in someway relates to the movie). However American Flatulators was so bad that they felt it didn't even deserve an Ironic Destruction. So they just decided club it while random clips of Un Chien Andalou pop up.
• Portmanteau: Rich the malaproper has a habit of unintentionally creating these when fumbling with his words. Expect the new portmanteaus to appear onscreen as he says them.
  Rich: All of the valuable auction items, which came from, like, a dollar store and are made out of plaster, are sitting on a folding chable^note "Chair" + "Table" that's covered in a dirty tablecloth.
  
  Rich: Sometimes she's a skost^note "Skull" + "Ghost", sometimes she's a skull, sometimes she's naked in a pool...
  
  Rich: This is t'hofful^note "Terrible" + "Awful".
• Poverty Food: The crew likes to assume that the dinner scenes in The Last Vampire on Earth have the characters eating small portions of KFC fried chicken and sides because that's all the director could afford.
• Precision F-Strike:
  • When Jack says that he thought Theodore Rex was Best of the Worst, Jay snaps, "FUCK YOU, Jack." He later Flips The Bird at him.
  • When a woman in Blood Lock drops a box of her friends' fragile glassware, Jack blurts out, "You cunt...", out of nowhere.
• Product Placement: The majority of Tree Stand Safety goes into, well, tree stand safety. The last 15 minutes or so of Tree Stand Safety is for an alternative product, which would make what you learned in this video useless.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: Done by Jessi while watching Incredible Instant Adoring Boyfriend.
  Jessi: Nobody! Irons! A jean skirt!

R - Z

• Rapid-Fire "No!": Rich's reaction to the "water cycle" title card appearing during Energy & Me after a lengthy black screen where the guys got hopeful that the tape might have ended by Smash to Black.
• Random Events Plot: Ryan's Babe is this, and combined with how quickly the movie goes from one event to another, it makes for an incredibly confusing experience. There is even a montage of the crew yelling "what??" at various plot events.
• Reaction Shot: The round table portions are intercut with footage of the panelists watching the film, capturing their emotions as they watch it for the first time. This is crucial in capturing such things as Rich Evans' reaction to the Showbiz Pizza Bear appearing in Trick or Treat.
• Reckless Gun Usage: During the "burning at the stake" scene in The Last Vampire on Earth, Chloe confronts her family and their friends with gun she casually waves around and has her finger directly behind the trigger probably as some weird form of trigger discipline. Rich could not keep his eyes off the trigger when he watched that scene. They also bring attention to the fact that her family apparently stores the gun by just leaving it sitting in a random kitchen cabinet even though they have a young son who could probably reach it if he really wanted to.
• Red Herring: Watching Deadly Prey, the crew complains about the grenades on the evil merc leader's desk, which are always prominent in every shot of him at his desk, that are never used and have no bearing on the plot.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Jim and Colin, with Colin being more excitable and easygoing, and Jim being a stoic Deadpan Snarker.
• Refuge in Audacity:
  • Josh provides a nice instance of this during the discussion of Gary Coleman's obvious lack of enjoyment in filming his safety video.
    Josh: I mean, he can't even get off on choking a kid.
  • Mike's verdict that The Dance of Birth was the worst, since it had no redeeming value, while Candid Candid Camera vol. 6, though disturbing for its exploitative footage of nude women, had value simply because an old man could masturbate to it. Jessi is left speechless by this reply and can't dissuade Mike's opinion.
  • Jay's claim that the natural, satisfying resolution to Bloody Birthday would have been for the kids to be graphically murdered by the adults onscreen, citing Beware! Children at Play as a positive example. Gillian's expression as he's saying this is what really seals the deal.
  • The crew consider the ending of Blood Debts to be one of the best endings in film history because it's so out of nowhere.
  • The entire "Dom DeLuise lovechild" monologue from Plinketto #2, where photos of the beloved late comedian smiling are edited over all four hosts — red-faced, crying, and helpless with laughter — as Mike explains how Dom could possibly get pregnant from a passerby sticking his penis in the fat fold of Dom's armpit. Somehow, it mostly involved same-sex reproduction.
    Mike: No, no, no, it makes perfect sense!
  • Subverted with the Exploding Varmints video. They start out laughing at the absurd premise of watching ground squirrels get blown apart with high-powered rifles, but after a few minutes they realize the video isn't taking refuge in audacity at all, and is basically a prairie dog Snuff Film, at which point they become disgusted.
• Retraux: The Night of the Lepus episode was shot with an original RCA VHS camcorder, giving the show a grainy 4:3 video.
• Rewatch Bonus: They point out that the plot twist of Rock n' Roll Nightmare would retroactively make most of the movie Jon-Mikl Thor hanging out in a farmhouse by himself pretending there are other people there. They especially point out the awkward shower sex scene he had earlier in the movie would retroactively become him masturbating while tonguing the air, pretending he's with a girl.
• Right-Hand Attack Dog: Hollow Gate attempts to invoke this, but the pair of Golden Retrievers cast in the role are far from intimidating.
  Jay: Oh no, he got loved to death!
• Rimshot: Used when guest Freddie Williams remarks on Ice Dams: Causes Combats and Cures, "We should have bought boredom insurance."
• Rule of Cool: The Item tries to invoke this so hard that it annoyed the crew.
• Rule of Symbolism: The crew had a time mocking the director's alleged efforts at symbolism for Suburban Sasquatch and trying to make it sound like it has more substance than the cheap B-movie it is.
• Rule of Three
  • Defied by The Jar. The crew keeps expecting footage of the titular jar being destroyed to be repeated three times in a row but it only gets repeated twice.
  • Discussed and subverted in Bigfoot vs D.B. Cooper, where after three consecutive and blatant fanservice sequences of men each walking up the stairs, finding a room to sleep in, stripping down to their underwear, and then playing with a gun in front of a mirror, Jack begs for the third one to be the last one by practically chanting the trope name, until the sequence of the fourth guy walking up the stairs starts.
• Running Gag:
  • The line "You have a problem. You're gonna die." from Russian Terminator. The crew remembers it as "You've got a problem."
    • The whole crew laughs when a character from The Killer Eye says "You're gonna die."
      Josh: (thick Russian accent) You've got a problem!
    • Lampshaded when Invincible Hero Danton in Deadly Prey tells The Dragon "You're gonna die..."
      Josh: You've got a problem...
      Jay: Are we going to hear "You're gonna die" in every movie we watch?!
    • Lampshaded once again when Alexander from Robot Jox says "Yeah! We'll break your mind and kill you dead!"
      Josh and Jay: (with bad Russian accents) You've got a problem...
    • Referenced one last time at the end of Episode 6.
      Rich: Cyber Tracker has a problem. It's gonna die.
  • In the same style as Red Letter Media's other shows (particularly Half in the Bag), short clips from the movies watched each episode are used to comedically punctuate certain moments, sometimes multiple times. Examples include "What?" from Russian Terminator and "Excelente" from Key Matters.
  • Rich having almost burned down his grandmother's house while making French fries in his 20s^note Most assumed he was a child when this happened. Rich later revealed he was in his early 20s when this happened comes up multiple times in the second "Wheel of the Worst" episode; roughly half of these take the form of the shot of Rich's reaction as the video shows a pan of fries spilling burning grease onto the floor, complete with asynchronously upbeat "Be Cool About Fire Safety" music.
  • During the Crazy Fat Ethel II review, Rich Evans (complete with Muppet News Flash music) repeatedly runs in with trivia about the original Crazy Fat Ethel (aka Criminally Insane), its sequel, their lead actress, and the director's other work.
  • Every once in a while they try an ancient phone number. When it seems to still be in service, Rich Evans is becoming the go-to guy for improvising long and crazy messages.
  • "Rich Evans is Defeatable."
  • Mike describing one of the videos as "the worst thing I've ever seen". In later episodes, the others have taken to lampshading this repeatedly.
  • Mike and Rich frequently find ways to bring Star Trek into the discussion. The others, especially Jay, become very annoyed when they do.
  • Starting during the discussion of Undefeatable, Rich will repeat something another panelist (usually Mike) said only a few seconds ago as his own joke, bringing discussion to a screeching halt as the others waste no time in giving him grief. Reaches its climax in Episode 55 (The Sweeper, Empire of the Dark, Mad Foxes) with:
    Mike: During the autopsy, they're just going, "Jesus Christ, it's like a Tums festival in here."
    Rich: In the coroner's report, the guy's gonna be going, "Jesus Christ, looks like this guy died of a Tums festival."
    Mike: (suddenly echoing and strangely high pitched) THAT'S WHAT I JUST SAID!
  • Rich mispronouncing words and phrases like "folding chable" or "the birds and the beads" and everyone making fun of him over it. At one point he mispronounces "unconscious" without anyone noticing, but his attempts to go back and pronounce it correctly just cause everyone to notice and make fun of him anyway, ending with Rich predicting all the post-production editing gags that are going to be used to make fun of him even further (while the video treats his predictions as a checklist.)
  • "Did you know David Carradine died from auto-erotic asphyxiation?"
  • Someone jokingly declaring that the current episode will be the final episode of the series.
  • References to Rich's embarrassing childhood photo at Pizza Time Theater wearing a handmade "Dick the Birthday Boy" shirt, and then later the moment Ellen DeGeneres used that very same photo on her show with guest Julia Roberts, leading to another layer of Running Gags about Rich making it big and becoming more famous than the rest of the crew.
  • The photograph of Rich with one eye swollen shut due to an allergic reaction.
  • Calling attention to the show's loose rules in a variety ways including, cheating on wheel spins, picking other videos, and what actually constitutes best of the worst.
  • The growing shelf of Nukie tapes, and their constant Bait-and-Switch about pretending they're going to review it.
• Samus Is a Girl: In Pocket Ninjas, one of the female martial arts students is disguised as the White Dragon.
  Jack: Take that, patriarchy!
• Sanity Slippage / Suckiness Is Painful:
  • American Flatulators drives Rich into a screaming fit, making him overturn a table in pain.
  • Rich gets double-teamed by Double Down and Max Landis screaming in his ear, and he completely goes off the rails:
    Rich: YES! WE SEE HIS BALL SACK, OKAY?! HE HAS THE BEST BALL SACK!!! I'M SORRY!!! I'M SO SORRY!!! OH MY GOD!!!
  • Jack completely loses it during Pocket Ninjas. When a kid asks a girl how she had such great martial arts ability, Jack snaps.
    Kid: Wow! Where did you learn to fight like that?
    Jack: I WENT TO SCHOOL WITH YOU! I'M ALSO A BLACK BELT! WE'RE IN THE SAME FUCKING KARATE CLASS!!! YOU HORRIBLE DICKHEADS! YOU HORRIBLE DICKHEADS!!! (he and Rich proceed to pelt the TV with seat cushions)
  • Ryan's Babe leads to another one from Rich when Josh tries to break the incomprehensible jumps in time down to acts.
    Rich (to Josh): Fuck it, man, you deal with that shit! I don't need this in my goddamn life! You think I need Ryan's Babe in my fucking life? You think I wanna explain the "Inception" flashback within a flashback within a flashback!?! YOU THINK I WANNA TALK ABOUT THAT!?!
  • Mike, when he becomes Laughing Mad while watching Christy.
• Schmuck Bait:
  • Jack offhandedly plugs a Shock Site to the camera for a second during the second "Wheel of the Worst," with Mike genuinely questioning what it is.
  • A number of videos that feature on Wheel of the Worst portray themselves as educational videos, but are actually just a cheap scam with worthless content.
    • Exploding Varmints, Vol 1. purports to be an instructional video about how to hunt "varmints" on other people's land, but it's obviously just an animal snuff video made by a psychopath.
    • One video purporting to show the viewer how to gamble at slots effectively is simply a hyperactive man reading the payouts of slot machines to the camera, and consistently losing money.
• The Scrappy: invoked
  • The crew, Jay in particular, despised writer/director/lead actor Dan Clark in The Item, because he was trying way too hard to make himself the cool character in his Quentin Tarantino-inspired film.
  • The crew also hated Steve in Wired To Kill due to being a "dangerous combination of stupid and insistent" according to Rich, constantly putting poor Becky through hell with his suicidal war against the thugs. When Steve comforted Becky and gave her an Almost Kiss, Josh loudly objected.
  • When he appeared as a special guest, Max Landis refers to himself as this, outright saying, "You want me to be Scrappy-Doo? I'll be your Scrappy-Doo!"
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • During the screening of Robo C.H.I.C., most of the crew leave, at time, because of how bad the film was.
  • Rich does this twice during the Undefeatable discussion after feeling insulted by Mike, Jack, and Josh. The second time causes Mike to uncharacteristically completely lose it, as Josh giggles uncontrollably. A title screen pops up both times saying "RICH EVANS IS DEFEATABLE".
  • The entire group reacted this way to the hour long Nightmare On Drug Street.
    Mike: We gave up four minutes in, because... fuck it.
  • Everyone but Mike attempts this in The Black Spine Edition, but Mike prevents them from leaving by grabbing their car keys.
  • Rich does this again in the 100th episode when Mike suggests "How to Have Cybersex on the Internet" was made for people like Rich; he is replaced by Jay for part of the subsequent discussion. Jack does this for the "Black Spine" portion of the discussion. It becomes a Running Gag when Mike and Josh also do it.
• The Scrooge: Rich and his bathrobe. (Christmas Special)
  "Ho ho hooo.....no."
• Self-Deprecation: Some of the more cheaper movies featured in this show are directly compared to RedLetterMedia's very own Space Cop. Most of the time, Jay retorts that even those movies make Space Cop look better. When Mike insults Len Kabasinski's films, Rich reminds Mike that he is responsible for making Space Cop.
• Sequelitis: invoked This was what made Jay worried before he saw The Deadliest Prey, having him think that the movie would just be like a satirical parody of Deadly Prey. As it turns out, it plays just as straight as its predecessor and is just as enjoyable to the crew, even if it looks like a Shot-for-Shot Remake.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: Mike's anecdote in The Star Wars Holiday Special episode about meeting Joe Pilato at a horror convention. He forgets most of the details and has to be reminded by Jay, even though he wasn't even there, and in the end it turns out he never even interacted with Joe Pilato.
  Jack: Your "Joe Pilato story" ends with no interaction with Joe Pilato?!
  Mike: Oh no, I didn't have personal interaction with him, no.
  Jay: You were too busy eating chicken wings with Michael Berryman.
  Jack: That's a dumb story!
  Rich: Why isn't that "the Michael Berryman story?"
• Shameless Fanservice Girl:
  • Candid Candid Camera Vol. 6. The blond strips in front of two cameras and one hick in an empty auditorium. Not exactly "candid camera" there, guys.
  • The aerobicizing women in Killer Workout.
    Jack: (as director David Prior) C'mon! Arch your back, stick out that plot!
  • In Cyclone, the second scene of the film are a closeup of breasts. Jack laughs, "Oh, Fred Olen Ray." Jay remarks that it's actually Foreshadowing since the MacGuffin is hidden in Heather Thomas' bra later in the film, and that the boob shot is to subliminally remind the viewer breasts exists.
    Rich: (holds one imaginary boob) Setup. (holds the other imaginary boob) Setup. (bounces both) Payoff.
• Shout-Out:
  • Watching Gymkata, the crew tells, "GYMNASTICS!" when the hero attacks using gymnastics, then one yells, "GYMKATA!" when he does it again. It's unknown whether the crew is aware that it was a Catchphrase for Mystery Science Theater 3000, though Mike professes to be a fan.
  • While the VHS copy of American Flatulators is destroyed, footage from Un Chien Andalou is shown.
  • In "Plinketto #4," Mike mistakenly calls Turbulence 3 's shock-rocker character Slade Craven "Slade Wilson". This doesn't go unnoticed by Rich and Jack. Jay later mistakes the same character for Sammy Hagar.
• Show, Don't Tell: A big problem with Ghetto Blaster is that most of cast keep saying that their neighborhood has gone bad without showing why.
• Shown Their Work
  • Pacing issues aside, the crew commends the people behind Robot Jox for making the best movie they could with the limited budget they had while adding very subtle world building details. Jay in particular was charmed by this and admitted that it made him like the movie more.
  • To a lesser extent, they admit that, while the miniatures and sets in The New Gladiators and the matte paintings in The Aftermath aren't 100% convincing, the craftsmanship and effort that went into making them is admirable.
  • While concluding that The Exterminator was somewhat flawed, Jay and Josh admit that some craft went into the camera work and that it had some very good shots and sequences.
  • Perhaps due to their own experience as filmmakers, the gang is sometimes able to notice subtle details about a film's production. The most clear example is when Jay theorizes that there were reshoots in Exterminator 2. This was months before the official DVD came out with commentary by the film's director which pretty much confirmed this.
  • Jack and Jessi vote for the otherwise incomprehensible Santa Claus (1959) as the Best of the Worst because of this.
    Jack: This is classic cinema where their imagination was bigger than their budget or means, and I really enjoyed how big it was for how little they did.
• Sick and Wrong:
  • Their reaction to Candid Candid Camera Vol. 6, since the marks are largely (probably poor or homeless) older men who were tricked into being on camera under the pretense of being a temp agency purely for the non-gag of having these clearly confused men interact with naked women. They're especially horrified when one seemingly-drunk man begins feeling up the actress under the impression that she was trying to seduce him only for the scene to suddenly cut away.
  Rich: Can you imagine watching [Candid Candid Camera] without the Laugh Track?! It would be just like watching a Snuff Film!
  • The handjob scene from The Amazing Bulk.
  • The crew's reaction to the sadistic stripping scene in Psycho From Texas, which could have worked if it didn't come out of nowhere and give the impression that the entire rest of the film was a time-wasting excuse for the director to get off on filming that one scene.
  • The crew was also horrified by the lustful Brother–Sister Incest desires of Robert Ginty's character in White Fire.
  • Their reaction to RepliGATOR, which is pretty quickly deduced to be nothing but an excuse for the writer/lead actor to fondle pretty, topless young women.^note It wasn't. The lead actor bailed on the film, and the writer had to fill in.
  • Exploding Varmints again. The crew does take time to point out that killing prairie dogs is, indeed, something farmers simply have to do sometimes to protect their property and livestock, but the video's creator is very obviously using that as a flimsy pretense for his own amusement in grotesquely mutilating small animals with overpowered ammunition.
  • Yello Dyno: Can't Fool Me! elicits a strong negative reaction, namely from how it demonstrates what sexual grooming looks like by putting its young protagonists in inappropriate clothes/makeup and having the antagonist lust over them onscreen.
• Sleeves Are for Wimps: The opinion of many of the directors of the bad action movies that the crew watches, since many of them have the protagonist wearing black tank tops. This lead to Mike coining the term "The black tank top theory", which states if you're a older, slobby guy making a movie, you will wear a black tank top at some point in the movie.
• Small Name, Big Ego: The crew's view on Joy Cowley in her video A Day Full Of Joy. Since she's not very well-known outside of New Zealand, they found her presentation of every minutiae of her life to be annoying.
• So Bad, It's Good: invoked The entire point of Best of the Worst is to decide if a film is "good bad" or "bad bad". That is, entertaining or not.
• So Okay, It's Average: invoked The crew's kryptonite is watching movies that are unexceptional, neither entertainingly good or bad. Jay states at one point, "There's nothing worse than middle of the road." Some films that get this reaction include The Vindicator, Cyber Tracker, Ninja Vengeance, Exterminator 2, They Bite!, Let's Rap Fire Safety, Playing Dangerous, and Key Matters.
• Soundtrack Dissonance:
  • In The Aftermath, the Big Bad kills women and children on camera to what sounds like goofy Looney Tunes music.
  • V-World Matrix has commercial heavy metal music behind every single scene regardless of whether it's appropriate or not.
  • Played for Laughs in "Wheel of the Worst #2" whenever Rich's reaction to the burning french fries scene is juxtaposed against the "Be Cool About Fire Safety" song.
  • To demonstrate how little we actually see the titular CGI snake in Python II, every single shot of it (and its replacement) is put into a montage, backed by Paula Abdul's "Cold Hearted".
  • In one episode, they attach the Jurassic Park score to Theodore Rex, Carnosaur and Tammy and the T-Rex.
  • At one point in Psycho from Texas, two men kidnap an oil baron, and for some reason the composer thought this would be an appropriate time to play a jaw harp.
• So Unfunny, It's Funny: Averted with Playing Dangerous 2, which made Rich invent the term "Non-medy", defined as a joke so bad that it actually makes the listener less amused than they were before they heard it.
• Special Effects Failure:
  • invoked The obviously fake dummies in Never Too Young To Die, including one that has a reverse Railing Kill.
  • invoked V-World Matrix. The only special effects scene that doesn't literally look like it was done using MS Paint lifts its footage from another movie, and even that sequence is done in rather obvious CGI.
  • invoked The crew devote their entire time with The Amazing Bulk to discussing the cheap visual effects in the movie and what shortcuts the creators took to create them.
  • Blood Lock has its eponymous lock attached to what looks like a door covered in aluminum foil with a child's art project glued to it.
  • Order of the Black Eagle. The crew comment that Hitler is filled with red Jell-O.
  • Diamond Cobra vs The White Fox deserves special mention for its almost Amazing Bulk-esque use of green-screening and stock 3D clipart and effects.
• Special Guest:
  • Gillian Bellinger, star of their movie Feeding Frenzy and previously a guest on Half in the Bag, appears in episode 10.
  • Episode 15 features the appearance of Len Kabasinski, whose film was previously featured on the show. He's gone on to collaborate with RLM a few more times.
  • Max Landis joins the gang in Episode 35, and Macaulay Culkin shows up in a cameo during Landis's film destruction segment.
  • Simon Barrett, writer of the Blair Witch remake, appears in Plinketto #6.
  • Macaulay Culkin shows up as a surprise guest in Plinketto #7, and goes on to become a recurrer.
  • And in what's becoming something of a pattern, Patton Oswalt pays the crew a visit in Plinketto #8. He had already appeared in a cameo role in their Space Cop film.
  • Continuing the tradition, Plinketto #10 features an appearance by Jack Quaid, foreshadowed only by a brief Twitter exchange between them the month before.
• Spit Take: The gang sip beverages during their discussion, so this happens occasionally.
  • Rich splutters into his drink during the discussion of The Exterminator, much to the group's amusement.
  • During the discussion of Telepathic Communication with Animals, Mike starts laughing and spits out his beer when Rich mentions Stalin trying to force humans and apes to cross-breed with each other.
  • Mike just barely avoids one (by covering his mouth with both hands) when laughing at Rich leaving the second time during the discussion of Undefeatable.
  • In Plinketto #5, while watching Princess Warrior, a hard cut from a wet t-shirt contest to some characters standing naked in a tube is followed by a close-up of Mike doing one.
• Squick: In-universe this is everyone's reaction to White Fire when the protagonist finds his sister attractive and sleeps with her replacement.
• Standard Female Grab Area: Discussed when a girl is instantly rendered helpless during their High Voltage review.
• Stealth Parody: The crew debate whether The Amazing Bulk and Incredible Instant Adoring Boyfriend are one or not.^note According to the producers of the latter, it is indeed a gag gift. The jury is still out on the former.
• Step Three: Profit: The crew summarize Elves as this. Step 1: Nazis breed hideous two foot "elves" as their master race. Step 2: ??? Step 3: Rule the world.
• The Stinger: Wheel of the Worst episode six ends with an homage to arthouse film Un Chien Andalou. The final shot shows a man fondling a bare woman's ass... which then farts.
• Stock Sound Effects: Discussed Trope. The boys spend the last five minutes of their Wish Upon review running through some extremely common sound effects, such as "female gasp", "crowd gasp", "squeaky door", and "the Kurlan naiskos" (a shattering vase).
• Stuffed into a Trashcan:
  • Mike, Rich, Jessi, and Jay find themselves at an impasse when attempting to judge the fourth "Wheel of the Worst" picks, as all three are uniquely horrible. At long last, Mike grandly announces that they've come to a unanimous decision — and we cut to the Wheel of the Worst lying abandoned in a dumpster.
  • When the Wheel returns, Mike states that Milwaukee sanitation rejected the Wheel. It's literally covered in garbage.
• Stupid Evil: In Shapeshifter, the crew wonders just what did the Ukrainian general and witch stand to gain from causing a nuclear holocaust.
• Stylistic Suck
  • Much of the sketch material follows Half in the Bag's template of Bad "Bad Acting" and Anti-Humor.
  • Mike, Jay, Rich, and Colin destroying the copy of The Amazing Bulk in front of stock footage from the movie, complete with gunshot effects copied from V-World Matrix and other stock effects.
  • Josh and Rich imitate the stripping scene from Psycho from Texas with the VHS tape of the movie itself, complete with VHS quality footage of the scene and obvious puppetry work.
  • The beginning of Wheel of the Worst #9, where Jim and Colin are introduced as Canadian special effects artists that will be joining RLM once again, and that they will be doing all of the special effects for the episode. The audience is then given a taste of their "talents."
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: The video description for Plinketto #7 includes "Nothing special about this video." It turns out that the gang is joined by Macaulay Culkin.
• Take That!: The Halloween 2021 video has Mike stating near the end that "none of our discussion was plagiarized". This is a shade at the 2021 run of Cinemassacre's Monster Madness which was found to have plagiarized writing in some videos.
• Take That, Audience!:
  • Plinketto #2 opens with Mike and Rich taking a swipe at the comments section on their videos for repeating the same stale jokes and memes over and over again.
  • In Wheel of the Worst #23, Mike recycles his "You held onto that AIDS longer than Magic Johnson!" joke. Jay defends him thusly:
    Jay: "Hey, if our comments section can recycle the same five jokes over and over and over for a decade, we can do one joke twice."
• Tastes Like Feet: During the discussion of Empire of the Dark, Mike interrupts Rich's long-winded explanation to announce that his IPA "...smells like a sweaty armpit."
• Technician vs. Performer: When the crew discusses ''Christmas With Dennis' they note a sharp contrast between how Dennis and his sister play the organ. They mostly talked about how flamboyant and dressed up Dennis is taking some cues from Liberace. When he introduces his sister and lets her play she's more technical and less showy so for the crew it was rather jarring watching her play.
• Teeny Weenie: The crew universally agrees that the Decoy Protagonist of "Action USA" has one due to him checking every possible box that he's Compensating for Something. It's to the point where Jack dubs the character "Small Penis" and Tim jokes that it's so small the antagonists can't even find it while trying to hit his groin.
• Tempting Fate: During The Dance of Birth.
  Jessi: [sullen] Why don't they just slap me in the face with more feminist bullshit?
  [Pregnant woman raises arms, showing armpit hair]
  Jessi: Oh my God!
  Jay: That was perfect timing!
  Jessi: I'm offended!
  • Comes up repeatedly in Plinketto #4, where almost every dumb thing they predict before and while watching the movies actually ends up happening in them. Mike pretty much perfectly predicts that the Big Bad in Little Bigfoot will be a Corrupt Corporate Executive and even nails what he'll look like, after Jay remarks how stupid the plot of Turbulence 3 is getting, a character in the movie says something extremely similar almost immediately after, and they predict exactly how the plot of Turbulence 3 would be resolved purely by suggesting the dumbest possible way for the movie to end.
• That Came Out Wrong: Defied during the Undefeatable review.
  Mike: Rich, did you just use "meat slabs" and "climax" in the same sentence?
  Rich: YES I DID, MIKE. YES I DID.
• That Poor Cat: When Jessi throws the VHS tape for They Bite! offscreen, a cat meows in pain.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: invoked
  • In They Bite!, The '50s-style sea monster porno, Invasion of the Fish Fuckers, is far more interesting than the film it's in. The crew compliments the sequence's satire and expresses their wish that they were watching it instead of the actual film.
  Scientist: If we don't stop these creatures, no women with big tits will be safe anywhere!
  • One of the greatest perceived crimes of R.O.T.O.R. was that R.O.T.O.R. didn't have a climactic battle against invoked Robot Cop.
  • Ninja Vengeance initially seems to be setting itself up as an underdog story wherein the titular ninja protagonist, after being summarily defeated early on, will go on to hone his ninja skills, grow as a character, and ultimately emerge triumphant. Instead, the ninja doesn't fare any better in the action climax than he did before, and the film is resolved by the female sidekick simply murdering the antagonist with a shotgun.
  • Jay is disappointed with the Shakma plot in that they could have kept the LARP game going with the titular baboon on the loose. It would have been novel and creative, if nothing else.
  • One of their main criticisms of Killer Workout was that, despite being a slasher movie set in a gym, a location that obviously lends itself to a lot of gimmicky murders involving workout equipment, almost nothing of the sort actually happens in the film. The workout equipment gimmick is only used a couple of times in the entire movie and the killer's weapon of choice is inexplicably an oversized safety pin.
  • They thought Bigfoot vs D.B. Cooper was probably the biggest example they've seen on the show, since the premise sounds cool and ridiculous, but the actual confrontation between the two is only a few seconds long at the end of the movie. The rest of it is just endless shots of almost-naked men jogging around the woods and messing around with no particular plot to follow.
  • They thought the twin brother co-directors of Feeders playing the main character and his evil clone was the only legitimately interesting part of the movie, but that they didn't use this effect to anywhere near its full extent.^note In fact, it happens near the climax for about a minute, when one of the twins is killed. Spoiler: The wrong one, in fact. In fact, they suggest that this should've been the main focus of the movie, since given that the twins are the co-directors, it could have essentially been done on No Budget and wouldn't have relied on the incredibly fake-looking tiny grey alien hand puppets that the movie actually does focus on.
• This Is Gonna Suck:
  • Anytime Jay says his trademark, "Oh, no...!"
  • When Kitten Kommotion starts, after a piano note and a really off-key fake "Meow!" is sung, Mike snaps, "Okay, shut it off." It's only three seconds into the video!
  • Rich's expression when Jack discovers that their copy of Supergirl contains bonus footage. The camera zooms on Rich's grimace as a scare chord plays.
  • Jack's reaction to S.O.S.. His fears are unfounded since the crew really enjoy it.
    Jack: Oh, no! I don't wanna... I don't wanna...
  • Rich's reaction to Dog Sitter. His fears are unfounded since the crew really enjoy it.
  • When reading the description of The Item, when Mike reads that the criminals take the package back to their apartment, he mutters, "Oh, no," and surmises (correctly) that it'll take place in a college dorm, filled with movie posters and used pizza boxes.
  • This generally how the panel reacts to new video selection gimmicks.
• Those Two Guys: Jim and Colin, the Canadian special effects artists, who usually appear together after Colin's first (solo) appearance, contributing Gymkata to the Wheel. (Colin has since appeared without Jim, but Jim never appears without Colin.)
  Mike: (on meeting Jim) Jay! The Canadian visual effects artists are multiplying again!
• Three Cameras: The panel discussion is shot in this format: one camera is a "wide" master shot focusing on all four panelists, and the other two each focus on a closer shot of two panelists on either side of the discussion table. If the viewing had more than four attendees, the odd one out will usually be operating the cameras and occasionally contributes to the discussion off-camera (and off-mic).
• Throw It In!:
  • Jay surmises that Never Too Young to Die's first bad dummy shot was the result of the editor thinking it would be hilarious to include it in the final cut of the film.invoked
  • The gang assumes that the shot of the kid in Playing Dangerous II imitating a monkey for no reason was just some gag the kid did that someone thought was super funny.
• Toilet Humour: American Flatulators, which was filled with so much excess of this that even Jessi, who thinks farting is really funny, hated it. They also compare it to another Fart Joke movie they reviewed on the show, Thunderpants, which they liked and used farts more sparingly.
• Too Much Information: The Dance of Birth - that is, assuming the information even made sense in the first place.
• Too Smart for Strangers: A frequent fixture of many tapes they review that are targeted towards children. More often than not, these films completely botch the execution with accidental racism and sexism, excessive amounts of Paranoia Fuel, and straight-up incorrect information that causes far more harm than good.
  Rich: There's a legal disclaimer saying "Not all strangers are people you don't know some are strangers you actually know quite well so please talk to your children about the misinformation we have given you." There's nothing useful in this video.
  Jay: That's basically the main takeaway from the whole video: "This is pointless".
• Took the Bad Film Seriously:
  • invoked The crew concludes this is the case with Mario Van Peebles from Exterminator 2, who gave a very sincere performance.
  • The director for Suburban Sasquatch appears to be convinced that he's making a high concept film and made a film journal documenting his efforts.
  • Their main problem with Night of the Lepus was that, for such a ludicrous premise as giant killer bunnies that could have made a good campy Affectionate Parody of 50's style horror movies, everything in the movie was played arrow-straight, to the point that the there aren't even any plot twists or complications in how the giant rabbit problem should be fixed.
• Totally Radical: Let's Rap Fire Safety, complete with teenage rapping firemen (and -woman). Yo!
• Trash the Set:
  • Pocket Ninjas and Dangerous Men left Rich so angry, he was reduced to throwing everything he could in the room. Even breaking glasses and a small table.
  • Part of the show's style is the gang's cavalier attitude toward tossing props and beer bottles around the set, breaking them against the concrete floor.
• Troll: Mike seems to take great pleasure in tormenting and provoking the rest of the group, such as with his habit of picking the least popular films as the Best of the Worst, and his ideas for new gimmicks that seem designed to make them suffer (see the Black Spine edition for a prime example). As one YouTube comment puts it, "I feel like Mike is slowly becoming the antagonist of this series."
• Unabashed B-Movie Fan: Played straight generally, but highlighted in the Superhero movie episode (Supergirl (1984), Captain America (1990), and The Fantastic Four) with Rich, Jack, Josh and Jay.
  "We watched these in descending order of budget, and it turned out to an ascending order of entertainment."''
• Undignified Death: The gang just can't let go of the fact that David Carradine died choking himself while masturbating.
• Unfortunate Implications: invoked
  • In-universe, the reviewers thought the Key Matters video came off as "subtly racist". In the end, Mike kicks the remains of the crushed tape and declares "Take that, racism!"
  • The Family Guide to the Internet's two female characters are the wife, who becomes visibly excited at any mention of online shopping, and the daughter, who's so clueless and incompetent at everything that she even makes self-deprecating remarks about it.
    Daughter: And it's easy to do, too. Even I know how!
    (the crew bursts into laughter)
    Jack: "And I'm a woman!"
    Jessi: "I usually only make sandwiches!"
  • The biggest problem the crew had with Supergirl was that the plot came to a halt so that both the heroes and the villain can do girly things like hit on guys and, in Supergirl's case, go to school and hang out with other girls.
  • When Mike suggests that the antagonist of Undefeatable is going to use a woman as a human punching bag, Jack responds with "That would be awesome". He immediately realizes what he just said and follows up with "I mean, it's not awesome to hit women," which causes the others to laugh.
  • The black maid from Psycho From Texas, who, despite the movie being made in 1975 and giving no reason to believe it doesn't also take place then, is dressed and acts like a mammy stereotype.
• Unintentional Period Piece: invoked
  • The Skateboard Kid has so many of the characteristics that defined The '90s that the crew joked that the movie could actually be an elaborate period piece.
  • The guys note that the set decorations for Primal Rage look like a parody of dated 1980s culture by featuring toys and posters of ALF, Ronald Reagan'', the Bartles and Jaymes guys, Spuds McKenzie, and more.
• The Unreveal: Invoked for Ninja III: The Domination.
  Rich: Oh my God it's her - we all knew that!
• Unperson: Though the crew had been quietly distancing themselves from him for some time since initial sexual assault allegations were made in December 2017^note The "Hollywood writer" at the conclusion of the Jay/Plinkett wedding arc on Half in the Bag, played by Jack in the finished episode, couldn't be more obviously an intended cameo for Landis; and the "Break in Case of Max Landis" glass was renamed to remove any reference to him - and was indeed broken even after constant protests from the crew of having to "wait for a special guest" before they watched more Neil Breen movies, Max Landis finally got this treatment in full after he was accused by multiple women of sexual abuse in June 2019. The video featuring him (The Photon Effect/How I Saved the President/Double Down) - their most popular BotW video at the time, with over two million views - was delisted, as was their "Conversation with Max Landis" interview video, and even their excerpted "Rich Evans Explains Double Down" video.
• Unusual Euphemism
  • This line from Alien From the Deep got the crew to giggle.
    Jane: Don't touch me, you snake squeezer!
  • After Rich relays a story of an acquaintance inviting him over to his house and showing him a framed picture of a Wendy's ad he was in when he was a child, as well as his Warhammer figurines, the rest of the crew turns "Wendy's Ad" and "Warhammer figurines" into this.
• Vagina Dentata: Featured in They Bite! Naturally, it makes a blood splashing Groin Attack.
  Jessi: She got her period!
• Vague Age: Most of the actors in Johnson Family Christmas Dinner appear to be roughly the same age, even though they're supposed to be a big extended family covering three generations. The pot-smoking "son," who is supposed to be a teenager instead looks about 30 and the "grandpa" character looks like he's maybe pushing 40.
• Vanity Project: Many films reviewed on the show clearly exist to feed the creator's ego, usually by showcasing their musical or martial arts abilities. The panel points out whenever a film is written and/or directed by its lead actor as a warning sign. The creator's character is usually a laughably Ideal Hero and The Ace. They also note that the characters often wear black tank tops for some reason.
• Video Review Show: The show's purpose is to view, discuss and review a selection of bad movies in each episode. The panelists decide on which film has the dubious honor of being "best of the worst" and usually also select a "worst of the worst" to destroy.
• Viewers Are Morons: "Preventing Disaster at the Crossing" was made to ensure a tragedy like the 1961 Greeley Crossing incident never happens again. However, the film seems to think that bus drivers just don't know how to avoid getting hit by a train.
  Mike: "[After the Greeley tragedy], I guess they all went "shit, we gotta tell bus drivers to WATCH OUT FOR TRAINS!"
  Jay: "Apparently that was not common sense at the time."
• Viewer Pronunciation Confusion: invoked
  • SOS In Wheel of the Worst #5. Mike points out the title has no punctuation, so he pronounces the title like "Sauce".
  • The gang notes that the cover of Get Even makes it look like the name of the film is "GETEVEN," so they all pronounce to the title as "GET-uh-ven." This carries over to naming the main character "Geteven" as well."
• Villainous Crossdresser: Featured in Never Too Young To Die, Lethal Ninja, and The Item.
• Villain Protagonist:
  • Josh proclaims that the Exterminator is the actual bad guy in his own movie.
  • Gary Coleman may be giving helpful safety advice, but he's also using his divine powers to cause each of the dangers that need to be overcome, all for the sake of his own entertainment and selfish desire to impress a hot nurse.
• Visible Boom Mic: Practically a game for the crew, with boom mics visible in Never Too Young To Die, Lethal Ninja, and, surprisingly, Johnson Family Christmas Dinner.
• Visible Silence: When Jack asks who thought of the Wheel of the Worst, Rich runs away, as Mike curses him out. But when Jack asks whose idea it was to do bizarre short films instead of movies, Mike guiltily looked around before hastily changing the subject.
• Visual Pun: After the crew declare The Amazing Bulk as the worst, its "destruction" is a series of visual puns that serve as a Take That! to the film's cheap green screen effects. However, the actual DVD is never shown to be ''destroyed'', perhaps because the crew also realizes that it's really one-of-a-kind.
• Wardrobe Malfunction: Inverted in Deathstalker, as Mike states it was a wardrobe malfunction when Barbi Benton's cloak covered up her breasts.
• Was It Really Worth It?: Invoked verbatim by Rich, asking Mike if Octopuff In Kumquat was worth destroying the Wheel.
  • Again in Black Spine Edition #3 as Jay beats Mike at their very first game of Junka.
    Rich: Jay, you fought tooth and nail to destroy Mike. You were a true competitor today, WAS IT FUCKING WORTH IT?!?
• We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties: Rich "unwrapping" Christmas Vacation 2: Cousin Eddie's Island Adventure causes him to rip the ornaments from the office Christmas tree, then hoist up the tree and smash it on the floor. The camera shakes comically as the crew screams at Rich to calm himself, and we cut to a test pattern.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: invoked The group was shocked at how violent and disturbing the movie Playing Dangerous is, thinking it was a Home Alone ripoff as advertised by the cover, and spent most of their discussion talking about why the distributors would market it like that.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Some videos on Wheel of the Worst are just so boring that the gang doesn't even bother reviewing them and instead watches a fourth movie instead.
  • In Episode Four, the crew watches "Florence Henderson's Looking Great, Feeling Great". They do not include it in their discussion, and the video is not mentioned during the rest of the episode. Word of God states that they found no comedic value to the video, so they decided to turn it into a Let Us Never Speak of This Again joke.
  • In Episode Nine, the gang had already watched two boring instructional videos and were faced with a third: Who's in Charge?, a video about pet management. It bores the crew so much that Rich Evans walks out of the room, grabs the copy of Rainbow's Remedy that had so disturbed the gang earlier, and makes everyone watch it instead.
• What the Hell, Hero?: In at least two episodes, Rich exclaims, "What the fuck, Mike?!"
• The Woobie: invoked How the crew views Becky in Wired To Kill, with Rich describing the entire movie as a miserable horror story for her to experience. It doesn't help that she depends on Steve, who insists on her doing all dirty work in his war against the gangs with his moronic plans since he's crippled.
  Josh: Fuck you, movie. You have treated this woman like shit for ninety minutes.
  Rich: Becky deserves better.
  • Maggie in Through Dead Eyes, a blind psychic who can see someone's death from their perspective if she touches their body after they die. The detective main protagonist forces her to help him catch a serial killer by tricking her, and then essentially kidnapping and holding her prisoner in his apartment, and outright handcuffs and gags her on the floor when he leaves her alone to make sure she can't leave or call for help. They flat out can't interpret her falling for him as anything besides Stockholm Syndrome, and what makes it even worse is she mostly fell for him because she interpreted a future vision as them being together, when it was actually the two of their bodies being heaped together after their deaths, meaning everything she went through leads to nothing but her murder anyway. It's to the point that they seem legitimately just a little bit horrified by her storyline.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: Mike accidentally asks Jay of Alienator, "Jay, would you recommend Alienator?" Jay bemusedly replies to Mike's embarrassment, "This isn't Half in the Bag! That's not how this works!"
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?
  • The mercs in Deadly Prey, who had been killing people in their Hunting the Most Dangerous Game camp, decide to capture Danton instead of killing him like everyone else in one huge Idiot Ball - even as The Dragon keeps killing his own mooks for no good reason. The Heel Face Turned merc even inexplicably refuses to finish off the Dragon when given the chance, which promptly results in his death. The sequel Deadliest Prey brings this Trope all the further.
  • Pointed out at the end of Pocket Ninjas when the heroes decide to go with the villain's virtual reality game instead of just sucker punching him.
• Wild Take:
  • This happened when Rich declared his favorite pick of Ninja Movie was also his most hated, breaking the format of the show. Mike reacts by pretending an earthquake has knocked over his beer, and everyone flails around screaming "whooooooooooooa!"
  • Jack goes bonkers during Wheel of the Worst #5, at one point knocking over the Wheel and yelling, "I have no regrets!"
• Worldbuilding: Jay praises Robot Jox for its surprisingly subtle world building, with small touches of a Post Apocalyptic world, like billboards glorifying pregnancy, or a single hot dog being considered a rare treat for a family dinner.
• Worst. Whatever. Ever!: Mike has a habit of declaring whatever terrible movie they're watching (usually, the consensus pick for Worst of the Worst) to be the worst thing he's ever seen. He does this so often it almost happens Once an Episode, and the others have taken to lampshading it.
  • Doubles with Overly Narrow Superlative: They call "Linda" from The Osteoporosis Dance the worst elderly osteoporosis dancer ever. Mike then points out there's only two of them (and "Betty" is only marginally better).
  • The entire crew unanimously vote The Tomb as the worst film they'd ever done, chiefly because they suspected it was a Springtime for Hitler by Fred Oley Ray.
  • They later declared RepliGATOR to be the worst, or at least the most pathetic thing they've ever watched, since it's a softcore Porn Parody of sci-fi with failed elements of Screwball Comedy that mostly just comes off as an excuse for the writer/lead actor to film himself fondling hot, topless girls.
  • After that, the title of "Worst Ever" went to Bigfoot vs. D.B. Cooper, which is essentially just 87 minutes of shirtless dudes walking around a forest, plus a relatively short fight between Bigfoot and Frank West. There's also the fact that each individual shirtless dude has their own scene where they meticulously walk upstairs, go into a room with a mirror, take their pants off, make poses while holding a gun, and then leave. The two top-billed actors, Eric Roberts and Linnea Quigley, only appear through voiceovers, with Linnea Quigley having only one line of dialogue. After Mike declares it as the worst film he's ever seen, Rich pipes in to say that he always says that, but this time it's actually true.
  • Mike says this of Christy all while Laughing Mad, underscoring just how much he's lost it..
  • They declare the episode they did with Patton Oswalt to collectively have the worst film selections ever, especially Demon Cop. Patton is shocked to find out that he was there for the worst thing they ever watched.
  • The video description for the 2019 Halloween Episode outright declares it one of the worst selections of movies they've ever been stuck with. Jack-O is dull and lazily made with a lot of underwhelming kills and a monster that's somehow completely non-threatening despite using a huge scythe as its weapon, and Shark Exorcist is named as one of the most disgusting things they've ever had to watch on the show, for featuring so many scenes of girls in bikinis writhing on the ground that they assume it was the director's fetish and overtly sexual scenes involving characters that are clearly meant to be either children via Dawson Casting or adults with mental disabilities. The only bright spot of the night was Rock n' Roll Nightmare which even then is boring, lame, and cliché for almost its entire runtime before the last ten minutes hits suddenly hits them with a wild twist ending and maybe the most amazingly stupid fight scene they've ever had on the show.
• Would Hurt a Child: The villains of The Aftermath and Playing Dangerous, and the heroes of Beware! Children at Play. And Gary Coleman.
• WTH, Costuming Department?: invoked
  • The crew's reaction to the look of the protagonist of Killing American Style, who, according to Rich, "looks like the world's biggest douchebag" with his perm, pigtail, pink clothes, and low cut shirts.
  • Suburban Sasquatch had police officers that looked more like pretend mall cops on a budget than actual cops you would find at a police station. The crew dedicated a section of their review of the movie dissecting those costumes and how to make a better looking police uniform on an indie budget.
    • There's also the Suburban Sasquatch itself. Even looking past the obvious cheapness of the costume, who thought it would be a good idea for it to have a giant dick?
  • The fully-transformed werewolf in Lycan Colony is noted by the crew to not look at all like a realistic or threatening monster and more just look like a fursuit taken directly from a furry convention.
• X Meets Y:invoked Jay calls The Last Vampire on Earth "Twilight directed by Tommy Wiseau". Mike then snarks and claims that he thought Jay was gonna say "if Tommy Wiseau made bad films".
• You Can't Fight Fate: The crew's theory for the heavily formulaic structure of Kill Squad, using it to explain why the heroes are Made of Iron until they aren't, why the people they fight hold the Conflict Ball and have Mook Chivalry, and why the sniper holds the Villain Ball and doesn't just kill all the unarmed heroes at once.
• You Cloned Hitler!: Well, cryogenically froze him in Order of the Black Eagle.
• Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: Invoked verbatim by Jay during Doctor Butcher.

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