YMMV / Best of the Worst

• Awesome Music: The crew admits that they found the theme song from Dr. Mysterio's Patented Video to be genuinely catchy.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • The "Florence Henderson: Looking Good Feeling Great" tape. It was picked on the Wheel of the Worst, they watched it, and it was never mentioned again. Not even during the roundtable discussion at the end.
  • Whole slices of "The Star Wars Holiday Special" episode are this. At one point, the entire trailer for Ishtar is played in the middle of the episode.
  • Another moment during the "The Star Wars Holiday Special Part 2" episode has Mike spitting out an ice cube from his drink, claiming it to be a tooth. Everyone is baffled at his behaviour, but Mike then just keeps on with the discussion as if nothing happened.
  • During the post-screening discussion in one episode, Jay is wearing a tuxedo. We're never told why and nobody mentions it. Ostensibly, it was because some fans mocked Jay for looking schlubby and disheveled all the time, but that has never been confirmed or denied.
• Bizarro Episode: Wheel of the Worst #12. The intro segment where Mike, Jim, and Colin are talking at the wheel suddenly jump cuts to the same shot with Mike having a one-sided conversation with himself and Jim and Colin gone, implying he's just imagining them being there. During voting, Jay is inexplicably replaced with Josh, who had no screentime prior and calls all the other panelists by the wrong names. None of this is acknowledged in the episode or in any episode since.
• Crosses the Line Twice
  • Any time David Carradine is brought up, expect any number of autoerotic asphyxiation jokes.
  • The subtitle "R.I.P. Paul Walker" being displayed in their Tammy and the T-Rex review when his character gets mauled by lions and when his character's decaying corpse is revealed.
  • Many during the discussion of The Osteoporosis Dance, mostly during the hypothetical Troubled Production of the video.
  • "Wheel of The Worst #8" has Y2k Survival Guide With Leonard Nimoy as one of the options. From offscreen Mike snarks, "Good thing it wasn't C.O.P.D. survival guide." ^note Nimoy died of C.O.P.D. shortly before this episode aired. This comment does get a Dude, Not Funny! response in-universe, though.
    Jack: That's in poor taste.
  • Another from #8: The Geritol Follies segment has a lot of jokes about the elderly dancers being close to death, while the Let's Sing and Dance! kids look miserable enough that Rich starts cracking jokes about Abusive Parents just offscreen.
  • Wheel of The Worst #8 also has Rich Evans' Alternate Character Interpretation of the gun safety eagle as a pedophile with his own reasons for wanting to keep the kids away from guns...
    Rich (as the eagle): "Can't fuck 'em if they're dead!"
  • Mike states that the protagonists of The Photon Effect are in the hospital more than Charlie Sheen, only a few days after the actor publicly revealed that he was HIV positive. He repeated the joke with HIV/AIDS and the Elderly.
  • Wheel of the Worst #10 gives us Exploding Varmints Vol. 1. The whole video is just a guy shooting prairie dogs with explosive rounds, and the group laughing at how outlandish and morbid it is. During the discussion, they state they were laughing out of shock that the film was actually about making prairie dogs explode... and that after the initial shock, they stopped laughing and morbidly had to sit around watching animal cruelty for the next hour.
  • In the same episode, the group also makes (mostly light-hearted) jokes about AIDS, 9/11, Autism, suicide, and other things.
  • This conversation from Plinketto #1, about Deathstalker:
    Jack: So the goblins stop the raper from raping the lady, and they start raping the lady only to— *Jack and Mike start stifling giggles*
    Mike: What is this, Rich Evans' autobiography?
    Josh: *through laughter* Which one is Rich Evans?
    Rich: I'm the one getting raped by my friends.
    Mike: *mock offended* Are you calling us goblins? How dare you, sir!
  • Wheel of the Worst #11 gives us the double-whammy of How to Seduce a Woman Through Hypnosis and How to Get Revenge. The former essentially being a guide on how to rape women and get away with it (Including actively recommending the viewer, once in their subject's home, lock their doors and disconnect their phones to ensure that nobody disturbs them), and the latter giving several revenge stories that were serious felonies (including tax fraud, mail fraud, identity theft, and potential homicide) played off as harmless pranks. The crew were so baffled and disgusted by them that they found the third video, a Christian video perpetuating the theory that barcodes are the sign of the beast, to be tame and even legitimately informative by comparison, since it at least explained where that notion came from.
  • Wheel of the Worst #12 has the entire sequence with the 'My Twinn' doll video, from the anti-suicide nets in the factory to the accusation that the company just dips dead children in wax and passes them off as dolls.
  • Wheel of the Worst #13 has a ton of child molestation jokes during the Stranger Danger video.
  • The crew correctly predicting the death of a kid's father in The Skateboard Kid 2 and the clichés pointing towards it and jokingly celebrating.
  • Every single joke about AIDS made during the The Last Vampire on Earth discussion. Though it's mostly making fun of the film's rather clumsy treatment of the issue.
  • Jay mispronouncing the name of the director of Suburban Sasquatch as "David Miscarriage".
  • The Star Wars Holiday Special episode had Rich Evans loudly proclaiming "Baby Jesus is an asshole!" It gets turned into a Christmas card. In the same episode, the crew make numerous 9/11 jokes, leading Jack to exclaim in horror, "No! NO!", to which Jay interjected, "This is staying in, by the way", making Jack even more mortified.
  • Pretty much every joke made during their discussion of The Suckling due to the film's intentionally shocking premise of an aborted fetus mutating and killing people.
  • Black Spine Junka #3 features Mike literally pointing and laughing through tears at an elderly woman talking about her laundry list of ailments she'd overcome. The rest of the crew are utterly baffled at this and actually call him out on it several times.^*In Mike's defense, the moment that broke him came after two other segments featuring elderly people who had overcome more specific and less tragic circumstances and were in general more interesting as a result, only to then be hit with the Mood Whiplash of a woman who was solely defined by being chronically ill instead of anything else
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Len Kabasinski is easily the most popular guest they've ever had, both for his Giftedly Bad films, and his very friendly, laid back interactions with the crew and fans.
  • Colin is pretty popular as well, thanks to his heavily sarcastic but still lighthearted sense of humor and fitting in perfectly with the rest of the group.
  • Jim is also popular for his well meaning, likable presence, dry delivery, quiet wit, and Those Two Guys dynamic with Colin.
  • Freddie Williams II is well liked for being genuinely quick witted and funny as well as supplementing one of his appearances with some cool original art.
  • The Shoji Tabuchi Show gained some popularity after spending four Wheel Of The Worst episodes in a row on the wheel, lending it more of an air of mystery. It helps that when the gang finally got to it, it didn't turn out to be a massive disappointment like Tree Stand Safety (another video that got popular in part due to appearing on the wheel in multiple consecutive episodes and also had funny box art to go with it, but turned out to be incredibly dull) and even ended up winning Best of the Worst (rather than being some kind of bizarre amateur talk show like the VHS art suggested, it turned out to be a well-done live concert from a talented Branson performer).
  • As it says in the main page, Cameron Mitchell is an example for the crew, but he’s also one among fans. His performances, whether they’re genuinely good, drunken, or phoned in result in a lot of great laughs. Especially when he goes into Large Ham mode. He even has a spot on BotW's Hall of Fame, and is practically the show's Patron Saint.
  • Tim Higgins is very loved for his excellent one liners and effortlessly fitting in with the rest of the group. Many were very happy to see him become a part of the main gang.
  • Macaulay Culkin’s appearances have been well received due to him sharing a similarly cynical point of view with the crew, and also for developing a somewhat wholesome friendship with them.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Weirdly enough, Rich Evans is very popular among British fans, for reasons none of them can quite explain themselves.
• Growing the Beard: The Wheel of the Worst #5 episode is where Jack really cuts loose, becoming far more involved physically than any prior episodes.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Lampshaded with Curse of the Worst, which points out jokes in episodes relating to Dan Haggerty, Prince, Bill Paxton, and Don Rickles shortly before their deaths. Then they try Tempting Fate by remarking how Wilford Brimley was still alive at the time the video was posted^note Brimley would eventually die three years later.
  • Also occurs during the discussion cold open in Wheel of the Worst 10. Rich makes a one-liner about the Flint Water Crisis that first became national news around 2016, right around the time the episode aired. The gang lampshades how long lead times between episodes will all but guarantee that topical humor will "certainly be out of date by the time you watch this video". Unfortunately, the water crisis is still ongoing as of 2020, a full four years after the episode aired.
  • A number of these crop up in the delisted Max Landis episode in light of sexual assault allegations against Landis. Three of the most obvious ones are when Landis jokes that his Tinder profile features reviews that use the phrase "stunning desperation," and the gang looks at Landis when the back of the DVD of How I Saved the President asks, "What have you done that you didn't want to do but did anyway because you knew it was wrong?" The third has a character in The Photon Effect comment on how easy it is to take advantage of people when you're in a position of power.
  • David Carradine hanging himself at the start of Evil Toons, even if the crew nearly laughed themselves into a coma at the sight.
  • Every moment Jack is drunk on camera (especially the Halloween episodes, which are infamous for Jack getting drunk) is now this since he announced on Twitter that he is a recovering alcoholic and has gone sober.
  • After watching Twisted Pair, the boys express excitement for the sequel and talk about all the practical locations they want to see Breen film in. However, when they finally do get around to watching Tortured Crossing, they find it extremely disappointing. Neil Breen took his obsession with compositing himself onto stock images to the max, and one of their major complaints was that it had virtually no location filming and it seemed like Breen was just getting lazy and apathetic.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • During the opening of "Celebration of Age", Mike mentions that the narrator sounds like she's summoning demons. Given that the lineup includes Ishtar and Hecate, he may actually be correct.
  • The infamous "Dick the Birthday Boy" photo in their first Halloween episode was already funny but it became even funnier when the photo showed up on The Ellen Show five years later. Poor Rich.
  • During their 2016 Halloween episode, Jay brings up Clown to compare it to the failings of a story in Scary or Die with a similar premise, and afterwards the group jokes about how making a clown movie has ruined the director's career since he hadn't made a movie since. The following year, Clown's director Jon Watts would be tapped by Disney and has since directed the first two Spider-Man films for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and signed on to direct its iteration of the Fantastic Four.
  • In their episode featuring L.A. Wars, one of the joking names they give the protagonist is Jack Quaid. Fast forward to Plinketto #10 a year later and who's guesting?
• Memetic Badass: There are a few figures the crew holds in high regard for their skill in making entertainingly bad movies.
  • Cameron Mitchell for his over-the-top performances in Deadly Prey and Terror in Beverly Hills, though they note that he just as regularly completely phones it in.
  • Len Kabasinski also gets this treatment for his very inept but nevertheless energetic style of filmmaking. He is depicted as something of a martial arts master whenever he appears on the show (which isn't difficult, as he's won many martial arts competitions in real life).
  • Neil Breen and his evident Awesome Ego in Double Down so completely blew the crew's minds that they heaped praises upon just how interestingly and uniquely bad his filmmaking and acting is.
    Rich: Neil Breen is the best person who has ever eaten tuna.
  • The crew calls Shoji Tabuchi “the embodiment of the American Dream”. Twice. Unlike many of the other people to appear on the show, he’s genuinely talented and successful.
• No Yay:
  • The crew’s reaction when the teenage boy seemingly hits on an old lady in “Wormania”.
  • They also regularly get grossed out whenever an older, plain looking star gets intimate with a young actress whose blatantly there for Fanservice. In one such example, they noted that the star of "Geteven" was older than his Love Interest's father.
  • The crew are also extremely disturbed by the hero of White Fire wanting to fuck his sister, going so far as to strip her and tell her what a shame it is they're related. A Designated Hero indeed.
• Older Than They Think: Faust is repeatedly characterized as a knockoff of Spawn until an editor's note points out that the original Faust comic actually predates Spawn by five years.
  Was Spawn ripping off FAUST?????
• Paranoia Fuel: One of the main lessons of Surviving Edged Weapons: Everything is a knife.
  Mike: It's not a wonder that cops are paranoid motherfuckers that shoot you to death!
  Rich: Because they show them videos like this!
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • In the episode V-World Matrix, The Amazing Bulk, and ????, most of the films placed on the wheel were viewed later. Hollywood Cop, Alienator, Killing American Style, Crazy Fat Ethel 2, and Partners. Partners in particular shows up a full five years before its 2018 Spotlight episode, in which Mike reveals he's been waiting a long time to spring it on the world. Guess he wasn't joking.
  • During their discussion of Hack-O-Lantern, the guys quip that star Hy Pike looks and acts like a kooky local personality who is not an actor and never appears in another film. They are then astonished to discover he's had bit parts in many movies they've watched, including Blade Runner.
  • Fans quickly recognized California Big Hunks from its use in a segment of Whose Line Is It Anyway?. The fact that the contestant's name was Colin makes it even funnier.
  • Within 5 seconds of starting Safe Food Attitude feat. 2-B Moms, Jay recognizes one of the rappings moms as Felissa Rose.
  • In "Wheel of the Worst #2", the video Massage: The Touch of Love proudly proclaims it was produced by Bruce Seth Green in 1980, long before he became a director for such popular TV shows as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Babylon 5.
• Signature Scene: “Ladies and gentlemen, will you please make welcome to the stage, the incredible Shoji Tabuchi!”. Cue Engrish singing and hysterical laughter.
• Special Effects Failure: The ending of "Wheel of the Worst 21" seamlessly integrates Rich into footage from Turtle Dreams. The illusion is immediately broken, however, when he accidentally trips on the green screen, causing it to collapse on top of him.
• Squick: There are plenty of examples of pointlessly gross stuff and Author Appeal gone horribly awry in the movies they watch that tend to get this reaction.
  • The sex scene in The Item, between a girl and a overtly phallic alien slug with a Muppet voice.
  • The guys are very creeped out and disgusted by how the Incest Subtext in White Fire very quickly becomes plain old text.
    Rich: (as the crew groans watching it) I told you what the movie was about and you didn't believe me!
  • Even though Xtro turned out to be a pretty good film, the crew were nevertheless taken aback by the disturbing Body Horror and an instance of unpleasantly realistic and gory animal cruelty.
  • Their initial reaction to RepliGATOR, which turns out to essentially be a softcore porno that focuses on a fat, balding old guy (who, very suspiciously, is played by the film's writer) getting pretty sexual with a lot of attractive and often naked young women. They realized pretty early that it was likely just an excuse for the writer to see and grope these girls ^note  Though according to IMDb, the writer only stepped in to play the part when the intended lead didn't show up on the first day of filming .
  • Pretty much the entirety of Mad Foxes, which contains a sex scene in a piss-filled bathtub (it's supposed to be champagne, which it absolutely does not look like), a closeup of an unwashed arse and a couple of extremely graphic scenes depicting genital mutilation as its "highlights". Rich Evans is positively mad at the sheer depravity of the film, and even Mike is made visibly uncomfortable by it. The only thing saving the Blu-Ray from destruction in the end is that, much like The Amazing Bulk, the movie was so awful in such a unique and fascinating way as to make it worth keeping.
  • The entirety of How to Seduce Women Through Hypnosis, no thanks in part to its intense rape overtones and being in favor of predatory behavior.
  • The one universally agreed-upon downside of Surviving Edged Weapons; being a police training film, it is not shy about showing violence, interspersing cartoonish re-enactments with queasy real-life EMT and autopsy photographs of stabbings and stab wounds.
  • Episode 78 starts off with a video about nudists that features a lot of old people walking and swimming around naked, which is then immediately topped by the wheel landing on Orgasmic Birth, whose borderline-incestuous sexual subtext and on-camera childbirth makes everyone noticeably grossed out.
  • They end up calling Shark Exorcist probably the most off-putting thing they've ever watched on the show, completely ignoring how much it apes The Exorcist and focusing on how all those stolen elements are applied to various attractive women, causing them to accuse the director of being a massive pervert. The scene where a woman baits a very childish woman who the crew couldn't determine if she's an extreme case of Dawson Casting or if she's supposed to have developmental problems horrified them.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Jay felt the last five minutes of The Item where a woman has sex with an alien slug was perverse enough to make a good Frank Henenlotter film.
  • Jay also wished the producers of They Bite just do the Show Within a Show Invasion of the Fish Fuckers instead.
  • Mike in particular picks up on instructional and 'educational' VHS tapes not following through on their premises, in particular when it seems obvious what they should be. Cleared For Takeoff in particular was singled out for destruction for being painfully lazy. The video has lots of footage of planes and airports, but it neither becomes either a helpful survival guide for travelling with young children, or an educational presentation about how airports work and planes fly. It ends up looking like somebody's holiday video (without the bits in the middle).
  • Twister's Revenge features an AI installed in a monster truck. Mike points out there would be far more story potential if it was installed in a Nascar racing car, since monster truck rallies are mostly exhibition events, whereas in a race the AI could drive the car really fast and the protagonist gang could take the credit and the winner's prize money. Immediately they all agree that the monster truck was there because someone the filmmakers knew had one.
  • A meta example occurs when the gang lands on Ratatoing, only to abandon ship partway through. Fans were dismayed for two reasons. The first was that the special guest for the episode starred in the film Ratatoing knocks off. The other reason is that in the show's 90-plus episode run, they've never covered a feature length animated film ^note  They have reviewed animated content before — most notably "Where Did I Come From?", "Tales From Genesis Space", and "The Christmas Tree" — but those were no longer than 60 minutes each, much less one from the legendary schlock-masters at Vídeo Brinquedo.
  • Mike thought this when they watched Shakma, where he expected the group to have to play through the game they set up for fun to be able to escape, with the added threat that there's a real killer primate in the building with them, which ended up going nowhere.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic:
  • Much like many other filmmakers to appear on this show, Larry “Tree” Lonik is the butt of several mean spirited jokes. However, what makes him extra sympathetic is that Mike openly takes his pleasure in his early death, showing no sympathy to the man, even though he comes across as a decent person who wants to share a topic that he loves with people. Usually, well intentioned and good natured filmmakers like Larry get it easy while the sleazier filmmakers get the more hard hitting insults.
  • The group find Slick, the puppet from TV and Me to be this. He just wants to watch TV in peace, while Liz (the person who's supposed to be lecturing him) comes across as incredibly rude and condescending, especially when she starts complaining about him buying a toy with his allowance instead of donating to the church, leading them to the conclusion that church money is all she actually cares about.
• The Woobie: While it’s all in good fun, Rich Evans takes a lot of abuse throughout the series. In addition to watching horrible tapes regularly, he’s regularly insulted and humiliated by his friends, with Mike taking perverse glee in doing so. Thankfully, Rich's genuine friendship with Mike (as can be seen in many of the episodes of Re:view they share together) helps mitigate it.
  • Despite doing nothing worse than making a geeky video about a topic he genuinely loves, Motherlode’s creator Larry ends up attracting the scorn of the group with Mike being happy he’s dead and Jay and Rich backing him up. Sure, his video may be a bore, but there are several filmmakers on the show who’ve done far worse stuff than him that didn’t get treated as disrespectfully. He’s also pretty sympathetic when you discover that his death was very sudden and occurred due to an injury he sustained when working in the field that he shows real excitement and passion for.
  • In general, many of the filmmakers can be considered sympathetic. While some are greedy and sleazy, there are several who are genuinely passionate and/or want to help people with their projects. They just unfortunately aren’t good at it which results in them being hit with an onslaught of insults from the crew. However, usually the good natured filmmakers will get a complement for their efforts. Larry Lonik is unfortunately the odd man out in that regard.
  • Cameron Mitchell was a genuinely talented actor who performed alongside legends like John Wayne, Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe. He played Happy Loman in the original 1949 Broadway production of Death of a Salesman, which led to many film and TV roles throughout the '50s. His career buckled under the weight of gambling and alimony debts, causing him to star in many awful B-movies since the '60s. Especially pronounced with his performance in Low Blow, which the crew believed was his rock bottom, as he spends the whole movie sadly sitting down and mumbling. On the bright side, as much as they make fun of him, the crew ultimately respects and enjoys his work. Most of the time, anyway.
  • Similarly, David Carradine was once a big name who went on to star in many terrible movies that weren’t worthy of his talent. Especially sad is when Colin discusses a video with David shilling the "Spiral Fitness" system where he plays around with a tube in his backyard while his dog walks away in embarrassment. Unlike Mitchell, Carradine's fortunes changed thanks to his titular role in Kill Bill. However, this is undercut by him going back to horrible B-movies afterwards and ultimately dying an Undignified Death so embarrassing that you can’t mention him without someone making a joke about it. Which the gang always does.

---