Reuven’s guide to the worst film directors

Introduction

This section is dedicated to those I think are the worst directors, in the sense of "the directors who make the worst films". Actually, it’s dedicated to warning folks away from these directors and their film. Why worst directors? Why not the best? Well, mainly to write about the best would be rather mundane. I mean, everybody knows Hitchcock, John Ford, or Kurosawa. If you don’t know them, finding out about them or finding plenty of people who’d recommend and analyze their films is easy as pie. So, they actually won’t be needing me. But when you’ve seen more than 3000 films, it stands to reason you’ve seen you’re share of bad ones as well as good ones. And it stands to reason you’ve spent plenty of moments going through video store shelves, trying to find the safe bets in the video fringe, instead of falling to the traps of the many pieces of trash that occupy the shelves. I’ve been there. I know how it feels. So I think to myself: "here’s where you can help people. Not by advising on what to see, but by advising what not to see, and why". Granted, one can get that kind of service from any common film/video guide, and L. A. Morse wrote two VIDEO TRASH AND TREASURES books for exactly the same reasons. But I have a different, I think better perspective. Most critics, including Morse, are what I call "classically oriented": they have a distinct preference to A movies, ‘name’ movies, and towards good production values. I am much more "easy" on B movies, I come from B genres like horror, and will never hold lack of budget against a film that has imagination or originality, even if its crudely or amateurishly made (although I view professionalism as a plus, not a minus). Also, I try to judge a film by how much I enjoyed it, regardless of whether I was meant to enjoy it that way. So I give a very high ranking to enjoyable so-bad-it’s-good films. You will never find Ed Wood in my worst directors list. These perspectives, I think, are fresh enough to give reason for my little endeavor here. How did I get to this specific list? Well, I have a list of all the films I saw, complete with ratings on an 0 to 5 scale. From this list I derived a list of directors whose films I saw, with the average rating I gave their films. Then I derived a list of all the directors I saw at least five of their films. What this section contains is simply the lowest ranked people in this last list. The directors are arranged by average rating. The format is "the directors’ rating/no. of films seen", so if a director who has 0.8/5 it means I saw five of his films, and gave them an average rating of 0.8 out of possible 5. What follows is a list of the first (rather, last) ten directors. This is still under work so currently there is just a list. But I will gradually add entries for the various directors with some details on them, a filmography and a short critical discussion of them, and of their films that I saw.

THE LIST

You tend to disagree?