You won’t find Plan 9 From Outer Space—celebrated as the “worst film ever made” in Harry and Michael Medved’s The Golden Turkey Awards—in the pages of this book, but its spirit hovers over this particular chapter like a chintzy flying saucer bobbing at the end of two very visible wires. Here we celebrate the “so Rotten it’s good,” the “WTF were they thinking?” and the “let’s just do a bunch of edibles, press play, and get very, very weird.” These are the worst of the worst: bizarre ideas that met questionable filmmaking and resulted in the unforgettably terrible. Of course, no genre does terrible quite so well as sci-fi, and it’s been doing it since the dawn of film, hitting a particularly Rotten golden age in the 1950s. During that period, Leonard Maltin, the man to whom America has turned for movie advice for almost forty years, first became entranced with Bela Lugosi, which would lead him to the singularly awful Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla, a slice of sci-fi weirdness that would be the low point of the Dracula star’s career and yet hold a lasting allure for Maltin. In the following chapter, Maltin writes of the film’s strange pull, even to this day. Elsewhere in this chapter you’ll find robots—both sex- and battle-ready—and Sean Connery in a wedding dress. We allowed some fantasy into the chapter’s sci-fi mix, including a bizarre first attempt at adapting Tolkien as well as the appallingly enjoyable Masters of the Universe, which introduced He-Man to the movies by way of a cheap Star Wars rip off. We’d love to tell you exactly why we mixed the genres, but that would require thoughtfulness, logic, and sense—none of which you will find in the next set of pages.