I flicked through this lengthy thread hoping someone mentioned the worst film of all time. Sorry guys, you're all wrong. Not that most of the films aren't terrible, but this takes the cake.
The Conqueror (1950s)
O.K., first of all John Wayne plays Genghis Khan. That's right, the Duke as an Asian barbarian. It was financed by Howard Hughes and also starred Susan Hayward. It was terrible. Worse than it sounds, but there's more.
In an effort to show that there was nothing wrong with testing nuclear bombs in the American Southwest, the film was shot a few miles from where they had been blowing up nukes for many years. The soil was radioactive as Hell (actually I think that the Devil is too smart to test nukes in Hell). Then to make sure everyone had a good dose, they brought tons of the poisoned soil back to Hollywood so the sand in the interior shots matched the ones from the desert.
John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorhead (Samantha's mother on Bewitched), the rest of the cast, the producer, the director, in fact almost everyone who worked on this film died of particularly nasty cancer over the next two decades.
A film that was a bomb, shot near a bomb site, that killed everyone involved. I can't think of a worse film.
I'm a bit hazy on the details because I only saw it once many years ago and my brain is still trying to erase it before I get cancer and die too. If you ever get a chance to see it cover yourself in lead before viewing
