Content Guide
For me, a great film score can make me feel things I never expected to feel sitting in a dark room eating overpriced sugary popcorn. A truly terrible one, though, can haunt you for entirely different reasons. Music and cinema have always had a complicated relationship, and every so often that relationship produces something so spectacularly terrible that it deserves to be remembered, studied, and honestly, marvelled at.
Not all of these soundtracks are bad in the same way. Some were born from breathtaking hubris. Some were cynical cash grabs. A few were simply good music attached to the wrong film at the worst possible moment. What they all share is the distinction of having made film history for reasons nobody intended.
10. Suicide Squad (2016)
Before a single frame of David Ayer’s superhero disaster had screened for critics, Warner Bros. had already decided that what the DC Extended Universe really needed was a Guardians of the Galaxy-style needle-drop soundtrack. The result was a feature-length compilation of songs that had no meaningful relationship to the film they were buried inside.
Queen, the Rolling Stones, Eminem, Kanye West, Black Sabbath, Creedence Clearwater Revival all crammed into a two-hour runtime with the randomness of a Spotify playlist assembled by someone who had never actually listened to music. Each character got a song-driven introduction that played like a music video rather than a scene. Harley Quinn got “You Don’t Own Me.” Deadshot got Kanye. The Joker walked through a torture chamber to “Sympathy for the Devil.” Every choice screamed intent without delivering meaning.
Where Guardians used its classic songs to say something honest about loneliness, nostalgia and emotional armour, Suicide Squad used its licensed catalogue to cover up the fact that its story had nothing to say at all. Critics described it as an endless parade of on-the-nose selections, and several noted the film even plagiarised one of Guardians’ specific needle-drops by using “Spirit in the Sky” in an almost identical context.
The strange irony is that the accompanying album filled with original songs by Twenty One Pilots, Grimes and Skrillex debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 and held that position for a second week. People bought it. They just did not enjoy it in the film. Sometimes a soundtrack can be simultaneously a commercial success and a creative failure, and Suicide Squad is the purest example of that paradox.
9. From Justin to Kelly (2003)
Kelly Clarkson won the first series of American Idol in September 2002, and by June 2003 she was already starring in a spring-break beach movie opposite the show’s runner-up, Justin Guarini. That turnaround alone tells you everything about the creative ambition on display. Produced by 19 Entertainment and rushed into cinemas to monetise Idol’s phenomenal first-season ratings before anyone had time to ask whether this was a good idea, From Justin to Kelly was precisely the kind of product that gives the word “product” a bad name.
The soundtrack was a collection of pre-fabricated pop songs written to serve a plot involving beach volleyball, love triangles and very little else. Time magazine described the film as one of the worst pictures of the century so far. Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman called it like the food-court staff at SeaWorld performing Grease.
The Razzie Awards gave it a special prize for Worst Musical of their first 25 years. The soundtrack album was produced but never officially released, which tells its own story. Kelly Clarkson has since disowned the project publicly and repeatedly, which is understandable given that she spent the following two decades building a genuinely brilliant pop catalogue. The film feels like something that happened to her rather than something she chose.
8. The Garbage Pail Kids Movie (1987)
Based on the deliberately revolting trading cards that briefly scandalised parents across the Western world in the mid-1980s, this film should not exist. And yet it does, and it contains musical numbers. Actual musical numbers, performed by animatronic puppet creatures whose defining characteristics are uncontrolled bodily functions. The centrepiece is a Sesame Street-style production number called Working With Each Other, in which the Garbage Pail Kids sing about the importance of co-operation, surrounded by a film in which they have spent the previous hour urinating, vomiting and biting people.
What makes the music particularly remarkable is the casting of Anthony Newley in the lead role. Newley was a genuine talent, he co-wrote Goldfinger, contributed to the Willy Wonka score, and had a distinguished stage career. Here he gives a performance described by critics as limp and unenthusiastic, which is the only rational response to the material. The songs, composed by Michael Lloyd, are impossible to dislodge from memory once heard, in the same way that a car alarm outside your window at 3am is impossible to dislodge. The soundtrack barely received a release from Curb Records and is now a collector’s curiosity, sought out by people who feel they have not yet suffered enough.
7. Can’t Stop the Music (1980)
By the time this Village People vehicle arrived in cinemas in the summer of 1980, disco was already dead. The Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park had happened the previous July. Radio stations had shifted. The cultural backlash was complete. And yet here was a $20 million fictionalized Village People origin story, directed by Nancy Walker in her only feature film, starring Steve Guttenberg and Bruce Jenner, arriving into a market that had already decided it wanted nothing to do with any of this.
Variety was brutal, noting that the Village People and Jenner had a long way to go in the acting stakes and describing the score by Village People producer Jacques Morali as wretchedly sub-standard, with production numbers of exceptional tackiness. The YMCA sequence, a homoerotic spectacle involving a swimming pool, an impossible amount of bronzed flesh and men tumbling into the shape of the letter Y, captured everything the film was and was not simultaneously. It was camply spectacular. It was also entirely unwatchable as drama.
The film grossed roughly two million dollars against its twenty million dollar budget, helping to collapse its distributor, Associated Film Distribution. The soundtrack peaked at number 49 on the Billboard 200 and became the first Village People album not to go gold. More significantly, the double bill of Can’t Stop the Music and Xanadu, both released in the summer of 1980 directly inspired film publicist John J.B. Wilson to create the Golden Raspberry Awards. Can’t Stop the Music won the very first Razzie for Worst Picture. It earned its place in history, just not the history it intended.
6. Xanadu (1980)
Xanadu belongs on this list for a reason that is almost the opposite of most of the others. The music is not bad. The Electric Light Orchestra tracks are genuinely excellent. Olivia Newton-John’s contributions are charming and polished. The title song, co-written by Jeff Lynne and performed by Newton-John with ELO, is a legitimate pop classic. Magic spent four weeks at number one on the American chart. The album reached number four on the Billboard 200, was certified double platinum, and produced five Top 20 singles. By any commercial measure, it was a success.
The film, however, was an incoherent roller-disco fantasy in which Newton-John played a Greek muse who descends to earth to inspire Gene Kelly and Michael Beck to open a nightclub. Roger Ebert described it as a mushy and limp musical fantasy. The writer of its later Broadway adaptation, Douglas Carter Beane, remarked that you could practically see the cocaine on screen.
The gap between the quality of the music and the quality of the film was so vast that the album became almost a separate object something fans of ELO listened to in isolation, with the film treated as an embarrassing backstory. No soundtrack should be remembered primarily for being better than the film it accompanied. In the case of Xanadu, that is arguably its defining characteristic.
5. Glitter (2001)
Everything that could go wrong did go wrong with Glitter, and most of it had nothing to do with the actual music. Mariah Carey’s vanity project, a fictionalised rise-to-fame story set in the early 1980s was delayed following her very public breakdown and hospitalisation in the summer of 2001. When it was finally released, it landed on September 11, 2001. Carey has said plainly that she became a punching bag, and it is difficult to argue otherwise. No album released on that date was going to receive a fair hearing.
The music itself is a 1980s-influenced funk and disco pastiche, heavy on guest rappers, Ja Rule, Busta Rhymes, Ludacris and light on the kind of vocal showcases Carey built her reputation on. Critics found it disjointed. The album debuted at number seven, her lowest chart position at that point, and the film’s failure prompted EMI/Virgin to pay her twenty-eight million dollars to settle a four-album deal rather than continue the relationship. The commercial collapse was total.
What makes the Glitter story genuinely interesting, though, is what happened next. Two decades later, critics and fans substantially revisited the record. Carey began performing songs from it live for the first time in 2016. The album’s reputation has shifted from cautionary tale to misunderstood gem. It is the clearest example on this list of a soundtrack that failed spectacularly for reasons that were largely external to its actual content, and whose eventual rehabilitation says more about timing and context than it does about quality.
4. Cool as Ice (1991)
In 1990, Vanilla Ice’s debut album To the Extreme spent sixteen weeks at number one on the Billboard 200 and sold over fifteen million copies worldwide. SBK Records, watching Ice Cube succeed in Boyz n the Hood, decided immediately that their star needed a film. What they produced was Cool as Ice, a loose riff on Rebel Without a Cause in which Vanilla Ice played a motorcycle-riding rapper who falls for a small-town girl while wearing an extraordinary variety of neon outfits.
The soundtrack peaked at number 89 on the Billboard 200 and earned no certification whatsoever. The lead single, Cool as Ice (Everybody Get Loose), featuring Naomi Campbell, stalled at number 81 on the Hot 100. The Washington Post described the film’s energetic visuals as gourmet dressing on dead lettuce. Variety found it incapable of generating a single moment of genuine musical energy. Vanilla Ice won the Razzie for Worst Actor.
The production has an almost poignant quality in retrospect. Gwyneth Paltrow was offered the female lead but her father advised against it, fearing the project would damage her career, advice that proved correct. The cinematographer was Janusz Kaminski, who would go on to win two Academy Awards for his work with Steven Spielberg. The film opened and closed in the same weekend, and marked the beginning of the end of Vanilla Ice’s commercial relevance at a moment when his cultural credibility had already begun to dissolve following journalists exposing his fabricated biography. It is a snapshot of peak hubris, flash-frozen in neon and dry ice.
3. At Long Last Love (1975)
Peter Bogdanovich was one of the most celebrated American directors of the early 1970s. The Last Picture Show, What’s Up Doc, Paper Moon, the man had a run that invited comparison to the great Hollywood auteurs he had spent years writing about. And then he made At Long Last Love, a musical tribute to the screwball comedies of the 1930s, in which he cast Burt Reynolds and Cybill Shepherd opposite sixteen Cole Porter standards. That alone was not the problem. The problem was the decision to have the cast sing live on set, rather than lip-syncing to pre-recorded vocals.
Burt Reynolds and Cybill Shepherd were not singers. The live recording experiment demanded extraordinary technical solutions, microphones hidden in sets, meticulous staging to ensure audibility and the results, critics agreed, were a disaster. John Simon wrote in Esquire that the film may have been the worst movie musical of any decade. The Los Angeles magazine critic described Reynolds as singing like Dean Martin with adenoids. Vincent Canby of the New York Times compared casting non-singers in a musical to entering a horse in a cat show. The film grossed approximately one and a half million dollars against a budget that had ballooned to six and a half million.
What redeems the story slightly is Bogdanovich’s own honesty about it. He supervised a definitive cut for a 2013 Blu-ray release, restoring numbers that had been cut in post-production, and admitted that the original release had been rushed and visually ugly. A small but committed group of critics, including Richard Brody at the New Yorker, have since argued that the restored version reveals something genuinely interesting beneath the calamitous surface. It is perhaps the most complex rehabilitation story on this list.
2. Lost Horizon (1973)
This is the soundtrack that ended one of the great creative partnerships in popular music history. Producer Ross Hunter hired Burt Bacharach and Hal David, the team behind Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head, What the World Needs Now Is Love, and dozens of other standards to write the songs for his musical adaptation of James Hilton’s Shangri-La novel. The idea was not inherently insane. Bacharach and David were the most successful songwriting team of the era. The problem was the match between their breezy, hook-driven, radio-friendly sensibility and a story about colonialism, spiritual transcendence and a utopian mountain society hidden from the rest of the world.
The songs they produced, The World Is a Circle, Living Together Growing Together, and a series of similarly earnest anthems reduced genuinely complex thematic material to nursery rhyme platitudes. Roger Ebert wrote that he did not know how much Hunter had paid Bacharach and David, but that whatever the figure, it was too much. He singled out the fact that the song audiences would leave humming was the Happy Birthday sung at a party deep into the second hour. The film was selected for The Fifty Worst Films of All Time.
What makes Lost Horizon truly significant is the aftermath. Bacharach was so distressed by the experience and by being removed from the post-production editing process that he retreated from writing entirely. He later recounted driving to the opening night theatre, reading the Los Angeles Times review, and wanting only to leave town. The Bacharach-David partnership, which had produced decades of extraordinary popular music, did not fully recover. They did not reunite properly for twenty years. A soundtrack that broke up one of the most important songwriting collaborations in American pop history earns its place here on that fact alone.
1. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978)
Nothing else on this list comes close. This is the standard against which all other soundtrack disasters must be measured, a film so catastrophically wrong, built on a record so ruinously misconceived, that it managed to embarrass virtually everyone involved, return platinum to distributors, and contribute to the career decline of performers who had, weeks earlier, been among the most commercially successful artists on the planet.
Robert Stigwood arrived at this project with extraordinary momentum. He had just produced Saturday Night Fever and Grease, two of the biggest film soundtracks in history, and had concluded that combining the Beatles’ back catalogue with the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton could not possibly fail. The resulting film was a jukebox musical with no spoken dialogue, a story cobbled together from Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road, and a cast that included Steve Martin, Alice Cooper, George Burns, Aerosmith and a parade of 1970s rock luminaries, each assigned a beloved song to perform in contexts ranging from bizarre to actively upsetting.
George Martin, who had produced the original Beatles album, served as musical director. He later expressed regret. Martin reportedly took the job partly for the money and partly because he felt that another producer might treat the songs with even less respect, a justification that, given the results, offers cold comfort. Steve Martin mugged his way through Maxwell’s Silver Hammer. George Burns soft-shoed through Fixing a Hole. Alice Cooper’s villainous turn required him to lead a performance that effectively weaponised the Beatles’ own harmonies against themselves. Rolling Stone described the film as one of the worst ever made and the soundtrack as excremental, a word rarely deployed in music criticism and entirely appropriate here.
RSO Records invested twelve million dollars in the soundtrack, plus a further million in promotion. The double album debuted at number seven and climbed to number five. Then came the collapse. Over four million copies were eventually returned to distributors, a figure without precedent in the industry at that time. RSO took a loss of extraordinary proportions. George Harrison reportedly said the project had damaged the images of everyone connected to it.
Three tracks survived as singles: Earth Wind and Fire’s version of Got to Get You into My Life reached number nine on the Hot 100 and number one on the R&B chart. Aerosmith’s Come Together reached number 23. Robin Gibb’s Oh Darling reached number 15. Everything else became a monument to what happens when commercial confidence replaces creative judgement.
It is worth noting that Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees, two of the biggest acts of 1977, never fully recovered from the film’s toxicity. Their association with a project so completely and publicly humiliated made recovery difficult in ways that even their considerable talent struggled to overcome. A soundtrack does not simply fail in isolation. At its most destructive, it takes careers with it. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the 1978 version, did exactly that.
He discovered the gem when he was 12 years old and still has it now, claiming it to be why he fell in love with music. He likes to play disc golf when he's not writing about music. He is a one-of-a-kind individual who is always the first to bust out his air guitar on the dance-floor.
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