This Is the Worst R-Rated Movie Ever Made

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Under the Motion Picture Association rating system, R stands for Restricted. That means anybody under 17 has to be accompanied by a parent or adult guardian because the movie contains adult material. That translates into harsh language, intense violence, sexually oriented nudity, drug abuse and so on.

Of course, some people want to see movies that feature violence (what war movie doesn’t?), and many outstanding urban dramas feature bad language and drug abuse. Yet, having these certainly doesn’t make a movie good. Some R-rated movies are so bad people under 17 should be thankful they can’t see them alone.

24/7 Tempo has put together a list of the worst R-rated movies ever made. It contains several movies you probably haven’t heard of — movies so bad they were released and quickly disappeared without ever entering the public’s consciousness. Some of them have well-known actors, but none of them have A-list directors like Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese. Sometimes bad movies become cult favorites, but these movies are just plain bad.

“Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star,” a comedy made in 2011, was the worst R-rated movie. Tom Brady directed it, and it starred Nick Swardson, Don Johnson, Christina Ricci and Stephen Dorff. Its box office gross was a meager $2.3 million. Fired from his job at a local grocery store, young Bucky, played by Swardson, leaves Iowa and heads to California to become a porn star. TimeOut described the movie as “dire, soul-crushing stuff.”
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To determine the 15 worst R-rated movies of all time as finalists to determine the absolute worst, 24/7 Tempo reviewed data from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) and Rotten Tomatoes. We created an index based on the average critic rating from Rotten Tomatoes, the average audience rating from Rotten Tomatoes and the average user rating from IMDb. We only considered feature films with at least 5,000 Rotten Tomatoes audience reviews, 10 Rotten Tomatoes critic reviews and 10,000 IMDb user reviews. All data is for the most recent period available. Data was collected in February 2021.

Click here to see the 15 worst R-rated movies ever made.
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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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