The Greatest Guilty Pleasure Films

A guilty pleasure is not simply a bad film. It is a film that gives you something — energy, spectacle, absurdity, a specific kind of shameless entertainment — that better films frequently do not provide. The guilt is real: you cannot defend these films to anyone with serious critical standards. The pleasure is also real: you watch them again anyway, usually late at night, usually alone, because they deliver something that Citizen Kane absolutely does not.

The twenty films here are organized around a simple criterion: would you recommend them to a film critic? No. Would you watch them again this weekend? Yes. That gap — between what you can defend and what you actually enjoy — is the guilty pleasure’s natural habitat, and these films live there more completely than almost anything else in cinema.

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1. Flash Gordon (1980)

“Flash! Ahhh-ahhhh — savior of the universe!”

Flash Gordon is the platonic ideal of the guilty pleasure: a film made with complete sincerity and enormous expense that produces comedy through absolute commitment to material nobody takes seriously except the people making it. Max von Sydow does Ming the Merciless with the specific grandeur of a man who believes he is in a legitimate epic. Brian Blessed does Vultan with the energy of a man who has been waiting his entire life for this exact role. The Queen soundtrack is legitimately extraordinary. Sam Jones is Flash Gordon in the way a golden retriever is a seeing-eye dog — enthusiastic, decorative, and not entirely up to the task.

The film cost $35 million, made $27 million in North America, and has been in continuous home video rotation ever since. It is a film that failed commercially and succeeded as a cultural artifact — the camp classic that nobody planned to make, produced by people who thought they were making something serious.

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2. Road House (1989)

“Pain don’t hurt.”

Patrick Swayze plays Dalton, a cooler — a professional bouncer — with a philosophy degree from NYU who is hired to clean up the most dangerous bar in Missouri. Dalton keeps his degree in his back pocket, quotes Nietzsche, and tears people’s throats out with his bare hands when necessary. The film takes this premise with absolute seriousness. Ben Gazzara’s villain has a monster truck. Sam Elliott shows up as Dalton’s mentor, says wise things, and is immediately killed to motivate the finale. A polar bear is destroyed. None of this is examined.

Road House is the most purely entertaining film on this list by some distance. It does not have a single redeemable quality by critical standards, and it is impossible to stop watching once it starts. The specific pleasure it provides — a philosophically inclined bouncer fighting his way through a corrupt Missouri town — is not available anywhere else in cinema.

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3. Showgirls (1995)

“Everyone’s got AIDS and shit.”

Paul Verhoeven’s NC-17 Las Vegas showbiz drama was the most notorious box office disaster of the 1990s and has since been rehabilitated by some critics as deliberate satire of American ambition and exploitation. The rehabilitation is partially correct and mostly generous. Showgirls is simultaneously a sincere melodrama about a woman’s rise through Las Vegas entertainment and a film so tonally unhinged that it produces exactly the effect of satire while apparently not intending to. Elizabeth Berkley’s performance operates at a frequency that no other actor in the film can match, which is either a catastrophic miscalculation or the most committed acting of the decade.

The guilty pleasure version of Showgirls — the version watched with a group at midnight, the version that produces involuntary laughter at scenes designed to produce drama — is the most entertaining possible engagement with it. The serious version, in which you attempt to evaluate it as either sincere melodrama or intentional satire, is considerably less satisfying. The film works best when you stop asking what it is trying to do.

Two works have made the serious case for Showgirls as legitimate cinema. Jeffrey Sconce and Nathan Lee’s book It Doesn’t Suck: Showgirls argues that the film is a genuine camp masterwork operating in the tradition of Douglas Sirk — a film whose excess is meaningful rather than accidental. Jamie Babbit’s documentary You Don’t Nomi (2019) assembles a range of critics and fans who make the case for the film’s rehabilitation, tracing its journey from notorious disaster to cult icon. Whether you buy the serious arguments or not, both works are more interesting than most of the films they are defending against.

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4. Con Air (1997)

“Put the bunny back in the box.”

Nicolas Cage plays a decorated Army Ranger paroled from prison who ends up on a prison transport plane taken over by the most dangerous criminals in America, including John Malkovich doing his most theatrical villain, John Cusack looking deeply uncomfortable, Steve Buscemi as a serial killer who loves children, and Dave Chappelle. Cage maintains a Southern accent throughout that is a separate performance from the one he is giving in the scenes. He carries a stuffed animal bunny for his daughter. The plane lands on the Las Vegas Strip. A guitar is played over a sunset. The film is a masterpiece of its specific kind.

The guilty pleasure of Con Air is the specific pleasure of watching serious actors — Malkovich especially — commit to genuinely absurd material with the energy of someone who has decided they are in a great film and is not going to let reality interfere. Malkovich’s Cyrus the Virus is one of the great villain performances precisely because Malkovich plays him as a genuine tragic figure in a film that is fundamentally about a bunny being returned to a child.

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5. Speed (1994)

“What do you do? What do you do?”

Speed’s premise is so purely mechanical that it approaches genius: a bus with a bomb that detonates if the speed drops below 50 mph. That is the entire film. Jan de Bont executes it with a technical precision that makes the absurdity irrelevant — the tension is real, the pacing is perfect, and Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock have the specific kind of chemistry that produces heat without requiring either of them to act particularly well. Dennis Hopper’s villain is having considerably more fun than anyone else on screen.

Speed earns a slightly higher critical standing than most films on this list — it is often cited as a genuinely good action film — but it belongs here because the pleasure of watching it is the specific pleasure of watching a completely mechanical premise executed without any pretension to anything more. The film knows exactly what it is and delivers it without apology. That specific unashamed competence is itself a form of artistry.

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6. Face/Off (1997)

“I could eat a peach for hours.”

John Woo’s film asks a simple question: what if Nicolas Cage and John Travolta traded faces, and then both of them played each other while also playing themselves? The answer is one of the most purely entertaining action films of the 1990s, in which both actors give their own performance while simultaneously doing an impression of the other actor’s performance, and John Woo shoots all of it with slow-motion doves and dual-wielded pistols and the specific operatic grandeur that only Woo can produce.

Face/Off is a genuine craft achievement disguised as absurd entertainment. The central conceit — both actors must play themselves-as-each-other — requires a level of collaborative performance intelligence that most serious dramas do not demand. Cage plays Travolta-playing-Cage. Travolta plays Cage-playing-Travolta. Both are correct. The film operates entirely in this register for two hours and never collapses into incoherence, which is itself a remarkable achievement.

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7. Point Break (1991)

“Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true.”

Kathryn Bigelow directed a film about an FBI agent who goes undercover in the surfing community to catch bank robbers who wear ex-president masks and is seduced by their philosophy of radical freedom. Keanu Reeves is the agent. Patrick Swayze is Bodhi, the surfer-philosopher-criminal whose commitment to “the ultimate ride” is presented as a genuine alternative value system rather than an excuse to rob banks. The film takes Bodhi’s philosophy completely seriously, and in doing so produces one of cinema’s great philosophical villains dressed as a beach bum.

The guilty pleasure of Point Break is that Bodhi is right about something, even while being wrong about everything. His contempt for conventional life, his insistence on physical transcendence, his specific quality of charismatic certainty — these are compelling even as they lead directly to people dying. Bigelow understood that if Bodhi were simply wrong, the film would have no tension. He has to be genuinely seductive for the agent’s conflict to be real.

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8. Over the Top (1987)

“The world meets nobody halfway. When you want something, you gotta take it.”

Sylvester Stallone arm wrestles his way to custody of his son. This is the film. Stallone plays Lincoln Hawk, a truck driver who competes in the World Arm Wrestling Championship in Las Vegas while fighting a custody battle against his estranged son’s wealthy grandfather. The film treats arm wrestling with the same gravitas that Rocky treated boxing, which is simultaneously the film’s most absurd quality and its most endearing one. When Stallone flips his baseball cap backward before a match, the film expects you to feel something. Somehow, you do.

Over the Top is the purest expression of 1980s action cinema’s central belief: that any physical competition, pursued with sufficient sincerity and a good training montage, can become a vehicle for genuine human drama. The arm wrestling sequences are tense in a way that has no rational explanation. The film has no business working as well as it does, and yet the ending produces the specific satisfaction of a story that has committed fully to its own absurd premise.

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9. Tango & Cash (1989)

“Rambo is a pussy.”

Sylvester Stallone and Kurt Russell as rival LA cops framed for murder, sent to prison, breaking out, and taking revenge — delivered with the specific energy of two extremely famous people who know they are in a ridiculous film and have decided to enjoy themselves anyway. Stallone wears glasses and reads the Wall Street Journal to establish that Tango is the sophisticated one. Russell wears a leather jacket and makes wisecracks to establish that Cash is the cool one. The chemistry between them is genuine, the action sequences are excessive in the best possible way, and the film’s complete lack of pretension is itself a form of entertainment.

Tango & Cash is the 1980s buddy cop film at its most self-aware — not quite parody, not quite sincere, operating in the specific zone where the formula is being performed with full knowledge that it is a formula and no apparent interest in pretending otherwise. The pleasure is the formula delivered with maximum style by two actors having maximum fun.

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10. Commando (1985)

“I lied.”

Commando is the most concentrated delivery of pure 1980s action cinema in a single film: Arnold Schwarzenegger kills approximately 81 people in 90 minutes to rescue his daughter, delivering a pun after every kill with the specific quality of a man who has been told he is funny and is determined to be funny regardless of the evidence. The film opens with Arnold carrying a deer and a small girl simultaneously. It ends with him throwing a pipe through someone. In between, everything that can be thrown is thrown, everything that can explode does, and every one-liner lands because Arnold says it with complete conviction.

Commando is the definitive text of its genre — more purely itself than any other 1980s action film — and that purity is what earns its place as the quintessential guilty pleasure. You cannot defend it. You cannot turn it off. The puns alone justify its existence.

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11. Independence Day (1996)

“Today we celebrate our Independence Day!”

Bill Pullman gives a presidential speech before a dogfight with alien ships that is one of cinema’s great pieces of unironic schmaltz — a speech so earnest, so completely committed to the idea that the human race will not go quietly into the night, that it produces the specific response of wanting to stand up and cheer despite every critical instinct telling you not to. Jeff Goldblum defeats alien civilization with a laptop virus. Will Smith punches an alien and says “Welcome to Earth.” The White House explodes beautifully. The film delivers every single thing it promises and nothing else.

Independence Day is the guilty pleasure that most people will admit to without much guilt, which is why it belongs on this list — it is the gateway drug, the film that makes people comfortable saying “yes, sometimes I just want to watch something that makes me feel something uncomplicated.” The uncomplicated feeling it produces — patriotism, triumph, the specific pleasure of the underdog win at maximum scale — is not available from better films. Better films make you feel complicated things.

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12. Top Gun (1986)

“I feel the need — the need for speed!”

Tony Scott’s film is a two-hour Navy recruitment advertisement with one of cinema’s great soundtracks, a beach volleyball scene that exists for reasons that have nothing to do with the plot, and Tom Cruise at the absolute peak of his specific brand of charismatic intensity. The film’s plot — Maverick must overcome his recklessness and accept authority — is the thinnest possible scaffolding for a series of extremely impressive aerial sequences and extremely 1980s music cues. Goose dies. Maverick plays piano. Iceman bites his lip. The film is complete.

Top Gun is a guilty pleasure that has been partially rehabilitated by Top Gun: Maverick, which is a genuinely good film that made people reassess the original. The original is still not a good film by critical standards. It is an extraordinarily effective experience, which is different from being a good film, and the difference is worth being honest about.

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13. Twister (1996)

“It’s the wonder of nature, baby!”

Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt chase tornadoes for two hours while a villain with a corporate research budget threatens their purer scientific vision. The film exists to show you what a tornado looks like from very close up, and it accomplishes this with spectacular efficiency. A drive-in movie theater plays The Shining as a tornado approaches. A flying cow appears twice. The characters discuss meteorology as if it is the most exciting subject available to humanity, and within the film’s specific context, it is.

Twister’s guilty pleasure is the specific pleasure of a film that knows its own subject is inherently spectacular and does not attempt to compensate with narrative complexity. The film trusts that tornadoes are interesting enough to carry two hours of story, and it is correct. Jan de Bont, who also directed Speed, understood that a single powerful physical phenomenon — tornado, bus that cannot slow down — is sufficient premise for a satisfying action film.

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14. Waterworld (1995)

“Dry land is not a myth. I’ve seen it.”

Waterworld cost $175 million in 1995 — the most expensive film ever made at the time — and was treated as the greatest disaster in Hollywood history before it made $264 million worldwide and became a profitable film that everyone had decided was a catastrophe before it finished its run. Kevin Costner plays a mutant with gills in a post-apocalyptic ocean world. Dennis Hopper plays the villain with a jet ski and an eyepatch. The film’s production — shooting entirely at sea, sets sinking, everything going wrong — is more interesting than the film, which is itself interesting enough.

Waterworld’s rehabilitation as a guilty pleasure is one of cinema’s more unusual critical arcs: a film that was almost universally condemned on release that has been quietly reassessed as a flawed but genuinely entertaining adventure with a distinctive production design and a central performance that works better than anyone admitted at the time. Costner is good. The world is interesting. The film deserved better than its reputation and slightly worse than its actual content.

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15. The Rock (1996)

“Losers always whine about their best. Winners go home and f*** the prom queen.”

Michael Bay’s best film — and it genuinely is his best film — pairs Nicolas Cage’s neurotic FBI chemical weapons expert with Sean Connery’s imprisoned British spy for a mission to recapture Alcatraz from a rogue Marine general. The premise is maximally absurd and maximally entertaining, Connery clearly enjoys himself more than he has in years, and Cage’s specific quality of controlled hysteria is perfectly calibrated to the material. The film has approximately forty explosions. Every single one is filmed with the specific reverence Bay brings to explosions, which is more reverence than most directors bring to anything.

The Rock earns a slightly higher critical standing than most films on this list — it is sometimes cited as a genuinely good action film — but it belongs here because its pleasures are specifically guilty: the over-the-top everything, the specific comedy of Cage and Connery’s dynamic, the complete commitment to being exactly what it is without apology. It is the best possible version of a film that should not be this good.

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16. Armageddon (1998)

“I quit, I’m out. It’s just — I quit.”

NASA trains oil drillers to be astronauts rather than training astronauts to drill, which is the single funniest plot decision in blockbuster history. Bruce Willis sacrifices himself to save the Earth from an asteroid the size of Texas by detonating a nuclear device on its surface. Aerosmith provides the soundtrack. Ben Affleck and Liv Tyler have a romantic subplot. Steve Buscemi rides a nuclear warhead. The film is edited at a pace that may be medically inadvisable and produces a specific kind of exhausted emotional investment that leaves audiences crying at a Bruce Willis death scene despite every intention not to.

Armageddon is the guiltiest pleasure on this list precisely because the ending works. The specific emotional manipulation Bay deploys — the slow motion, Aerosmith, Bruce Willis’s face — is shameless and effective, and the viewer who finds themselves genuinely moved by it feels the guilt most acutely. You knew what it was doing. It worked anyway.

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17. Mortal Kombat (1995)

“Mortal Kombat!”

The original 1995 Mortal Kombat film is one of the better video game adaptations precisely because Paul W.S. Anderson understood what the games were and made that thing rather than trying to make a different thing. The games are a tournament fighting game with colorful characters, exotic settings, and the specific pleasure of watching very different fighters face each other. The film is a tournament fighting film with colorful characters, exotic settings, and the specific pleasure of watching very different fighters face each other. The logic is faithful even if the execution is limited by a budget that was clearly insufficient for the ambition.

The soundtrack — the iconic “Mortal Kombat” theme — does more work than any piece of licensed music in film history, generating adrenaline on cue every time it plays. Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa’s Shang Tsung is an underrated villain performance. The film knows what it is, commits to it, and delivers it cleanly. This is more than can be said for the 2021 version.

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18. Judgment Night (1993)

“Wrong place, wrong time.”

Four suburban men on the way to a boxing match get their RV stuck in a Chicago housing project and witness a murder committed by Denis Leary’s gang leader, who then spends the night hunting them through the projects. The film is essentially a survival thriller with the specific tension of ordinary people — Emilio Estevez, Cuba Gooding Jr., Stephen Dorff, Jeremy Piven — completely out of their depth in an environment they have never encountered. Denis Leary gives one of his best performances as a villain whose menace is entirely believable.

Judgment Night is an underseen guilty pleasure — it was not a major release, never achieved wide recognition, and has survived largely through cable television rotation and home video. Its specific pleasure is the sustained tension of the chase, Leary’s performance, and the specific horror of the environment the characters are trapped in. The film earns its place here as the most efficiently effective thriller of the group.

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19. Demolition Man (1993)

“Be well.”

A 1990s cop and criminal are cryogenically frozen and thawed out in a sanitized 2032 future where all salt, red meat, contact sports, and profanity have been eliminated, and all restaurants are Taco Bell. Wesley Snipes plays the villain with maximum theatrical energy — platinum hair, elaborate villainy, the specific pleasure of an actor who has been handed an absurd role and decided to go all the way with it. Stallone plays the fish-out-of-water cop with the specific quality of a man who has just discovered that everything he enjoys has been made illegal.

Demolition Man’s satirical portrait of sanitized future California has aged into something remarkably prescient — the specific anxieties it is mocking in 1993 have not diminished — and the film’s guilty pleasure comes partly from how accurate its comedy has become. It is funnier now than it was in 1993, which is not something that can be said about most action comedies of the era.

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20. Drop Zone (1994)

“You’re going to have to jump.”

Wesley Snipes plays a US Marshal who learns skydiving to infiltrate a ring of criminal skydivers — led by Gary Busey — who are using freefall to break into DEA facilities from above. The film is essentially Point Break with skydiving instead of surfing, released three years after Point Break to considerably less acclaim and considerably more Busey. Snipes has the specific charisma of an action star who is working in a film beneath his ability and has decided to deliver maximum value regardless. Busey is Busey, which in 1994 was still a reliable source of entertaining unpredictability.

Drop Zone closes this list as the most purely guilty of the guilty pleasures — a film that has no defenders, no critical rehabilitation, no cult following beyond people who encountered it on cable television at 2 AM and were unable to change the channel. Its inclusion is a statement of intent: the guilty pleasure exists in the gap between what you can defend and what you actually watched, and Drop Zone lives in that gap more completely than anything else on this list.

The Honest Defense of the Guilty Pleasure

The guilt in “guilty pleasure” is worth examining. Why do we feel guilt about enjoying these films? Not because they have harmed anyone. Because they fail to meet the standards we apply when we want to be taken seriously as viewers. The guilt is social — the anticipated judgment of the person who would raise an eyebrow at Road House while defending Breathless.

These twenty films provide genuine pleasure. The pleasure is real. The guilt is about how you look enjoying it, not about anything the film actually does. At some point the honest position is: these films give you something. Better films sometimes give you something else. You want both, and there is nothing to be ashamed of in that.

What’s Your Guilty Pleasure?

Every reader has one they didn’t see on this list. Drop it in the comments — no judgment.