Girl on the Third Floor (Travis Stevens, 2019)

In 2019, the ‘Second City Saint’ CM Punk entered the acting world with the low-budget horror movie Girl on the Third Floor. Punk, whose real name is Phil Brooks, has always been known for his ability to deliver passionate promos on the microphone during his hugely successful tenures in WWE, so it made sense for him to transition to movies at some point. Fittingly for a self-professed comic book and horror fan, Brooks’ first acting gig was a gorily gross fright flick with a plot that has to be seen to be believed.

Brooks plays Don Koch, an ex-con who buys a dilapidated house and begins fixing it up for his pregnant wife. Naturally, though, he has actually purchased a haunted house, and he is soon being driven mad by the malevolent forces within its walls. He is soon seduced by the ghost of a sex worker who plied her trade in the house during its previous life as a twisted bordello, and as the movie unfolds, Koch reveals himself to be a pretty unsavoury character who refuses to face his past misdeeds.

The movie has some incredible practical effects, and Brooks’ performance is strong for a first-timer, but it’s hard to escape the idea that this one might simply be throwing a lot of ideas at the wall to see what sticks.

River of Darkness (Bruce Koehler, 2011)

Kevin Nash, one of three wrestlers who starred in the 2011 bottom-of-the-barrel horror schlock known as River of Darkness, was once asked about the film, and he quipped, “I think you have to microdose some mushrooms to actually appreciate it.” Now, Nash is known these days for shooting from the hip when it comes to both wrestling and Hollywood, so it’s perhaps not surprising that he would dump on the movie. However, considering Nash has worked on big movies in his career like The Punisher, Magic Mike, and John Wick, his opinion on this slapdash production does carry some weight. After all, he has a better idea than most wrestlers about what it takes to make good films – and this ain’t it.

Nash starred in the movie alongside Olympic gold medallist and WWE legend Kurt Angle, as well as the late great Sid Eudy, known in his career as Sycho Sid, Sid Justice, and Sid Vicious. Angle plays a small-town sheriff who investigates a series of murders that lead him to believe an ancient evil has risen from purgatory to take revenge on his quiet river town.

It’s all the kind of low-rent stuff that even passionate gorehounds would turn their noses up at and looks heartbreakingly cheap. Nash once revealed that director Bruce Koehler told him the production didn’t have time to wet his hair when his character was supposed to have emerged from a river, so he shot an entire scene with incongruously dry hair – and that should tell you all you need to know.

3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain (Sean McNamara, 1998)

In the 1990s, the 3 Ninjas franchise delighted young martial arts enthusiasts who wished they could be as proficient at fighting bad guys as brothers Rocky, Colt, and Tum-Tum. Then Hulk Hogan got involved in the franchise’s fourth instalment, the preposterously-titled 3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain, and killed it stone dead. There were no more 3 Ninjas adventures after this one, which featured Hogan as the oddly-coiffed Dave Dragon, and even Hogan himself pretty much gave up on acting, only appearing in one more low-budget action movie after it. Oh, and a cameo in Muppets From Space. We can’t forget that.

In truth, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that Hogan would be capable of sullying the good name of a kid-friendly series like 3 Ninjas. After all, his attempt at movie stardom in the ’90s amounted to a string of disasters, including Suburban Commando and Mr Nanny, both of which tanked at the box office before he was shuffled off into direct-to-video fare like Thunder in Paradise.

Hogan – legitimately the biggest star in wrestling for much of that decade – just couldn’t translate the thing that fans loved about him to film, probably because he was a truly awful actor. Or maybe people already had an inkling that he wasn’t the nicest guy in the world, and watching him outside of wrestling held little appeal.

The Fred trilogy (Clay Weiner, Connor Tereport, Joe Battisti, 2010-12)

These days, John Cena is flying high in Hollywood thanks to his role as the foul-mouthed DC superhero Peacemaker, his role in the Fast and Furious franchise, and his appearances in a string of bawdy comedies like Blockers and Vacation Friends. He’s shown a talent for making himself look like an idiot, which isn’t an easy thing to do when you’re built like a Greek God. True, his future mightn’t necessarily involve Academy Award recognition or serious critical appraisal, but he’s forged a good career for himself by subverting his image as often as he plays it up.

Some fans mightn’t know what Cena credits with shifting his entire attitude toward moviemaking, though. In fact, he says his appearances in this trilogy were the first projects that allowed him to truly sink into a character and challenge himself. Bizarrely, though, this epiphany came while Cena was playing a heightened version of his wrestling character in the Fred trilogy.

What is the Fred trilogy, you might ask? Well, it’s a series of films about the high-pitched YouTube character played by Lucas Cruikshank, who regularly imagines that he’s talking to his imaginary dad. His hulking fake father appears in the form of Cena, wearing full ring attire and helping his imaginary son overcome life’s obstacles – often while playfully wrestling with him.

Hell Comes to Frogtown (Donald G Jackson and RJ Kizer, 1988)

In 1988, legendary wrestling heel ‘Rowdy’ Roddy Piper starred in two films. One of them stood the test of time and is still a beloved cult classic today: John Carpenter’s They Live. The other is called Hell Comes to Frogtown. Bizarrely, only one of these movies was followed by two sequels – and it wasn’t Carpenter’s ass-kicking bubblegum-chewing masterpiece. Yes, that’s right – Hell Comes to Frogtown was followed by Return to Frogtown and Max Hell Frog Warrior. Do you ever wonder who is actually watching these things?

Regardless of the B-movie audience that extended the lifespan of movies like Frogtown, Piper decided that one go-around with this mutant frog-filled post-apocalyptic wasteland was enough for him. The kilt-wearing wrestler plays Sam Hell, the only fertile man in a future where the need to repopulate the earth is paramount. He leaves a trail of pregnant women in his wake as he travels from town to town before he is ordered to infiltrate the titular “Frogtown”, where mutant amphibians have taken a group of women hostage.

It is Hell’s job to rescue the women so he can impregnate them, and for the mission, he is fitted with a protective codpiece secured tightly with an electronic lock. After all, his crown jewels are integral to the future of humanity. And no, we are not making any of this up.

Santa’s Slay (David Steiman, 2005)

Have you ever wanted to watch a movie about a demonic Santa Claus who brutally murders a father played by Hollywood legend James Caan? How about if said not-so-jolly Saint Nick came in the form of the impossibly jacked WCW star Bill Goldberg? If your answer to this is “yes,” then you need 2005’s Santa’s Slay in your life.

This black comedy slasher film tells the tale of Santa reverting to his original demonic self after losing a bet with an angel, and it culminates with him exacting a grisly demise on Sonny Corleone himself. Amusingly, Caan chose to go uncredited in the film. We simply can’t imagine why.

In recent years, action and horror-focussed Santa movies have actually experienced something of a renaissance. There was David Harbour’s Violent Night, which will soon be getting a sequel; Dwayne Johnson’s Red One, which mercifully seems unlikely to ever get a sequel; the Finnish masterpiece Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale; and even Mel Gibson got in on the act with the direct-to-streaming oddity Fatman. It says a lot that Goldberg’s foray into murderous Christmas movies is even worse than Johnson or Gibson’s efforts. Sorry, Bill.

Southland Tales (Richard Kelly, 2006)

Yes, despite being the proud owner of one of the safest filmographies in Hollywood history, even Dwayne Johnson took a walk on the weird side once. Before he settled into the groove of playing a version of himself in various different family-friendly action settings, Johnson took some risks as an actor. He tried comedy in Be Cool and took a shot at dark satire in Pain & Gain; he made gritty R-rated action movies like Faster and Snitch; he made kids’ movies like The Tooth Fairy; and he even trusted a young auteur director with his pioneering vision of the future.

That auteur was Donnie Darko wunderkind Richard Kelly, who followed up that mindbending Jake Gyllenhaal indie classic with an even more mindbending dystopian sci-fi picture. Sadly, Southland Tales wasn’t the kind of mindbending that was open to multiple interpretations like Darko. Instead, it was simply the kind of movie that baffled anyone who watched it, daring them to try and make sense of what they were seeing.

Even Johnson himself didn’t have a clue what Southland Tales amounted to, nor what Kelly was trying to say with the film. In fact, he once chuckled, “I’m still not quite too sure what that movie is about.”

Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! (Anthony C Ferrante, 2015)

Chris Jericho is one of the best to lace up a pair of wrestling boots. An insanely charismatic man who has reinvented himself countless times over the course of his four-decade career in the ring, the Canadian always seemed like one of the best candidates to move into movies and TV. Unfortunately, it hasn’t quite worked out that way, and Jericho’s acting career is littered with embarrassing projects, unfunny comedies, and cameos in trashy horror movies.

Perhaps the nadir of his acting career was when he chose to cash in on the viral fame of the SyFy Channel’s Sharknado series. He appeared as a Universal Studios ride attendant in Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! but by the time that misbegotten film was released, the joke of a hurricane that carries man-eating sharks within it had begun to wear unbelievably thin. Naturally, Syfy still milked the idea three more times.

At least Jericho had fun shooting the scene, though – and then had even more fun pondering whether he could beat a shark in a one-on-one matchup. He told The Toronto Sun, “That’d be a pretty admirable way to go. It’d be like the worst 30 seconds, but it’s a pretty cool way to die. Yeah, you got eaten by a shark. That’s like a Viking way to die.”

Knucklehead (Michael Watkins, 2010)

Somehow, we’ve come all this way without addressing WWE Studios, the film production company owned and operated by WWE. Beginning in 2009, the company began farming its talent out to appear in films that mainly went straight to DVD. Titles like John Cena’s 12 Rounds and The Marine followed, along with lesser-known films with stunningly generic titles like Interrogation, Eliminators, and Countdown. Interestingly, though, to prove that even a broken clock is right twice a day, the company also produced Mike Flanagan’s Oculus – which didn’t star any wrestlers at all.

Undoubtedly the worst of WWE Studios’ early efforts was Knucklehead, though, a problematic “comedy” that starred Paul ‘Big Show’ Wight as a good-natured giant tricked into helping a con artist with a get-rich-quick scheme. Wight’s acting chops weren’t enough to save the movie, which was lambasted by every critic who had the misfortune of watching it.

Hell, even co-star Dennis Farina once told Total Film that it was the most embarrassing project of his entire career – and he starred in something called National Lampoon’s Bag Boy. Ouch.

Final Score (Scott Mann, 2018)

Dave Bautista is Hollywood’s current pro-wrestling surprise package. After an ignominious start in acting, which included lamentable efforts like The Scorpion King 3: Battle for Redemption and Kickboxer: Vengeance, he arrived as a movie star when he played Drax in Guardians of the Galaxy. From that point on, he proved himself in other action movies like Spectre and Riddick before stretching himself as an actor with the Dune movies, Blade Runner 2049, Knock at the Cabin, and Glass Onion. These days, putting Bautista in your film isn’t a sign that you’re trying to make a quick buck by including a lunkheaded wrestler – it’s a sign that you believe in him as an actor.

Despite this, though, Bautista hasn’t been immune from falling into the trap of making a weird picture or two. For our money, the weirdest has to be 2018’s Final Score, a film that can most easily be described as “Die Hard at a West Ham game.” Shot just before the team’s iconic Upton Park stadium was to be torn down, the movie was actually the brainchild of the football club’s co-owner David Sullivan – and how often can that be said in Hollywood history?

Bautista plays a former soldier who fights terrorists threatening to blow up the stadium, and the big set-piece of the film involves him riding a motorcycle across the stadium roof. Oh, and the villains are played by Pierce Brosnan and the late, great Ray Stevenson. What a picture.