“What do you mean an actual werewolf was only the 12^th worst President depicted in film?”

~AFFotD’s “Fact” Checker

When one of our staff members got lunch drunk (it’s like regular drunk, only it’s immediately followed by a nap) and proposed that we try to rank all the fictional Presidents that have appeared in cinematic history we thought, sure, that could be fun for everyone.

We didn’t know what we were getting ourselves into. There are so many movies that have Presidents, you guys. We’ve already gone over nearly twenty movies that just barely didn’t make the list for one reason or another, and definitively determined that the worst Presidents in film history were responsible for nuking New York, and causing Doomsday, in that order (New York was worse because the President himself pulled the trigger. Or…pushed the button? Turned the key? Whatever one does with nukes).

But we’ve made our bed, and might as well see this thing through to the bitter end. Here are ten more fictional Presidents who you’d definitely not consider re-electing.

Every Fictional President in Film History: Ranked (#140-131—The Truly Terrible [and Sometimes Evil] Presidents)

140: Whoops Apocalypse (1986)

Loretta Swit as President Barbara Jacqueline Adams

Our first female President on this list doesn’t really do a lot for gender equality in politics. Wikipedia judges this President from the political parody film based on the TV series of the same name by saying that “her incompetence helps cause World War III.”

Listen, you’ll find plenty of Presidents on this list that were around during World War III, which is a weird sentence to write, but most of them weren’t really to blame for everything going all nuclear. You can’t say that here. Her rating here is almost too high if we’re being honest.

139: Escape from L.A. (1996)

Cliff Robertson as the President

This motherfucker made himself President for life, banned, among other things, alcohol, red meat, and profanity (the motherfucker), and would strip away the citizenship of anyone caught breaking these rules. Anyone not following the rules of his “Moral America” could either then “repent” and get goddamn electrocuted to death, or get sent away to the island of Los Angeles (earthquakes, science, long story) to basically live in a lawless steampunk murder society. This guy sounds like he’s super fun at parties.

(By the way, we’re kind of astonished at how much he looks like the, cough, kind of fascist President who just ekes him out on this list.)

138: Gabriel Over the White House (1933)

Walter Huston as the Hon. Judson Hammond, the President of the United State

From The Library of Congress (seriously): “The good news: he reduces unemployment, lifts the country out of the Depression, battles gangsters and Congress, and brings about world peace. The bad news: he’s Mussolini.” Damn, Library of Congress, when did y’all get so sassy?

Also, yeah, sorry as a general rule, Mussolini is not allowed to go any higher than here on a ranking of movie Presidents. We’ll begrudgingly admit he’s better than the three people that saw everything get nuked into oblivion, and we’ll even give him the edge over the “murder prison island” guy, but that’s as high as we’re willing to go.

…Okay we made a promise to our that we weren’t going to deep dive into every movie that appears in these rankings. There are so many Presidents to talk about, it wouldn’t be fair to them or you, the reader, to go in-depth on every one, but we have to take a moment to talk about how batshit crazy this movie is.

It received the “financial backing and creative input of William Randolph Hearst,” a.k.a. basically the real-life Citizen Kane, it follows a “partisan hack” (the movie’s words, not ours) President who suffers a car crash, then as some breeze blows through a closed window (divine intervention) awakens from his coma as a “decisive man of action.”

So he fires basically his entire cabinet, gets impeached, declares martial law, dissolves the legislative branch (what), creates an “Army of Construction” who answered only to him (um), and nationalized the manufacture and sale of alcohol. Oh, and of course he immediately called for a suspension of civil rights (oh lovely) before revoking the fucking Constitution (are we having a stroke?).

He meets with resistance from the mob, and not like “a mob of people” but like, the mafia (you know, the bad guys who are like “hey, stop dissolving the legislature and stripping away civil rights), and they all get fucking summarily executed. Then, Hammond tells the whole world he has a doomsday device, thus blackmailing (Wikipedia’s word, not ours) the world into complete disarmament, ushering global peace. Finally, his mission completed, breeze blows through a closed window once more, and he dies from a stroke to like, we don’t know, go home to Jesus or whatever.

Like, what? What? We understand that things were really messed up in the 30s, but we didn’t realize it was that bad, man! Holy fuck!

137: Iron Sky (2012) and Iron Sky: The Coming Race (2018)

Stephanie Paul as the President of the United States

Hey it’s the second lady president of the series, and we’re still in the “top 10 worst Presidents of all time.” Huzzah. This President doesn’t start World War III she’s just… supposed to be an extremely lazy parody of Sarah Palin. Cool. Listen, this movie involves Space Nazis who live on the moon, and a Presidential campaign called “Black to the Moon” where the President decides to launch an African American male model into orbit.

There are spaceships that look like Zeppelins called Siegfrieds, and just, there’s a lot, you guys. The first movie ended with the world getting nuked to death, and honestly we’re going to put a decent amount of blame on the Sarah Palin spoof here.

Oh also, we watched the trailer for the sequel that’s coming out in August, and apparently she’s also a lizard person, and at least associates with a dinosaur riding Hitler. Speaking of sentences we didn’t expect to ever write.

136: Virus a.k.a. Day of Resurrection (1980)

Glenn Ford as President Richardson

Yes, this is a completely different movie titled Virus than the one we lazily stuck in our Honorable Mentions section.

President Richardson sets up an automated system that can launch all their nukes in case there is no one left to push the button. Then, he dies of a virus that wipes out most of the Earth’s population, except for a handful of people stationed in Antarctica (to his credit, he warned them to stay the hell away from the rest of the world before dying).

Then an Earthquake set off that nuclear failsafe system, which led to Antarctica getting nuked, thus almost wiping out the last of the human race. Thankfully, a few humans survived (they took a boat out to sea, which, sure?), but man, Richardson did not have a great tenure as the “probably last President of America ever.”

135: Wild in the Streets (1968)

Christopher Jones as President Max Frost

In this counter-culture film, the President is 24-years-old, 30 is the mandatory retirement age, and everyone over 35 has to spend the rest of their life dosed with LSD. You could have stopped reading after the “24-years-old” part and known how this shit was going to turn out. You’re not allowed to rent a car when you’re 24, and honestly, that’s probably for the best. Jesus, we’re almost tempted to drop this guy lower, but, you know. We can’t really justify dropping him below the proto-Nazi or the world-enders.

134: Death Race 2000 (1975)

Sandy McCallum as Mr. President

This goober was President for over 20 years, leading a totalitarian regime and keeping America under martial law after the “World Crash of ’79.” Most of the movie is about trying to kill this guy, because he sucks so hard. He finally gets run over by Frankenstein (David Carradine’s character) and Frankenstein becomes the new President as a result, because this dude was a shitty President who set up a very shitty Presidential succession process.

133: Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017)

Bruce Greenwood as the President of the United States

Are we sure Cliff Robertson, Walter Huston, and Bruce Greenwood are actually different people? Because look at those three actors on this list and tell us they don’t all look like the same dude.

Anyway, yeah, the President in Kingsman 2 is an asshole who was willing to let every single drug user in the United States die. He gets impeached for conspiring to commit genocide, and, um, guess what? Genocide is a bad thing for a President to be doing. Sorry to get all political on you, but Presidents should not do genocide. We don’t care if we lose page views for that opinion, we believe it to be true.

132: Hail (1972)

Dan Resin as the President

According to IMDB, Hail, which was such an inconsequential film that it doesn’t even have a plot synopsis on its Wikipedia Page, is about “a presidential advisor discover[ing] that the President has assembled a secret army of vigilantes to suppress dissent and is setting up concentration camps in which to imprison protesters, hippies and other ‘social undesirables.’” Since this came out in the 1970s, the tagline for the film was “The Comedy his administration didn’t want you to see.” Yeah, comedy.

Oh but yeah, in case you’re wondering why he’s so high on this list…like, we really hope you aren’t wondering that. Setting up concentration camps is definitely the sign of a shitty President. Cough. Well that was awkward. Let’s move on.

131: The Werewolf of Washington (1973)

Bill McGuire as The President

The President in this horror comedy was meant to spoof Richard Nixon, which is not a great start. He also ends the movie as a werewolf, which is not a great ending. Like, he didn’t nuke anyone, and he wasn’t a fascist, but “an actual werewolf” definitely is cause to deduct a lot of points.

Honestly, once you reach “werewolf President” that’s usually a good point to take a breather. Come back in a tomorrow for our next ten Presidents, which includes a President who tried to kill his wife because his dick doesn’t work anymore. We’re being 100% serious.