Friend of mine got one of the Kingsman movies and before the opening credits was what I could only guess was the Russian pirater's homemade rap video; he was injecting his own ads into the media.

When I and my sister were kids, dad brought home a pirated VHS of the Sixth Day with Schwarzenegger. CAM quality shit but the worst part is that whoever was pirating the movies was using recycled VHS tapes... Porn VHS tapes, so after the movie ended there were like maybe 10 seconds of static and then just hardcore porn.

Return of the King [2003] cam Xvid while it was still in theaters. A nearly 3.5-hour film compressed enough to fit on a 700MB CD or two.

When I wanted to learn Polish, I obviously downloaded Star Wars in Polish because it should be fun. I had a shitty connection and it took me 4 days to download everything (like, oh it's all the movies in uncompressed Full-HD grab your pop corn).

I discovered that they use lektors in Poland, people who speak in the most boring way on top of the English dialogues. You can hear the original audio in the background, which makes it worse. I deleted everything in less than 10 seconds.

Ok this is a whole story.

So back in the 90s, my mum's friend came back from working in Kuwait for a few years.She gave us a bunch of pirated disney movies. These were cams, but camcorders from the 90s. The video quality was terrible, and several had ads all through them for some burger place like their equivalent of burger king. The ads had some guy dressed in Saudi style robes and turban watching his burger get eaten by an invisible genie or something.

One of the films was Beauty and the Beast. Seeing it now, it's like a whole different movie. As a kid, it was gritty, darkly lit the whole time because of the shitty camera, and because of that it had this severely oppressive horror feel to it. It also didn't have any ads. As kids, that was one terrifying movie. There was no Disney brightness and joy. Just darkness.

Pokémon: The First Movie (1998), which I had downloaded with Kazaa, turned out to be a Pokémon hentai ripoff, which my parents got to before I had a chance to come home from school. I walked in on mom and dad sitting in front of the computer, trying to act intrigued at what they're watching. Possibly trying to justify why their child is into Pokémon porn. I did my homework and helped doing the dishes that day. Can you believe that?

When the first 50 Shades of Grey movie came out in theaters, my friends who went to see it were discussing how hilariously terrible it was. I love watching awful garbage like that for funsies, so I torrented it. It took forever because of my shitty connection.

When I was finally able to watch it, it just made no sense. But not at all like how a bad movie makes no sense. It felt like it was skipping around. I was so confused.

After some web searches, I realized that I think I somehow got my hands on some weird, badly-censored Chinese copy where they just cut out anything remotely saucy. Which was most of the movie, hence it not making any damn sense.

I still haven't seen the actual movie, since I just never bothered to try again, but that experience was pretty entertaining.

Now You See Me. I don't know if it was intentional by the uploader, but it was completely "out of order". The video played fine, but all of the scenes were mixed up, so we were really confused. It happened on scene cuts though so it wasn't totally obvious and at first we thought it was just some sort of weird editing technique because of the subject of the movie.

Well, I originally saw both Blair Witch and H20 played from really dark and messy VHS copies of theater recordings.... And man, let me tell ya, they were both way better as low quality cams that HD movies!

I intentionally watch bad Horror as cams now, when I can, even decades later... It really adds to the experience!

Haha memory unlocked, it was the first transformers movie, it started off perfectly, clean picture, good audio, but by the end of it we had been treated to about 6 different versions, form camcorder out of the movie theatre with people moving around, different languages and sub titles, was an experience lol

I couldn't watch more than 10 minutes of it. It was a CAM that you could hear coughs, laughs, people talking to each other.

I remember getting a copy of American Pie 2 off Kazaa or edonkey and it literally being handycamed in a theatre with people laughing and getting up and walking past the camera during the movie

A download of the Stephen Chow film 回魂夜 (Out of the Dark) (1995) that I got with eMule in the late 00s/early 10s.

It's a horror comedy, much of which takes place at night. Meaning it's dark to begin with. But this copy was an RMVB file, a format developed to show a postage-stamp-size streaming video on a web page in the last days of the dial-up era. The video was so low res and dark barely anything was visible.

In addition the subtitles were of the shitty, burned-in, let's-not-bother-paying-a-real-translator type. So I couldn't see and I couldn't understand anything 😅

Still got it on a DVD-R somewhere, though.

A Serbian Film.... don't watch it. You have been warned.

The Catwoman starring Halle Berry. Not only I found the movie sort of lame, also the quality of it was... Well. Someone went to the cinema and filmed the projection with a hand held camera. The image quality was trash, but the camera moved all the time, occasionally shaking. You got to hear the occasional cough or candy wrap noise from the audience, you got to see people standing up and moving across the camera because they needed a toilet break. You get the idea.

The Dark Knight Rises. I was in middle school, and my someone had told my parents that it was extremely violent. Anyway, my cousin had a pirated copy, so I watched it at his place. We could literally hear people chomping on popcorn, and see moving heads lol.

I got a Downton Abbey movie for a friend. Someone had recorded it from their chair in the theater. Fully handheld.

It's funny how many talk about cam versions burned to disk because that's my answer too. I found "Toy Story 3" in some bootleg ripped DVD's long LONG before it was ever made.

I bought it just because I was curious what was on the disk because it couldn't possibly be what the cover said.

I remember buying a VCD of some movie around 2000 and then 20 minutes in, I see the outline of someone getting up and walking out of the cinema the cam release was recorded in! I quit watching and from there on I only go for quality rips.

Not a movie, but I pirated the Tomacco Simpsons episode onto a CD. DVD players couldn't actually play it, but it played the audio in a CD player just fine. I would listen to it when I fell asleep. I was on odd kid.

I got the screener of Signs before it came out in theaters. It was a solid copy, despite being a meh movie. DVD quality, had the red band that would scan diagonally across the image every few minutes, not a shitty cam.

The Video-CD had many advantages, you can record on regular CD-R and play on any dvd player. Also, the quality was crap!

I've seen some pretty funny cam records, people that would be filming the top of other people's heads half of the time, random talking and laughter, cam being dropped or the person not noticing it was now pointed at the front sit instead of the screen... and there was a curious thing when those betting mafias started, they started flooding the internet with a lot of cam records directly from the projection room, so they had good quality as framing goes but audio was shitty, and most of those seem to have come from Russia and they'd have audio and subtitles in random languages (with your local subtitles burned in the file over the subtitles on the theater screen) and tons of ads, especially 1xbet... but hey, you could watch the latest Marvel or Star Wars movie on the internet same day of release.

I bought a film DVD from a local shop (pirated, of course) and 2 songs and a few minutes before the interval didn't play properly, probably due to the disc being scratched or something.

If you're wondering, "songs?"... It was a Bollywood film. We had a lot of songs in films. Now a days, there's like 3 or 4 songs, ~3 minutes each. Up to around 2010, especially in the 80s and 90s films used to have 8-10 songs, some even 5-6 minutes long.

Sinners, just recently - not bad quality, but stopped in the middle for an advert in Hindi (I assume).

2025 - after the virus

(It’s free on YouTube!)

It has… nothing. Go watch it. I cringed so much my future kids cringed

The very first movie I pirated was Van Wilder when it was new in theaters. It was awful quality and I still have it around here somewhere.

But I had such a crush on Ryan Reynolds at the time, the quality didn’t matter

Kick Ass 2

I am not lying but it was cam and the person below the cammer was talking and he said something along the lines of "oi mate, shut the fuck up I'm trynna film this, what's fair is fair right? Shut your fawking mouth."

I could not believe what I heard and started laughing.

It was fairly good quality, but Morbius.

"Gundala" (2019) by far

Not the worst one, but the worst one I watched entirely. Wanted to watch Freddy vs Jason with a friend. I got a DVD screener intended for press that switched to black and white every few minutes.

At first we thought it was intentional because the whole movie plays around with weirdly tinted scenes. So why not black and white as well?

This is how videos like the church of the subgenuis circulated, replaced pirated VHS copies swapped for some surreal culture jamming dadism stuff.

An nth generation vhs fansub of an episode of Dragon Ball. That someone had recorded using a late 90's video capture card and uploaded in realmedia format.

Pre release of Soul Plane. Half the effects weren't in the movie yet. Hilariously bad.

I once downloaded How to train your dragon, and it was in Hindi 🤦🏻‍♂️
They didn't say it was not in English

Megalopolis

They were all great quality, although I made them. There used to be a trend where you could buy pirated copies of movies, and they'd have a cheap paper sticker on the disc, they'd be at local markets and stalls on the weekends. They were absolutely abysmal quality. Grainy, colours all oversaturated, lines all through them, super quiet sound. You couldn't watch them. People would buy them and give them to me. But they were just trash.

When I was a kid I had a copy box that took off the copywrite protection, on vhs, and I used to tweak the vcr to pile multiple movies on one vhs. It had this system of super fast, skip fast forwarding, where you selected the number of the movie and it zapped to it. I was so young, I cannot remember how it worked. Then I got a computer and downloaded DVD shrink and DVD decryptor. You couldn't tell the copy from the original.

The new Naked Gun was really bad and not funny at all. It was torture to watch.