Michael Bay in ‘Armageddon’ (1998)

Some directors become famous for their propensity to cameo in their own movies, clearly loving the spotlight that comes with finally stepping out from behind the camera. Other directors, like the king of blockbuster mayhem, Michael Bay, regularly turn up in blink and you’ll miss it roles in their films, but they don’t really seem to catch the cultural zeitgeist.

Bay has filmed short cameos as the wonderfully named ‘Crappy car driver’ in Bad Boys II and a man who is smashed into a taxi by a giant transforming robot in Transformers. He also appeared in the third and fourth Bad Boys movies, which he didn’t actually direct, as an MC at a wedding and a guy driving a Porsche. He even had lines in the wedding cameo and did a decent job.

However, for my money, his ludicrously brief, yet equally ludicrously implausible cameo in 1998’s Armageddon was a bridge too far. Anyone with any passing familiarity with Bay knows he’s a handsome, long-haired, surfer lookin’ dude with a highly problematic sense of humour who happens to be genuinely amazing at shooting gunfights, battles, and all kinds of shit blowing up on-screen. However, in no universe should Bay ever try to convince as a scientist, let alone one who works for NASA. That, sir, was beyond the pale.

Stephen King in ‘Maximum Overdrive’ (1986)

In 1986, with the unearned confidence that can only come from being high on narcotics at all times, Stephen King directed a major motion picture. The ‘King of Horror,’ who had sold millions of books by that point, must have thought his skills would be transferrable to moviemaking, despite having no experience whatsoever behind a camera or on a movie set. The result was the disastrous Maximum Overdrive, which he later described as a “moron movie” and vowed never to be foolish enough to direct again.

King’s cameo comes right at the start of the movie and sets the tone for how bizarre the film will be, and what level of juvenile humour the audience can expect. King plays a bespectacled man in a hat who saunters up to an ATM machine to get some cash, but then sees the message, “You are an asshole” emblazoned on the screen. Dumbfounded, he calls to his wife off-screen to tell her the cash machine just called him an asshole.

It’s a testament to King’s drug-addled demeanour that he doesn’t convince as a human being in his sub-20-second screentime, and an abject lesson in not making major career decisions while being, by your own admission, coked out of your mind. To be fair to the horror legend, though, he went on to have much better luck with his massive array of cameos in projects based on his work over the years. It simply appears that director King couldn’t get a handle on actor King back in ’86.

Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller in ‘Sin City: A Dame to Kill For’ (2014)

You’d be surprised how many director cameos are born of necessity, instead of a desire to soak up the limelight. Quite often, a director will have a small part in mind that they intend to cast an actor in, but by the time it comes to shoot the scene, they’ve run out of time or money and simply figure, “OK, I guess I’ll do it myself.” This is what happened with co-directors Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller in Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, but after watching their dicey work, it becomes apparent they should’ve held out for real actors.

In this belated sequel to Rodriguez’s genuinely groundbreaking adaptation of Miller’s similarly pioneering hardboiled comic book, the pair had an idea for Jessica Alba’s Nancy to be watching an old noir movie on TV during a scene. They wrote a dialogue exchange between two tough-guy gumshoes for the movie-within-a-movie, and wound up casting themselves in the roles.

The mercifully brief scenes see Miller deadpanning, “You shot me in the gut,” to which a wooden Rodriguez replies, “It wasn’t me, Sam. It was the babe.” With an unconvincing sigh, Miller muses, “This rotten town; it soils everybody it touches.” This is proper old-school noir dialogue, but it’s delivered in such a ham-fisted way that the cameo falls flat on its face. Hell, it was also so slapdash in its execution, that the audience can see Rodriguez is just wearing modern-day jeans and shoes in the ’40s/’50s-set scene. Oh dear.

M Night Shyamalan in ‘Lady in the Water’ (2006)

I like M Night Shyamalan. I also tend to like most of his cameos: from the suspicious doctor in The Sixth Sense and the drug dealer in Unbreakable, to the nerdy tech guy in Split and the mysterious voyeur in Old, Shyamalan calibrates most of his cameos in conjunction with his acting abilities. However, he has come a cropper a few times, such as with his cameos in Signs and The Village, which people dump on for being too central to the plot, and responsible for ruining the entire movie by being part of the big twist.

However, for me, his role in Lady in the Water is patient zero for ill-advised Shyamalan cameos that wildly overestimate his ability and come across with a startling lack of self-awareness. Admittedly, this one is more than a simple cameo, as he appears in a handful of scenes and is integral to the movie. Therein lies part of the problem, though, because it strikes of Shyamalan feeling the need to inject himself into his story in a way that turns people off.

To make matters worse, though, Shyamalan casts himself as a struggling writer who finds out he is destined to write a book that will inspire a future President to change the world for the better. Unfortunately for him, the ideas in his book are so revolutionary, incendiary, and dangerous that he will be assassinated for even putting them on paper. If you need me to explain why this is self-indulgent in the extreme and a truly bad look for Shyamalan, then I don’t know what to tell you.

Quentin Tarantino in ‘Pulp Fiction’ (1994)

Quentin Tarantino never met one of his own movies that he didn’t want to be in. Unfortunately, while he may be an endlessly talented filmmaker who changed the very face of cinema in the ’90s, and is still a celebrated auteur today, one thing he most definitely is not is an actor. Frustratingly, Tarantino has never seemed to grasp this blindingly obvious fact, either, meaning he has a tendency to cast himself in cameos that are fairly important to the plot and feature a lot of dialogue.

QT’s cameo in Django Unchained, which featured him putting on an Australian accent that offended an entire nation, is arguably his worst cameo in terms of performance. He’s undeniably dreadful in that scene. However, I reckon his cameo in Pulp Fiction, which was extremely famous and quoted ad nauseam for several decades, is actually his worst. After all, it doesn’t stand up well to the scrutiny of Father Time. Not well at all.

In a poorly acted, bafflingly long stretch of back-and-forth dialogue, Tarantino’s profane rant about how his garage doesn’t amount to a place to store a dead African-American falls entirely flat because the guy is so wooden he might as well be made of mahogany. However, the fact that the speech features enough incendiary racial dialogue to make Spike Lee want to strangle Tarantino is what makes it troublesome to modern eyes, and that’s why it’s got to be number one on this list.