We’re often asked to judge the best Scottish film ever made, or shown a list somebody has already concocted. These throw up familiar titles – Trainspotting, Local Hero, Gregory’s Girl, Shallow Grave, Whisky Galore! – as well as estimable contenders such as My Childhood, the first in Bill Douglas’s autobiographical trilogy, or Ratcatcher, Lynne Ramsay’s searing 1999 debut.

But what about the worst Scottish film ever made? I ask because an adaptation of HG Wells’s 1898 novel The War Of The Worlds was released last month and is being roundly hailed as possibly the worst film ever made, period. So it has set me thinking about home-grown duds. For the record, The War Of The Worlds stars Ice Cube, has a 3% rating on esteemed movie ranking website Rotten Tomatoes (that’s bad) and was described by the critic for Empire magazine as “misguided movie-making cubed.”

That was one of the kinder reviews, by the way.

An AI overview tells me The Wicker Man and Braveheart are considered by some to be two of the worst Scottish films ever made, though if you flip the question the same algorithm will also cite them as among the best. I do think Braveheart is a terrible film, so I’m happy to propel it into my putative top five Worst Scottish Films Ever, even if most of it was filmed in Ireland.

And I was once very sceptical of The Wicker Man, though having re-watched it recently I now re-cant. It’s actually pretty good, despite the accents and the geographical inconsistencies and the haircuts (it really should have a trigger warning). Perversely, I also quite rate Brigadoon, Vincente Minnelli’s 1954 musical about a magical Highland village which has long divided opinion and will often feature on the tartan-flecked Worst Of lists.

Vincente Minnelli's 1954 musical Brigadoon often appears on lists of the worst Tartan-clad films (Image: TCM) But mention of Brigadoon begs an important question: what do we even mean by a Scottish film? Bar the subject matter, the only connections Brigadoon has with Scotland are tenuous. Yes, Edinburgh-born Moira Shearer was originally down for a role. Yes, star Gene Kelly did travel to........

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