AVQ&A: What's the worst family vacation in pop culture?

We revisit some memorable bad trips, from the beach that makes you old to the hotel that drives you mad.

By A.V. Club Staff  |  August 30, 2025 | 8:00am
Clockwise, left to right: Sharknado: The 4th Awakens (Photo: Tyler Golden/Syfy); Little Miss Sunshine (Photo: 20th Century Fox); Old (Photo: Universal Pictures); The Simpsons (Screenshot)
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AVQ&A: What's the worst family vacation in pop culture?

Bob Odenkirk and Manuel Garcia-Rulfo dragged their onscreen families on disastrous getaways this summer, reaching Clark Griswold-levels of poor thinking. But the perilous vacations in Nobody 2 and Jurassic World Rebirth are just the latest in a long history of bad trips. With Labor Day approaching, The A.V. Club staff sat down to answer the question: What’s the worst family vacation in pop culture?

As always, we invite you to contribute your own responses in the comments—and send in some prompts of your own! If you have a pop culture question you’d like us and fellow readers to answer, please email it to [email protected].

Old

There’s a reason they (read: I) call it “The Beach That Makes You Old,” and it’s because that’s exactly what the beach in M. Night Shamalayan’s 2021 film will do to you. The beach resort is a front for some pharmaceutical conspiracy, which is using its technology to make its captive vacationers age rapidly. This is especially bad news for the more extended families who arrive at the beach—grandma Agnes (Kathleen Chalfant) just has a few minutes before her heart stops working. But it’s a total nightmare for everyone else too, as the children rapidly hit puberty, have sex, get pregnant, and deliver a baby that quickly dies from starvation within the span of a couple of hours. Throw in a doctor afflicted with schizophrenia, and you’ve got an environment that I would simply never want to be in, much less with my parents. [Drew Gillis]

Us

The phrase “You are your own worst enemy” has never felt more appropriate than in Us, when the Wilson family’s coastal getaway is interrupted by their evil doppelgängers. After spending the day on the beach with friends, their night is interrupted when their lookalikes—clad in creepy red outfits—break into their summer home and chase them through town. The fact that it happens to them while they’re on a vacation, with their guards down and spirits high, adds a lot more tension to the narrative. But the horror doesn’t stop with Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o), Gabriel (Winston Duke), Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph), and Jason (Evan Alex) battling the villains. Us adds another twist to the mix with the reveal that Addy’s day out with her own parents as a child resulted in a different type of catastrophe, which only adds layers to the whole “worst family vacation” angle. [Saloni Gajjar] 

Funny Games (1997)

Back in 1997, could anyone have anticipated that Michael Haneke, the Austrian writer-director who had already disturbed audiences and fascinated critics with Benny’s Video, would take things this far? A masterful and tough-to-shake play on horror and thriller tropes, Funny Games finds a happy couple (portrayed by Ulrich Mühe and Susanne Lothar, who were married in real life) and their sweet son Georgie starting vacation at their lakehouse when a harmless looking stranger knocks at the door. Soon enough, a pair of white-shirt-wearing psychopaths (played by Frank Giering and Arno Frisch) force the trio into some very sick mind games. If the fourth-wall-breaking rewind scene doesn’t fuck you up, the way the final kill casually, quickly, and coldly unfolds surely will. [Tim Lowery]

Speak No Evil (2022)

Let’s be clear: Though both the original Speak No Evil and its recent American remake feature bad vacations, Christian Tafdrup’s 2022 horror is far darker than any U.S. movie ever dares to get. And this feel-bad fable isn’t just mindlessly bloody either. Bland affability and a discomfort with saying “no” are the damning factors in this Danish family’s trip to the Dutch boonies. Going along to get along is a death sentence on this uneasy trip, whether you’re a meek dad or a small child. I imagine many of the picks for this question result in everyone getting killed, but few probably have such a chilling motive as “Because you let me.” The remake features a far less nihilistic ending, but Hollywood’s tinkering can’t fully take away from the source film’s 0-star Airbnb rating. [Jacob Oller]

Sharknado: The 4th Awakens

All due respect to the various other bad family vacations out there, but can you think of anything worse than going on a trip and being caught in a SHARKNADO? Actually, it can get worse: Imagine after personally saving the world from several increasingly dangerous sharknados, your wife died in a sharknado-related incident, and then after five sharknado-free years you go on a fun family trip to Las Vegas, comforted by the knowledge of recent sharknado-preventative technology—and then the worst sharknado ever hit? All of that happened to our hero Fin Shepard (Ian Ziering) in Sharknado: The 4th Awakens. It’s nearly impossible to comprehend the level of PTSD that poor man has or the number of civilian casualties this movie incurs. On the bright side, Fin’s wife April (Tara Reid) turns out to be alive and now a cyborg (thus even better equipped to fight sharknadoes), so at least this vacation had a silver lining. [Mary Kate Carr]

Little Miss Sunshine

Sure, the family trip from Little Miss Sunshine doesn’t involve a tornado-based shark attack or attempted ax murder like some of the entries on the list, but it does end with a little girl dedicating an inappropriately sexy dance to her grandpa who not only died on said trip, but currently rests in the trunk of the family van—one which, by the way, won’t start without a shove from multiple family members before they all have to sprint to make it in the door. That’s not to mention Paul Dano’s color blindness-related crash out, Steve Carrell as the family’s depressed, tag along Proust scholar uncle, Greg Kinnear as the father from hell, or the thousands of other indignities that befall the poor family. It all makes for great film fodder, but it’s not a vacation I’d ever want to be on. [Emma Keates]

The Simpsons, "Itchy & Scratchy Land"

If your mother says, “I wish there was a hole I could just crawl into and die,” [Jeff Foxworthy voice] eh, you might be on a bad vacation. The Simpsons have endured many in their extensive history, but few have topped the family’s season six trip to “Itchy & Scratchy Land,” the most violentest place on Earth, where nothing can possib-lie go wrong. Even before the Itchy and Scratchy bots go Westworld, the trip isn’t going to plan—and we’re not even touching the gift shop’s lack of “Bart” branded license plates. Park security jails Homer and Bart for terrorizing Itchy mascots, which comes back to bite them when the robots go rogue (“When you get to Hell, tell ’em Itchy sent you.”). In the end, the family survives, but it was a truly horrible vacation, despite Marge’s assessment: “This truly was the best vacation ever. Now let us never speak of it again.” [Matt Schimkowitz]

The Cabin At The End Of The World by Paul G. Tremblay

I’ll admit, when I first planned to ask this question of the rest of the staff, I was thinking more along the lines of Matt’s pick or pointing out that the McAllisters would have been better off spending their money on (more) pizza and some Michigan Avenue shopping than international flights in Home Alone. (Sure, Kevin learned a lesson about self-reliance but at what cost?) But seeing as things have taken a turn for the macabre, I’ll go with the ultimately ill-advised jaunt to the woods in Paul G. Tremblay’s The Cabin At The End Of The World. First, because going from Massachusetts to New Hampshire hardly counts as a vacation (to me), and second, because of, well, everything that happens after the family gets to the cabin (and that the film adaptation balks at depicting). Maybe the real takeaway is to plan a family trip around what your kid wants to do. [Danette Chavez]

The Shining

Sure, the family getaway in Stephen King’s The Shining is a bit of a working vacation… but you know what they say about “all work and no play,” right? As with any truly great vacay from hell—and regardless of whether we’re talking about King’s original novel, or Stanley Kubrick’s hated-by-the-author 1980 adaptation—the tensions that destroy the Torrance family were already in place well before they checked into the Overlook Hotel for one very long and deadly winter. The Hotel (and its resident damned souls) just needed to turn up the boiler a bit to get heavy-drinking pater familias Jack to start reaching for the ol’ axe, while also busy tormenting young Danny with the sorts of vacation memories (and playmates!) that would haunt him all the way into the days of Doctor Sleep. [William Hughes]

 
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