If you love movies, especially genre movies, eventually you develop a taste for, and affection for, total pieces of crap. There’s not a point that it happens, it just seeps in gradually until you find yourself genuinely enjoying movies you know to be objectively awful.
My personal favorite, and it has been since I’ve seen it, is Birdemic.
There’s only one cultural crime I can fault Mystery Science Theater 3000 for, and that’s popularizing bad movies so much that crappy filmmakers discovered the word “campy”. If somebody knows, on some level, that they suck, all they have to do is throw a lesbian vampire at the screen with a wink and say “See? See! I could do better, but I’m not, because CAMP!”
There are rare gems that actually pull off the trick of being deliberately campy and still funny: The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra comes to mind, a movie where they nail the tone and refuse to wink at the audience, no matter how stupid it gets.
Still, that’s not a genuinely bad movie. It’s a good one that pulls off a very hard trick. That’s not somebody sincerely doing his best and failing miserably. For that, you need James Nguyen. You need Birdemic.
Here’s a scene from this classic:
Birdemic is a movie I actually own on Blu-Ray because I love it that much. Not because it’s any good. It’s miserably incompetent in just about every respect. James Nguyen has no filmmaking talent whatsoever.
But the result is a movie so bad it’s absolutely hilarious. It becomes even funnier if you’ve actually made a movie with no money, because you know exactly what situations he faced and his complete inability to solve them creatively. Places where he had to cast his friends, or just the one person who made it to the casting call. The fact that he put in the Ford Mustang he so obviously rented because it cost a fortune and dammit, he was going to get his money’s worth.
In other words, it’s a guide to absolutely everything that can go wrong. And it’s brilliant.
How about you? What’s your favorite bad movie?
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Someone will have to mention Troll 2; might as well be me.
Also: Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare, starring Canadian bodybuilder and rock musician Jon Mikl Thor. The climactic scene is excellently awful: [www.youtube.com]
I have seen that movie, believe it or not. YouTube doesn’t do it justice.
@Dan Seitz
Unless you can find the whole thing on there
Personally, I’ve always loved the Syfy original movies like the Asylum pictures. I remember watching with my Dad, before they received such a cult following, and just laughing so hard at how incredibly tacky and awful they were and I truly believe those older films were trying hard to be taken seriously. I get it now and it’s more for fun, but I still love it. My personal favorite is Megapiranha. I met the lead actor, Paul Logan, once at a boxing event and he facebooked friended me (yay!) so I can’t hate.
Another good one is Troll 2. Maybe not the movie itself but the documentary ‘Best Worst Movie’. In the documentary, the director really believed that he had a blockbuster hit with Troll 2 but it was just so damned awful. Pretty good watch.
Midnight Madness
[www.imdb.com]
Killjoy. This actually changed my life. I formed a life bond with the 2 chuckle-heads I watched this with first. True fact; they actually buried their copies to stop other from seeing it.
maximum overdrive. Not only was it objectively bad, but it had such controversy surrounding it; 12 yr old me had gone through a whole case of DP before realizing the movie was just a metaphor for drunk driving. I’m still trying to figure out what it all means.
Con-Air is the worst, dumbest film… that I will watch every time. But I’m thinking you mean more low-rent b-movie fare. I’ll have to think.
Yeah Con-Air is a pretty good (and by that I mean awful) movie, althoug Killer Klowns has to be my favorite go awful movie.
+1 ….Con air was the first thing to pop into my mind…
but “cheap bad” has to be Tromeo and Juliet…
Ghosts of Mars. Ice Cube, Jason Statham, Random White Lady.
Hot Air Balloons… ON MARS!
Although not as incompetent of the other movies, Point Break is probably my favorite bad movie. Also the disney chanel movie Halloweentown if full of awesome
Modern Vampires is pretty incredible, my buddies and I were probably the only people that ever rented it from our local Blockbuster, but we did so on a regular basis. And even though I’ve only seen the MST3K version, Manos: Hands of Fate is pretty hard to top.
Can’t believe nobody has mentioned “The Room” yet…
“The Room”
thank you.
I definitely second this.
After insulting MST3k, Dan was last seen getting attacked by an army of Tom Servo clones
Don’t get me wrong, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.
I know. BUT DOES TOM SERVO?
The Harder They Come but for one brief beautiful scene only.
“I want every possible car in the area” @ 1:09:33 from the full movie here: [www.youtube.com]
can’t choose between “Laser Mission” & “Showdown in Little Tokyo.”
either way, Brandon Lee is pretty important, apparently.
Trick or Treat: [www.imdb.com]
The chase scene at the beginning with accompanying 80′s hair metal describing what is going on is my favorite thing in all of cinema.
The original I Spit On Your Grave.
Hard Ticket to Hawaii
or
Ninja III: The Domination (I can’t be sure if Ninja I or Ninja II exist but if they do, I’m willing to bet that they have very little to do with a ninja’s ghost that possesses a fitness instructor through an arcade machine.)
Hard Ticket was amazing and the main song is still in my head years after watching it.
The snake was my favorite character.
Doomsday.
Wait, does that count as a bad movie? I mean, critics hated it, but it’s Neil Marshall remaking every single movie he loved as a teenager all at once, with Rhona Mitra as a one-eyed badass and Malcolm McDowell as a completely fucking crazy scientist. And Sean Pertwee gets deep-fat fried by a bunch of Glaswegian cannibal punks. Also, Bob Hoskins.
I love Doomsday to an unhealthy degree.
Holy shit I’ve seen that movie, but had forgotten about it until you brought it up. That is an awesomely bad movie.
I, too, love Doomsday. It’s two completely different movies, one survival horror and the other crazy apocalyptic mayhem, crammed together to form one amazing whole. I will always be down for a viewing of Doomsday.
I actually love the crap out of Doomsday and give it a pass because it’s making zero effort to be a classic: it just wants to kick major ass. It succeeds. Admirably.
Jason X. I don’t want to love it, but I do. Jason….In SPAAAAACE!!! It makes me giddy. Another horror movie called Mortuary. Awful. Just awful. But I couldn’t keep myself from quoting it for months. “Together, you and I can prevent grave babies.”
Funny enough that Jason X was easily better than the previous 5 Jason movies.
Jason X has the virtue of just not taking itself remotely seriously. “Do you want to smoke some weed? Or have sex? WE LOVE PREMARITAL SEX!”
THANKSKILLING —-> Greatest bad movie ever. seriously look it up, you wont be sorry.
I have seen that movie. It… tries a little too hard for my taste. But hey, professional dead guy!
Batman & Robin, easily the most entertaining of the non-Nolan Batman films.
The Black Ninja.
[en.wikipedia.org]
[www.imdb.com]
I’ve only been able to get it on Netflix DVD, but if you see it, GRAB IT.
Do I have to go there and mention Tank Girl?
Tank Girl was friggin awesome. Not to mention it had Naomi Watts in one of her first roles when she was still purdy.
But what a shitty movie that I have watched a number of times I am ashamed to admit.
lol co-staring Ice-T-Dog
Naomi Watts isn’t hot anymore?
Center Stage. Although I maintain it’s more formulaic than terrible. Nothing with Ethan Stiefel fucking owning ballet is terrible.
The entire plot of the movie—one of the dancers losing her virginity to her instructor & ultimately ends up with the nice guy–is choreographed into a ballet starring the very people who lived it. No one acknowledges this. All of the NYC social scene watches it. And it’s amazing.
Runners up?
-Peter Gallagher’s eyebrows
-A Paul Rudd look-alike boyfriend involved in an anorexia subplot
-Zoe Saldana’s line: What, did you go to a special bitch academy or something.
A fun game with Center Stage: take a shot every time a character identifies their sexuality within three lines of being introduced.
Dan if you happen to see this, I’d like you to know that that game will be played next time I watch Center Stage. And I will be drunk 30 minutes in.
Rocky 4 is my favorite movie of all time. Oh that’s considered a good movie as a simple guilty pleasure? Ok, fine then. “Hercules in NY” aka: Arnold Schwarzenegger’s first film.
Gymkata. My sister watched the first half with me before falling asleep and was shocked to find out that she had seen “the good half” of that movie.
Rifftrax did a track on Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe. Jesse Ventura battles some Eastern European wrestler(?) after he impregnates some Earth woman with space magic. Pick it up, you will not be disappointed.
The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra
I once saw this movie on xfinity on demand called child of the living dead. It was the worst zombie movie ever and it was awesome. It had a guy in a stationary car lighting dynamite and throwing it out a half open car window…. He died because he tried to throw 1 through the other side of the car and it rolled onto the roof and into his passenger side window which was also half open…. in a zombie attack…
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Cr–oh, oh, I see what you mean.
Neil Diamond’s remake of “The Jazz Singer.”
Oh, and “TerrorVision.”
Trancers
Tim Thomerson and Helen Hunt
[www.youtube.com]
I’d have to say Good, Bad, and the Ugly, if only because Bad News Bears can’t decide what kind of movie to be, and Bad Company with Chris Rock and Anthony Hopkins was so-so. Bad Boys was definitely a close second though.