We’re gonna get down and dirty over in our little corner of the internet. What exactly is it we are going to talk about over here?
Bad movies.
I know, I know, there are somewhere in the neighborhood of fifteen to twenty million articles and sites dedicated to terrible movies. From podcasts to YouTube they’re everywhere.
What going to be different here?
Well, we aren’t going to be spending our time going over movies like TROLL 2, THE ROOM or PLAN 9 FROM OUTERSPACE, as great as those bad movies are.
No, we are going to dig deep, hopefully really deep like a deep dish pizza, into the dark corners of the streaming channels to find real shiny jewels of world class terrible art. Lets take a journey to find something below FATEFUL FINDINGS, down near JURASSIC SHARK and spending time with PHOENIX: THE WARRIOR, ROBOT MONSTER and TURKISH STAR WARS.
You’re probably thinking to yourself right about now one of two things:
“I need another beer” or “What is this guy talking about?” and possibly “what makes a bad movie great and how do we do this?”
Really, I guess we are talking three or four things, so lets get down to it.
Everyone and their neighbor has in their mind a list of movies that are great for being bad. Like porn, tacos and which way to load a fresh roll of toilet paper, there is no right or wrong answer. You’ll know it when you see it. What about me though, you ask?
Incompetence
Sure, this one covers a lot of ground. We could dedicated days and days worth of internet time to breaking it down bit by bit, but we can keep it general for now. This group can have two sub categories:
- People who don’t know any better. Here you’ll find the MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE style movies. A person, or group of people, who have no idea how to write, direct, edit or act all coming together and failing at each and every one of those basic tenants of filmmaking. Typically there is a producer who also has no idea what they or anyone around them is doing.
- People who should know better. I like to look at this as the domain of movies like BATTLEFIELD EARTH. Lots of money thrown into sets, computer graphics, production and hiring of top talent. What happens then? a shot gun blast of stupidity. Sometimes you get a BATTLEFIELD EARTH or SHOWGIRLS. Often times it doesn’t work and you get JUPITER ASCENDING and PEARL HARBOR.
Zero Originality
Personally, most of the really good terrible films are rip-offs of much better and far more original movies. JAWS, STAR WARS, ROAD WARRIOR, ALIEN and a few others have create, nay, laid the foundation for decades worth of B, C, D and better, level of fantastic stupidity.
Lack of Awareness
Simply put, a movie setting out to be so bad it’s good is an automatic failure. Sorry, with rare exception movies like SHARKNADO and most everything from THE ASYLUM aren’t worthy of our love. These movies are self aware and are deliberately trying to be a good bad movie. It doesn’t work that way. These things happen organically like we’ve already blown over quickly.
So how are we going to rate these? For me that’s pretty easy.
Beer.
Every movie is going to be graded on how many beers a movie takes to get through.
We will still cover all the basic boring stuff like plot and story for all you nerds, but we will also try to get into why whatever movie we happen to be talking about is so special and worthy of our love.
Also, when we have time, we’ll talk tacos.
So, until that day… try not to burn this sucker down.
Dom.
