Specifically, bad movie recommendations. You see, this past Saturday I was invited over to a friend’s house for bad movie night. He presented Ryder PI as the nuclear option of bad movies and threw down the gauntlet for me to find one worse. I figured that this would be a darn good place to start.
So, as far as some basic criteria here goes: He has seen things like Killer Clowns from outer space, Manos the hands of fate and Amazon Women and the Avacado Jungle of Death. That said, this is the sort of thing that I am looking for.
Rat Pfink a Boo Boo might fit the bill, though it would be hard to find as would any of the Mexican wrestler Santo movies though they would face the same problem in locating them.
Basically what we want is low budget, spend the whole movie groaning and not quite sure if the director and actors are taking this seriously or not.
The problem with such things is that most bad movies are just no fun to watch.
But ***Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band ***is a favorite exception to that rule: it’s so astonishingly, surreally bad, but the music and the startling nature of its badness keeps it entertaining. I mean, come on, Peter Frampton and the BeeGees singing Beatles songs. It’s filmed like a silent movie, and the only words we ever hear that aren’t sung are spoken by the narrator, George Burns, yes even when we need to hear George Burns’s voice coming out of Peter Frampton’s mouth. Plus there are a couple of GREAT numbers in it: Earth Wind and Fire doing “Got to Get You Into My Life,” Alice Cooper doing “Because,” Aerosmith doing “Come Together,” Donald Pleasance doing “I Want You.” Well, OK, maybe not that last one. Still, it’s a hoot and a half.
Yeah, you have a point there and I think that I should have made that one of my criteria. It has to be fun. We have to be groaning out loud, and open mouthed with the sheer audacity of the badness
I should make it clear that one of the things that makes SPLHCB actually watchable is the guilty-pleasure fact that the music is actually pretty listenable, if you can get the image of John Lennon spinning in his grave out of your head long enough to listen. The BeeGees may have questionable taste, but their talent is really not in question. Ditto Frampton. And the tracks are (I’m not making this up) actually produced by George Martin. So the music keeps you moving along relatively comfortably while you watch in gleeful horror as the rest of the movie drift inexplicably by. (Script sessions must have mostly been people shouting, “but that makes too much SENSE!”)
Audacity? Badness? Sheer? I nominate (from the maker of Lord of the Rings and King Kong, no less) Meet the Feebles. It’s got everything that one would want in a movie: puppets, sex, puppet sex, violence, puppet violence, jokes about drugs, scat, sex, hedgehogs lusting after poodles, giant sea monsters, and all the excitement of the Variety business. In short: it’s just so gawdawful bad that those people in the audience I was in who did NOT claim early business on the morrow sat there, open-mouthed with the sheer audacity of the badness…
You can’t do better…uh, worse…uh, better (I guess) than “Monster Dog”. Ya want low budget?! I’ll give you cheap!
It was filmed, in Spain, in English. Then they decided to release it in Spanish. So, the logical thing to do would be to make another master of the soundtrack, dubbed into Spanish, right? Oh, no. Tape costs money. They just recorded over the original master. Then they decided to release it in North America anyway. (I believe it was only destined for the Phillipines to begin with. ) Now they have a problem. The original actors have long since fled. Simple solution? Get English speaking actors to re-dub it, again!
It’s more or less a werewolf movie, with the premise being that a band is going to the singer’s ancestral home to film a video. Of course the ancesters were cursed. It’s pretty bad, all right! There are a couple of good songs though, well one anyway, “See Me In The Mirror”. At least they left the voices alone for that.
Oh, the stars? C’mon, this is zoogirl! Ya just know Alice Cooper’s in there somewhere. Actually, he’s the star, but he’s damn near unrecignizable. Short hair. (shudder! :eek: )
It’s also known as “Levithan”, not to be confused with the whale movie.
I can heartily recommend Steele Justice. I caught this little epic on cable a few weeks ago. If there is an 80’s movie cliche that they missed I have no idea what it is. The cast is a verittable who’s who (or who the heck are they) from 60’s 70’s and 80’s TV.
here is part of my LJ review of it…
Martin Kove, post “Cagney and Lacey”, Sela Ward, somewhere around the time of “Sisters”, Bernie Casey, Ronny Cox, Sarah Douglas(!), Joseph Campanella, and even Shannon Tweed. This movie just defies logic. It plays like a D version of a mash-up between the A-Team and Miami Vice. It had almost every bad 80’s action cliche, including a training scene ripping off, err paying tribute to “Rocky”. If there would have been any stairs nearby, Kove would have been running up them. *
I have two for you: Exorcist II: The Heretic, or Freddy Got Fingered. E2 is confusing and boring, FGF is just stupid and stupefying.
In fairness, there is one laugh in FGF: near the end, someone in a large cheering crowd is holding a sign saying, “When is this movie going to end?”. Honestly unexpected, one genuine laugh. The rest is pure horror.
No bad movie collection would be complete without The Yin and Yang of Mr. Go. You’d think that James Mason and Burgess Meredith would make fine Chinese characters, but you’d be wrong.
If you can find a copy of Suburbia (1984), it’s a good example of how Penelope Spheeris can sometimes suck ass. A quick look at netflix shows that wow, they finally released it on video. This punk suck is now in my queue.
Look, a bad movie night must include Roadhouse. Patrick Swayze as the best Kunbg-fu jujitsu zen bouncer a bar ever seen. Kelly Lynch as the small-town doctor who is way too hot too be believed. Ben Gazzarra in an over-the-top bad guy role. Sam Elliott. And the immortal line…
The Roadhouse recommendation reminds me of another atrocious Patrick Swayze movie that’s full of decent-to-awesome actors who got famous later: Next of Kin. We TiVoed this a few months back and it’s a howler. Swayze, Bill Paxton and Liam Neeson are three brothers from rural Kentucky, and each has a different acent. Neeson’s is probably the closest to authentic; Swayze and Paxton are Texas boys and sound like it. The movie also features a young Ben Stiller, Adam Baldwin, and Helen Hunt, plus a pre-Babylon 5 Andreas Katsulas.
Or if you want to go for maximum pain, try Ankle Biters. It’s a zero-budget movie about midget vampires.