For years (and starting before MST3K was around) I used to host a Bad Film Festival, at which I’d show bad movies, and invite the guests to make snarky comments. The thing is, you can’t just use any old Bad Movie – they have to be entertainingly bad.
But at one of these I had the theme of “Failed Cult Movies”, and I showed The Forbidden Zone , an off-the-wall flick that featured Herve Villechaiz, Danny Elfman, and The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo (arguably before they were less well-known than Herve). I thought it was a perfect piece of fluff to rank on, but my wife-to-be asked me to stop it during the opening credits. She was voted down, but everyone else opted to kill it after five more minutes.
You gotta choose your Bad Films carefully.
That said, I’ve occasionally reflected that you could make a party-killing combination of truly non-entertaining Bad Films. Realizing that one person’s Bad Film is another person’s Overlooked Gem, I propose the following partial list:
**The Forbidden Zone
Pearl Harbor - my entire department went to see this one when it was in the theaters. After about 15 minutes, the rest of the audience joined us in loudly deriding the movie at every turn. I saw no-one leave in a huff because of our snarkitude.
No, you see, it IS so bad that it’s good. It’s enjoyably bad. It has no business being in a Worst of the Worst film Festival.
Ditto, IMHO, for
*Zontar, the Thing from Venus
The Brain from Planet Arous
Fiend Without a Face ****
But I WILL give you The Beast of Yucca Flats
Actually a remake of Roger Corman’s It Conquered the World, with Lee van Cleef and so pretty decent Paul Blaisdell monsters. Zontar was part of a package of even lower-budget remakes by Larry Buchanan that included Attack of the Eye Creatures (a remake of Invasion of the Saucer Men) and Crerature of Destruction (remake of The She Creature). Awful as such second-tier horror is, it’s still watchable.
** This film is actually available on DVD from Criterion Video, which shows that THEY think it’s not all that bad. When I was a kid, I gave this one a pass because it featured animated monsters. If someone goes to the trouble of actually doing stop-motion animation, the film is usually salvageable. (But not always. Monsters from Green Hell belongs in the Unwatchable category, despite the animation, because there’s so little of it, and it’s lame. )
I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle. Hilariously cheesy, it’s got Anthony Daniels (C3PO) as a trike-riding priest, Satanists, and a Norton that runs on blood (but only at night). Best watched with plenty of cheap beer.