You know what I mean. Movies that may have bad actiing, sloppy FX, dumb dialogue, etc., but for some reason you just love to watch them. MST3K material does not count. I’m talking about serious movies that are unintentionally fun, funny, or just enjoyable. My nominees:
“Kull”- Swords, lasers, leather jerkins, shapeshifters, and a flying metal blade-thingie. Cool!
“Road House”- Possibly the best bad movie ever. Dumb dialogue, mediocre acting set off by decent fights, tits, and lots of violence.
“Starship Troopers”- Same as above; tits and violence offset bad acting and stupid dialogue. Great FX though.
“Her Alibi”- I actually think it’s funny, although i may be the only one.
The lead who died was Bela Lugosi, the legendary horror star. At the end of his career, Lugosi was heavily into drugs, and director Edward D. Wood, Jr. cast him in a few of his stupendously bad films, including Plan Nine. And the man who replaced him? (IIRC) Wood’s chiropractor!
Truth is stranger than fiction: Bela Lugosi died before the filming of Plan 9 From Outer Space. Ed Wood used stock footage of Lugosi, coupled with footage of Wood’s wife’s chiropractor covering his face with a cape. Very inept. The scene often changes from day to night and back again, same furniture is used outdoors and indoors, the “plane” set is nothing more than a fake wall with a shower curtain…just sad.
Clash of the Titans
That movie turns 20 this year - Harry Hamlin at his finest (well, that’s not too hard to accomplish). I don’t know why I love this movie, I just do. Maybe it’s the bad effects or the little owl, but I watch it every time it’s on.
My new favorite bad movie:
“Riki-Oh: Story of Ricky”
Ricky Ho is such a powerful kung-fu master he apparently needs three variant names. Actually, he doesn’t know kung-fu so much as qi gong breath control, which enhanced the superhuman strength he’d had since a young boy. It allows him to do things such as, when an opponent cripples his arm by slashing tendons, to pull the severed tendons out of the wound and tie them together to repair it. Sensing the direction that particular fight is going, his opponent then disembowels himself, and attempts to take Ricky with him by pulling out his own intestines to strangle him (which worked about as well as you’d expect).
I’m not sure what you mean here. Even most of the MST3K movies were made with serious intent. One does not generally set out to be bad (although there are exceptions, like Attack of the Killer Tomatoes).
So I’d put Plan 9 from Outer Space and Robot Monster as the two BEST of the good-bad movies. Some others:
Doc Savage
** The Mummy** (The recent awful remake)
Oh, dear . . . I don’t have the strength to go into another description of the awesome horror that is “Kiss Her Goodbye,” but if AMC ever shows it again, I will post a warning.
I must add…if any of you used to watch the Daily Show on Comedy Central, when craig Kilborne was the host, when the 5 questions came on and they had the chinese guy getting his head smashed like a watermelon, that was Story of Ricky. The big guy doing the head smashing was Tarzan (hahaha).
This is not a fair assessment. Like many WWI veterans, Lugosi was accidentally hooked on morphine by his doctors, which at that time was not uncommon. Because drug addiction was a matter of great shame, Lugosi didn’t seek out treatment until the end of his life. By the time he died in 1956, though, Bela Lugosi was free of his addiction.
My favorite bad movies include Showgirls, which Quentin Tarantino called, “the first big-budget exploitation movie,” and Starship Troopers, a truly bad film which perverts the intent of Heinlein’s novel, but is redeemd by Caspar van Dien’s shower scene. It’s times like that I really appreciate having a frame-by-frame function on my DVD remote control.
One of my favorite bad movies (and it’s really bad) is Friday the 13th VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan.
I’ve saw Riki-Oh: Story of Ricky years ago and thought it was so bad. When I saw them using it on The Daily Show, however, I thought to myself: Oh my God, someone else has seen that movie?
Are you sure of this? I’m not saying you’re wrong, I hadn’t heard he was clean when he passed away. I was under the impression that his death was caused by his addiction, but it could just be that my impression is colored by Hollywood.
Lugosi went into rehab for his habit, and went public about it – reportedly one of the first Hollywood celebrities to do so. See David Sklar’s wonderful book Hollywood Gothic. I believe there’s also a Lugosi bio out there that should have this information in it.
By the way, there seems to be a modern myth that Lugosi had fallen from grace so far that the only thing he could do was Ed Wood movies. It’s not really true. He appeared in regional theater, had a Las Vegas revue, and an appearance on “You Asked for It” on TV, all in the 1950s. I suspect that there were other appearances as well. In addition, he appeared in at least one non-Ed Wood movie in the 1950s – The Black Sleep. It may not have been great, but horror actor John Carradine was there slumming with him. He also made a vampire picture in England. I admit that this is not the high life in acting, but it’s far from destitute and unemployed. Even Boris Karloff was reduced to things like Voodoo Island[b/] and ** Frankenstein 1970 and horrible Mexican pictures during the 1950s.
True, it’s not as if he was unemployed. The life of the horror actor’s never a glamorous one anyway, it seems. Karloff’s Mexican films, IIRC, all came in 1968 (unless he did a lot of them earlier, too); he was working on four of them simultaneously when he died. [But as an aside, unlike Lugosi, Karloff made a tremendous movie right near the end of his career - 1968’s Targets.]
I think all of John Waters films could fit into this thread, but Pink Flamingoes, Waters’ first feature, would have to be my pick. Starred Devine.
Where else could one hear such lines as “You have been convicted of assholism” or see someone eat fresh dog poop.
Hm, a lot of people interested in Story of Ricky. Well, as luck would have it, I have a present for you: a link to a review of the movie, with a video clip of the head-smash!
