Fall, a nauseating, self-indulgent ego-trip by writer/director/star Eric Schaeffer. He plays a narcissistic novelist/cab driver who has an affair with a vapid, married supermodel.
Oh man, I LOVE Tom Green! 
He was awesome in Stealing Harvard; though Freddy wasn’t to my liking.
And Punch Drunk love is so good I bought it! The first few minutes are slow but then it’s so good! Oh well.
Here’s a terrible (and absolutely leftist/radical feminist obnoxious piece of crap) non-mainstream garbage-worthy CLERKS RIPOFF - “Slacker”. I thought of it because someone has the name slacker hehe.
I was watching Kevin Smith when nobody had heard of him…he lives a few minutes from me (unless he’s moved to Hollywood since the last time I checked heh.)
Not terribly long ago, I picked up a handful of cheap dvds at a local supermarket: titles I’d never heard of with graphics that looked Xeroxed.
The one I’m currently in the middle of suffering through is called “Samson in the Wax Museum”. I thought it would be a cheesy movie about the Biblical hero brought back as a crime fighter through mysterious means or something.
Instead, it’s about a masked Mexican wrestler who’s a crime fighter. He wears a sparkly cape, and has to take frequent breaks from his crimefighting to wrestle people in a ring…somewhere…with no “play-by-play” type of commentary. Just silent bodies thumping each other.
He’s not even very good at it.
Truly a bizarre waste of my $5.00. But to be fair, I haven’t finished watching it yet. It could get better.
There’s a great MST3k of Samson Vs. the Vampire Women 
Same Samson, only fighting… well… vampire women. He wins in the end by
entering the vampire lair and basically getting his ass kicked until the sun rises and incinerates the vampires through a partially open window
I wish I owned a copy on video.
I’m discounting movies I only saw on MST3K, although the show did a fine job of exposing the masses to films that were both horrible and obscure.
With that rule in place, I’m going to have to go with Ken Russel’s Lisztomania. Now almost entirely forgotten (and thankfully so!), it was at the time billed as the movie that out-Tommyed Tommy. Well, it did, but not in a good way. Ostensibly a biopic of Franz Liszt (played by Who lead singer Roger Daltrey, in his second screen role), it makes Tommy look like a Merchant-Ivory production.
I have attempted to describe this movie many times before, and I am invariably accused of making it up. Thankfully, my mind is not that diseased. No, there really is a movie that has Liszt and his mistress caught in flagrante by her husband, who punishes them by shutting them up inside a piano. And leaving it on the railroad tracks. Where it is hit by a train. And explodes in a huge fireball. Within the first few minutes of the movie!
In the next scene Liszt is merrily playing “Chopsticks” at a concert, to the disappointment of young Richard Wagner (who rather anachronistically wears a sailor’s cap that says “NIETZSCHE” on it in Fraktur script). No explanation is given for Liszt’s miraculous survival, but I suspect most viewers forget all about once they see the scene in which his penis grows to be ten feet long and a bunch of women do a maypole dance around it. Or the part where there’s a solar eclipse and Wagner turns into a vampire and drinks Liszt’s blood. Or Ringo’s cameo as the Pope. Or the gratuitous nude scene that doubles as an interpretive dance version of Mein Kampf. Or the stirring climax, in which the late Liszt and all the women in his (after)life get into a pipe organ spaceship and fly down from heaven to save the world from an electric guitar-toting Hitler.
The Pledge! I am sorry but what the fuck was that?! I could barely could get through it but I kept watching, hoping for a good ending. Nope, never got it. Half that movie was him driving around or fishing.
Whoa… in ** Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter ** there is a masked Mexican Luchador named “Santo Enmascarado de Plata”-- I wonder if it’s a reference… he had a shiny silver mask and wore a business suit… (But then Jesus got a haircut and wore a jogging outfit in the movie so looks aren’t neccessarily a problem)
(Xadium does some digging)
Yeah, I really think it’s the same character, just remixed a little. Apparently your Santos also fought vampires in many mexican movies.
Arrgh… I meant to say your Samson… I think they just changed the name for JCVH
Well, I’ve sat through some stinkers over the years, and even appreciate (or at least thought I did), really bad movies, but there has been only one that I’ve ejected unceremoniously from the DVD player, and hoped that it hadn’t corrupted my machine in some way: Sergio Lapel’s Drawing Blood. Words fail me, so I’ll offer a quote from one of the IMDB viewer reviews:
The worst movie I’ve ever seen personally is a Russian “science-fiction” flick called the The Zone. I use quotes because for all but the last scene of the film there are no special effects whatsoever and the “science-fiction” consists of four guys wandering around a park giving speeches and almost setting off deadly traps. These deadly traps are never seen, never heard, and they’re certainly never set off. Which is a pity, because by the end of the movie I found myself hoping that something, anything nasty would happen to these characters just to shut them up.
The whole point of the stupid movie is that there this region called “The Zone”, at the centre of which is “The Room”. If you can get to “The Room” past the supposedly deadly traps, you get a wish granted, anything you want. So these four guys are on an expedition to reach “The Room”, and after many boring speeches and not a single trap in sight, they reach it.
Then they DON’T go in. They make some more speeches, one characters pulls out an “atomic bomb” that looks suspiciously like a short length of pipe (but they don’t set it off; they throw it away instead), then they just go home. At this point I nearly screamed at the screen.
Finally, in the very last scene, we see the daughter of one of the characters sitting at the kitchen table apparently moving a small object across the table with her mind. It has nothing to do with the plot; it’s just a completely gratuitous “special effect” presumably accomplished by a guy under the table with a magnet. But it’s the only such effect in the entire freakin’ movie.
A wretched, awful movie.
Wow. I’ve never seen this movie, or even heard of it, but your description sounds…beyond words. Whoever Ken Russel is, he must have been on something STRONG when he came up with that concept.
(I’d love to see this movie some day though)
Runaway Car is pretty freaking bad. Although it’s really in the ‘so bad it’s good’ category for me. I’ve stumbled on it twice now late at night on TV.
It’s a pretty blatant Speed rip-off, except with Judge Reinhold (exhibit a in the gallery of ‘quite prolific actors whose careers have gone absolutely nowhere’), which probably gives some indication of the quality. Him and some lady and a baby (and a token black guy, IIRC) are stuck in a car with no brakes. That’s it. No sub-plots or anything. The car honestly doesn’t even go that fast, so there’s some wonderful over-acting in an attempt to inject some excitement into it. They spend most of the movie on an apparently deserted freeway, too, which doesn’t exactly provide a lot of action.
And then the car just runs out of gas and stops. The End. (It’s really bad.)
Lamia, you’ve totally sold me on Liztomania. I must see it.
“Dirty Duck” by Flo and Eddie of The Turtles. My wife and I attended the movie thinking it was based on the Dirty Duck undergound comic. No such luck. We walked out. It was just a mass of disjointed images. I can’t even remember any of it, thank God.
The government should stop with their stupid-ass ad campaigns about how when you smoke a joint the money goes to Osama bin Laden, or the “this is your brain on drugs” ads. Just air this movie frequently, explaining in the beginning that this movie was made by people who did a lot of drugs. It would do more than anything I could possibly imagine to get kids off drugs.
In terms of really bad arthouse stuff, I’ve a few suggestions. I’m usually a fan of totally incomprehensible stuff like Eraserhead, Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia, and the Quay Brothers’ Institute Benjamenta (all not recommended for those who like plots, character or logic) but even I have my limits.
Michael Winterbottom is now a respected filmmaker (24 Hour Party People, Jude, etc.) but one of his early movies, Butterfly Kiss, definitely falls into the category of pretentious, would-be sensationalist but deeply dull art bollocks, with 2 lesbians, one of whom is mentally retarded, going on a killing spree through the northwest of England. It stars the uniformly improbable Amanda Plummer and most of it takes place in motorway service stations.
Most of Pedro Almodovar’s early movies were spectacularly awful in a “random oddly-dressed spanish people doing wacky things” way.
French director Bertrand Blier is similar in his pursuit of the controversial: Les Valseuses (Bollocks) is funny in an obscene way, but Buffet Froid and Merci La Vie are just awful. The former is an impenetrable black comedy that’s a whisker away from being a Monty Python parody, and Merci La Vie has some statement to make about AIDS and the Holocaust, that statement being “Charlotte Gainsbourg is really cute”.
And has nobody mentioned the cinema of Andy Warhol? Chelsea Girls makes me urgently want to go see Legally Blonde 2.
Whoops, I left the second “L” off the end of his name…it’s Ken Russell. He was a fairly well-known British director a few decades back, and even got an Oscar nod for Women in Love. (His biggest American hit was probably Altered States.) He’s also completely freaking insane.
and then
Ah, this is the other part of the Lisztomania curse – once I manage to convince people that the movie is real, they think they want to see it. I realize it sounds like campy good fun. I thought that same thing, until I actually saw it. I often like bad, campy movies, but Lisztomania was just too much…it was like it never took a breather. But some of you may have more stamina than I, and in fairness some of the songs (yes, it’s a musical!) were okay.
I can’t believe no one’s mentioned 200 Motels, by, I believe, Frank Zappa. It was a standard of the midnight movie circuit in the '70’s, which probably explains why I never saw it when I was totally coherent. The cast includes Ringo Starr, in yet another cameo, as Larry the Dwarf. I’m guess the movie was supposed to represent the chaos of being on tour . . . it was chaotic, anyway.
Um, no, “Slacker” came out in 1991, while “Clerks” was released in 1994. Aside from the obvious time factors, I don’t see any other similarities between the two movies that would support a “RIPOFF” accusation.
I like “Slacker” a lot. Did you ever consider that the movie doesn’t really have the radical agenda that you seem to deplore, but merely attempts to depict the people who do? Slacker presents some weird characters in an interesting way. It doesn’t really have a plot. I suppose I can understand why that doesn’t appeal to some folks.
Didn’t Andy Warhol make a lot of movies which are completely unwatchable by human beings? (one which was 24 hours long, another consisting of a six-hour-long static shot of the Empire State Building)
About Samson/Santo, the silver-masked wrestler/actor, he was like the biggest pop culture star ever in Mexico, approaching almost Elvis-like levels of popularity before his death. He was the most famous wrestler in Mexican history (where wrestlers traditionally wear masks), and his movies, cheesy though they were, were always loved over there. He was well-known for always wearing his mask, even in real life (even in public), often accompanied by a smart business suit. Also, the movies often had musical numbers. He was called El Santo (“The Saint”), but when the movies were dubbed into English and released in America, he was renamed “Samson.”
El Santo’s real son, El Hijo Del Santo (“Son of Santo”) continues to wrestle today, wearing his father’s silver mask. The “Santo” who appeared in Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter was just a regular actor in a mask, unlicensed by the Santo estate. It may have been a loving tribute, but true lucha libre aficionados would consider that movie an affront to Santo’s legacy (especially because his name and image are still in use in Mexico).
For more information about lucha libre (masked Mexican wrestling) and the pop culture traditions associated with masked wrestlers, check out http://www.frompartsunknown.com , one of my favorite online resources.
Dijon Warlock, I’d be interested in that DVD for $5 if you really don’t want it! I’m a bit of a lucha libre fan myself.