My two favorite B-movies are Xanadu and The Manitou (rhyme unintentional!)
I love Xanadu’s music, bright colors, Gene Kelly, Olivia Newton-John… basically everything except the male lead, who’s a terrible actor IMO and kinda brings the whole thing down a bit. But other than that, it’s a not-so-guilty pleasure that I enjoy watching.
The Manitou is a horror movie from the Seventies, starring Tony Curtis as a sham fortune teller whose girlfriend is growing a Colonial-era Native American medicine man on her neck. It’s gory and every bit as cheesy as it sounds, but I love the heck out of it (and the book it was based on). Happening upon that movie on Showtime during a lazy summer day in the late Seventies started my lifelong enjoyment of horror author Graham Masterton.
I see Killer Klowns from Outer Space is #46 on that list. I think it should be higher, although it’s more of a parody of 50’s era sci-fi B-movies than the real deal. In any case, it’s well done and quite funny.
Repo Man is my favorite. At least currently, sometimes my favorites switch around but it’s been my fav for while. There are others that are near the top for me.
Rock and Roll High School Return of the Living Dead Spaced Invaders Blind Fury This is Spinal Tap UHF Army of Darkness
I had a proud father moment the other day - my teen referenced the paper airplane scene from Rock and Roll High School unprompted from me.
I wouldn’t call that a B-movie. A spoof, a mockumentary, sure, but it is a film with rather high production standards about a band and their shows that have ridiculously low production standards, that’s a difference.
ETA: my contribution is a movie that no one else here will have seen, “Kondom des Grauens” (“Killer Condom”), a German movie from 1996 after a book by renown underground comic artist Ralf König about a possessed condom. Granted, it was a deliberate exploitation and shlock movie, a parody of B-movies, and it had some of the best German actors of the time (Iris Berben, Peter Lohmeyer), but it’s so funny and bizarre that it counts in my book. And I think everybody involved had a lot of fun, not only the spectators.
I was in the USAF in the late 70’s, and if it was a B, C, or D movie that could be gotten cheap, the bases would show them. Every knock-off “Bruce Lee” film, every post-apocalyptic “far future” film where everyone drove cars from the 70’s, every cheap-ass horror film imaginable etc., I saw them all. They showed “straight-to-video” type films before videos became common, and my love for the sincerely awful continues to this day. I don’t think there is a movie in this thread, or even a movie from a list posted in this thread, that I haven’t seen, but there is a special place in my heart for the “Puppet Master” series from Full Moon, and I truly belove it is the title music that originally hooked me.
I love They Live for the epic fight and the subliminal messages, but I also love Stephen King’s Maximum Overdrive. I always watch it when it comes on. Emilio Estevez isn’t hard to look at either!
The worst part of it is the girl that screams ALL THE TIME.
I thought Battlefield: Earth was a fine example of "so bad, it’s good. I have a weakness for movies where the plucky underdog overcomes the odds and defeats the more powerful villain. And I enjoyed the fact (spoiler alert) that the arch-villain wasn’t killed in the end, but locked up so that he could be tormented by his captors.**
I had more of a problem with The Cutting Edge being thought of as a B-Movie. As far as fame goes, Plan 9 From Outer Space is certainly famous, but would anyone say it wasn’t a B-Movie? I mean besides those arguing it was a Y or Z movie. I always think of a B-Movie as one that has a low budget.
Let’s look at the estimated budgets for some movies that came out in 1988.
They Live - $3,000,000
Caddyshack II - $20,000,000
Bloodsport - $2,300,000
Colors - $10,000,000
Young Guns - $10,000,000
Elvira: Mistress of the Dark - $7,500,000
I don’t have any problem classifying They Live or Bloodsport as B-Movies. They’re both better than Caddyshack II by a country mile.
“B-movie” can refer to any low budget movie but the films most people think of when they hear the term fall into the sub category of Schlock: Outlandish or trashy plots, gratuitous sex and violence, lurid special effects, and immature humor. They Live is one of those outliers with a nearly average budget and a proven director but with themes that seem very schlocky. There’s even big budget schlock like the kinds of films Tarantino makes.
