Badmovies.org Forum

in other words, when did people first start watching films because in a 'so bad it's good' type way?

because surely there was a time when this would've been inconceivable. at the dawn of cinema, when the very notion of a moving picture on a screen would've wowed every audience in the world, regardless of the actual content.

First landmark I can think of were the Medveds book "The Fifty Worst Films of All Time" in 1978 (which kindled interest in Ed Wood when they named him the worst director ever). I'm sure there were people who appreciated bad films before that, but I can't think of anyone doing it in any organized way.

Reefer Madness was a popular midnight movie in the late 70's. That might have been the first time people went to a movie theater to see a movie they knew was stupid and laugh at it (because they were all stoned).

For me if it's meant to be bad it's never really going to be true BM gold, I dunno maybe I have double standards on this subject though because I love gervais mockumentaries for example

Drive-In Movies and double-triple features might have been a factor...late night TV too and Monster movie hosts. Rocky Horror Picture Show perhaps deserves a mention.

interesting, not heard of that book before. I was thinking about Plan 9 possibly being the first recognized 'good' bad movie but I wasn't sure about a timeline.


yeah, not really a 'movie', but I guess it counts in a way. same period as the book rev mentioned too, late 70s. maybe that's the year zero of bad movies then

Ozzymandias speaks: Before the Medved brothers book, this was probably fueled or, at least, inspired by the advent of older movies being shown on TV. That was part of what created the "monster kid" phenomenon. I remember reading an old newspaper article, from the late 50s, about some problems Johnny Carson was having with the censors on his CBS TV show. He mentioned that the network didn't want him to do a skit called "Old Movie Watchers Anonymous" about a treatment program for people addicted to watching old movies on TV (making fun of Alcoholic Anonymous). The "Shock Theater" package was released to TV at this time. This leads me to believe that the cult started springing up around films at this time.  This was also about the same time Famous Monsters appeared on newsstands.

It probably grew after the Golden Turkey book. I know college campuses and, in some markets, radio stations sponsored "Midnight Movies" which was a major factor. It think it really exploded with the advent of home video. You could watch these movies over and over at anytime.

Ozzymandias has spoken!!!

And you have Vampira from the late 50s who poked fun at the movies shown, simply because the TV station could only afford packages of the crappy second-run titles.

My brother, who got me hooked, used to sit up on Saturday nights in the late 60s to watch bad horror movies and then he would talk about and make fun of them during Sunday breakfast.

You can even find comments going back to the age of true exploitation flicks (30s and 40s) of people frequenting grindhouses, which were theaters that stayed open pretty much 24 hours a day showing whatever movies they could get cheaply. I'm fairly confident that among the people who went there that there were a few who watched the stuff because it is so loopy as to be entertaining.

Stephen King wrote about 'the siren song of crap'  :buggedout: in his book Danse Macabre where he said that people will go see a bad movie many times just to justify how bad the thing is.  :teddyr:

For me, it started in 1973 when a friend of the family took me (aged six) to see this POS:

(http://theseconddisc.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/lost-horizon-poster-2.jpg)

I loathed it: it almost put me off watching movies forever.  :teddyr: :teddyr:

Didn't they used to show double features way back in the day at the theater where the first one was really low budget and terrible?  I imagine that was from the time when it was five cents for both movies lol.  And then you had all those awful low budget things made in the Philippines at the drive ins.  I imagine some people developed a certain fondness for those.  Or just a fondness for the drive in experience.

Vampira started in 1954. That's now the earliest "official" cult-like recognition of bad movies as entertainment cited (though it was limited to bad horror movies). Of course, there were probably people riffing the early Edison and Biograph nickelodeon shorts before the turn of the century.

I agree with the low budget, but I don't know whether I always agree with the terrible. Terrible sounds more like the C movie and especially the Z movie. As an example of how good a B movie could be is 1952's "The Narrow Margin" w/ Charles McGraw, Marie Windsor, and Jacqueline White, directed by Richard Fleischer, and with a screenplay by Earl Felton, who was nominated for an Oscar for his work. An RKO picutre, it is actually thought to be a better film than many of RKO's A movies.

Actually, the B movie apparently dates back to the early days of films, back to the 1920s, with the decline beginning in the 1980's. Though, for me, the decline began a decade earlier in the 1970's, when theaters, or the ones I attended, stopped showing 2 movies for the price of 1.

Another qualification of the B movie was its shorter length or from 1 hour to 90 minutes or often shorter than the main feature or the A movie shown with the B movie.

Interesting topic.

I read about Lost Horizon in that Hollywoods horrible turkeys book or whatever it was. I've always wanted to see it.

I refuse to believe that version of Lost Horizon was a POS. I mean, it had Bobby Van. He gave an Oscar-level performance in The Doomsday Machine. You must be confused, Trev.
 :bouncegiggle: :bouncegiggle: :bouncegiggle: :bouncegiggle: :bouncegiggle:

talking of the late 70s time period, I also feel like AIRPLANE is one of the first movies to actively make fun of the format of bad movies and their various clichés. In fact isn't some of the script taken almost verbatim from some older movie?

 anyone know any movies before Airplane which were kind of 'aware' of their own badness?

Would the ABBOTT & COSTELLO MEET ______ series qualify?

    I'd have to agree that the late 50's / early 60's "Shock Theatre" phenomenon fueled this; I remember Ghoulardi telling us, "this flick is so bad, kids, you wouldn't BELIEVE! You should just go to bed!"

     O' course, this insured we'd be glued to the set until one in the morning, or even later, depending on what "Milkman's Matinee" was showing.

Ghoulardi (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e52cXCrmauc#)

Target Earth (1954) Richard Denning, Kathleen Crowley, Virginia Grey (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-v0SRk6JbA#)

that probably came out of the fact that Ghoulardi and shows like that had to show those movies because they were the cheapest.


random thought: nostalgia was really big in the 70's. old movie stars and stuff like that. I think we're living in a very non nostalgic age today. Seeing anything that's over 6 months old is considered more or less pointless.

yeah but you don't really get nostalgic about stuff that's only 6 months - a couple of years old. however I do agree today is mostly about the newest thing, the next big thing. not old enough to remember how it was in the 70s, but I do remember there was quite a bit of 60s/70s nostalgia going on in the 90s

Richard Linklater's Dazed + Confused from 1994 is almost purely based on nostalgia, and was set in 1976. can't imagine a film made today being set in 1996 and having anywhere near the same enjoyment or nostalgia factor?


don't know as (perhaps ashamedly) I've never seen a single one of them. has to be said they are not big over here in England, hardly ever show them on tv but very occasionally they do crop up

The Bob Hope/Bing Crosby Road pictures featured a lot of in-jokes about Hollywood and current politics and even became somewhat self-referential with the humor in the later installments.

I gotta go with this. Vampira mocked old horror films first.

It was available to buy from Amazon not too long ago.

That's the problem with many of today's kids. They won't give anything, even a film classic, a chance. They just dismiss it as old and boring without even watching it - at least that's my own experience with many younger people. Not going to say all.

I think the 90s saw a revival of the popular 70s disaster flicks and the sci-fi genre got another kick-start as well with early 70s style  future dystopia films in both the 90s and 2000s. Nowadays they just remake everything (typically giving it a more action-oriented, comedic dumbed down vibe) and  many young people often immediately assume the new is better in a lot of cases (Star Trek, Doctor Who, Battlestar Galactica, Godzilla, Batman, Spider-Man, Halloween) whether it really is or not...

Agree with the mentions of Hope & Crosby and Abbott & Costello as comedians not afraid to make fun of themselves and one another...

Typically there was a lower budget B-movie that did air with a higher budget movie at one point in time. Suspect that's the real true start of the low budget B-movie (which was undeniably sometimes quite bad)...How about the adult shock films of the 30s warning about drugs and other dangers like the aforementioned Reefer Madness but there was also stuff like The Cocaine Fiends, Assassin of Youth, Marihuana, Narcotic, and Maniac to name but a few...these movies definitely leave many shaking their heads in disbelief.

Plus, they won't get off my lawn!

But honestly, when I was a kid/teen, most of my peers didn't give anything older a chance and dismissed it as automatically boring. Hell, most adults now do the same, unless it's something they remember from their own childhood. I don't think anything has changed there.

Yeah what's really annoying though is when they can the latest hip "in" thing the greatest thing ever made. Yeah, no it's not.

Jase is right about 70's nostalgia in the 90's. remember that song "protect yourself against the 70's"?  one of the only things eddie vedder ever did that i like

That series of films was also notorious for "breaking the fourth wall." That is a character in the film speaking directly to the audience watching the film. One example would be from 1947's "Road to Rio," where Bob Hope, as Hot Lips Barton, where after falling off the bicycle he is riding on on the high wire, and barely holding on, he starts yelling: "Help! Help!" Then he turns to the audience and says: "You know, this picture could end right here."

Though the one I remember from the same film is one at the end of the film, where Jerry Colonna, who has been riding to the rescue of Hope and Crosby, stops, as they no longer needed rescuing, and turns to the audience and makes some sort of comment.

Actually they're still doing disaster and dystopian sci-fi flicks which I feel definitely gained popularity late 60s, early 70s but really one could argue it was done way back in the 30s with Deluge and Things To Come. Actually a lot of 1950s-1970s drive-in fare also recalls the shock films of the 1930s in some ways. Actually you could argue there are some examples in almost every decade since the 30s except maybe the 40s especially when you throw in alien invasion films. Still I think it was at its most popular late 60s, early 70s. Everything old becomes new again it seems.

The poking fun at themselves in film may well have started with the Hope and Crosby Road films or Abbott and Costello, I'm not sure. Hmm if there was no Buster Keaton, would there have been Jackie Chan? Interesting stuff to think about, perhaps a tad off topic though. Back to when the bad movie "cult" following began...probably when people could gather together and watch bad movies in an enjoyable way - maybe drive-ins, home video, late night movies on tv with horror hosts or without...

I like to think of the original line from the first KTMA version of MST3K.
"Joel says when you got lemons, you make lemonade."

Well, if 90% of everything is crap, and only 10% is good, and only 10% of that is excellent...that leaves a LOT of manure in which jokes may grow.