The thread "Why bad movies?" has come up quite often, but I thought it would be interesting to get some more personalized responses out of you folks.
As for me, I grew up on genre movies, mostly horror and sci-fi. That's what I liked to watch. Of course, at the time I didn't know that they were bad.
Now that I'm grown up, physically if not mentally, I still watch bad movies mostly for the same reason. I love horror and sci-fi.
However, I have found that there is a certain enjoyment from watching art gone wrong that you can't find anywhere else. Whether it is simple incompetence on the part of the makers, or just flat out wrong-headed notions committed to any medium, watching artistic failure is one of the more rarified pleasures of life.
I can enjoy this in any medium, but I think it works best for movies. Music has its own rhythm, and bad rhythm is mostly simply grating. Bad writing is enjoyable, but only in short bursts. No way you would want to read an entire novel of the stuff. Movies on the other hand, they're just about the perfect length that one can tolerate such malarkey. And if you're lucky, a movie can be a heady stew of bad input after bad input, as bad direction, bad writing and bad acting all come together into one colossal maelstrom (maelstrom?) of badness.
Also naked ladies. Lots of bad movies have naked ladies in them.
So what's your take?
Mofo Rising Wrote:
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> Also naked ladies. Lots of bad movies have naked
> ladies in them.
>
> So what's your take?
I must confess, this did play a role in developing my interest in low budget obscurities.
Yup, seems when my folks split up, my Dad took all his Playboys with him. 'Round about that same time, pixelizing was starting to catch on, so the late night movie marathons could get away with leaving in the naughty parts, which obviously saved me a lot of trouble when video rental stores caught on. I really began to get into cheap clones & rip-offs of better movies like Friday the 13th, Halloween, Animal House, Up in Smoke & Mad Max that often served up more gratuitous skin then their superior counterparts.
Of course, when playing & replaying a VHS Nastasja Kinski's midnight stroll in Cat People, one eventually learns how eyestrain (maybe that's why it make you go blind) & remote controler's cramp really feel, not to mention, the fragility of VHS, so one developes an understanding of the need to preserve the tape, the batteries in the remote, and find a movie with more well lit scenes.
For me, this understanding coinsided with the purchase of my first motorcycle, and my interests quickly changed to watching movies about guys spending two hours just riding & riding & riding & riding & riding along whilest outdated rock songs played in the forefront. This more or less played into my study of ineptitude when I bought a copy of The Loners starring Dean Stockwell. Particularly, I couldn't help but laugh at how they took 400 rice burner twin & tried to make it look like a Hog by slapping on a sissy bar & cruiser fork without raking the frame, making the bike look lopsided, as well as some other silliness that occured throughout the movie. Other jokes included movies depicting bikers sitting on stationary bikes in front of a blue screen whilest smoking cigarettes & chewing gum, which in real life is a big no-no, as bugs can get into your mouth.
Naturally, I've always been a fan of sci-fi, and at a certain point I began to get nostalgic over some of the Star Wars rip-offs I was so crazy about before I hit puberty. Seeing them as an adult, I began to notice the bad special effects, flimsy sets & cheesey story lines, and I found myself wondering how I could've taken them so seriously when I was a kid.
Strangely enough, all this only spurred my interest in poorly made films.
Man, I've been into them for so long that it's hard to reconstruct just how come I got there --
I like odd stuff. As a kid, I liked unusual birds and animals & would get really excited if I saw something rare in the woods, like a redheaded woodpecker -- not a lot of those in my part of Virginia, though common elsewhere --
So I naturally always wanted to see movies about unusual stuff -- flying saucers! Men from outer space!! MONSTERS!!! -- It was sheer blithering coincidence that so many of them were micro-budget & "bad" -- I pretty soon got the hang of telling the difference between a good giant bug monster movie: "Them!", and a bad one: "The Beginning of The End". At the same time, I understood that the "bad" ones had qualities of their own to admire that made them distinct from the good ones.
Later on, as I got more into acting and film, I became fascinated with the whole idea of keeping bad scenes in a completed film and even releasing bad films when I understood how damn hard it is to make and release even a mediocre movie. I am still fascinated by this.
peter johnson/denny crane
Well two reasons:
1-"Bad" is very subjective. There are some "bad" movies out there that I don't really consider bad because I don't expect too much for the. When I watch "Transporter 2" or "Wild Wild West", I expect kickass action and stuff being blowed up. Nothing more, nothing less.
"Flash Gordon" is not gonna win any Golden Globes, but it's not really a bad movie.
2-And sometimes I watch bad movies to have a blast ripping them apart and laughing AT THEM, not with them.
I MST3Ked the hell outta Joel Schumacher's "Phantom of the Opera", and "Open Water" is so terribly pathethic, it becomes a comedy (you CANNOT take seriously a movie with so low a budget than they didn't even have the money for a puppet shark).
I too grew up watching classic horror and sci fi and this probably marks my interest in cinema in general. I've always been interested in photography (my Dad and I even once operated a small freelance operation). So, the generation of Fx for sci-fi and horror movies was of interest, too. In high school, I was the nerd who carried around Fangoria to read the Fx articles during class.
Good vs. Bad movies is not something I made a distinction of until I was in my mid-20's, however. Until then, it was just "I like movies" (in particular, movies that require Fx of some sort - be they actioners, sci fi or horror, etc; plain drama did little for me). I did not care if it had bad acting, direction or editing. I hardly noticed anyway.
Then I realized, probably due mostly to USA's Up All Night that I particularly liked movies of B-grade. The low budgets made the production more challenging, and the approaches and solutions were often funny. Sometimes this humor was intentional, sometimes not. But I found B-Movies were nearly always entertaining at some level. (Notice how few movies Andrew gives a skull).
Then came MSK3000 and the realization that others like them, too, and for much the same reasons.
But, no matter the course, it all stems from watching old horror classics (Frankenstein, The Mummy, etc) with my Dad when I was very young. He also really liked Westerns and WWII flicks, and watching older movies from HIS childhood was how we spent a lot of down time together.
Because when I was but a wee lad I spent many an hour hiding behind the couch during Chiller Theater or the late show. Those old 50's horror and scifi movies (both good and bad) were what got me hooked. I also saw my share of WWII and Western movies.
Some of the bad movies I really didn't realize were bad as a youth, but by the time I grew up they were part of the nostalgia of my youth, so there you go.
Those blockbusters tend to tire me, and watching B-movies means fresh air. And many of them are just good movies that have been very underrated. And of course, I can appreciate the cheese when I see it, like everybody else.
I studied bad movies as an art form. I considered every aspect of the bad movie to see how they composed some of their shots, lit some of their scenes, directed their actors, and created some of their special effects, and then compared that to movies with big budgets and respectability. What I learned how to do was distinguish the difference between the good and the bad. Close up on the eyes of Fuad Ramses in Blood Feast as he hacks a woman at the beginning of the movie = bad. Close up on the face of Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange at the beginning of the movie = good. Why? Because of context and effectiveness. Fuad was accompanied by a timpani, buckets of gore, and no discernible emotion. McDowell had Beethoven, a beautifully composed long shot to wide angle/tracking shot, a tons of character in his smile.
I watch bad movies now to get a break from the seriousness of some of the world's films. I couldn't watch La Dolce Vita every day. I need Prince of Space to keep me company.
A couple of interesting points have been brought up that I overlooked in my previous post.
The first one, I mentioned breifly about movies that I thought were cool when I was a kid. I do recall as a little kid, some of my friends & I used to have a lot of fun reinacting scenes from such films as StarCrash, ThunderBirds, & Battle Beyond the Stars. Back then, anything with lasers & space ships was cool, and poor production values were a concept to which we were totally oblivious, even as my older sister barked them out as we watched.
Another point brought up is the desire to see something different, and I was a very different kid. When most of my friends were either into Micheal Jackson or Van Halen, I was into Devo, and this somehow crossed over into my taste in movies. I've always liked movies such as El Topo, EraserHead, The Monkees 'Head' & others that are just plain weird. Whether I get it or not, if it's weird, I just like it and I don't know why.
Another big influence in my partiallity towards the off-beat & obscure would have to be the years between '80 & '85 when we had cable. (I'm strictly rabbit ears now, but that's another story.) In retrospect, it seems at the time that programmers were grasping at straws in search of content.
One of my favorite shows was this Japanese import called The Space Giants, in which Goldar the giant robot must thwart just about every kind of Gojira clone imagoinable. I still can't tell you why I liked it.
Another thing that I liked about those first few years of cable, was how some of the non-commercial chanels would try to compensate for shows with short running times by filling the empty space with independant film shorts.
I've always loved shorts because they often get away with ideas that no major motion picture studio would ever greenlight. You get an interesting perspective on age old genres or techniques & storytelling from someone whom you're probably never going to hear from again. Shorts tend to be fresh, expiremental and energetic, even if it's just a couple of guys with a super 8 goofing off with style. And of course, it doesn't always take two hours to tell a story, which can be pretty convenient if you catch a short that sucks.
After we cancelled our cable, I really started to get into shows like Night Flight, Alive From Off Center & the like. I know they have something on the SunDance channel, but like I said earlier, I'm strictly rabbit ears.
Frankly, I wouldn't mind seeing a few threads about Good Grief!, Almost Beat, Bambi meets Godzilla, Cosmic Zoom & Webb Wilder: Private Eye.
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Isn't that the truth! Cable used to be extremely cool regarding showing oddball programming, but not quite so much anymore.
Now as to why I watch bad movies - It's just something that's progressed over time, but really came into fruition over the last 13 years, since I was 17. Reading a lot about movies also really got me interested.
I was a kid during the early 1970s and I remember seeing lots of trailers, movie posters, newspaper ads, etc., for movies that often played at the local drive-ins (there were probably a dozen drive-in theaters within 20 miles of my house). I was always attracted to these movies for some reason. Probably because many of them were horror movies and I LOVED horror movies. So, thanks to the miracle of videotape - - and now DVD - - I have the opportunity to get my hands on all of these bad movies that I remember from when I was a kid.
I guess this is just some sort of a sad, twisted mid-life crisis for me. Some men get hair transplants. Some men buy sports cars. Some men have affairs with younger women. I watch bad movies.
I think my life went astray somewhere along the line . . .
lilcerberus Wrote:
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> Frankly, I wouldn't mind seeing a few threads
> about Good Grief!, Almost Beat, Bambi meets
> Godzilla, Cosmic Zoom & Webb Wilder: Private
> Eye.
Bambi meets Godzilla is one of my favorite short films, especially when it comes to animated shorts. Hilarious, and straight to the point.
Wow, I was trying to figure out why I like to watch bad movies and why I always wander back to this board, and I think The Burgomaster hit the nail right on the head. I guess there are a few other reasons:
***There were so many movies I wanted to watch as a kid that looked really cool, but for some reason or another I didn't get to see them (probably because they were rated R).
***I also went to a lot of really obscure movies with my older brother. I have to thank him for taking me to see movies like Strange Brew, Flash Gordon, and Ice Pirates.
***I thought Star Wars was one of the greatest movies and I would go see any crappy Sci-fi movie that even remotely copied it. (last starfighter, battle beyond the stars, etc.)
They're not "bad." They're only misunderstood. Actually, I find "bad" movies, and I use that term loosely, such as "Krull, " "Lair of the White Worm," etc. alot more entertaining and fun to watch, over and over, then "good" movies, and I use that term very loosely, as well. Especially the "bad" movies of yesterday vs. the "good" movies of today.
I have a really short answer: the storytelling methods, the creativity (the cheaper the movie, the more unusal the concept behind it), and the variety (I find mainstream films pretty dull).
Well, i frequantly need distraction from the Real world. Avoids deep depression, don't cha know...
There is, in my lexicon...
B- MOVIE : The low budget stuff made by people with less genius, but lots of enthuseisiam. ( Plan 9, ect )
GOOD MOVIE : The infrequant times a big budget film gets everything right ( Indiana Jomes series )
GOOD BAD MOVIE : PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE! The definition of the concept.Entertaining...just not in the way the producers/stars/director intended!
BAD BAD MOVIE : Pain...sering pain! Growing more painful as you try to remember! SEXTETTE...and i've only read Ken Beggs review! Ouch!