There seems to be alot of Bias among B-Movie and Cult Movie fans when it comes to which movies are allowed to be bad, and which movies arent. It seems like only the older movies can have gaping plot holes, bad effects, bad acting, etc while newer movies are held to a much higher standard. It's like when I watched AVP, at the start I was all high and mighty and PO'd thinking of how great the first Alien film was, and now how bastardised Geiger's ideas had become, and all this hoity toity crap. By the end I was laughing, cracking jokes, and enjoying the movie in the same way I enjoy watching 80's horror flicks or 50's drive in movies. It was so silly to me I was able to laugh at it and actually enjoy it just like when I saw Jesse James vs. Frankenstein's Daughter or Nightmare City for the first time. It kinda made me wonder why I'd pay money to see yesterday's cheese and turn my nose up at the bad stuff being put out today. Maybe dated cheese just seems to have more character that the new stuff. Anyway, just a thought.
I agree with you. But I do think it is less excusable to spend millions of dollars and make a bad movie, then to work on a shoestring plus couch change and make a bad movie.
Doesn't cheese get better with age anyway? Maybe our descendants will treat AVP with the same joy as we treat "the Brain from Planet Aurous" or "Eeegah".
Maybe Andrew will pass the site on to his newborn son, and we will fhave a B-movies dynasty.
Just a less worthy thought inspired by your thought.
-Ed
It seems, maybe I am wrong, that even with the bad older movies, at least they were trying. I have seen some newer straight-to-video, shot-on-video movies that make Ed Wood's and William Bodine's worst look like Shakespeare. I think it hurts the newer material as well since duplication seems to be the standard frequently. Hey, some of the old timers may have produced crap, but some of them gave us original crap. I would prefer original crap over recycled crap. I do agree, though, that I am more forgiving of older movies, but then, with as much of a foundation as has been laid by those who came before, we should expect better today considering there is so much more with which to work.
The Badmovies.org Dynasty. It has a nice ring to it. Prepare the child.
The thing about the old bad movies is the fact that they were trying and a lot of them featured actors that you would see in small parts in good movies. Most of the direct to video stuff now features maybe one actor you've heard of .
The people in the 50's were at least sincere in trying, even though the results were sometimes so laughable..
Here's a quote from Ed Kemmer (Earth vs. The Spider, Giant from the Unknown)
"You look at the script and say, 'This is s**t! Well, let's make it the best s**t we can!' That's what you do. You've just got to play it the best you can."
That's what's wrong with todays B movies, they make s**t , but it's not the best they can make it.
I'd say that the biggest reason to hold a films flaws against it is to look at what went into it. Movies with a $5,000 budget that get scraped together into something mildly coherent can suck and still be enjoyable because there was a lot of heart put into it. Movies with a 750 member crew and 100 million dollars at its disposal should not suck "period". AVP should have been a hardcore R rated splatterfest like the films that inspired it. Instead the ever buckling studio delivered a pg-13 action flick with a predictable plot and some utter BS just to satisfy the largest demographic market instead of the diehard fans. And while I rant, let me point out that CGI is not being used properly. Jurrassic park came out in 1993. It's CGI is STILL good. Van Helsing rears its head and its CGI looks like SH**. Why is it, that in 12 years CGI is still being used incorrectly? It's forgivable in low budget films, but when a huge studio invests hundreds of millions on their film and for its advertisements, you'd think they'd make sure that the film won't make people laugh at the effects. In closing if a bad movie is going to be bad, let it be bad without p**sing away a fortune to make people believe that it will be good. Thank you.
You have valid points, but I have to dissagree. In the 50's movies were being made quickly on shoestring budgets just to make a quick buck, just like today's straight to video and sillier feature films. The old westerns and drive in flicks are a good example. They were cheaply made films that did there best to give their audiences what they were after. Bad guy in black hat vs. good guy white hat, or American space crew battles scary alien creature. Today I think it's the same thing. There are filmakers trying to make movies on small budgets that appeal to a certain loyal market. Alot of this stuff (like the movies that one guy makes, forget the name) AVP, Resident Evil Apocolypse, House of the Dead and such are just exploitation films geared at attracting a specific younger market. I wouldnt be suprised if this stuff gains a cult following in 30 years or so.
You're right about the quick buck aspect of things. I just think a lot of the actors in the old B movies gave a little more effort than some of the ones appearing in the modern B films.
It is intolerable now that they can spend $100 million on something and it's pure crap.
Yeah I see what you mean Master Blaster. Their seems to alot of "badmovies with big budgets" seem to be video games also. So 30 years from now not only will it attract B-movie fans of that time but also old video game enthusiats.
Unless 30 years from now we ARE living a B- movie because its a "Mad Max" type of world :)
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You can’t give it, you can't buy it, and you just don't get it!-Aeon Flux
You got me there. Alot of actors nowadays couldnt act their way out of a paper bag. : )
The independent studios and distributors tha produced so many of our beloved classics don't really exist anymore--the closest thing would be DTV, but the quality of those isn't even as good as a lot of the turkeys of days past.
I can still find fun in the crappy movies of today, but it's almost too easy to make fun of them in a lot of ways. Master Blaster is right, the bad movie fans who are kids now will become obsessive fans of AVP, RE, etc. today the same way we are about the Evil Dead, Godzilla, etc.
I mean" wet paper bag." I always screw up expressions for some reason. For years I was saying "bleeding like a stuffed pig"
Major studios then and today pumped out crap. Ed Wood and others like him did not have a budget of which to speak, unlike the movies you mentioned.
Back in the fifties, the days of film cameras and slow speed film, it took quite an effort even to make something that was bad.
Today we have people basically pointing a camera at people and telling them to act. Even in the early eighties when I did video work, we had a heavy camera and a seperate heavy deck and had to use lighting if we wanted to get a decent picture.
If someone has to put effort into their work and actually work hard at it, even if it is bad, the effort will show through.
I definitely see your point Master Blaster, and some good responses have been made. I think the point about originality is especially strong in this case, but I also think there's a deeper cause that nobody's touched on: nostalgia. A lot of my favorite bad movies are things I saw in the theater as a kid (Deadly Spawn, The Fog, Evil Dead)... or on TV on Sunday afternoons in the 1970s and early 80s (which seemed to be more of a horror-scifi showcase than they are today - stuff like Gargoyles, Gwanji, Them, etc) - in other words I love the movies I saw as a kid and I love the older movies that I didn't see until I was an adult but that REMIND me of those movies.
I've frequented this board on and off for a year or two now and I gather that a majority of the usual posters are around my age (34) or older - and I think that's why you detect a real bias toward older movies on this site. I also notice that the younger posters seem to be more open to enjoying the big budget excrement of today - the common ground is that they enjoy it in much the same way that we all enjoyed the small budget B-movies of yesterday.
These are all generalizations, of course, and I'm sure I'll hear from the twelve year olds who love Brotherhood of Satan and the octogenarians who couldn't take their eyes off the screen when they saw Battlefield Earth.
Well, I'm in my 20s now, and the way I see it, the old films are often forgivable for their wretchedness simply because back in the day, some of that stuff not only was the best they could do, but had people eating it up. Something to remember when you're looking at all that cheesy stop-action film of yesteryear is that some of these films had people running screaming from the theater in horror, and not because the acting was bad, either! These days, you can show the director's cut of Exorcist and raise hardly a single goosebump on the viewers. Our age is a lot more jaded than the highly censored era our parents knew. A lot of what makes older B-films so humorous to us is that they really were a novelty in their time, but they haven't aged well.
In fact, what's bothersome about bad movies these days is that so many of them use their big budget to show off instead of telling the &*%@# story. I've seen "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians" from www.archive.org, and although it's every bit as cheesy as the reviewers say, it's entertaining. It's also very clearly and intentionally made for four-year-olds, which nicely excuses it from the standard criticism: "This looks like it was made for four-year-olds!" If it were made nowadays, it might be just as cheesy, but it would also be showing off lots of CG work to dazzle the eyes of the more sophisticated kids of today instead of telling the &*%@# story, which at least had an interesting premise. It would also look like a film made for teenagers that has a plot too lame for them, but too complicated for younger kids.
(It's the old religious question, taken to a safer level: if Jesus has indeed died and risen again to save our souls, did he also do this to save extraterrestrials, too? A few authors have suggested that this is so. They say that if there are extraterrestrials, they're made in God's image too, our God has undoubtedly paid them a visit, and they may have a Christmas of their own. In this flick, the question is: if Santa really existed, wouldn't he serve such a vital purpose that extraterrestrials would need to have a Santa of their own? Thus, the writers can play with the notion of Christmas on other planets without getting into anything too controversial.)
I've seen Aliens Vs. Predator and it really isn't all that bad, though I think it tends to strip away the horror of the other films for the story to explain so much of what's really going on. Part of what made the first two Alien films so terrifying is that the aliens seemed unstoppable. Now we learn they're just the game stock of these Predators, and it was probably a crashed Predator ship that Ripley and her crew encountered. The Predators show us that, with their advanced weaponry, the aliens are rather stoppable after all. You just have to nail them with one of those spinning multi-bladed thingies or enclose them in a net that crushes the life out of them, or blow them up with a convenient pocket-sized nuke. That does make for some fun video-game-style action, but it's not really a horror film anymore.
What's causing most of the trouble in my era is that the quantity of B-movies has grown so rapidly that you have to dig through a much bigger pile of crap to find the jewels these days. Also, my parents' generation didn't have any video games to which to compare mindless action flicks, and mindless action flicks were a lot harder to do in the old days anyway. Not to worry, though: I imagine that someone will eventually figure out how to make video game movies more like the game-show movies we had in the 1970s and 1980s, such as Death Race 2000, Rollerball, and The Running Man. The people who've been making video game movies so far haven't really been from the players' generation yet; let the actual players be in charge of making the movies, and maybe we'll have some higher-quality--or at least more entertaining--video game movies to watch in our old age.
Some new movies with (relatively) high budgets are allowed to be crap. Look at Alone In the Dark. Beautiful, lovely crap. But Alien vs. Predator is spawned of two of the best and most beloved franchises in all of horror/SF filmdom, plus about 15 years of comic book continuity ranging from excellent to at least interesting. I don't think it's excusable to take a previously well-handled property beloved by so many people and still possessing so much potential and turn it into a giant thundering turd.
I think you hit the nail on the head Eirik.
On the acting note, I thinkour standards foracting are much higher than they used to be. Not long ago I saw John Wayne in "Genghis Khan" on AMC. Dear Lord what poor poor acting.
I think poeple didn't mind so much when an actor just played themselves playing a part... Bogart, the Duke, Jimmy Stewart, etc. It was always "them" shining through. Personally, I think a good character actor is worth more than a dozen stars... someone who can immerse themselves into a part and you don't recognize them .
"Shall we invade the Han, Pilgrim?"
-Ed
At the risk of starting yet another AVP sideline... It was a fine movies, that I was able to see at the cheap theatre with a beer in hand. ( boy I love movie pubs). In that light it was fun, and served its purpose... so it wasn't QUITE a BAD movie on that level. Just another monster flick with some familiar "faces". For all that it didn't live up to its family roots.
I will add the disclaimer that I have seen all the movies, but I'm not a fanatic. I'll further add that my only AVP experience was 90 seconds on a coin-op game back in 1990 or so.
-Ed
That's an interesting observation. I've often wondeered the same thing about myself. I guess it stems from the fact that most of the films in the past were meant to be taken seriously.
Now days everybody is dabbling in something so most concepts and areas of expertise have been overdone. As a result, we have hack directors coming out of the woodwork trying to immitate bad films. You can't make a bad film, it just happens.