Good "bad" movies

[mikeyg27]

I have much much love for Starship Troopers but had always assumed people realised it was the most unsubtle film ever made. As Santa's alludes to, it's actually so unsubtle it seems to have swung right back around into subtle judging by the amount of people who don't get it.

[Cohaagen]

Isn't it true (or at least a really good rumour) that Verhoeven deliberately didn't tell Casper van Dien and Denise Richards that they were filming a satire, resulting in their disturbingly deadpan delivery?

They sucked their brains out...

[Viero_Berlotti]

I've always had a soft spot for Ridley Scott's Hannibal. Yes, Lecter was hammed up and turned into nothing more than a pantomime villan, but I don't think it could have worked any other way, and it was definately intended by Scott and Hopkins to play it out that way.

If you can let go of The Silence Of The Lambs and the original Manhunter and buy into the premise of Hannibal, then it's a really enjoyable bit of hokum. Let's not forget Gary Oldman's turn as the true villan of the piece, Mason Verger, which is superb as well. It's one of those films that if I'm channel surfing late at night and it's on, I'll always put the remote down and watch the rest of it no matter where it's up to.

[Puffin Chunks]

Jason X is a brilliant film.

There, I said it.

I came home one night about 5 years ago and got very stoned for the first time in a long time. I flicked the TV on and Jason X was just starting. 'I'll just watch 5 mins of this' I thought. What followed was 2 hours of the most awe-inspiring, intense sci-fi slasher horror I have ever seen. I mean... it's Jason Voorhees... in SPACE!!! He turns into UBER JASON!!! Words cannot begin to describe how completely gripped I was.

I logged onto imdb afterwards to see if anyone else had found this hidden gem only to find it rated 4/10... Admittedly I have no real interest in the Friday the 13th franchise, and have never really followed it, however I refuse to accept that it's a terrible film and that my mental state at that time influenced my enjoyment in any way. With this in mind, I have vowed never to watch it again and sully the memory of a film that I will always remember fondly.

[Rolf Harris]

I love Octaman:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7j6xhFdDxDI

I believe there's an incredibly brief clip from that film showing on a TV in Gremlins 2!

[Cerys]

I'd say that any self-taught art design auteur who imagines a universe where giant fusion-powered robot warmech robots are commonplace, yet paraplegics are restricted to wheelchairs that wouldn't stand up to a decent game of cripple murderball, has certainly dropped a futurist bollock somewhere.

Or maybe he has a better understanding of the way some governments allocate funding.

[biggytitbo]

Little known fact bit the tories were in power during the events of Avatar, the bastards!

[Mr Colossal]

I've always had a soft spot for Ridley Scott's Hannibal. Yes, Lecter was hammed up and turned into nothing more than a pantomime villan, but I don't think it could have worked any other way, and it was definately intended by Scott and Hopkins to play it out that way.

Not that its 'bad' either,  but  I really enjoyed the far-fetched revisionism and almost completely out-of-synch herr lip-fest that was hannibal rising.   Everyone was jizzing their pants over Batman Begins at the time, but I thought its 'early years' segments complete with the instantly forgetable Ra's al Ghul non-entity and crap batmobile made it a much inferior film.  It seemed to me the last two batmans seemed to spend more time establishing characters for "OMGz harvey dent is TWO-FACE!!!' moments and getting off on pure recognition than bothering with any kind of plot at all...

[biggytitbo]

Hannibal is an amusingly outlandish film, entertaining because we have a mainstream hollywood film that did really well at the box office that is genuinely quite eccentric and weird. Whereas Silence of the lambs, which is a brlliant film, is a crackerjack, straight as a die thriller, Hannibal is a sort of slightly tongue in cheek grand guignal piece of theatrical weirdness. I like it a lot, Silence is clearly 'better', but Hannibal is probably more interesting. It would have been interesting if Jody Foster had returned as Clarice though, the continuity might have had an adverse effect on it, made it seem too similar to the original. Or it may have made it less weird and more powerful, who knows?

[Cerys]

Hannibal is another one where the ending differs from the way it pans out in the novel.  The conclusion to the novel, while being much more interesting, seems a bit scrambled together; whereas the film has your bog-standard 'you had us going for a bit there' ending.

[biggytitbo]

The really good thing abut Hannibal is it doesnt forget that Silence of the Lambs is really, at its heart a kind of love story. In fact that aspect of it is actually played up  more in Hannibal.

[Ballad of Ballard Berkley]

Velvet Goldmine. Not a guilty pleasure at all, I love it and genuinely can't understand why it got so many bad reviews, Brian Molko and Ewan McGregor's accent aside. Oh, and Eddie Izzard... apart from all of that it's great.

I love it too. It's flawed in many ways, but that just makes me love it even more. I was absolutely baffled by all the terrible reviews it received upon its initial release, as I thought it was one of the finest movie evocations of a particular musical spirit I had ever seen. Still do.

Apart from Chris "Glam 4Eva" Roberts in Uncut, pretty much every other critic hated it, or they affected to at least. Not that all film critics are connected by an intercommunicative hive mind, but I can only assume it was one of those films which, for whatever reason*, was deemed to be a turkey by default, so everyone followed suit in tearing it an undeserved new one.

There are lots of things I love about it, but I honestly think that final shot, as the camera floats forlornly through a crowded modern-day bar, finally settling on Roxy's 2HB playing gently on a transistor radio , but with no one paying attention, is one of the most touching and memorable moments in all of rock cinema.

Ewan McGregor leaping over a wall of flames, flapping todger and all, lingers in the mind also.

_{* Was a fairly off-the-wall and impressionistic ode to Glam Rock not the sort of British rock movie critics wanted or expected at the tail-end of the Britpop era? Was it considered too gay, too sentimental and too outlandish? If so, does that make the majority of British film critics in the late 90's a bunch of boorish, point-missing cunts? Discuss.}
 

[Santa's Boyfriend]

Jason X is a brilliant film.

You're thinking of Malcom X.

[SavageHedgehog]

His struggle on behalf of all half-zombie machete owners won my heart and owned my soul

[biggytitbo]

I liked 'The Happening' a lot. The scenes of people killing themselves were horryfing and uncanny in a way most horror films actually aren't. Very powerful film I thought and I liked the fact that humanities reaction to a terrible event is confusion and introspection rather than panic and hysteria.

[clingfilm portent]

Edited version of my strongest candidates for cheesiest film ever, Cyborg Cop II, and bunged on YouTube in three parts. Here's the first http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwyPMoc1AUo

[SavageHedgehog]

I remember enjoying The Happening but mostly because I was laughing a lot. Then again I believe Shyamalan claimed it was meant to be "campy"... it was certainly preferable to Lady in the Water anyway.

I'm interested in The Last Airbender because I think a director trying desperately to restore his commercial and critical clout by adapting some psuedo-anime Nickelodeon cartoon is  a really stupid idea. The kind of really stupid idea I can get behind. However, word is it's not just crap but boring too.

[Ginyard]

I believe there's an incredibly brief clip from that film showing on a TV in Gremlins 2!

Another great bad movie :)

I know this is a serious films that are bad but good thread, but I don't know where else to stick this comedy so its going here.

The Sherrif and the satellite kid (although the italian version translates roughly as 'The Sherrif and the little Extraterrestrial')

This is a fucking brilliant very bad film, not least because of the endless and shite fx, and wonderful fight scenes with music that just digs deep into the soul. Its basically about a policeman who happens across an alien kid with this gadget that can manipulate all sorts of things, from jamming guns to reversing time. Unfortunately, this vulcan magic tambourine, or whatever the fuck it is, just looks like something ripped off the base of a Hasbro Star Wars toy. The dynamic duo spend time talking about frying beans and then he demonstrates to this kid how well he can kick the shit out of Joe Bugner, among many other people.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMJbJD2-Z5s&feature=related

I saw an interview with Bugner years later on Aussie tv and he said that they all expected this to be a bit of an international hit, so they must have thought it was a decent film when they made it.

[Phil_A]

My best mate and I have an ongoing contest to see who can find the "best" bad film for the least amount of money, so I've collected quite a few of these. My greatest car boot find so far is Creatures From The Abyss(aka Plankton) which is a (possibly) Italian horror/comedy about a group of teens who get lost at sea, and stumble on a deserted boat which seems to be a cross between a floating marine lab and a brothel for pervy scientists. I'm not actually sure how much of the comedy is intentional(or whether the actors dubbing the voices were just taking the piss the whole time), but it is hilariously strange nonetheless. It was supposedly released in 1994, although judging by the hair, special effects and music I suspect it was made much, much earlier.

Watch the amazing bit near the end of this scene where our hero Mike goes mental on some dead fish.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52qicHMNvm4

Oh, and this was the actual DVD cover it was released with in the States. Incredible.

[Ginyard]

Haha, love that last bit when he's prodding that dead fish with what looks like a klingon golf club.

[Nelson Swillie]

Death Wish 2 which, although it loses points for that truly sickening gang rape (which is still funny in parts if you only look at the actor's contorted orgasm faces)

This is a really, really tricky one for me. I had fairly broad-minded parents as a kid and they thought nothing of letting me watch insane crap like Zombie Flesh Eaters or Night of the Demon, or even Robert Ginty feeding a Mafia kingpin into a giant mincing machine in the Exterminator, but they applied their own kind of censorship with DWII, when it was originally released on video in its full, nasty, uncut form. As soon as the hoods broke into Bronson's apartment, they ordered me out of the room, saying "We'll call you when you can come back in". I was nine at the time. When they decided I could come back in, Bronson was identifying his daughter's corpse in the morgue. The maid had disappeared. So he seemed to go on his vigilante spree for no reason.

Being a curious (some would say too curious) type of kid, I crept downstairs really early the next morning while my parents were still in bed and spooled the tape forward to the forbidden footage. While I can see now that it's really poorly acted and shot in an over-enthusiastic, exploitative manner that suggests a porno 'roughie' rather than a mainstream studio film, as a nine year old it shocked the absolute living shit out of me. I hope I'm not embellishing this particular hazy memory, but I'm sure there was a brief shot where you see the maid is bleeding from her vagina. It's tough. The subsequent rape of Bronson's traumatized, mute daughter is also pretty hard to take, but the scene with the maid was so sweaty, uncomfortable and salacious, it sent me off to school that morning feeling shell-shocked.

I saw the scene again (playing on a monitor in James Ferman's office) in the 1991 Ch4 documentary Sex and the Censors (along with the 'boner scene' from Jarman's Sebastiane and some eyeball-slashing from Fulci's The New York Ripper) and it still hit me as a harrowing piece of work. In recent years, I've tried to take a detached view of it, as in "it's only a film, the overacting kills it, it's all laughably over the top", yadda yadda yadda, but the fact that we're watching a sexual assault - albeit a dramatized one - just sucks all the fun out of the room. It's like that greasy seventies exploitation flick Carnal Madness, which unbelievably plays its rape and molestation scenes for laughs, complete with parping Benny Hill-style music. The sleazy, no-budget, piss-alley atmosphere makes it even harder to take.

According to the IMDB..."The original UK cinema and video versions were extensively cut by BBFC head James Ferman (to the fury of Michael Winner). 3 minutes 42 seconds were removed from the rape of Rosario the housemaid and a minor edit was made to the rape of Carol by Cutter. Although 19 secs of cuts were reinstated for the 2005 DVD release (the R-rated US release was submitted) the film was then cut again in 2006, losing a further 27 seconds of 'sexual and sexualized violence'".

http://www.cinemaretro.com/index.php?/archives/271-EXCLUSIVE-INTERVIEWS-THE-WOMEN-OF-DEATH-WISH-II.html

[Marty McFly]

Death Wish 4 is on telly tonight!

Death Wish 4: the Crackdown
Film
1 star

Tuesday 27 July
10:00pm - 12:10am
ITV4

Crusading vigilante architect Charles Bronson cleans up three crack-dealing LA syndicates after one causes the death of his girlfriend's (Kay Lenz) daughter in this shoddily staged sequel. J Lee Thompson takes over the directing ropes from Michael Winner and incredibly does an even lousier job marshalling the brain-damaged plot, inane dialogue and abruptly senseless violence. Awful.

Sounds like they're all big fans

[Nelson Swillie]

I did TRY to watch Death Wish 4. Ten minutes in, the tape broke. It was like a blessed release.

Bronson made a couple of memorably sleazy films in the 80s, Ten To Midnight (1983) and the Evil That Men Do (1984). Both entertaining in a morbid, exploitative way.

[Epic Bisto]

DWII, when it was originally released on video in its full, nasty, uncut form

I thought the original video wasn't uncut. From reading stuff like 'See No Evil' I assumed that although some companies were more than happy to release uncut prints, others went into panic mode and removed scenes randomly. It is a horrible film, though - the only one out of the DW bunch I don't want to return to.

As for DW4, I thought it was fun. Not a masterpiece, but enjoyable in a 'psychopath-turns-yiddish James Bond' way. Also, have you read "Bronson's Loose", the book about the Death Wish saga? It's a great book, although Brian Garfield does sound quite up himself.

[The Boston Crab]

First: I'm not a fan of 'nasties' or any realistic representations of violence or suffering. I saw Saving Private Ryan the other day and found the opening scenes really rather bleak and quite nauseating at times. Very powerful.

That said, and this is no idle brag: I didn't find the rape scenes in Death Wish II even slightly disturbing. The ridiculous faces, honking noises and exaggerated physical movements ruined the excellent work the actress was putting in. I ended up finding it daft, though I didn't laugh. The second rape, where the girl was silent and passive was a little bit uncomfortable because of the mental health issues but didn't really shock me. Good acting, again, from the rapee.

Death Wish 3: What a film. The point-blank rocket-launcher clinched it for me, though it was pretty much joyful abandon from start to finish. Many thanks again for that fabulous review which prompted me to watch this glorious shit.

[biggytitbo]

Death Wish 3 is on tonight at 10 on ITV4!

[biggytitbo]

40 minutes in and I concur, this is absolutely awesome! Even though its completly ludicrous I still know I'm going to be cheering when he offs these punks,

[biggytitbo]

How come the main villain in this is Paul Bettany?

[tygerbug]

Voyage of the Rock Aliens. Pia Zadora in a vanity 80s musical. I've uploaded it to Youtube as it's great.

Starcrash. Caroline Munro!

Yor, Hunter from the Future. Reb Brown!

[Tommy Trumpet]

If the storyline was anything other than fairly formulaic then it just wouldn't have worked.  It's so close to the thing it's attacking that many people simply don't realise the whole thing is a parody.  Much of it is laugh out loud funny, other bits are just disturbing in what it's saying.   

I was really expecting to like Starship Troopers but I didn't think it was funny enough to be enjoyable as a parody, I found it was mostly pretty boring. I'd get more laughs out of watching an actual bad film like Armageddon.