Films you truly consider 'so bad they're good'

[Sebastian Cobb]

But that's comparing it to possibly the greatest SBIG movie of all time!
Hollywood Cop is so badly made that there's something to 'enjoy' in every scene.

Starting to see a pattern form here with films titled '<noun> Cop'.

[Famous Mortimer]

But that's comparing it to possibly the greatest SBIG movie of all time!

It's comparing two movies made by the same director, is all. Further Shervan - "Killing American Style" has fewer funny scenes than either of the "Cop" classics, and "Young Rebels" is almost good. Almost.

[Big Mclargehuge]

The obvious ones are always firm winners (The Room, Birdemic, Troll 2, Ssssss, Caligula)

But i've found some absolute corkers over the last few months thanks to Lockdown:

Nutbag - an alt-right fever dream of a movie made by a director who was clearly an edgelord in the making

Zambo: King of the Jungle - Effectively Itallian "Tarzan" hamtastic and packs a decent wallop on the bad movie front

The Gingerdead man 2 - The first is slow and pointless, the third is aggressively unlikeable. the 2nd one hits the sweet spot of being cheap/nasty/AWFUL trash. but in a way thats bizarrely tolerable

The Films of Mark Pirro - Just...pretty much any of his stuff up to about the turn of the millenium "Deathrow Gameshow", "Curse of the Queerwolf", "Nudist Colony of the dead" all wonderfully demented trash cinema.

The films of Rick Sloane - Hobgoblins, Blood Theatre, The Visitants. take your pick they're utterly jawdropping. personally I steer clear of his "Vice Academy" movies (Not my cup of tea) and his sequel to hobgoblins is unwatchable. but his early films? Great stuff!

[DrGreggles]

It's comparing two movies made by the same director, is all. Further Shervan - "Killing American Style" has fewer funny scenes than either of the "Cop" classics, and "Young Rebels" is almost good. Almost.

Didn't enjoy Killing American Style at all. Still rotten, but not really in a funny way.

I will seek out Young Rebels though.

[Egyptian Feast]

Nutbag - an alt-right fever dream of a movie made by a director who was clearly an edgelord in the making

Never saw this, but the director's later film Murder Set Pieces is fucking atrocious. Astonishingly shit serial killer porn, which isn't incompetent enough to be remotely amusing, despite the lead actor's McBain accent. Only recommended for those who enjoy watching strippers' implants covered with corn syrup and 9/11 camcorder footage from an unfamiliar angle inserted halfway through a film for no reason whatsoever.

[Famous Mortimer]

The Films of Mark Pirro - Just...pretty much any of his stuff up to about the turn of the millenium "Deathrow Gameshow", "Curse of the Queerwolf", "Nudist Colony of the dead" all wonderfully demented trash cinema.

Only seen "Nudist Colony Of The Dead", but it's a belter. Another enthusiastic recommendation from me.

The films of Rick Sloane - Hobgoblins, Blood Theatre, The Visitants. take your pick they're utterly jawdropping. personally I steer clear of his "Vice Academy" movies (Not my cup of tea) and his sequel to hobgoblins is unwatchable. but his early films? Great stuff!

I didn't really care for Hobgoblins because it was made bad on purpose (he made it with the express purpose of getting on MST3K, if memory serves). And the Vice Academy movies are shocking. But I've not seen any of the others, so I might go hunting.

[gmoney]

I've been watching a bad/flawed film every week with some friends over Skype since the pandemic began. We had been due to go to a screening of Showgirls togther last March, which was obviously cancelled so we did it remotely instead. We've had a few films that were commercial flops or critical failures that I really enjoyed. Mommie Dearest was probably my favourite, followed by Village People musical Can't Stop The Music.

[AsparagusTrevor]

Never saw this, but the director's later film Murder Set Pieces is fucking atrocious. Astonishingly shit serial killer porn, which isn't incompetent enough to be remotely amusing, despite the lead actor's McBain accent. Only recommended for those who enjoy watching strippers' implants covered with corn syrup and 9/11 camcorder footage from an unfamiliar angle inserted halfway through a film for no reason whatsoever.

Awful film, with the stuff like Jack The Ripper quote, killing children and the aforementioned 9/11 footage chucked in as if to shout "wow, we're so edgy". Also, the lead looks like a muscular Mark Kermode.

[Sonny_Jim]

Looks like we might be getting a sequel to the cliffhanger ending of 'Fight of Fury' by Shuny Bee:

https://twitter.com/BeeShuny/status/1644543692550832128

Legit excited, best bad movie I've seen in a long time.

[Dr Rock]

Twilight franchise

Showgirls (but Verheoven knew he was making a 'bad' movie)

[Famous Mortimer]

There's a third Birdemic movie, I just discovered.

[Rizla]

On the original theme, Olympus Has Fallen is fucking hilarious. Koreans torturing American politicians singing The Star Spangled Boner. I've not seen any Red Dawn but it all seems lovely.

Oh man. I watched all 3 of these things the other night and they are incredible. Slow motion shots of the 'mrcn flag riddled with bulletholes fluttering slowly to the ground wth sad choir music. The London one fucking rocks, bearskin hatted palace guards with uzis and whatnot. The Scottish SAS guy had me in tears.
I'm thirsty as fuck

[riotinlagos]

Gonna watch this tonight, I have high hopes. Someone uploaded it to archive.org

[NoSleep]

This thread has just reminded me to look for a recent film by John Schneider (Dukes of Hazzard, Smallville) called "To Die For". Schneider has gone full MAGA, which, combined with the zero budget for the film, promises to be worth a look.

Rm Brown explains:

I love how they couldn't find anyone stocky enough to play a jock, so went with someone who's physically not intimidating at all (especially stood next to Schneider); "He'll have to do."

Ah, while I'm there, he also found another one by Kevin Sorbo (the Hercules TV series, Andromeda) who's a full-on christian conservative these days:

[Roxy Robinson]

Citizen Kane

[Average Comedy Enjoyer]

San Andreas (2015).

Gardaland, the Italian themepark, currently has a 4D cinema which exclusively shows a ten minute section of this film. Two hundred people every twenty minutes, wandering into a giant IMAX screen, recieving their 3D glasses and then filing out again underwhelmed. The best thing I can say for it is there's air-conditioning

[Mr Farenheit]

Death Wish 3
Class of 1984
These keep the interest all the way through, I think a lot of 'so bad they're good' films can quickly run out of gas.
A couple I remember enjoying in my teens, that I suspect might not stand up on a rewatch
The Car (1977) about a possessed car
Trapped (1973) a guy is somehow trapped overnight in a department store patrolled not by security guards but by dobermans- great idea that, let dogs run around your shop knocking over displays and shitting and pissing everywhere.

The Room was really uncanny, I don't know what's like that apart from Derek.

[Dr Rock]

An excellent examination of Showgirls by the excellent James Somerton

[NoSleep]

A couple I remember enjoying in my teens, that I suspect might not stand up on a rewatch
The Car (1977) about a possessed car

I need to rewatch this as I also remember enjoying it when I saw it late 70's/early 80's. Not sure if it's a possessed car, but you never see who's driving it, so it bears a similarity to Spielberg's early (made for TV) film about a guy being stalked by an evil truck (driver?), Duel (1971).

[lazyhour]

Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf is one of my favourite crap films.  It's just packed with memorable moments, from Christopher Lee blending in with the gothy punks by popping on some dope-ass shades, to the Werewolf Queen getting her boobs out for no reason - which also leads to one of the greatest end-credits sequences I've ever seen, but I don't want to spoil it for those who haven't watched it.

Other great things that spring to mind:

C Lee looking uncomfortable in the back seat of a car that's clearly too small to be appropriate. His knees are practically by his ears!

The strange local guide who obviously can't speak English and appears to answer "yes" to a question that surely called for a "no", but the scene continues regardless.

The creepy foot movements that the werewolves do that remind me of Harry Hill's impression of a horse.

Marvelous film. No continuity whatsoever with the first Howling either.

[dontpaintyourteeth]

fuck yeah. it's also got that class song the goth nobodies sing. and one of the best alternative titles ever "stirba werewolf bitch"

[Egyptian Feast]

Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf

Other great things that spring to mind:

I loved this but remember fuck all about it other than the incredible end credit sequence and an exchange between the hero and his love interest after she's spoken to Christopher Lee in a graveyard, which goes something like:

"What did he say?"
"He said your sister was a Werewolf."
"Aww bullshit!"

[Bad Ambassador]

I need to rewatch this as I also remember enjoying it when I saw it late 70's/early 80's. Not sure if it's a possessed car, but you never see who's driving it, so it bears a similarity to Spielberg's early (made for TV) film about a guy being stalked by an evil truck (driver?), Duel (1971).

The Car is fucking great. It's Jaws, but if it was a car instead of a shark. The end suggests it was actually the devil in car form, and the end credits run over extreme close-ups of the car driving around LA, as if the prelude to a sequel. Top stuff.

[Ant Farm Keyboard]

If you want something appropriate today and have Prime Video, check out Black Easter, aka Assassin 33 A.D.

It's about a group of scientists who accidentally create a time machine. It's immediately used by the man who funds them to deploy a bunch of assassins, most of them Islamist terrorists, just before the Crucifixion, so they kill Jesus with an assault rifle before his martyrdom, preventing Christianity from existing in the first place. The scientists then try to thwart their efforts, which involves a lot of time paradoxes. It's racist, incoherent, preposterous, and it has plastic reality star turned Evangelical-favourite Heidi Montag playing a British character.

https://holapapi.substack.com/p/the-christian-film-where-they-shoot

[magister]

Samurai Cop is just absolutely hilarious.

https://youtu.be/Fvni9KbZfoo

I has to stop watching it one evening during the sped up fight sequence cos I was hurting from laughing so much.

The best thing about Samurai Cop is the lead's hair. He went off the shoot something else and had his mullet cut off. When he was called back for reshoots, the director gave him a wig to wear that had been stolen from a shop window dummy.

[Ant Farm Keyboard]

The actor cut his hair after he assumed that shooting was over, hoping he could get more parts with this look (he didn't). Except that the director called him nine months later for reshoots. When he discovered the short hair, the director bought a woman's wig at a shop.

Amir Shervan actually kept the shot during the fight where the wig falls off and Nakamura helps putting it back in place.

[Famous Mortimer]

Nakamura

Okamura

Samurai Cop is a goddamned delight. I like how he flirts with Melissa Moore, as she's flying a helicopter, some unspecified distance above his head, by just talking in his normal voice. Or the facial expressions from Mark Frazer. Or the way the guy on fire looks around waiting to be put out.

Do not under any circumstances watch the sequel, though. Sneering fuckwits thinking they're above trash cinema, but managing to make something far duller than anything Amir Shervan ever did.

[Catalogue Trousers]

Marvelous film. No continuity whatsoever with the first Howling either.

There is a little continuity with the first film, in that the first werewolf to be killed is apparently the Dee Wallace Stone character from that first film, despite looking nothing like her or the werewolf that she turned into.

But other than that, yeah, nothing. Also has one of the most pointless attempts at a final scene fake-out that I've ever seen.

Love it.

[Ant Farm Keyboard]

Okamura

At least, I didn't call him Fuji... Fujiyama.

If you love Amir Shervan, check another Iranian expatriate, John S. Rad. He worked with the same director of photography, with even less budget,  and had the same misguided ambitions to deliver some mainstream blockbuster full of action. He needed 20 years to complete his only film, Dangerous Men, which was unavailable on video until a few years ago, and it's... something. The issue is not so much the continuity between shots or the dialog, as in the worst/best of Shervan, but the fact that he only had something like 50 minutes of footage in the eighties before his lead actress for a rape and revenge victim turned serial killer story broke her leg and quit. So, in the mid 90s, he used a totally different cast, with a barely related plot to fill a few gaps, and still needed to use a third set of characters to finish the story.

Which means that the narration is about as haphazard as the "two-in-one" ninja movies from the eighties starring Richard Harrison and directed by Godfrey Ho, like Ninja Terminator or Ninja Exterminator. These movies were put together by slicing entire sequences from older Taiwanese, Korean or Thai Z-movies, redubbing them with entirely new lines and integrating them as a subplot that an associate of the hero must complete, with telephone scenes with Harrison (hence the ubiquitous Garfield phone) giving the illusion that he's calling some friend to check on the advancement of the plan, while the footage is totally unrelated.
Here, Rad had to make his own "two-in-one", and let's just say that it shows, especially with the decade-long gap that caused clothes, cars, haircuts to be totally different.
Rad was also a musician, and performed the entire score on some awfully dated synth, which adds to the charm of the whole thing.

[Famous Mortimer]

Dangerous Men is magnificent, and perfectly qualifies for this thread.