Have you got one? Something that just makes you cringe, but every time you find it on TV you drop whatever you’re doing and watch the whole thing? Tell us! It can be something MST3k/RT/CT has done or it can be something else. Spill!
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Weekend Discussion Thread: Which Are the Truly Great Bad Movies?If you’re reading this blog, then I assume that you are into bad movies as much as I am. I got into a discussion the other day about one that is very close to my heart: 1987’s “Masters of the Universe.” It came up because apparently a remake is in the works. :::sigh::: How can you possibly improve on a movie that rivals “Road House” as the best bad movie ever made? I mean that cast! (Dolph Lundgren, Frank Langella, Meg Foster, Billy Barty, a so-young-she’s-positvely-dewy Courteney Cox, Jon Cypher, James Tolkan, Christina Pickles, the list goes on and on) and scene after incredibly riffable scene of nonsense played (almost) completely straight. It’s a guity pleasure and my nominee for a list of the truly great bad movies.
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Curse of the Crimson Altar. Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee, Barbara Steele, and the goofiest satanic ritual scenes ever put to film.
Agree w/Masters Of The Universe, very fun movie. I’m gonna say Howard The Duck (Lea Thompson and the principal from Ferris Bueller whose name I can never remember)-I loved the comic as a kid, and the movie definitely failed, but did so spectacularly. Also always love watchin’ me some Xanadu and Buckaroo Banzai. And The Pirate Movie. I could go on and on….
Wow, just ONE!
1. Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster
2. The Head
3. Let’s Scare Jessica to Death
4. The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave
5. Sasquatch
I’m sure I can come up with 4-5 more!!
The Last Dinosaur and The Karate Kid 3. Just the most fantastic, awful movies I’ve ever seen. Rifftrax worked their magic on KK3, and I’m really surprised MST3K never got their hands on LD. Maybe Rifftrax will hear my begging!
Billy Jack. Bad acting, worse plot, but every time I stumble across it I HAVE to watch it.
I can think of a bunch of them like The Astounding She-Monster or Frankenstein’s Daughter,but this movie,which I only discovered a couple of years ago,is R.O.T.O.R..Here are a couple of reviews:http://www.jabootu.com/rotor.htm http://dante001.tripod.com/QZ/rotor.htm But,there’s also another movie called Jaws of Satan starring a young Christina Applegate..http://themoviebros.com/2011/02/20/jaws-of-satan/ Enjoy!!
Leaving out the cringing, because none of the great bad movies I like make me do that as I’m too busy enjoying them for what they are. Here’s a couple.
Brain Smasher: A Love Story, Andrew “Dice” Clay as a bouncer protecting a model(Terri Hatcher) from evil Chinese monks seeking a flower that will give them ultimate power.
Zone Troopers, American soldiers in Italy in 1944 team up with some aliens to whup Nazi keisters. Now a MOD DVD from Amazon, yay!
Cabin Boy. It might be cheating a little because it was a bad movie that was made to be a bad movie, but unlike pretty much every other movie made that way it’s actually awesome instead of just terrible. Chris Elliot, Andy Richter, and a bunch of grizzled character actors stuck on a fake boat in a fake ocean, plus a half man/half shark, a giant who works at an office supply store, and a giant talking cupcake that spits tobacco.
My choice is more obvious, I’m afraid, but I ADORE Bride of the Monster. It’s bad (but obviously GOOD by Ed Wood standards), and watching it (riffed or not) never fails to make me happy. And it’s got Bela, Tor, and pencils that appear and disappear.
The trouble with picking Masters of the Universe is that it’s
fun to watch. Such an experiment doesn’t really hurt a whole lot.
Generally sequels (or even more (thirdalls?)) tend to be baaaad.
For thirds there’s Godfather III, Alien Resurrection (4 was just
goofy), the second and third of Peter Jackson’s LoTR movies (TTT and
RotK—because of his botching the characters and silly “improvements”
on the book).
Then there are baaaad remakes like The Flight of the Phoenix,
Alfie, Arthur, The Italian Job, etc.
Oh course there are good, worthwhile remakes:
Out of the Past/Against All Odds
The Birdcage
Yojimbo/A Fistful of Dollars
Over the Top and Cobra.
Don’t forget the King (Cobra) of 70’s horror…SSSSSS! Snakeman freaked me out when i was a kid. Watched it with my kids now and we laughed the whole time, trying our best to RIFF it.
Another bad (re unfunny) was the pointless remake of
The In-Laws. Just no chemistry compared to Peter Falk
and Alan Arkin.
Frankenstein Unbound with Raul Julia- don’t know why CT or rifftrax don’t take this later Corman cheese on.
@ #11- MICHAEL!!!!!!
Samurai Cop. The lead character’s hairstyle changes in closeup shots, the dialog is stunning in its clunky stupidity, the fight scenes are impressively dull, AND it’s got Robert Z’Dar. It’s beautifully, watchably bad.
I also love the very inept Birdemic. Never laughed harder at a non-MSTied movie than I did when the clip-art birds attacked.
Also the 70’s movie version of Tommy…..wow, I just heard Jack Nicholson sing. I used to hang out with a disabled fella from our church when I was a teen while his wife would run errands, and he introduced me to Night Of The Lepus…god, we howled. They just couldn’t make those rabbits look scary, no matter what they did.
Okay, I’m back, and I’m thinking more closely about Sampo’s diction, and I’m going to add KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park. I was actually a pretty huge KISS fan growing up, and I was in junior high when that movie aired. Well, I thought it sucked HUGELY then, and that was right around the time when I was starting to re-think some of my musical tastes. (I was getting into The Ramones at that time, and jazz was just around the corner, so things were beginning to look up.) The thing about it, though, is that if I were to turn on the television today and discover that KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park were on–I’d sit down and watch the whole thing! I’d laugh at it, and I WOULD cringe (mostly, but not exclusively, at my tastes then), but I’d watch it, and I’m sure I would ENJOY IT (in a very complicated kind of way). And I would even revisit those days when I thought KISS was the coolest band ever. :-)
The Fifth Element.
Not sure if Rifftrax has done this but Jaws 3 was so incredibly bad it was funny. I remember a scene were the shark went through a plate glass window and into a control room. Just so absurd it has to be seen to be believed.
Arena
Steele Justice
Anaconda
Pretty much any straight to Sci-Fi movie
Grunt..the Wrestling Movie
Cannonball Run (any of them…)
Professor Gunther nailed Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park
Robot Jox(when your sports motto is “Crash and Burn” it’s strikes me as a future version of Sidehacking.)
The Wratih
SolarBabies
Cool As Ice (Vanilla Ice……acts???)
Ants or Kingdom of the Spiders or any ABC Friday Night Movie that had animals rebelling against what humans were doing.
There was a movie that was so popular in LA (when I was growing up) that it ran all the time. It was called “Voyage into Space” and it was actually four episodes of the “Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot,” edited together. It was FABULOUSLY BAD!
Any thing with Jacinto Molina (aka Paul Naschy) in it–with one reservation. I prefer my Naschy movies from the prints that were shown on TV. I don’t need nudity. My philosopy for bad movies is, if I can’t watch it with my kids, I’m not interested in watching it, either.
One exception to that rule and the last movie I want to bring up. “Night of the Living Dead.” Definitely not a kid-friendly movie, but I never miss it when it comes on. I was never crazy about the rest of Romero’s movies, but “Night of the Living Dead” is top notch bad movie making!
And the remake isn’t nearly as good. Stick with the original!
Klisch, I agree on Jaws 3D. I actually have a copy of that in 3D. Not easy to find. But it is great Bad/Good movie watching.
Well, much as i love 50’s Sci-Fi B-films, the ones i rewatched the most in the last few years were musicals: From Justin to Kelly and the Spice Girls movie. FJTK is just an old-fashioned beach movie, and the SGM is all tongue in cheek.
The other bad movies i enjoyed the most were the Andy Sidaris films, all very NSFW over the top 80’s B-movies. There’s about 12 and they’re lots of fun.
Flash Gordon. Plot makes no sense, no known actors except for the James Bond guy, and lead dialog. Oh, yeah, what is hands-down Queen’s worst music ever, which is really saying something. But I find myself tuning it in if I find it while channel surfing.
Burn, Hollywood, Burn and Blubberella.
Great topic! I can see I have a few movies to track down and watch now!
I have to go with Mac and Me. Terrible story, terrible acting, awesomely bad puppets…I’m sure everyone has seen clips but you must experience the whole thing! Also Yor:The Hunter from the Future. I own it on VHS and DVD, and it often quenchs that bad movie urge I get from time to time. Beware: once you seen Reb Brown dressed as a caveman, you can’t un-see it. Loincloth-McLarge-Huge!
No mention of Red Sonja yet? Brigitte Nielsen and Ahnold as I’m not Conan (but I’m kinda Conan)!
@#7–
Just got my copy of Zone Troopers from Amazon. Amesomely bad. Also pretty much the same main cast as Trancers…minus Helen Hunt, of course.
saherrin-wow, thanks for the reminder on Robot Jox! I watched that with some friends when it first emerged on video and god was it entertaining, just not in the way the filmmakers probably intended. Also thank you for mentioning The Wraith. I don’t know why, but I used to get sucked into that one every time it would run on TBS or USA or TNT or whatever channel used to show it constantly…there’s just something hypnotic about that one, I think.
Is GAMERA: SUPER MONSTER the one they made by editing old footage from the previous Gamera movies together and tossing in a lonely kid who hangs out at the pet shop and plays the electric organ, plus ineffectual lady superheroes from outer space (“Transform to Earthwomen!” SHOOH, SHOOH, SHOOH!”)?
And I would KILL to get cheap DVD releases of K. Gordon Murray’s kiddie matinee fairy tale movies like PUSS IN BOOTS, TOM THUMB, and LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD AND THE MONSTERS, maybe as a box set.
On the opposite extreme, there’s Mae West’s last movie SEXTETTE, which seems to be going out of its way to not make sense. Mae (who’s around ninety here) and poor, poor Timothy Dalton as newlyweds singing ‘Love Will Keep Us Together’ is one of those things you can see countless times and still not quite believe your eyes.
For volume, however, there’s THE LOST CITY, which may very well be the most deranged serial ever made. It plays like the fevered dream of a sexually repressed Gay twelve year old comic book / steampunk nerd. I’d try to describe the plot but there isn’t any; just really weird cliched characters running around jungles and high tech art deco castles. It makes THE PHANTOM EMPIRE seem reasonable.
How’s that?
doug (#25): I was gonna recommend the 1980 Flash Gordon, too, but I have to disagree with you – there were far more name actors in it than just Timothy Dalton. Brian Blessed, Max von Sydow and Richard O’Brian should all be very familiar to folks on this board.
And as for the Queen tunes, I prefer the Flash soundtrack to the stuff they did for Highlander…
How about comic book movies like THE SPIRIT or JONAH HEX….or even worse than that, (shudder) Nick Cage’s GHOST RIDER films…..I won’t even go into BATMAN AND ROBIN….that’s too horrible for words.
Oh, sorry…I though we were talking about films I would not touch with a ten foot pole….In that case, I would have to say HOWARD THE DUCK…It is one of my guilty pleasure films…and I prefer it to GHOST RIDER, Ang lee’s HULK, and DAREDEVIL combined.
For other good “bad” movies, I nominate:
Superman III
Superman IV
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
Any Toxic Avenger film (including the short lived Saturday morning cartoon)
The early ’90s, straight to video version of Captain America
House of Dark Shadows
Just about any sword and sorcery movie
Hell Comes to Frogtown
The Lost Boys (mostly for the music…)
and, well, The Goonies, which few would consider a cringe-worthy movie, but it has that wierd childhood nostalgia thing makes in compulsory viewing for me.
Our number one film in this genre is “The Brainiac”. One of the goofiest monsters ever committed to celluloid. We were so happy when Rifftrax came out with it. (BTW, Rifftrax; Keep ’em coming!). It is your basic sorcerer / demon pledges to come back in 300 years to wreck revenge on the descendents of the people who put him to death. But, with a Mexican spin on it. And then the K. Gordon Murray dubbing on top of it. A must see. Too bad we have to wait another four months, or so, to come to it on our rotation.
The next one is “The Giant Claw”. Watchable just for another of the goofiest monsters ever.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you “The Apple” — a movie of such staggering awfulness that your only response is to watch the whole darn thing with your mouth hanging open. And, folks, that’s a good thing, a very good thing!!!!
Really can’t just pick one…
Undefeatable
Rad
Halloween III: Season of the Witch
Death Wish 3
Iron Eagle
Jaws 3D
Mr. Nanny
Stone Cold
American Ninja
The Wizard
The Delta Force
Ice Spiders
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze
For a little taste of “The Apple,” go here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BY9cvgrP1c It really doesn’t do it justice, though.
If we can do animated movies, I have a bit of fondness for Don Bluth’s “Rock-a-Doodle”. Now that one is just one insane film.
Granted, most of the film is a sick kid’s fever dream, so…
I have put in a vote for one of my favorites, the 1970s killer bee epic The Swarm. A cast packed to the gills with Oscar nominees and winners, written by an award-winning screenwriter, shot on a big budget…and it is staggeringly inept. It fails even at the level of individual shots and sentences. As a result it is hilarious. I’d love to see it riffed but I’ll watch it any time without it.
I’ll go along with “Tommy,” which has some wonderful moments, but it also has Oliver Reed’s singing (which is ten times worse than Jack Nicholson’s–apparently Reed had to record his dialogue in short snippets because he couldn’t stay on key long enough. Shudder). Still, I watch it occasionally, if only to remind myself what a wasted opportunity it was.
But the one bad movie I really liked was 1975’s “Bug,” from Jeannot Szwarc (the man who gave us “Code Name: Diamond Head”). It’s a goofy sci-fi film about an earthquake that releases hundreds of fire-spewing cockroaches into a small California desert town. It’s a pretty good critter flick until about halfway through, when the protagonist’s wife gets flamed by one of the suckers, and the guy goes unhinged and breeds them–and they develop super-intelligence (including the ability to arrange themselves on the wall to spell out words). It’s a movie MST should have done, but probably couldn’t get the rights to. Anyway, I saw it about 10 times when it used to run in rotation on late-night TV–along with “SSSSSSSSS” mentioned earlier (which also gets my vote). Both are mind-numbingly stupid and yet compellingly watchable at the same time (seeing a bunch of intelligent cockroaches writing threatening messages with their bodies has to be seen to be believed).
I’ll second “The Swarm.” It’s available on instant streaming at Netflix and after reading about it in the Razzie Movie Guide and just had to see it. It more than lives down to its reputation as truly, truly awful.
I’d also mention TROG, with “Mommie Dearest” herself, Joan Crawford playing an anthropologist who discovers a pre-historic apeman living in a cave in the rurals of 1970’s England. Horrible “ape” costuming, a ridiculous over-the-top performance from Michael Gough as the fire-and-brimstone religious zealot who is the movie’s bad guy, and a 30-minute long filler scene in which we watch a “history of mankind” film Crawford’s character is showing to OTHER CHARACTERS IN THE MOVIE all add up to one atrociously unforgettable piece of cinematic crap.
The Exorcist II
The Wild Wild West
@ 39 – Good call – “The Apple” is hilarious!
My first pick is “Hausu” (aka “House”), a 70’s coming-of-age-horror-comedy-fantasy from Japan. Watch the trailer & tell me this doesn’t seem like it was beamed to Earth by aliens who thought they knew how to make Earthling entertainment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN0HVJ5tkIM
My second pick is “Southland Tales”. I’ve been absolutely fascinated with it since I first saw it. It’s got interesting scenes & ideas mingling with SyFy Channel movie-caliber scenes & ideas. The casting decisions are bizarre. And it doesn’t make a damn bit of sense the first time you watch it. If you love ambitious disasters where it’s obvious the writer / director was never told “no” (Richard Kelly had a lot of cred from “Donnie Darko” that he subsequently peed down his leg with this movie & the far less fun “The Box”), you are in for a treat!
Blue Sunshine. Don’t eat the blue acid!
Satan’s Cheerleaders
@7, 29 – Now, y’see, I actually sorta liked Zone Troopers because of its Charles Band-repertory resemblance to Trancers–But then, you have to take Re-Animator-era pre-Full Moon Band as its own acquired taste. (Which doesn’t include Robot Holocaust, thankfully.)
I’m not one of those danged new Sci-Fi kids, so I don’t “punish” movies for being bad; I’m just merely annoyed at the ones that are (like MotU forgetting to get the cartoon rights, and having to shoot at night because they couldn’t afford extras), and pluckily bemused by the ones that aren’t, really.
I found The Swarm paint-drying, for example, but enjoyed the “name that Irwin Allen 70’s disaster-movie trope” exercises of “The Towering Inferno” and “When Time Ran Out” on a decade-nostalgia level when they turned up on Netflix, I had to go out and rent the entire canon of Airport sequels I’d never seen. (And “Airport ’77” would be a lot harder to buy into without that little bit of respect for Jack Lemmon taking the whole darn thing so seriously.)
@42 – Bug (seeing a bunch of intelligent cockroaches writing threatening messages with their bodies has to be seen to be believed).
Every time I see that, keep thinking, “But if they were going to attack, why did they spell out ‘Scram!’?”
“Well, they’re showoffs, really. It’s the only word they know.”
Wow, a lot of bad/good memories resurrected here. A few movies that are terrible but I can’t tear myself from:
1. Reefer Madness
2. Saturday Night Fever: The “plot” and dialogue are so dumb it cracks me up (a special dispensation from the Pope for your girlfriend to get an abortion?)
3. Speaking of rockers letting themselves get dragged into movie hell,like Kiss, how about Alice Cooper and Aerosmith in “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”? Watching the boys from Aerosmith get beat up by Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees is bad enough, but the musical disservice done to the music of the Beatles (with the exceptions of Aerosmith and Earth, Wind, and Fire) is blasphemy to my ears. (Oh yeah, I love the Ramones and jazz also, but why question your love of Kiss? I’ll listen to “Dressed To Kill”, “Alive!” and “Destroyer” anytime!)
4. Halloween 3 was mentioned, but I would include Halloween II also.
5. Die Hard 2: Die Harder.
6. Independence Day.
7. Point Break.
8. Starship Troopers.
OK, I’ll stop now. Can’t wait to see more!
I forgot about Ghosthouse until Rifftrax recently covered it; my friends and I rented it expecting a scary movie, and we were instead hit in the face with a pie of movie awfulness. We loved re-watching it. also, just about any Van Damme movie (like Cyborg). Universal Soldier was pretty good, but I recently got the really lame sequel and haven’t got the nerve to watch it yet.