Wondering what people's favorite "bad" movies are. Can be low budget, box office flops, foreign, so bad it's good, whatever. I'm pretty big on Cannon Group stuff and cheesy Turkish pop cinema (Tarkan vs. the Vikings, etc.). Mostly go for 80s stuff as that's my generation.
Buckaroo Banzai is one of my all-time favorites. It is the quintessential New Wave film, featuring John Lithgow's most unhinged performance - "Laugh while you can, monkey boy!"
The largest volume of fake blood in all movie history. It always shocked me that Peter Jackson was ever considered to do LotR, since I was quite familiar with all of his previous work. I remember nearly falling over when I heard the announcement and let me tell you, the images in my head at that point were NOT what we got in the theaters!
You're gonna laugh, but I have a lot of love for Legend with Tom Cruise and Tim Curry.
How Tim Curry managed to chew the set that hard with horns that size is beyond my acting skill to comprehend. And the fact that Tom Cruise ran around saving unicorns from Satan with a motley crew of fairy sidekicks is a sentence gay enough to make me puke rainbows. I'm already gay, man, I puke rainbows all month during June.
Seriously, it's a good and awful movie. It has no plot, it's just aesthetic art. But if you want a really good fantasy movie about unicorns... The Last Unicorn. Full stop. It has made me cry since I was a child. Not a B Movie, just a cult classic.
But if you REALLY want a B movie? Time Bandits. How the hell Kenny Baker went from R2-D2 to one of the gremlin thieves on strike because God wouldn't let them have a turn on the time machine... I can't. And kidnapping The Generic English Schoolboy as their sidekick was just... interesting. At least Sean Connery did a great job as Agamemnon.
Legend and Time Bandits are two of my favorite movies and I have multiple copies of each as they are some of the movies I rebuy each time there's a format change or a special edition! I have never actually seen The Last Unicorn so I'll have to check it out.
Equilibrium https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0238380/
A mixture of all dystopian sci-fi with a never seen before (or after, for obvious reasons) martial arts style called Gun-kata.
Dunno if it counts but I'm a sucker for Jean Claude van Damme movies. And the only others I can think of off the top of my head are a couple of Albert Pyuun movies called Omega Doom and Knights, really bad sci-fi flicks. I actually need to save this thread for future watching material.
Haha that looks great, going to have to check it out. It's a little disappointing to see that there's no cyborgs in it though. On that note, I was also going to mention the movie Cyborg because there's a director's cut called Slinger that makes it clear that JVCD did miracle work salvaging it for the theatrical cut of Cyborg lol.
Jennifer's Body made some money but was poorly critically received, but it is actually a pretty good horror movie that was marketed poorly
Lake Placid is meant to be a goofy comedy horror movie that is a fun watch and made just enough to trigger endless terrible sequels like Hellraiser and Amityville, reviews treated it like it was trying to play seriously but some of the lines are so cheesy
Kelly Scott: The lake is so black and still.
Sheriff Hank Keough: Yeah, we wanted to call it Lake Placid, but someone said that name was taken
If you're into 80s action/thriller The Guest is an homage that does a really good job, and has a unique soundtrack
Brick, early 2000s neo noir with the cast talking like a bunch of 1920s private eyes and gangsters. Like The Guest it was received well critically but just had a really small release.
Blue Underground has a bunch of stuff no streaming service would ever touch
Jennifer's Body was impressive enough (when I saw it on a whim years after it came out) that I looked up its writer (Diablo Cody) and what else she'd done. Which led me to Young Adult. Wow! And: Ooof! Powerful stuff.
Or as one critic put it: "Young Adult may be the year's most engaging feel-bad movie".
Babylon was a massive bomb, and i dont understand why. I think it's a masterpiece.
Pig was another underappreciated masterpiece. When Nic Cage did his AMA on Reddit (one of the best ever), he said it was one of the acting jobs that he's most proud of. He deserved an Oscar for it, but wasn't even nominated. The screenplay, too.
I recently watched "Pieces" and I was laughing my ass off through the movie, It's a weird little slasher. It felt like if Terrifier embraced the fact that it was a complete trash movie. Hell maybe even Terrifier was inspired by this .
Other than that I'm a sucker for low budget foreign horror. There is something about bad Indonesian horror films that just makes me smile every time. Late 90's and 2010's Japanese horror action films like "versus", newer ones like "Tokio gore police", "Robo Geisha" and "meatball machine"
Tetsuo the Iron man is probably one of my favorite films of all time, but I don't consider that a bad movie by any means.
This actually has surprisingly good writing and character development, until it fell into the usual trap of an overblown, cliche, and boring 30 minute final battle. Also check out Carry On, which is the literal definition of ‘So bad it’s good’….. until an overblown and boring 30 minute final battle that almost ruins everything else.
If you're not laughing at how absurdly bad both of these films are, I don't know what to tell you. The comedy of them is what makes them B-Movies to me.
Stars the guy who hosts Iron Chef and Brittany Murphy. Legit martial arts mixed in the middle of an insanely bad it's good movie.
https://youtu.be/7y3sCYmqOz0
During early pandemic, I watched/rewatched a whole bunch of mid-80s to late-90s action flicks (action's heyday?) and remember Drive not just as great fun but one of a whole slew that had that same... exercise machine?
The one with three concentric rings, and you strap into the middle and spin around in all directions. I think Universal Soldier, Fortress and a bunch more had it too. I should have turned it into a drinking game, as it seemed to be crammed into every 90s sci-fi flick.
Here's my terrible attempt at drawing what I mean.
What it's called, no, but NASA and Air Force use them for training. It's like a giant gyroscope, simulates an accident, like a plane or helicopter falling out of the sky, and you have to try to complete a task while spinning.
The Replacements. Keanu Reeves playing a sub quarterback. It’s stupid fun even if you don’t like football and the supporting cast of football players are great.
These are my favourites so far, don't discount the new movies though, there's some really talented people making dumb movies right now in the spirit of the 80s B-movie!
Hard Ticket to Hawaii (1986) (and the rest of Andy Sidaris' movies)
Gataca was a more recent film, like 2008 or something. It starred Ethan Hawk, Jude Law and Uma Thurman. Ethan plays a naturally born person trying to excel in a world where only generically (LOL typed generically instead of genetically)enhanced people seem to have any rights. It's a little slow and cerebral but I like underdog stories. Fun fact, the name Gataca was derived from the four letters used to define genes G A T and C.
I kinda feel like actual kung fu movies (not things like Kung Pao: Enter the Fist, etc.) are their own special category, lol! Had almost forgotten about America 3000, yet another Menahem and Yoram gem!
Chalet Girl - Solid B level romcom with Bill Nighy, Ed Westwick, and Felicity Jones. Story is kinda plain, but it's one of my go to movies to cheer me up