Tuesday 31 March 2015

Top 5 "So Bad It's Good" Movies

Once in a while, a work turns out to be so bad, it creates a disruption in the badness continuum, and wraps right around to good. Whatever the reason, a truly horrid piece of work can become an unintentional riot and even get it's own fandom for its lack of quality. 
A So Bad It's Good movie is one that's so bad that you can't suspend your disbelief enough to not laugh at it so you watch it just to riff on it and laugh at it. Keep in mind that even when something is So Bad, It's Good, it's still bad. For all entries on this list, there should be an almost unanimous opinion that they fail entirely at having the sort of appeal they intended. Far less unanimous will be the opinion that they have a sort of appeal that is unintentional.
Note: This list is meant to showcase my individual opinion.

1. Anaconda

Jennifer Lopez is literally being hunted by a huge, thick snake. The puns start with Sir Mix-A-Lot and it's downhill from there.  Based on an absurd premise — that Jon Voight is a professional snake hunter (what?) and he kidnaps documentarians to help him locate the world's largest anaconda (why?) by using them as live bait (sure okay?) — nothing in this movie makes sense and it is glorious.

2. Battlefield Earth

 Set in the year 3000, a millennium after the Psychlo master race invades Earth and enslaves humanity, this has Travolta as a 10-foot-tall alien who gets around in dreadlocks, nose plugs and KISS boots. Even more over-the-top is his performance, which is all mwu-ha-ha-ing and an almost Shakespearean declamation of eeeeeeevil! Barry Pepper's terrible, too, bringing Christian Bale levels of intensity to his cave warrior. What also makes this badly watchable is that director Roger Christian shoots every scene on a weird askew angle.

3.  Black Devil Doll from Hell

This is a no-budget African-American fare about a virginal, church-going woman who buys a cursed ventriloquist's dummy that wants to have sex with her. Did I mention that the doll wants to have sex with her?  Did I mention that the doll does have sex with her? And she likes it? The highlight/lowlights also include a Super Mario Bros.-esque Casio keyboard score and a 7 minute opening credit scene.  Plus, close-ups of the puppet's fully functional tongue, covered in what looks like vanilla soft-serve ice cream.

4. Peopletoys

This is exactly that movie that Tarantino, Rodriguez, Roth, Zombie, and Wright were parodying in Grindhouse. It’s that dirty, super low-budget 70s drive-in film that is so stuck in the culture of the 70s that it’s damn near lovable.  The execution is poor, the deaths are ridiculous, and you have a young Leif Garrett killing adults before he was the Justin Bieber of his generation. All attempts at being artistic are tasking and laughable. There’s a death in slow-motion that is incomprehensible and goes on forever.

5. Trolls 2

The film starred an unknown and hypnotically strange group of Utah non-actors and does not contain any “trolls” at all. No, the beasts of the perfect B-movie are actually vegetarian, shape-shifting GOBLINS whose cuisine of choice is humans who’ve been turned into plants. The joy of this movie is that neither the crew nor the cast is able to convey anything resembling real human interactions, reactions, or emotions at any time during the film.  The result is 94 minutes of aliens pretending to be humans pretending to be in a movie where they pretend to be threatened by other aliens pretending to be goblins.

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