What Bad Movies Mean to Other People

Before I get into this post, I just want to let you know that I’m going to be in italics for this post.  The reason for that is because there is some writing from other people that will be scattered throughout the post.  You can see a bit of that right below this paragraph.  The use of italics will help to differentiate my writing from those of my fellow movie lovers and make it easier for you to know who is writing and when.  If it is not me writing, I will give the Twitter handle of the person who wrote that stuff.  Thanks, and I hope you enjoy this post.

@aaronsps4

I don't really use the term 'guilty pleasure' all that often, as I think that would imply having some sort of shame about enjoying a film. I'm pretty forthcoming about what movies I like and what ones I don't, regardless of the reasons for why. With that said, there are a few movies where I find the moniker to make appropriate sense, as some movies you just cannot explain why you enjoy them so much (generally comedies or dumb action/horror movies), but for some reason they put a smile on your face anyway, despite understanding that other movies can do something similar and better.

Bad movies have a profound impact upon people who find enjoyment in watching films.  The reason for this is simple.  They are movies.  As much as many viewers deride bad movies as being not worth the time, an argument can be made that bad movies are beneficial to any cinefile’s movie watching.  Why?  It’s because they show the faults of the filmmaking world.  There are many mistakes made in bad movies that can help to enlighten a director, writer, actor, etc. on what not to do when making a movie.  And many times, these faults can help to make a movie more enjoyable than it would have been in capable hands.  Sometimes the faults are what makes for entertainment.

I like to believe that I am not the only person who takes joy in watching bad movies.  Everyone has one bad movie that they enjoy.  They know it is a bad movie.  They know that there are much better things that they could spend their time watching.  But the bad movie captivates them and keeps them enthralled.  They spend countless hours rewatching the movie because it entertains them in the same way that an exceptional movie can.

That’s why I put a question out to some of the followers on my Twitter account, and some of the people who have suggested movies for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  I went onto Twitter recently and asked people to submit a paragraph or two to my email account about a bad movie and their relationship to it.  I wanted to find out how other people feel about some of the bad movies that they have seen.  The turnout was a little less than I had hoped for; although, I still managed to receive a few good submissions.  Throughout this post, I will be compiling these pieces of writing by other writers and giving you a full idea about some bad movies enjoyed by people who aren’t me.

@MarcusIrving317

I was twelve years old and my favorite movies of all time were the first two Spider-Man movies.  When I heard that a third was being made, of course I was excited.  I was talking to all my friends about it.  I was watching Spider-Man 2 on a loop.  I was so damn ready for this movie.

@Movie_Doc

Because there is so much to say about this film, I honestly could write a huge piece on this awesomely bad gem from 1989.

@ImPABLO_i_WRITE

I love this movie and I have no qualms about saying it.

Those are only three of the reactions of some of the people who submitted writing about bad movies they like.  Three different bad movies that brought out the feelings deep inside people.  Anticipation, salivation, and entertainment.  These are three people who have a fondness of the bad movies that they watched.  It goes to show that even when watching a movie that may not be a classic blockbuster or an award winning tale, there is still something that people can find themselves attracted to in a movie.

Enough about that, though.  What were the movies that people wanted to write about?  What movies do they want to share their fondness of?  I’m not sure which movie I would have written in with.  There are numerous bad movies that I find captivating in one way or another.  There are so many to choose from.  But I asked for one movie.  A single movie that each person would write about and share their adoration for.  Adoration may be strong.  Yet, it may not be.  These are movies that the participants wanted to defend their liking of.  Some even admitted to loving the movies.

Each of the six people who submitted some writing to me chose a different movie.  None of these movies have been featured on the Sunday “Bad” Movies before.  Some of them may be coming up in the future.  All of the movies fit within the bad movie realm, and all of them have qualities that make them entertaining.

@TheTalkingCan

For as long as I can remember I have loved Masters of the Universe.

@aaronsps4

I have a huge amount of love for The Big Hit.

@TheChewDefense

My pick is John Landis' magnum opus, The Stupids.  Yes, the same John Landis who gave us The Blues Brothers, American Werewolf in London, and Animal House.

@ImPABLO_i_WRITE

The movie I have chosen is Buffy the vampire Slayer.

@Movie_Doc

Beginning with a low budget Vietnam battle scene, Cage gives audiences only a hint of its schlocky goods.

These are movies that the writers enjoy.  Two of them even said how they loved them when giving the title of the movie.  As you can see, only five of the six participants knew immediately that their love for the movie was true.  One took a little bit longer to find that admiration.

@MarcusIrving317

When I left the movie theater after seeing Spider-Man 3 for the first time, my mom asked me what I thought of it.  I couldn't say a word.  I was just confused.  Not by anything that happened in the movie, but because this was the first time I had ever seen a movie in a theater that I just plain didn't like.

Not all bad movies make a good first impression on a person.  I know that from experience.  But there are things that can be taken away from watching bad movies.  There is almost always some nugget of brilliance in even the worst movies.  Whether it’s some sort of interesting effect or innovative technical aspect of the movie, there tends to be something worth the time spent watching the movie.

@MarcusIrving317

Today, I actually like Spider-Man 3, not because I think it's a good movie, but because it taught me a valuable lesson.  Look for the best in every movie.  Even the worst movies have cool little things such as that Sandman transformation scene to make them totally worth watching.

What is it about bad movies that connects with certain viewers?  There are various reasons that any given movie can connect with the person watching it.  It may have something to do with the state of mind that the specific audience member has.  It could be strange moments in the movie that speak to the person.  No matter what, the bad movie gives that person as much joy as any other good movie that they see.

@TheTalkingCan

Call it nostalgia if you want, but even through my last viewing of this film -- which was last week – I found myself still loving each character, good and bad. Skeletor and his legion of mercenaries are the epitome of evil, while He-Man and his rag tag group of followers are among the purest of heroes. The story still captivates me. The practical effects still hold up, though they are a product of the times.  Compared to now, they come off incredibly cheesy.  But let’s be honest, it’s a live-action version of an eighties toy line/cartoon series, so what can you really expect?

@Movie_Doc

Because there is so much to say about this film, I honestly could write a huge piece on this awesomely bad gem from 1989.  However, I will try to keep it short.  In addition to the laughable writing and ludicrous scenarios, the acting by Ferrigno and Brown is often atrocious, especially in the more dramatic scenes.  To Ferrigno’s credit though, he nearly pulls off the role of the man-child Billy.  Cage also features a cast loaded with highly recognizable character actors from the 1970s and 80s including Michael Dante, Mike Moroff, Brancombe Richmond, and Die Hard alumni Al Leong and James Shigeta.  If one doesn’t find entertainment in ridiculous writing, silly acting and laughable fight scenes, then Cage is probably not your cup of tea.

@ImPABLO_i_WRITE

I saw the film before I saw the series and it creeped me out big time as a kid. As a teenager I fell in love with the series and saw it up until the end. Since then I've revisited the film a few times, and it still holds up for me as much as it did when I was a kid. Many people trash it, claiming it feels dated, but that's what makes it great.

@TheChewDefense

Yes its bad, but stuff still makes me laugh from Stanley (Arnold) disguising himself as a bush to hide from bad guys, to Christopher Lee as Mr. Sender, an evil man who gets all of those "return to sender" letters, and the many cameos from famous directors that film buffs would get a kick out of.  It’s worth seeking out and yes, you will probably get a laugh out of it.

@ImPABLO_i_WRITE

Where this film really excels is in its dialogue, it's so cheesy and 90s it's hard not to love it. The horror cues are almost completely horrible, but they have some effect if you watch the movie really loudly, and in the dark.

@aaronsps4

It’s a silly movie with some fun action direction by Che-Kirk Wong, but really has no reason to get much praise, beyond the fact that I think it is very entertaining and funny for reasons that only extend to me and few others.

@ImPABLO_i_WRITE

Kristy Swanson is great as Buffy in her own right, Pike is cool as hell as the guy every guy wants to be, and everyone else is good in their own little way. The two best parts of this movie aren't Pike with his cool slicked back hair and his dirt bike, or even Kristy Swanson doing gymnastics in yellow tights, though both those things are great. No, the two things that make this movie really worth watching are David Arquette's and Paul Reubens' performances. In what's almost an homage to Evil Ed from Fright Night, David Arquette plays Pike's best friend turned vampire Benny, and I have to say, he really kills every scene he's in.  Paul Reubens plays Amilyn, the right hand to the lead vampire Lothos (Hauer), he probably has one of the funniest death scene's I've ever seen in a film, that alone makes this worth watching.

These bad movies mean things to people.  Sometimes the meaning is simply entertainment.  Some viewers want to turn off their brains and have mindless fun for a while.  They want to let go of all of the worries in their lives and indulge in the stupidity of bad movies.  The bad dialogue, poor acting, and overall horrendous execution of some of the movies can lead to a fun time.  You can appreciate the bad, look beyond it, and find something that speaks to you.  Deep down inside, it hits you in the right way.  You fall in love.

There’s also the side of bad movies in which they are well made, yet the subject matter is in no way mainstream.  These would have been the b-movies in a theatrical double bill way back when.  Now they are shown on SyFy channel, or released direct to DVD.  They are not poorly done.  They are like Rodney Dangerfield.  They get no respect.  It has nothing to do with the talent on the screen or the talent behind it.  It all has to do with the story.  Spiders come down from Mars and attack sorority girls.  Strippers fight off a horde of zombies.  The movies end up being tons of fun.

No matter what your stance on bad movie is, it is hard to deny that you can have a good time watching a bad movie.  As much as good movies stand the test of time and represent some of the best artistic work of the modern era, the bad movies have helped to push cinema forward.  Some were the starting point for movie stars of the future.  Others were blueprints about what not to do when making a movie.  No matter what, they mean something.  To someone, somewhere, bad movies mean something.  And that’s what makes them great.

@aaronsps4

I have plenty of fun with this film, regardless of why it’s not technically 'good' and that's what matters.

@ImPABLO_i_WRITE

This is the type of movie you want to sit down and watch with a bunch of friends.

@Movie_Doc

This movie has never grown old with me.  I heartily laugh every time I watch it.  I particularly enjoy watching it with first time viewers just to see their reactions. It is definitely a movie I love watch with a group of buddies over a few beers and I have done so on more than one occasion.

@aaronsps4

This movie brings me the kind of joy that is nice to have now and again, with bad movies such as this.

I would like to go out on this nice paragraph that was written by a reader about me.  This might seem a little bit egotistical, but who says I don’t like to rub my own ego?  Why not share this nice paragraph?  Someone wrote it.  I might as well share it.  Thanks for reading, guys.  Thanks for reading for 100 weeks, and thanks for reading this.  I’ll see you again next week.

@ImPABLO_i_WRITE

I've been a reader of Sunday Bad Movies for a few months now and have made it a routine of sorts to check out the new post up on Sunday Mornings or as often as new posts are up. I've really enjoyed seeing JurassicGriffin one of my favorite twitter film friends take on some "bad" movies and give them a fair shake. This is something a lot of today's film enthusiast's wouldn't do, or even think of doing. It's nice to see someone out there taking time to sit down and watch these movies without any bias. With that said I'm glad to be able to share some of my thoughts on one of my favorite "Bad Movies" for this blog's 100th week.

Timing of Sequels and the Birdemic (2010, 2013) Movies

It has been a full 100 weeks since I first started my journey through the world of bad movies for these blog posts.  I began with Starcrash, one of the most well-known rip-offs of Star Wars, and a movie that lives on as an example of what not to do when making a movie.  It seems only fitting that for the 100^th week of the Sunday “Bad” Movies, I dip into similar territory by watching another movie (two in this case) that rips off something classic and shows many of the mistakes that can be made while making movies.

Birdemic came out of nowhere in 2010 and rose to fame as one of the worst movies ever made.  After being rejected by the Sundance Film Festival, director James Nguyen self-promoted his movie into a distribution deal.  The release did a lot of things for the movie.  It became popular in bad movie circles, and the shoddy effects and poor acting crossed into the mainstream.  People were sharing clips of the birds doing Kamikaze attacks and exploding on impact.  I know that prior to seeing the movie, I had seen a clip of the two minute applause scene.  The movie was quickly invading the popular culture of North America.  Possibly other places too.

Soon after the popularity of Birdemic came to fruition, James Nguyen announced that he would be making a sequel to the bad movie classic.  Birdemic 2: The Resurrection came out in 2013.  It brought back many of the actors from the first movie, and presented the same terrible bird effects that audiences had seen and loved before.  It was the right sequel for the series.  Yet, it didn’t catch on in the same way as the previous effort.  Nobody talked about the follow-up the way they had spoken about the original.

I’ve seen many debates over the past year or two or three or however long it has been about the right time for a sequel to come to fruition.  I’ve seen people say that a sequel made ten years after the prior movie is too long to wait between sequels.  I’ve seen people say that a sequel was made too close to the movie before and that the writers needed more time to think out a good script.  What decides how people feel about a movie’s sequel and how does any of this relate to the Birdemic movies?  That’s what I’m about to write.

In order for me to fully realize my thoughts about this topic, I must first take a look at two different sequels from 2014 that came out years after their predecessor.  The first is the critically praised Before Midnight.  Before Midnight stars Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy.  It is the second sequel in the franchise following 1995’s Before Sunrise and 2004’s Before Sunset.  As you can see, it had been ten years between Sunset and Midnight.  The things that people appreciated about the third installment was that the story built upon the characters and their lives.  The movies have always been a look at the characters and that moment in their lives.  The third movie was no different and the viewers ate it up.  They appreciated seeing the characters nearly twenty years after they first met and witnessing how their lives had changed.

Another 2014 sequel didn’t fare quite as well as Before Midnight.  One of the biggest commercial and critical flops of 2014 was Sin City: A Dame to Kill For.  It was a sequel to the successful Sin City, a movie released in 2005.  It was a sequel nine years in the making.  It also had a lot of changes that were made in the nine years.  Most of this was on a casting level.  Many of the roles were recast, which caused confusion in the continuity of the franchise for casual viewers.  But these changes weren’t the only thing that caused the movie to be considered a failure.  In 2005, when the first movie in the franchise was released, it brought a new style into cinema.  It looked and felt more like a comic book than any of the other comics that had been adapted to film.  No, it didn’t have speech bubbles and panels, but the aesthetic felt much more comic-bookish than what people were used to with the X-Men, Spider-Man, Batman, and Superman movies.  It was new.  It was refreshing.  Nine years later, the style failed to have that same bang that it had when it was first shown to audiences.  It had been used in many movies since, and lost its luster.  And that’s why it was a bad idea to wait as long as they did for a sequel.  All of the fun in the style of the Sin City movies had been drained through other movies aping it.

Now to take a look at the sequels made very quickly after the movie that came before it.  On the successful side you have Sharknado, which was released in 2013 on SyFy, and Sharknado 2: The Second One, which was released on SyFy in 2014.  There’s only one year in between the movies.  The second movie was made between when the first one came out and when the second one came out.  It was made due to the cultural saturation of Sharknado.  When the first Sharknado came out, the internet went wild.  It was a movie about a tornado (actually three tornadoes) filled with sharks.  It had Tara Reid and one of the guys from Beverly Hills 90210.  The internet ate it up.  It got a lot of traction on Twitter.  The sequel capitalized on this fame and did even better.  It got high ratings for SyFy, and was all over Twitter.  It was a case of making the sequel quick enough to still be a part of the cultural zeitgeist.  And it worked.

Compare this to the Saw movies.  Particularly to Saw V.  Every movie in the Saw franchise come out a year after the one previous to it.  Aside from the first movie, of course, since there was no Saw movie before that one.  For the first two or three movies in the franchise, there were interesting ideas.  The plot moved forward.  Things were not at a standstill.  Things began to change after that as the movies all tried to tie into one another.  This meant that eventually, they wouldn’t be able to move the story forward.  It culminated in Saw V, where the entire story of the movie was negated in the final moments.  Everything that happened was meaningless because of the conclusion.  It was the series’ version of the “everything was just a dream” cop out.  And it was a result of the need to tie everything together.  The events had to happen within the time frame of the other movies with very little outside of it.  And it showed that sometimes you need a little bit more time to write when the plot is so complicated and intricate.

How does all of this relate to Birdemic?  You’re probably asking that right now.  You’ve probably been asking that almost this entire time.  Why did I go through all of these long and short times between sequels?  Birdemic falls in between.  It wasn’t as quick as a year between films, but it wasn’t as long as a decade either.  It was three years between movies.  Let me explain.

I said nearer the beginning of this post that the second Birdemic didn’t have the same success as the first one.  There aren’t as many people talking about Birdemic 2: The Resurrection.  I think the reason is pretty clear and it comes down to what I wrote about the Sharknado movies.  Timing was everything.  Birdemic needed to capitalize on the popularity that it had garnered around 2011.  There should have been a sequel in the works already.  But there wasn’t.  The sequel got produced after the wave of popularity for the movie was already fading away.  This isn’t the only factor.  The distance between the movies isn’t the only factor for the less popular sequel.  People believed that the filmmaker might set out to make a bad movie instead of trying to make something good and failing.  They thought that the mindset of the people involved in the movie would have changed, thus taking away from how enjoyable the original was.  Whereas Sharknado was intentionally insane and bad, Birdemic was not.  To have it be intentional in the sequel would take away from the magic of the experience.

Sequels are a tricky thing.  Having them too far apart can cause the audience to forget about the predecessor, or it can allow competition to come into the business and eat away at an audience.  Having a long time between sequels can also allow for better writing or more growth in characters as they age and become wiser.  Having sequels too close together can cause fatigue and put a strain on the people making the movies.  But they can also give the audiences more of what they want when they want it.  The timing is crucial to how well it is seen in the public mind.  Is it too long of a distance?  Is it too short of a distance?  Is the distance between sequels just right?  It all depends on the movie.  That, and the people who watch it.

It’s the 100^th week, so you know there are going to be a bunch of notes:

• There are two more posts this week.  One post is a retrospective on 100 weeks doing the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  There is also a post that was created with the help of readers like you.  It’s about bad movies that you like.  I want to do some more reader participant posts in the future.  Maybe once a month.  We’ll see.
• A poll is now up on the blog.  It contains every movie from week 51 until now, excluding The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure.  Basically, you must choose one of those movies.  I will rewatch whatever movie gets the most votes for the two year anniversary.  Vote away.  Any of the movies are eligible.
• Birdemic was suggested for the Sunday “Bad” Movies by @ER_NotR.
• Ten actors are featured in both Birdemic films.  These actors are Alan Bagh, Rick Camp, Damien Carter, Patsy van Ettinger, Stephen Gustavson, Steve McMoy, Whitney Moore, Colton Osborne, Eric Swartz, and Danny Webber.
• James Nguyen directed both Birdemic and Birdemic 2: The Resurrection.
• At the beginning of the post, I mentioned Starcrash.
• In the post, I mentioned Sharknado.  I haven’t featured Sharknado yet, but I wrote about it a little bit in the post for Big Ass Spider!
• I wrote about animal attack movies when I watched Two-Headed Shark Attack.
• Do you have anything to say about the length of time between sequels?  Does it matter to you?  Is there a right amount of time and a wrong amount of time?  Have you seen Birdemic or the sequel?  What do you think about the timing between the two?  What do you think about the movies?  You can answer these questions or share any other thoughts regarding this post in the comments.
• If you have any suggestions for the Sunday “Bad” Movies, you can leave them in the comments, or message me on Twitter.
• I have recently made an email account for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  You can email me at sundaybadmovies@gmail.com.