WE’RE currently in the thick of “awards season”, when excellence in filmmaking is rewarded in glittering ceremonies replete with spectacle, statuettes, anti-Trump acceptance speeches and tummy-control underwear.
Celebrating good movies is great, but what of the other end of the spectrum? Considerable enjoyment can be had wading through the well-intentioned, stinking detritus of the film industry, intentionally watching very terrible films indeed.
If you’ve never set out to knowingly watch an excruciatingly bad movie, it can be more fun than you think if you don’t mind a bit of despair for humanity. Have a bad movie night. Invite some friends ‘round, open a bottle of something (you’ll need it) and remind yourself of the reasons that it’s actually pretty difficult to make a good film. You’ll appreciate the Oscar winners even more.
A veteran of bad movie nights, I feel qualified to recommend the following horrible excellence-free examples as a starting point.
THE ROOM
Any Terrible Movie List that doesn’t include Tommy Wiseau’s masterpiece is a terrible Terrible Movie List. The Room has one of the characteristics almost guaranteed to make a woeful film — it’s written, directed, produced, and acted by the same guy, and that guy is in himself one of the oddest guys you’ll ever not be able to take your eyes off for one and a half hours.
Okay, you’ll be able to take your eyes off him while he’s bare-buttocked during the sex scenes — including one that’s just recut footage from the previous sex scene — but otherwise this is compellingly bad.
From every shirt and suit in the movie being two sizes too big, to lines that sound like they were written on an incomplete Ouija board, you can watch The Room over and over without either getting bored or having any clue why those guys in tuxedos are chucking a football around. And don’t get too attached to the breast cancer plot line or Peter the psychologist friend — you won’t ever see those again.
The Room has reached such cult status that there are still global cinema screenings, and James Franco is making a star-studded film called The Masterpiece based on a book about the film’s shambolic production by one of its stars, Greg Sestero.
This is the movie that will make you love watching bad movies.
Best line: “I did not hit her! I did naaaaaht. Oh, hi Mark”.
FOR Y’UR HEIGHT ONLY
I don’t know how many great midget spy movies there are, but this isn’t one of them. If you’re not fussy about plot but quite like watching bad guys getting punched in the genitalia, then the tiny two-foot-nine Filipino star Weng Weng has the movie for you.
A clear Bond film rip-off with unclear English dubbing, Weng spends half his time being a waist-height violent spy, and the other half grooving down the discotheque.
Arguably like all martial-arts based spy movies, For Y’ur Height Only’s sketchy, irrelevant plot is just the vehicle by which badly-choreographed fight scenes can occur. And occur. And occur. By the twelfth or thirteenth bite-sized barney with an endless supply of henchmen, it feels like you’ve been watching this film for three days.
Who wouldn’t want to watch a midget spy in a jet pack?Source:Supplied
Best line: “Sex is like tequila. Take one sip and you’re a goner”.
DOUBLE DOWN
Another writer/director/producer/star vanity project, to understand the magnificence of Neil Breen’s terribleness in mystical hacker movie Double Down, all you need is a synopsis of the main character.
Aaron Brand is an ex-military agent who lives in his car, only eats tinned tuna, uses multiple laptop computers in the desert without turning them on, and hangs out with the ghost of his dead girlfriend in his dreams. When he’s not trying to cure cancer with a rock that a dying old man gave him, obviously.
There are many messages in Double Down, and not a single one of them makes any sense whatsoever. The script — mostly a Breen voice-over — sounds like it was written by copying and pasting random bits of text from a conspiracy theory website.
It begs so many questions, the most pressing of which is: If you’re terrible at climbing rocky hills in the desert, why write a movie that is one fifth climbing rocky hills in the desert?
Almost impossible to watch the whole way through, this is a movie that will make you extremely angry.
Best line: “It kills immediately on contact. He’ll be dead in five minutes.”
STAR WARS EPISODE II: ATTACK OF THE CLONES
Look, on the one hand you have the intolerable Jar Jar Binks of The Phantom Menace, but after careful consideration I declare Attack Of The Clones the most dire of the Star Wars prequels. Any movie that can make multi-award-winning Natalie Portman’s acting look like someone put flat batteries inside an origami robot deserves the ‘worst’ title. It’s a movie that even bad hairstyles are embarrassed to be associated with. And yet definitely are.
Even Natalie Portman is terrible in this film.Source:News Limited
With the exception of its love story, Attack Of The Clones adds little to the Star Wars story — it just introduces characters, concepts, and a relentless amount of CGI that nobody wants to bother with again, with the exception of Count Dooku on a hovercraft motorcycle, or as I call him: Space Fonzie.
And it’s in the love story that gag reflexes are truly tested. It involves lines like “I’m not afraid to die. I’ve been dying a little bit each day since you came back into my life”. As Yoda might say as they hammer his idiosyncratic delivery down our throats, chuck the up, we might.
This is a movie that will make you want to join the dark side.
Best line: “I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere. Not like here. Here everything is soft and smooth”.
ALSO WORTH A LOOK
Battlefield Earth: For the most unwatchable of all Travolta films, and for another reason to dislike dreadlocks and Scientology.
Birdemic: Shock And Terror: for terrible effects and the most boring leading man in history.
Hard Ticket To Hawaii: for Ron Moss’s lethal frisbee skills and a cross-dressing double crosser.
Showgirls: For sticking nipple-tassels on your TV screen and taking a drink whenever they line up.
The Sweetest Thing: For the most incongruous penis-based song ever performed in a Chinese restaurant.
Oh Cameron.Source:News Limited
Jo Thornely is a writer who loves it when you explain her jokes back to her on Twitter. Follow her @JoThornely