My friends from the fencing team in a Milwaukee, WI suburban catholic high school were bored. We wanted to watch a movie, but didn’t want to spend theater prices. So we went to Blockbuster (!!) in search of something…. else.
No, not that you gooner.
We invented the rules on the car ride there:
- None of us could have seen or even be aware of the movie
- None of us can recognize any of the main actors in the film
- Sci-fi or fantasy since those seemed to have the cheese we wanted
As we strolled along the shelves where most patrons don’t bother, there it was. Like a (scuffed) diamond in the rough: Cube
And it was glorious. lol
Bonus points: Two friends and I moved out to Denver, CO in the middle of college to go snowboarding and finish school (in that order). One of us became a manager at Blockbuster right at the beginning of the switch from VHS to DVDs. For whatever reason, his store started with the least rented titles they had, and their solution was to just throw all the VHS in the garbage.
One day he just showed up from work with ~ 4 or 5 huge garbage bags filled to the brim with the crappiest VHS films Blockbuster deemed unworthy to return to a distributor.
Around a week later he did it again.
It was the absolute (free!) jackpot of gloriously bad films.
I’m not sure you know what a “bad movie” is, if you think Cube is one.
Cube was great! I gave it a 6/10, enjoyed it. Fun concept that was pretty novel at the time.
Cube 2: Hypercube was not great. 3/10
Cube 3: Cube Zero was very bad. 2/10.
Would Velociraptor Island count? Or Mega Shark versus Giant Octopus? 😆
Low budget movies with cheap special effects and awful dialogue absolutely count. I don’t know if those two fit that description, but I’m guessing they do.
Cube is a good movie because it tried something new on a low budget, pulled off a decent script, and there were a lot of subtle details that made it thought provoking and not just gore for the sake of gore. The sequel was terrible though, because it had a terrible plot with stupid plot twists.
I haven’t seen them. But if you said Cube² Hypercube, might count. Should check that out, since you’ve seen the first.
Cube Zero isn’t the worst? Sounds like a marathon night!
I completely forgot that Cube: Zero existed. Yeah, it is even worse than Hypercube.
I think it was a really bad movie, people moving between 2 boxes for 1 hour, using cheap stereotypes (IIRC the “autist” cracks the code and can leave, sigh).
I’m not sure you watched the movie. Or maybe you weren’t paying attention. He’s not the one who cracks the code. And that’s not even why he gets to leave.
So why is it then, it was like 20 years ago 🙄
He got to leave because the others were too busy fighting each other. He was the only one that wasn’t intentionally antagonizing anyone else.
The first guy with the shoe didn’t antagonize anyone IIRC
Agreed. Cube was a terrible movie. That doesn’t mean it’s not popular though, as demonstrated by the endless stream of Marvel barf coming out of Hollywood.
A “bad” or “terrible” movie isn’t simply a movie you don’t like.
I can acknowledge the talent, skill and quality craft, that went into Top Gun: Maverick. But I still didn’t enjoy it much, and thought it was all too obvious and predictable a story. Which made it boring.
Nothing with a $200M budget and wide theater release is a “Bad Movie”.
Well… Other than Megalopolis. But that’s a special case.
I would nominate Batman v Superman as a genuinely bad $200M movie.
The story wasn’t very good. But the rest of the film making was top notch, like all Snyder’s movies.
I actually disagree. The script was a disaster, which you pointed out, but super basic stuff like coherent editing was missing too. There were constant jarring cuts after scenes would end abruptly for no apparent reason. Sound and particularly dialogue mixing was atrocious too, which isn’t a problem unique to BvS (looking at you Christopher Nolan) and doesn’t on its own disqualify a movie from being good, but as part of a whole picture it deserves a mention. The acting was comically bad in many places. Overblown post processing made some scenes look muddy even though that effect worked well for other scenes. A lurching, uneven pace is often more a fault of the director than the script itself, and this movie suffered from it in spades.
Yeah Marvel/DC is the fastfood of movies.
Only utterly deranged class movies by how much money they make, it’s like lauding mcdonalds because they gain lots of money.
Space Mutiny ftw!
Blast Hardcheese!
Brick Hardmeat 😂
Cmooon, MST3K is cheating
My friends and I started getting into bad movies in high school, Troll 2 and Street Trash were some of the more memorable ones
The movie that taught me what bad movies are is the adventures of Pluto Nash.
If anyone asks me to recommend a bad movie, I always start with the adventures of Pluto Nash.
Also, I realized that I misunderstood the prompt, the first intentionally bad movie that I remember watching, that I knew was going to be bad the second we picked it up, was a movie called Make Them Die Slowly.
It was so bad. It’s something about two white people being trapped with some cannibals or something, and it was so bad that we couldn’t actually watch the movie. We just had to fast forward through to the gore.
A Troma all-nighter at the Scala Cinema in London in the late 80s.
- The Toxic Avenger
- The Toxic Avenger Part II
- Rabid Grannies
- Troma’s War
- And maybe one more, can’t remember
Two US exchange students were renting our downstairs flat, the Scala was our ‘local’, we passed the signage for upcoming films all the time and we went “What the hell, let’s go.”
A glorious night, going from midnight to around 6-7am. At one point during War I heard a rumbling and thought “Uh oh, the bad guys are coming in tanks.” But it was just the first Tube (metro) train of the morning running underneath the cinema.
My favorite bad movie of all times is Hardware. Although in fairness, I’m not sure it’s bad so much as low-budget. But I’m partial to it; I must have seen it at least 30 times, so what would I know… 🙂
BOAR - Australian movie about a pig the size of a dump truck terrorizing the Australian outback. Not bad! I was screaming and rooting for the pig.
Brain Damage. It’s about an ancient snake-like creature that eats human brains and excretes a powerful addictive drug-like substance.
Ice Cream Man!
Campy dumb horror movie that I still love.
Wow, the first intentionally bad movie I saw was probably lost in time, as a kid late at night watching cable TV and seeing a bunch of movies listed and knowing they were going to be terrible and sure enough they were.
The only ones that stick out are a set of fantasy movies, two of which were produced by Roger Corman:
Went to the theater with a g/f at the time hoping to fool around a little bit. That did not happen.
It was probably Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, depending on whether you call it intentionally bad or not. I was a kid when I saw it.
If you don’t count that, then it’s Toxic Avenger. Saw it on one night on vhs with my mom and dad. Our local video store ran heavy to really trippy shit like that anyway, so there were a few times that some very out there movies would get selected, and then there would be some debate as to whether or not me and my sister would be allowed to see them lol.
In this case, it was stopped, and I was super into it. So, after my sister went to bed, they gave a shrug and we watched it. I was twelve-ish. We then proceeded to rent every troma movie because we’d usually let my sister pick one out that was usually a kiddie movie. My parents would pick one that would be something we kids would consider boring. My picks were all over the place. But because of that, my dad in particular would rely on me picking less serious stuff usually so there was a smattering of fun stuff so he/they could pretend was just for me lol.
But I got hooked on Troma for a while there.
My parents were far from perfect, but they managed to give me a lot of freedom to explore stuff like that. I’d overlap with their tastes often enough that they’d take my tastes seriously way younger than they did my sister, so that helped some. But they generally encouraged me to enjoy what I enjoyed even when they didn’t take it seriously.
We were too far away from museums to get too deep into art, but my mom would help me find good books that had good size to them so we could see things better. I was allowed to play my music obnoxiously loud, up to a point, and it didn’t matter what it was. Books in general, if the library didn’t have it, my mom would usually buy it when the budget allowed, if I was really into something.
But movies, they’d sit through things they couldn’t stand just because me or my sister were into it. Back then, there was one TV, one VCR, and that was it. Big old console TV, CRT with two speakers and everything. But, as long as things weren’t too crazy, they’d let me watch damn near anything with them, as long as I was willing to talk about things after, if it was something real iffy. There were some things that were a no that probably shouldn’t have been, and some yesses that should likely have been noes lol. But, on average, I was always fine with anything, so they let me watch stuff other kids my age weren’t allowed.
Like A Clockwork Orange, I saw for the first time in Jr high after having seen some other Kubrick films.
Which is waaaaay off topic, but I’m prone to tangents lol.
Our aunt loved chick-flicks and would rent them from Blockbuster when she watched over us when we were young/teens!
Two absolutely fantastic ones are “Popstar” (starring Aaron Carter!) and “Sleepover”, with Alexa Vega!
You just… you just gotta watch them to understand… just wow.
