The withered, age-old “worst movie ever” question is a tale of perpetual unfinished business. It is far too intimately linked to personal fixation and context, far more so than any question of “best” or “greatest” film. Still, although we know the question really doesn’t get us anywhere, it is an enticing one. Especially because, in all frankness, movies seem to flock to it, and a handful put up a great argument for their claim to the holy grail of “worst film ever”. It becomes difficult to compare the “worst” movies between genres and sub-genres, but within close company, the differentials are more apparent. Take, for example, “zombie films”, a genre with more than a few wishful contenders for the title of “worst”. It is probably true that none are categorically the worst film ever made, but something about crawling flesh and rotting brains galvanizes the ineptitude of a film in an especially forthright, plain-spoken coating of badness. I’ve reviewed bad movies, but few feel as phantasmagorical in their patented ineptness as Zombie Lake. It doesn’t glance at badness, nor does it hint. It bellows at it head on, with charisma and a grubby, bilious doggedness. Ultimately, Zombie Lake’s flaws are as legion as they are incurable. Continue reading →

The early days of sound cinema are some of the most consistently inconsistent years in all of the medium. Universal Horror was one of the few companies to attempt a personal stamp during that era, along with one of the few to shine through into the public consciousness in the modern era. The company’s dynasty, especially throughout the 1930s, was marked by exactly that particular breed of scattered and scaffolded formal invention that marked all of early sound cinema. The medium was still trying to figure out what it meant to be “sound cinema”, and the process of the collective unconsciousness of film-land figuring out all that “sound cinema” could entail is one of the most exciting treasure troves for any modern cinephile to discover and witness with the benefit of hind-sight. It wasn’t quite as off-balance and delectably weird as silent cinema – always cinema at its most frontierist and vexing – but the wild years had not yet given way to the increased symmetry and corporate similitude of the 1940s and what would become classical Hollywood filmmaking.
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Cool as Ice is a colossally wrong-headed movie. Sure, it stars Vanilla Ice, but we know that. This alone is not what makes it wrong-headed. What makes it wrong-headed, broadly, is that it wishes to initiate itself into the grand cinematic tradition, and the American one, of sympathetic motorcycle riding rebels proving their innocent and righteous ways starring in films asking that outsider to bridge class boundaries and implicitly distance his or her self (almost always a “his”) from that outsider tradition in the process. In doing so, it essentially deals the outsider and his status a backhanded compliment, getting to have its cake and eat it too by vaguely enlightening itself and mainstream middlebrow Americans in the process without actually having to sacrifice its own safe, middlebrow identity or really do anything to live life on the edge. It is, in other words, a corporate, milquetoast tradition that pretends to be dangerous so that mainstream America can imbibe in Other-watching from a distance without actually having to do anything other than pat itself on the back for pretending to give a care about the well-being of that Other.
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At which point we have to learn a thing or two about “the worst films ever”. Namely, we have to learn that the so-called “worst films ever” are sometimes indistinguishable from “this film was mis-marketed, was generally unlucky, and happened to fail at the box office”. Sometimes “worst” doesn’t really mean “worst”. Sometimes it doesn’t mean “bad”. Sometimes it means “pretty decent but a bit much and a difficult film to understand altogether”. Sometimes the film gods do not shine on everything that deserves it. Sometimes they just look the other way.
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And now, going along with our theme, a hive mind of bad video game movies for your viewing pleasure.

“A sprite pretending to be a plumber with a mustache runs across a screen to a castle and fights a dinosaur to rescue a princess”. A giddy fever dream, most definitely, but a film? Super Mario Bros and its sequels are to this day a cipher by which audiences confront video game pop culture, but they are elder statesmen now. So much so that it is difficult to conceptualize how fresh and alien this franchise was in the late 1980s, and how singular it was in its rejection of judiciousness or common courtesy. Today, video games bend over backwards to fill our heads with maturity, sense, and symmetry that varies from unearned to, well, slightly less unearned, and while a few prime selections rise out of the medium every now and then, it has a lost a touch of its new-fangled otherworldly singularity. Today, most games look to cinema to accrue the veneer of “respectability”. They are far less interested in the candy-coated, mechanized fluff they used to be, and they tend to function more or less like other mediums, conforming to film’s definition of narrative and the ensuing precedence for cohesion and order especially.
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And now, going along with our theme, a hive mind of bad video game movies for your viewing pleasure.

A Christmas morning present if ever there was one! Modern movies can be this bad! Thank you Santa, I mean, Mr. Boll. May you reign long and without forgiveness.

For what they say is true. Modern movies just don’t suck like they used to. Films used to be passionately bad, defying all good taste and jumping head first into their personal idea of art and sense. Now, they stumble into badness almost against their will. They are bad not because they defy the basic laws of filmmaking, but because they lazily fumble within the rules. The best bad movies are anything but lazy, and as we know from a director who was willing to personally enter into a boxing match with some of his most vicious critics to defend non-existent honor, Uwe Boll is no lazy guy.
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The Blaculas of the world aside, the 1970s were not a safe time to be a vampire film fan. Horror? Absolutely. But vampires? Not so much. As a rule, vampire films were saved only when they went off the deep end and reveled in their ineptitude and incompetence, a criterion which, admittedly, takes us more often than not into the nether-realms of South European soft core erotica horror, a sub-genre of film that is absolutely worthwhile for wholly unintended reasons. But today our subject is the mac daddy of all modern vampire film franchises, the Hammer Films Dracula franchise, which began with a re-invigorating explosion in the late 1950s and damn near herded in a new age of serious horror filmmaking a far cry from the pesky atomic-age kitsch-fests of the 1950s. Continue reading →

Scream Blacula Scream

For the many lonely souls who will undoubtedly look to it for an ounce of frivolous camp and disco-tinged incompetence, the flaw of Scream Blacula Scream is readily-knowable and open-faced: it is, maybe against all odds, a very good film, almost as good as its wonderful name suggests. Although, “against all odds” may be misleading. Many exploitation films, and blaxploitation films among them, are surely bad, and the difficulties of the budget and the audience had their limits for these films to be sure. But exploitation cinema had a certain magic about it, a certain unhinged, brash, expressive quality that freed it from the restrictions of popular cinema and allowed it to concentrate on its own artistic whims with the full extent of its limited budget. Simply put, exploitation films didn’t have to please millions to make a buck, so they had the freedom of actually concentrating on their almost accidental goodness. They had the freedom to eschew normativity and expand in fascinating and creative new directions that didn’t require composure or good sense. They had the freedom to be artistic in an environment where “pleasing the masses” wasn’t of interest. And the fact of the matter is, blaxploitation films were often quality productions, even when they were pretending not to be.
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Now, a trio of what could charitably be called “rock ‘n’ roll films” for Worst or “Worst”. It’s gonna get weird.

It is a crying shame that the slasher film and heavy metal music, the two most iconic cultural forms of the 1980s (in my mind at least, but that may say more about me than the cultural forms of the 1980s), crossed paths so infrequently. Perhaps because slasher films were more about making the quickest buck imaginable, the sort built on cheap budgets and profit-cost margins mind you, and metal may be the most self-consciously grand genre in all of music, the two just didn’t meld well (metal and giallo on the other hand…). They just seem such natural companions for each other, though, and the opening ten minutes of Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare proceed to do just about everything it can possibly imagine to destroy the legitimacy of this melding of minds.
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Now, a trio of what could charitably be called “rock ‘n’ roll films” for Worst or “Worst”. It’s gonna get weird.

Whatever else one can say about Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park, it achieves something that less than one-tenth of one percent of all films achieve: it ends on its strongest note: a performance of “God of Thunder”, the best Kiss song ever released, and the most naturally cinematic. This is a genuine achievement, something most films aspire to and few succeed at. Watching this particular film, it is immensely obvious how easy it was to earn that “best scene as last scene” achievement, but all involved had a genius, heretofore unheard of tactic for ensuring they arrived just there: make sure that the rest of the film is absolutely awful, and run from there. Continue reading →