I do lean toward horror myself, but this thread isn't just for horror. It's for any B movies, whether they're horror, camp, sci-fi, kung fu, exploitation, or whatever. Anything soooo bad that it's actually good, or at least fun and cheesy.
I grew up loving shows like Dark Shadows and old Vincent Price movies the TV stations played late at night before the sign-off. So I was pretty darn happy that, when my small hometown finally got a video rental store, they mostly only had the worst movies. Cheap 'n' crappy. This is how I saw movies like: Motel Hell, The Toolbox Murders, Gates of Hell, The Toxic Avenger, Female Plasma Suckers, Pieces, Prom Night, Puppet Master, Satan's Cheerleaders, Frankenhooker, Reanimator, etc. (Yeah, I read Fangoria, too.)
That store introduced me to my two absolute favorites: Attack of the Killer Tomatoes and Plan 9 from Outer Space. Classics! I can watch them over and over and it never gets old.
In Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, the government creates super-tomatoes and, of course, it all goes to hell and tomatoes start killing people. So they call in a team of specialists (who suck, natch) to take care of the tomato menace. My favorite scene, without a doubt, is when that one tomato avoids death (the song "Puberty Love" (!) is lethal to killer tomatoes - or, actually, it shrinks them to normal tomato size so they can be easily squished) by wearing what appear to be ear muffs. The hero is able to kill it, however, by showing it the sheet music. Brilliant! (AotKT actually has a fairly serious message about genetic engineering that resonates even more now, some 25 years later, than it probably did at the time.)
Plan 9 is...it defies description, really. It must be seen to be believed. Seriously. In a nutshell, aliens come to Earth to stop humanity from blowing up the whole universe. Humanity ignores them. So the aliens set about to resurrect dead humans to get our attention.
Behold some of these lines:
- Greetings, my friends. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember, my friends, future events such as these will affect you in the future.
- Your guess is as good as mine, Larry. But one thing's sure. Inspector Clay is dead...murdered...and somebody's responsible!
- My friends, can your hearts stand the shocking facts about grave robbers from outer space?
- For a time we tried to contact them by radio, but no response. Then they attacked a town. A small town, I'll admit. But nevertheless a town of people. People who died.
- Ah yes, Plan 9 deals with the resurrection of the dead. Long distance electrodes shot into the pineal pituitary glands of recent dead.
- Well, as long as they can think we'll have our problems. But those whom we're using cannot think. They are the dead. Brought to a simulated life by our electrode guns. You know, it's an interesting think when you consider...the Earth people, who can think, are so frightened by those who cannot: the dead.
(That last one is my favorite, btw.)I'm also especially fond of Trog and The Wicked Stepmother, as they are not only excellent crap, they are also the last films of Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, respectively. Trog is pretty standard '60s/'70s B movie crap and is mostly notable for Joan's appearance. Now that I'm thinking of it, Berserk! is good, too. It's campier than Trog. Any Joan movie from around that time, late '60s, will have a heavy Pepsi presence, which amuses me. Unlike Joan's movies, which I like mostly for her, The Wicked Stepmother ('89), is spectacularly terrible/wonderful all by itself, and would mostly likely be on my list anyway. However, it's really because of Bette that it sucks so much. Since she quit after a few days of filming, supposedly because she wasn't pleased with how she appeared on film, they had to do a whole lot of scrambling to rewrite during filming, so the plot goes completely insane at a certain point and ceases to make any sense whatsoever. Hee, she just walked off. That is so Bette Davis.
In recent news - I'd been wanting to see Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter for some time, and I finally saw it recently. It immediately went into my Top Five. Here's a review. Aside from being profoundly low-budget (as in totally homemade-looking), which is de rigeur for films in this thread, I was pleasantly surprised to see that it's a very LGBT-positive film - it's packed full of the stuff. It's a transwoman who plays Good Samaritan, saving Jesus from the gutter. A major plot point is that the vampires are killing lesbians in the first place because "they're deviants and no one will miss them." To which Jesus insists, "There's nothing deviant about love!" Jesus' mother talks to him from a glowing plastic Mary statue. After Jesus tells her about what's going on, Mary says something like, "Oh, we love the lesbians! They get so much done in a day."
Okay, I've yapped long enough. What do y'all have to say about B/Camp/Cult/etc. films? Love 'em? Hate 'em? Which ones? Why? Discuss!
i got a dance ain't got no steps / i'm gonna let the music move me around
