2d ago

What was your first intentionally bad movie, and what were the circumstances? I'll go first: Cube

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.

35 comments

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.
- 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.
  
  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.

Space Mutiny ftw!
- Blast Hardcheese!
  
  Cmooon, MST3K is cheating
  
  Brick Hardmeat 😂

My friends and I started getting into bad movies in high school, Troll 2 and Street Trash were some of the more memorable ones

Celebrity
Went to the theater with a g/f at the time hoping to fool around a little bit. That did not happen.

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.

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.
- https://youtu.be/DrQcNwsjVEQ
- 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.

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.

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.

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:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deathstalker_(1983_film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Warrior_and_the_Sorceress
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sword_and_the_Sorcerer

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... 🙂

Brain Damage. It's about an ancient snake-like creature that eats human brains and excretes a powerful addictive drug-like substance.
https://youtu.be/_HpWUreJn4o?t=173

Ice Cream Man!
Campy dumb horror movie that I still love.

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.

35 comments