I really really jealous here – I should have thought of that. Still the Enemy Below suggests I try writing a book on the history and art of bad movies – which I’ll mull over for a while. I mean I know a lot but I don’t know everything – for example I know little about the bad movies of the silent era – but then has anyone complied a list of the bad movies of the silent era?
And there are so many bad movies, some of which are simply badly done dull junk (I’d give an example but they escape me here), some are the campy good bad movies (plan 9 from outer space for example), and some make you wish that the movie makers parents had strangled him in his cradle so that no one would have to endure something like that (Manos, The Mesa of Lost Women).
As I think this along I see that bad movies fall into several broad categories, categories that reflect the period in which these movies were made.
1) The mega bomb – Big Stars big budgets and huge messes. Things like Batman and Robin, The Last Action Hero, Waterworld, Hudson Hawk, Catwoman, The Scarlet Letter and The Exorcist Part II fit comfortable here. While these films are all bad in different ways, they share in common that somebody’s ego took the wheel and drove the project off the cliff be it director or star or studio head or all of them.
2) B-Movies. Now back when everybody went to the movies once a week, the theaters needed new movies once a week and well sometimes the quality could be a bit off. In the beginning B movies were under card of a double feature – in the 30’s and 40’s a night at the movies got you a Serial a newsreel, cartoon, maybe a short, a B picture and the main feature. Nobody really cared about their quality as long at the damn thing was about 65 minutes long. None of these films are really as bad as they are dull timewasters.
3) The Drive in movies
In the 50’s with the advent of TV, the audience going to the movies skewed younger – more parents were staying at home to watch wrestling or the Milton Berle show, while teenagers kept going. But the teenagers wanted different types of movies than their parents. For one thing monster movies. Meantime the Major studios were spending more money on fewer films (the first blockbuster era was upon us – Ben Hur, El Cid, et al). Soo these small operators showed up and theater owners, especially the drive in theater owners realized that it really didn’t mater much what the heck they put up on the screen at all since folks were there to neck. Yeah they might like a thrill or too but mostly it was just background noise to couples making out. So American International and even smaller studios started to churn out trash by the bucket full – some of it was goofy (I was a teenage whatever) some of it was just god-awful (The giant Mantis) but it did the job. I suspect the long boring stretches in the middle of these films were there so the guy could make a move on the girl.
This was almost if you will the golden age of bad movies – distributors really didn’t care what the hell was on the screen as long as it was cheap – and oh god where they cheap. It was in this fever swamp that movies like Plan Nine from Outer Space and Robot Monster and Red Zone Cuba saw the light of day.
4) The Indies
Its funny these days an independent film is likely to be about say a couples problems with real life issues like childlessness or drug use where as in the 60-70’s an indy film was more likely to be about brain eating zombies. This, this is were the absolute bottom of the barrel exists – In the formof things like Manos the Hands of Fate and all those Gore gore films.
More as I think of it.
