Hi folks. Several posts ago, I expounded to you on how the movie BIRDEMIC: SHOCK AND TERROR should be watched by any and all fledgling movie makers because it would act as a sort of inoculation against the vast majority of mistakes that a movie maker can make. I still stand by that assertion. But I also said that I wished to talk about bad movies in general, so here I am again.
Because, you see, there is more than one kind of bad movie. There are your classic bad movies, such as Plan 9 from Outer Space, or Robot Monster, movies that are indisputably bad, but still have entertainment value because they're funny -- in fact, their funniness is increased because it is unintentional (the TV series Mystery Science Theater 3000 thrived on this kind of thing). When Ed Wood directed Plan 9, he was trying to make a good movie. Essentially, Plan 9 has the same basic plot as that 1950's science fiction classic The Day the Earth Stood Still: aliens come to Earth in a spaceship to warn its inhabitants not to use nuclear weapons. Both movies are topical, both are products of their times. But the makers of The Day the Earth Stood Still had a decent budget with which they could hire decent actors and purchase decent (for their time) special effects, whereas Plan 9 had a shoestring budget and a director who was the movie-making equivalent of tone deaf. But Plan 9 has endured as long as The Day the Earth Stood Still beause it still manages to be entertaining, if not for the reasons the director intended, and thus it qualifiies as a classic. Not so BIRDEMIC. Call me crazy, but I don't think that movie will last long in people's memories.
Of course, a big budget is no guarantee of a good movie. There are any number of examples of this, from Battlefield Earth to Van Helsing, but a far worse example, hands down, is the recent Sucker Punch. That has got to be the most misguided, ill-conceived movie I have ever seen. Some people were confused by the constantly changing storyline -- first the young woman is in a mental institution, then she's in a brothel, then she's in a video game -- but that wasn't what turned me off. I got that part: she was manufacturing different realities in her mind to deal with her deep personal psychological trauma. What turned me off, what made me squirm (and not in a good way) was not the actors (I'm sure they did the best they could), or the production values, but the dichotomy between the surface storyline -- young women with swords and automatic weapons battling huge monsters in a video game environment -- and the core subject matter -- essentially young female inmates of a mental institution being sexually assaulted. I wanted to beat the villains of this movie with a baseball bat. I have never left the theater in the middle of a movie, but I almost did with this one. I stuck through in the hope that the movie would somehow redeem itself in the end. It did not. I have Plan 9 from Outer Space on DVD. Hell, I even have Van Helsing. I will not get Sucker Punch.
By the same token, a small budget is no guarantee of a bad movie. A good example of this is 1962's Carnival of Souls. It was made on something like $30,000, and it shows, but it nevertheless tells a chilling and atmospheric tale of a young woman who has a brush with death and survives, only to find herself haunted by a dark, sinister figure. The director, Herk Harvey, had cut his teeth making the kind of short films that you saw in high school that dealt with such subjects as personal hygiene and managing your allowance, so he at least had an inkling of how to make a movie. Carnival of Souls has now become a cult classic, and is part of the Criterion Collection of classic movies, thus rubbing elbows with such films as Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal.
And then there's movies like Season of the Witch (witch which I reviewed in an earlier post). I like this movie, dangit. It plays like a cross between The Name of the Rose and Army of Darkness, and maybe it had the wrong director (what else has Dominic Sena done?), but I still find it highly entertaining, a good old-fashioned good vs. evil story. In a documentary on the DVD for The Seventh Seal, Woody Allen said that Ingmar Bergman realized that a moviemaker has to entertain his audience. If you do that, than a lot of other things can be forgiven.
Because, you see, there is more than one kind of bad movie. There are your classic bad movies, such as Plan 9 from Outer Space, or Robot Monster, movies that are indisputably bad, but still have entertainment value because they're funny -- in fact, their funniness is increased because it is unintentional (the TV series Mystery Science Theater 3000 thrived on this kind of thing). When Ed Wood directed Plan 9, he was trying to make a good movie. Essentially, Plan 9 has the same basic plot as that 1950's science fiction classic The Day the Earth Stood Still: aliens come to Earth in a spaceship to warn its inhabitants not to use nuclear weapons. Both movies are topical, both are products of their times. But the makers of The Day the Earth Stood Still had a decent budget with which they could hire decent actors and purchase decent (for their time) special effects, whereas Plan 9 had a shoestring budget and a director who was the movie-making equivalent of tone deaf. But Plan 9 has endured as long as The Day the Earth Stood Still beause it still manages to be entertaining, if not for the reasons the director intended, and thus it qualifiies as a classic. Not so BIRDEMIC. Call me crazy, but I don't think that movie will last long in people's memories.
Of course, a big budget is no guarantee of a good movie. There are any number of examples of this, from Battlefield Earth to Van Helsing, but a far worse example, hands down, is the recent Sucker Punch. That has got to be the most misguided, ill-conceived movie I have ever seen. Some people were confused by the constantly changing storyline -- first the young woman is in a mental institution, then she's in a brothel, then she's in a video game -- but that wasn't what turned me off. I got that part: she was manufacturing different realities in her mind to deal with her deep personal psychological trauma. What turned me off, what made me squirm (and not in a good way) was not the actors (I'm sure they did the best they could), or the production values, but the dichotomy between the surface storyline -- young women with swords and automatic weapons battling huge monsters in a video game environment -- and the core subject matter -- essentially young female inmates of a mental institution being sexually assaulted. I wanted to beat the villains of this movie with a baseball bat. I have never left the theater in the middle of a movie, but I almost did with this one. I stuck through in the hope that the movie would somehow redeem itself in the end. It did not. I have Plan 9 from Outer Space on DVD. Hell, I even have Van Helsing. I will not get Sucker Punch.
By the same token, a small budget is no guarantee of a bad movie. A good example of this is 1962's Carnival of Souls. It was made on something like $30,000, and it shows, but it nevertheless tells a chilling and atmospheric tale of a young woman who has a brush with death and survives, only to find herself haunted by a dark, sinister figure. The director, Herk Harvey, had cut his teeth making the kind of short films that you saw in high school that dealt with such subjects as personal hygiene and managing your allowance, so he at least had an inkling of how to make a movie. Carnival of Souls has now become a cult classic, and is part of the Criterion Collection of classic movies, thus rubbing elbows with such films as Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal.
And then there's movies like Season of the Witch (
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