Today I want to do something a bit different than what I usually do, and instead write a personal essay about what bad movies mean to me and how they’ve reinvigorated my passion for cinema. I’ve been writing this column for Cinema Crazed for over a year now, and have been watching the movies that inspire it weekly for almost three and a half years. It’s been a hell of a journey to be honest, and I think it’s worth talking about.
Imagine, if you will, that the year is 1988 and that you’re a huge fan of the original Return of the Living Dead. You’ve been patiently waiting for months for the sequel to finally be released on home video because it didn’t play in any of the local theaters. You’ve been reading about the making of the film in magazines. You’ve been counting down the days to when you get to see it. Finally, it comes out and you get your mom to drive you to the video store. You rent the tape, excitedly take it home and then pop that thing in the VCR quick as you can, and… err… uh… um… what the hell is this?
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For today’s review I thought I’d tackle a film that I’ve long been a fan of, even when it wasn’t popular to like it. It’s the first installment in a cinematic universe, which normally would mean that it should also be the best, but in this case the film was so infamously panned by both critics and audiences that it almost killed the franchise dead before it began.
I’m talking of course about the one and only STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE.
Welcome back to BAD MOVIE MONDAY! Today’s demented doltish detritus is DAY OF THE ANIMALS. It’s a 1977 eco-horror movie starring Christopher George, Lynda Day George, Richard Jaeckel, and Leslie Nielsen that is best described using two words: Jaws Wannabe. You see, after the success of the 1975 blockbuster imitators sprung out from under every rock trying to copy Spielberg’s film. Usually using ten year old scripts that had been previously rejected. In fact, these movies were so omnipresent that Christopher George starred in TWO of them. This one and the previous year’s GRIZZLY.
Today’s BAD MOVIE MONDAY column is about a film called NEW YEAR’S EVIL. It was released in 1980 and was directed by Emmett Alston. It stars Roz Kelly, Kip Niven, Grant Cramer and Chris Wallace. The film is a pretty good horror movie, but… is it a slasher? I’ve always said that from 1979 to about 1983 every horror movie was trying to force itself into the slasher subgenre, often with poor results, and NEW YEAR’S EVIL is the perfect example of a movie that feels like it was hastily rewritten to fit the trend. So you know what? Instead of a review, I’m going to answer the question of whether or not NEW YEAR’S EVIL is a Slasher Movie, and my answer will be definitive.
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The word of the day, when choosing something for my friends and I to watch on BAD MOVIE MONDAY, has almost always been “agony”. However, on the particular night that we watched this movie I thought it’d probably healthier for their collective sanity to at least try to pick something that wasn’t gut wrenchingly awful. Hence, we watched 1982’s PIECES. Partially because it has Christopher George in it, who’s sort of become my own personal bad movie mascot, and also because no one else but me in the group had watched it and I thought it was a rather important film. It’s a quirky mix of Italian Giallo and American Slasher movie tropes, even though the film is Spanish. It’s also not a bad movie in any way. Let me be very clear about that. However, it has enough bonkers moments and questionable logic to be shown on a “bad” movie night.
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Welcome back to BAD MOVIE MONDAY! Today I’m going to review something legendary. Well, legendary to me anyway. It’s called ACTION U.S.A. and stars Gregory Scott Cummins, William Hubbard Knight, Barri Murphy, Cameron Mitchell, William Smith and Ross Hagen. It was released in 1989 and directed by stuntman John Stewart. It was written by… Oh, who am I kidding? This movie wasn’t written. It was a teenager’s daydream that was doodled on the back of his algebra textbook during class and the filmmakers used that as a script. Seriously, this movie is bananas.