So Bad They're Good

Just last week, I was flicking channels before work when something caught my eye.  Weirdly enough, it was a SyFy original movie called Bermuda Tentacles (I'll give everyone one guess as to the subject matter), but what really caught my eye was the fact that Mya Harrison was one of the main stars.  Since there was a good portion of my late teenage/early twenty years where this was my dream woman, I had to tune in.

Seriously, how was this woman not a more enduring pop star?

If you're waiting for the epic conclusion to this story, I watched the movie and...it sucked.  And not in the good way.  90 minutes of tedium, horrible CGI, by-the-numbers storytelling and tepid acting.  Even worse, Mya's character is a Navy Sergeant who never once gets to remove those thick fatigues and strip down once throughout the running time.  It was a world tragedy, I tell ya.

If you're reading this, you're most likely aware of a weird kind of subculture within the horror community.  The SyFy original movies that air seemingly every weekend have a rather substantial collection of people who are very attached to them, and not for anything resembling quality.  It really is something to behold.  Every weekend, people gather online to engage in a long round of MST3K-style riffing of the movies in question, the more hokey and CGI-driven the better.  The best example of this was the phenomenon known as Sharknado, a movie that had such a huge reaction on Twitter that it was the #1 worldwide trend for the better part of its running time and attracted media attention from pretty much any large outlet with two minutes to spare.  It still didn't register on the Nielsens, proving once again that Twitter does not equal ratings.

Just ask WWE.

Without a doubt, it seems like a lot fun to revel in the SyFy flicks, but it's a ritual that I've never taken part in.  Millions (well, scores, anyway) of people disagree, but I don't find these movies (from the infamous Asylum studio and otherwise) to be bad to the point of being good.  I just find them bad to the point of being unwatchable, and until recently I couldn't quite pin my finger on why.  On paper, they share so much with a lot of the cheesy masterpieces of my youth, with crappy production values, even crappier acting and a few true WTF cinematic moments taking center stage...the fact that it's all done INTENTIONALLY just removes so much of the fun for me.

I believe that is what's missing from today's bad horror films.  They're not bad in the epic way.  They're just bad in the BORING way, where the countless remakes that littered the landscape throughout the latter half of the '00s were just simply too bland to be anything resembling entertaining one way or the other, while the SyFy original films and other assorted direct-to-video crapfests actually try to be bad and instead come across as unwatchable.  Folks, I just miss the days when horror movies aimed big and fell hard without doing it on purpose.

Thus, I present my picks for the five best horror movies that are so bad they're good.  Criteria for these include at least a somewhat serious tone, infectious sense of fun, and a heart and soul at their core, no matter how much they might fly off the rails.  Give any of these five movies a rental, grab some friends and commence playing like Mike and the Bots.

5. Troll 2
This is one of those movies that just quite simply has to be seen to be believed.  Produced by Joe D'Amato, the guy behind the '70s "black Emanuelle" movies and several other sex-drenched exploitation films, the movie is a sequel in name only to the original Troll and concerns a group of vegeterian monsters attempting to turn a family into plants in order to eat them.  Which begs the question of why not just eat plants to begin with, but whatever.  In between, there's all kinds of nonsense about druids, perhaps the most banal score in the history of horror and the most life-saving bologna sandwich in all of moviedom.

4. Creature
There were a ton of movies in the early-to-mid '80s that ripped off Alien, and none of them are more hilariously inept than Creature, a movie that stars Klaus Kinski, Marie Laurin and Ferris Bueller's father.  Yes, really.  The plot is about an alien that has the ability to telepathically manipulate victims before assuming their identity, making it a sort of weird cross-hybrid between Alien and The Thing.  It's no less hilarious in how seriously it takes its preposterous subject matter, especially the bit where a dude sees his naked girlfriend outside in the enormous atmospheric air pressure and falls for the simple ruse of removing his space helmet.  And then said naked girlfriend in alien form still bangs him.  Yikes.

3. Silent Night, Deadly Night
No, it's not THIS Silent Night, Deadly Night.

Yes, it might have the most infamous rampage scene ever, but when it comes to yuletide hilarity with slasher-style kill scenes, I've gotta go with the original film in this franchise, and not just because the sequel is essentially half of the first movie played in repeat.  The saga of Billy Chapman is one of those things that words don't do justice - the tender, tragic, and always fun saga of a kid who sees his parents murdered by a guy in a Santa suit only to be raised in a Catholic orphanage and grow into a psychopathic killer himself.  Couple this up with some way over-the-top kill scenes and some questionable acting by Robert Brian Wilson and you've got a real winner that gets regular airtime in my DVD player every Christmas season.

2.  Friday the 13th: A New Beginning
For a lot of folks, this is probably the mother of them all.  Of all the movies in the legendary Friday the 13th franchise, this is the one that truly holds up a lot of the tried and true tropes of the series and effectively went "no such thing as overkill" with them, giving us a ridiculously high bodycount, gratuitous sex and nudity by the mouthful and enough stock characters to choke a donkey.  What else is there?  Well, we've got Miguel Nunez singing his Top 40 hit "Ooooh baby," the insane scenery chewing of the guy who plays the Sheriff, and the hilarious non-mystery that is this movie's mystery killer.  Yeah, uninitiated horror fan, it ain't Jason.  This entry in the series might not be anything close to good, but it's never boring and easily the best flick for comedic purposes.

and finally...

1.  Star Crystal
Of all the horror movies I've seen, nothing can top this one when it comes to the sheer level of ineptitude that it manages to achieve.  Yeah, it's got a low budget, but the problems of Star Crystal go beyond anything that a studio didn't feel like shelling out.  For the first 20 minutes, we get to know a varied group of astronauts only for them to summarily die, the narrative sputtering and giving us ANOTHER group of numbskulls to get behind.  From there, the new protagonists are picked off one by one by the strangest-looking aliens I've ever seen in this type of film, only for the twist to be that alien is really...the hero.  Yes, really.  Take my word for it, this is a movie that is worth seeking out and paying some decent money for on Amazon, because it is bad.  Gloriously, wonderfully bad, and I love every minute of it.  Don't believe me?  Watch for yourself.

Long live Gar!