Zombies, Were-sheep, The Devil and Bruce Campbell

This weekend, I made it out for a monthly tradition in my circle of friends, the “Bad Movie Night.” As a group, we turn up on a Saturday evening, usually each bringing some dish or other item for a kind of pot luck dinner, and we watch movies so terrible that they are entertaining.

Usually, horror and science fiction produce the “best” bad movies, but regardless of whether we bring in DVDs or have something we've found on Netflix streaming, there are a few guidelines for selection, and a couple vague guidelines for conduct collectively known as “The Rules.”

1. No Porn. This includes softcore “Skinimax” stuff. Some of the best films will have some nudity, but there needs to be something else going on.
2. The Movie Must Not Be Boring. There's a difference between “bad” and “boring”. If, as a group, we can't sit through something because nothing is going on, we change it.
3. Commenting on the Film is Encouraged, But Make Sure Anyone Who Wants To Can Hear the Dialogue. This is just a minor point of etiquette, to make sure being a wiseass doesn't replace watching the movie.
4. Don't Question It. We know characters will behave illogically, and there will be holes in the plot that you can drive a zombie-infested spaceship through, don't waste everyone's time by pointing these out.

There may, at one point, have been more rules, but these have been the main ones that have endured. This tradition has been going on for a long time now, and this is the 2^nd such event I've been a part of. I think a lot of us grew up watching Mystery Science Theater 3000, and developed a taste for the remarkably bad film, and commenting on the same.

There's something really cool about seeing a subpar script, terrible acting, bad editing and laughable special effects come together to make something that entertains a group of adults for a few hours. You wonder “what were they thinking when they made this?” Some of these, in theory, were actually made with the idea of making a profit on the project, and you question why anyone thought THAT would work.

The pictures throughout this post are from the best of the worst films we've encountered so far. Skeleton Key, and its sequel by John Johnson is camcorder, splatterhouse horror with senseless violence and nudity, toilet humor and a hilarious character in a bathtub. Most of the script was an outline, with all specific dialogue ad-libbed during filming, and it shows. Frog-g-g-g! is intentionally terrible, a throwback to 1970s horror with rubber monster suits, and was obviously made by and for fans of this genre. Black Sheep was made in New Zealand, the cinemaphotography and location scouting was top-notch, and it was poorly (or well-) spent on a film about... were-sheep.

Most of our other offerings are crazy overproduced and over-the-top foreign films, and almost anything starring Bruce Campbell. I'm currently searching for a copy of The Barbarians, with a pair of twin wrestlers in a horrid swords-n-sorcery epic, and doing research on some of the best bad Kung Fu out there, to break up our constant stream of zombies and spaceships.

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