A video version of this post is available here.
Film is just about the only medium where a failure can fail so hard it becomes a success. Take, for example, the films in this post.
Today, I’d like to share my five favorite bad movies with you. They’re bad for several reasons, but good for one: hilarity. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.
Number 5: Plan 9 from Outer Space
It’s never a good sign when a movie is directed, written, produced, and edited by the same person. That’s what we have with Plan 9 from Outer Space, widely considered one of the worst movies of all time.
The name behind the credits: Ed Wood, a now-notorious B-movie master with a fantastic Wikipedia blurb, which I’ll quote now.
“[Wood’s films were] notable for their campy aesthetics, technical errors, unsophisticated special effects, ill-fitting stock footage, eccentric casts, idiosyncratic stories, and non sequitur dialogue.”
That’s Plan 9 in a nutshell. Aliens arrive on Earth and, in an attempt to stop humans from destroying the planet, they enact the titular Plan 9, which involves summoning zombies from beyond the grave. Why the zombies? To get people’s attention, of course. (You’d think that aliens landing would be enough, but not in this movie.)
In addition to the aforementioned aliens and zombies, Plan 9 also boasts such discordant elements as 50s working-class drama, film noir detectives, and vampires, in the form of both Vampira and the original Dracula, Bela Lugosi.
Lugosi’s presence is perhaps the strangest element of the film, not least of all because he died three years prior to its production. Here’s the deal: Ed Wood filmed several miscellaneous scenes of Lugosi in 1956, many of which involved him sporting his Dracula cape and stalking around a graveyard. When Lugosi died shortly after, Wood shelved the footage. Until 1959, that is, when he decided to cram it into Plan 9.
The result is magnificent. The same handful of scenes with Lugosi are replayed several times throughout the film. Furthermore, he never appears in a scene with any other member of the cast (since, you know, he was dead). To fill narrative gaps, Wood hired his wife’s chiropractor to act as Lugosi’s stand-in. Unfortunately, the two looked nothing alike, so the chiropractor covers his face with the Dracula cape whenever he’s on screen.
It gets better. The film features the kind of special effects you probably used in home videos when you were a kid, such as flying saucers that are clearly hubcaps suspended from fishing wire. Also, the alien spaceship looks like a submarine with lots of curtains. And I can’t forget to mention some of the best dialogue, such as:
“Inspector Clay is dead, murdered, and somebody’s responsible.”
“Future events such as these will affect you, in the future.”
“Then they attacked a town, a small town I’ll admit, but nevertheless a town of people, people who died.”
A foundational pillar of so-bad-it’s-good cinema. Highly recommended.
Number 4: Ghost Lake
This obscure gem was first introduced to me by my wife Sara, who lists it as possibly her favorite movie, ever. Her mom bought it for her and a friend to watch on their way to an ice-skating competition, and it’s been entrenched in Sara’s pantheon of bad movies ever since. In fact, she owns a DVD copy of the film, which we’ve watched several times. (By the way, the shipping cost more than the product itself.)
Ghost Lake is a film about loss. Er, well, it tries to be. It’s actually more of a rip-roaring comedy featuring bizarre direction and goofy dialogue. Here’s a great example of the latter:
“What did you think stars were as a kid?”
“I don’t know. Stars, planets, galaxies.”
Or this line, which almost feels like a direct plea to the viewers re the movie itself:
“Understanding it doesn’t matter. Surviving it does.”
Or how about this searing one-liner that was no doubt meant for the trailer:
“Don’t die…yet.”
But that’s not all there is to love. There’s also the aforementioned bizarre direction, exemplified by the gratuitous use of split screens. Characters go for jogs and have their upper torso pictured in one screen and their feet in the other, all for no discernable reason. And let’s not forget the movie’s earliest use of split screen, in which the main character is out clubbing on the left frame while her parents die of carbon monoxide inhalation on the right.
Are the split screens necessary? No. Am I glad they’re there? Absolutely.
There are plenty more baffling shots, such as a long take of the main character’s eyeball peering through a dollhouse window. My personal favorite is a scene in which a little girl bounces a ball, and the camera jerks up and down with every bounce. And then there’s the film’s final scene, in which we slowly zoom on the neighbor’s lawn, then fade to credits. Not sure why our parting image is grass, but I like it.
Ghost Lake is a B-movie of the highest order. Recommended especially for those who like lines enunciated so poorly you’ll need subtitles to understand them. For years we thought the ghosts were saying, “We. Are. People.” Turns out they were saying, “We. Are. All. Here.” Who knew?
Number 3: The Happening
If you were duped into paying full ticket price for this one, you might not find it as funny as I do. The Happening dropped in 2008, back when people still respected M. Night Shyamalan. Not so much after this one.
The Happening stars Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel as a weird couple struggling to survive while the world suffers a series of mysterious mass suicides. Wahlberg plays a high school science teacher (nice sweater vest), and Deschanel plays…I’m not really sure what she’s supposed to be. She spends most of the film bugging her eyes out and asking Wahlberg why humans suck so much.
Speaking of Marky Mark, he delivers some of the best lines in this movie. Like this one:
“I need a second, okay, why can’t anybody give me a goddamn second!?”
Or this exchange, which is outstanding:
That stuff’s great, but the Shyamalan twist is the best. Spoiler alert, but here’s the twist of The Happening: the plants did it. How did they do it? By urging people to kill themselves via the wind.
The. Wind.
This leads to arguably the funniest chase scene in movie history, in which the characters try to, yes, outrun the wind. Most confounding of all, they somehow succeed.
At least Shyamalan knew it was bad. Just before the reviews rolled in, he stated, “We’re making an excellent B-movie, that’s our goal.” Wahlberg took two years to admit it, but in a 2010 Entertainment Weekly interview, he said, “It was a really bad movie. Fuck it. It is what it is. You can’t blame me for not wanting to try to play a science teacher.”
If you dig usually good actors delivering terrible performances, this is the one for you.
Number 2: The Wicker Man
If there’s a GOAT of unintentional humor, it’s Nicolas Cage. I don’t care if he’s in a movie about witches, vampires, or homicidal parents—he always makes me laugh.
Nic’s Wicker Man is a remake of a 1973 British film of the same name. The original is apparently quite good; Film magazine Cinefantastique went so far as to call it, “The Citizen Kane of horror movies.”
Nic’s version? Probably better described as The Room of horror movies.
Cage plays a bummed out cop who’s summoned to a secluded island by his ex-girlfriend because their daughter has gone missing. Nic spends the rest of the film moping around, doing some shoddy investigative work, and later threatening a bicycle-rider at gunpoint.
First off, this film has very confusing gender politics. The island is ruled by murderous women, and it’s unclear if they’re supposed to be evil, or if Nic is just a misogynist douchebag. Probably some of both, though the question remains unanswered and mostly unconsidered, even at the film’s conclusion, when Nic’s own daughter lights the fire that burns him to death.
A guy burning to death doesn’t sound funny, but Nic is such a master at unintentional comedy that he manages to pull it off. Imagine him shoving his face through a gap in a wooden cage and bellowing incoherently for a collective 22 seconds of screen time (I counted).
But the hilarity doesn’t stop there. In the scene prior to the burning, the gals dump a swarm of bees on Nic’s head. This might’ve been horrifying with better supervision, but that’s the magic of B-movies (no pun intended); their earnest attempts at affecting moviemaking invariably turn to comedy. In this case, we get the now-classic line, “Oh no, not the bees! There in my eyes, my eyes! Ahhhhhh!”
The Wicker Man boasts some wonderful slapstick moments as well. For example, Sara’s favorite scene is one in which Nic lumbers downstairs in disarray, after having been nearly killed the night before. The innkeeper smirks at him and remarks, “You’re looking a bit worse for wear.” Without saying anything, Nic trudges up to the counter, glares at her, and punches her out. This sets off a slew of random ninja kicks and sucker punches, the best of which comes while Nic is dressed in a bear suit.
The Wicker Man is one of Cage’s all-time best. And you can trust me on that, because I’ve seen way too many of his movies.
Number 1: Troll 2
Troll 2 is everything a bad movie should be. Atrocious dialogue, horrendous acting, cheesy special effects, a ludicrous premise, even a bug settling on an actor’s forehead during a dramatic(?) scene. Troll 2 has it all, and more.
Our main character is Joshua, a little shit (his sister’s words, not mine) who sees visions of his inexplicably omnipotent Grandpa Seth. He and his family vacation in a small town called Nilbog, which they eventually discover is populated by vegetarian goblins who turn people into—in the words of Grandpa Seth—”half man, half plant. The goblins’ favorite food.”
You may have noticed there were no trolls in that description. That’s because there’s not a single troll in Troll 2. Allow me to explain.
In 1986, Empire Pictures released a semi-successful cult film entitled Troll (which randomly featured the likes of Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Sonny Bono). It was a standalone film.
Four years later, Filmirage produced a film under the working title Goblins. An appropriate title, considering it was a film about, well, goblins. However, the producers felt the finished product was so terrible that no one would watch it unless they were fooled into doing so. They therefore renamed the film Troll 2, hoping filmgoers would mistake it for a sequel to Troll. The films, for the record, are completely unrelated.
It gets better. Since budgets were so low, many of the actors were not actually professional actors. The Nilbog shopkeeper, for example, was just a guy who’d smoked tons of weed before filming. Or take Joshua’s father, who’s actually a dentist from Alabama and had never acted before. Despite the lack of experience, he delivers one of the most iconic performances of the film.
There’s so much more, but words don’t do it justice. The local sheriff, whose name is Gene Freak. The music, which might be composed of Garageband sound loops. The corn cob makeout scene, which concludes with popcorn being tossed onto the actors from offscreen. It’s brilliant. It’s one of a kind. And it’s uniquely Troll 2.
All Highly Recommended
Hope you enjoyed this post. I recommend watching all these films, especially with friends. Just make sure you turn on the subtitles—might be hard to hear over the laughter.
Kyle A. Massa is a speculative fiction author living somewhere in upstate New York with his wife, their cats, and their dog. He has written two books and numerous short stories, both published and yet-to-be published. He enjoys unusual narrative structures, multiple POVs, and stories that make people laugh.