My Guilty Pleasure: Terrible Movies

Seriously, what is wrong with me?

In the ongoing “Because Prompts Are Fun” series, this week’s theme is “Guilt”  I have a very guilty pleasure:  bad movies.  I LOVE LOVE LOVE bad movies. I take great pride in the terrible movies I love.  I go out of my way to see the baddest of the bad.

This post originally started out as a “Top 5 Guilty Pleasure Movies” list. While creating that list, I got to thinking about my own taste in movies and how those tastes formed.

I honestly think the 80s/early 90s were the perfect breeding ground for the love of the B-Movie.  With the wide-spread adoption of the VCR and home-theaters, video rental stores became big business, and production companies just wanted to get crap into those stores so you would rent it.  Content was king (except it was quantity, not necessarily quality that ruled the land)!

I remember spending HOURS in video stores, looking at the new releases, checking and re-checking the descriptions on movies I never heard of, choosing a movie based on the box art!  Now we have Netflix, Amazon PRIME, Hulu and Redbox.  The video store culture is dead and I don’t feel that any of the alternatives really provide that same feeling you had when you walked into a video store not knowing exactly what you wanted and discovering a movie.  The time and effort you put into actually going to the store; the visceral, tactile experience that can only be had by picking up that movie from the shelf and carrying it to the counter to check it out.  And the independent stores were always better than something like Blockbuster (the corporate stores really didn’t have the same selection as the mom-and-pop shops; those stores always felt so sterile). And often the clerks at these stores would suggest something that was just exactly what you were looking for.

It was also the time when 24/7 cable TV really started grow.  The early, fledgling cable channels, without a large amount of original content, were looking for anything they could get their hands on in order to fill out their schedules. It was the perfect confluence of events that created showcases like USA’s “Up All Night” which would play terrible movie after terrible movie.  I can remember seeing such classics as, “Terrorvision“, “Hamburger: The Motion Picture“, and “Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-A-Rama“.  Yes, these are the types of movies I watched during my formative teenage years.  Thankfully, I had a support group; a group of friends who had the same interest and taste in horrible movies that I did.

We would constantly hunt down the worst of the worst.  I can remember long nights of movie watching at my friend’s house.  Gems like “Carnosaur“, “Uncle Sam” and “Class of Nuke ‘Em High III: The Good, The Bad and The Subhumanoid“.  Those are hours I can never get back but I wouldn’t trade them for anything.  As I said in my previous post about gaming with children, it was a shared experience; a bonding moment between my friends and I that we can always look back on and draw from.  Some people have sports, some people have music; we have “Hell Comes To Frogtown“.

What is your guilty pleasure?   The one thing you just can’t give up and wouldn’t want to?