The Best of the Worst

When I watch movies on Pluto TV's Rifftrax and MST3K channels, there are some movies that are so-bad-they're good in that they're so terrible they're fun to watch.  Like Birdemic.  It's so thoroughly awful that it's just hilarious.

But there are some of them that even though they're made badly I still like them for one reason or another.  So here are some of those that while deeply, deeply flawed are at the core maybe not so bad after all.

Julie & Jack:  It's the first feature from the director of Birdemic and it's just as bad in terms of production values, cinematography, and wooden acting.  But at the core it's the tender love story of a computer chip salesman and a dead woman who uploaded her consciousness online.  The only way they can interact is through virtual chat rooms.  At first Jack, the salesman, doesn't realize Julie is dead; he tracks down some of her old acquaintances until he finally tracks down her parents and learns the truth.  In the hands of a decent writer, cinematographer, and director it actually could have been decent, especially with some real actors.  One of those offbeat romances like Her or The Time Traveler's Wife.

Overdrawn at the Memory Bank:  On Facebook I described this as if in 1983 a PBS station had tried to create The Matrix starring Gomez from the Addams Family movies.  That's basically what this is.  Created by the PBS station in New York in 1983 it stars the late Raul Julia as a man who goes to a rehabilitation center.  They upload his brain into a computer system so he can pretend to be a baboon, which is supposed to somehow be therapeutic.  (It's mostly to use nature show footage.)  But when his brain gets lost in the system, he soon finds he can control the world around him.  Meanwhile a woman in the rehab center works to help him and they start to fall in love.  The acting isn't as bad as Julie & Jack but the effects and cinematography aren't a big step up, though for PBS in 1983 I guess the effects are pretty good.  Still, it's kind of the same thing where there's the core of a decent romantic story.

The Brute Man:  This is a fairly short black-and-white movie from the 50s or so about a guy whose face is messed up in a chemistry lab accident.  The guy goes into hiding and then starts to kill those he thinks are responsible for the accident, like his old girlfriend, college professor, and so on.  There's a manhunt for "the Creeper" during which he seeks refuge in the apartment of a blind woman.  Not being able to see his face, she doesn't recoil in horror like other people do.  And so he falls in love with her and tries to win her favor the only way he knows how:  by murdering a jeweler and stealing a brooch.  So it's a sort of Beauty and the Beast story--if the Beast were a murderer.  It's one of those if it weren't just treated as B-movie filler it could have been a decent movie.

To Catch a Yeti:  Yetis or Bigfoot have been sought for decades but you know why no one's found one?  Because they're looking for huge monsters instead of tiny, googly eyed puppets with huge feet they can use as skis.  And they didn't look in Ontario the Himalaya Mountains.  While on a super-casual trip to the most dangerous mountains in the world (I mean they don't have oxygen or even wear hats or gloves), a Canadian upstate New York man accidentally takes a tiny, weird-looking "Yeti" home with him.  While the yeti makes friends with the man's young daughter, a big game hunter played by Meat Loaf (the singer, not the food) is after the yeti to sell it to a millionaire's bratty son.  While the yeti looks ridiculous and the plot is completely implausible, I have a soft spot for it because it reminds me of something my dad would have rented for us to watch back in the 80s.  It's cute, goofy fun despite the massive flaws.  And it features one of my favorite riffs when the dad finds out Meat Loaf has gone to his house he picks up the phone and in a stereotypical Canadian accent Bill Corbett says, "Hey buddy, let me tell you aboot my particular set of skills, eh?"  How hilarious would Taken have been if Liam Neeson had been some Canadian hoser?

Carnival of Souls:  Much of this movie is pretty dull and in one post I already talked about how a big surprise was given away by bad camera work.  But really the story itself is pretty good, like The Sixth Sense or a Twilight Zone episode, where a woman seemingly survives a car accident but later is haunted by white-faced ghouls when she goes to Utah for an organist job.  She's especially drawn to a rundown carnival near the Great Salt Lake.  It just needed a little more drama and some better cinematography to be a decent movie.

The House on Haunted Hill:  Not to be confused with The Haunting of Hill House, the Shirley Jackson story.  This is about a millionaire who invites seven random people to a creepy "haunted" house.  They're locked in and if they stay the whole night they get $10,000.  But then they start seeing things and the millionaire's wife seemingly dies.  But in a twist she's trying to lure the millionaire to his death by faking her death.  But in a twist on the twist he turns the tables and lures her to fall into a vat of acid instead.  The movie is about as scary as a Scooby-Doo episode, but it's fun and the millionaire is played by Vincent Price with all of his oily, venomous charm.  Unlike some of these others it's not really poorly made so much as it's just old and thus doesn't seem very scary by our standards.

Red Zone Cuba:  Most of this movie is a schlocky telling of three convicts who get roped into the Bay of Pigs invasion only to escape to...somewhere.  They steal a plane in Cuba and then end up somewhere that looks like northern New Mexico or western Texas to try to steal a former comrade's mine.  It doesn't really make much sense and writer-producer-director Coleman Francis plays the main character with about as much charisma as a rabid dog.  But the part I really like is the theme song, "Night Train to Mundo Fine" sung by "guest star" John Carradine.  If I could I'd love to sing this on karaoke.

So those are some of my guilty pleasures.