Bad Horror Movies You Love

I love bad horror movies. I love the hobbyist aspect of it, people devoting WAY too much time to show off their clever tricks for gore and makeup. I love the bad acting, the way many horror movies take themselves way too seriously. They're funnier, in some cases, then most comedies.

Which brings me to...
Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2

It is the sequel to, as you can imagine, Silent Night, Deadly Night. This is a movie I've never seen, though some seem to think it's a decent movie. And when I say I've never seen that, I should qualify this by saying I've seen most of it, in that Part 2 is probably made of 50% flashback where they rehash the entire first movie. See, the producers were supposed to just recut the movie and release it as a true sequel, but decided that this would be wrong, so they recut half the movie and paid a few actors nothing to make the other 50%. So, this is a movie about the brother of the kid in the first movie who , after they both witness a Santa Claus murder their parents, is forced to dress up as Santa and goes on a killing streak. Ricky. Survivor. Orphan. Santa Claus? Man.

And how did they cast the movie? Well, this is where the movie starts to shine. The younger brother is played, if my figures are correct, 5 people throughout this movie. Apparently, 2 of these are Rickys from the first movie, so you have to forgive the filmmakers a little. So, we have different actors for Ricky at 4, 10, 14, 15, and 18. If you count the infant from the first movie, that's 6. We've all aged and seen friends and family age, so we know how different people look from one year to the next.

The main star is Ricky at 18. This actor, Eric Freeman, is a genius. Here's a clip of him in action. Pay close attention to his eyebrows. They're... spirited.



This is his acting style, you see. Every word he utters requires some sort of eyebrow motion. With a script as choppy as this one, it makes every scene he's in memorable and hilarious. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do! And I do. I think it's the funniest movie I've had the pleasure to watch.

Here's the rub: somebody decided to make a remake of Silent Night Deadly Night, which meant this DVD went out of print in about 2007. However, my addiction to checking Amazon for a cheap copy has resulted in my discovery that a new version will be released, with both Silent Night Deadly Night and Part 2 on the same DVD, on December 4th, the same day as the remake, Silent Night, goes straight to DVD. So you won't have to watch it in pieces on youtube, won't have to go to the seedier, privateerier sides of the internet to download it.

Save the date! Have your friends over and laugh.

And tell me of your favorite bad horror movie.

I watched Birdemic a few nights ago. It was worse than I could have ever imagined. But there is so much comedy!

Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter is still my favorite bad horror though it is 90% tongue-in-cheek by design.

More "serious" bad horrors I've been enjoying lately are coming from Magnet Releases, including: Hobo With a Shotgun, Troll Hunter, and The Perfect Host. Also a nazi-zombie movie called Dead Snow from another foreign distributor. Solid low brow, campy horrors.

High Desert Kill, mostly for this scene:

Chucky. Any Chucky.

edit: Leprechaun. Any Leprechaun.

edit 2 to counteract teh horrible: The Gate. Fuck yes.

I think it's pretty clear that the Matrix Revolutions had its 'burly brawl' sequence directly inspired by Jesus' epic battle against the atheists.

Starring the Beastmaster? AWW YISSSS!

Man, I had forgotten about the atheist clown car jeep attack. Lesson learned: never attack your Lord and Savior with a hair pick.

A friend of mine got way in to horror movies a while back and had me watch Driller Killer and Wizard of Gore with him. Wizard of Gore is not so much a horror movie as an excuse for ridiculous shit with blood everywhere. The ending is a hoot -- it reframes the whole movie that makes you go "why the fuck?" Driller Killer, on the other hand, is just awesome because the premise is a good who goes nuts and starts power drilling people in the face and stuff. It's tagline is "There are those who kill violently!" What the shit? Do people expect they're gonna see a movie about euthanasia of terminal cases? OF COURSE IT'S GONNA BE VIOLENT.

Since there is no regular horror movie thread, I'll hijack this one. Just watched Rec and it did, uh, scare me. I liked it a whole lot but I wish I knew Spanish so I could read all the newspaper clippings and hear the background conversations. The end seemed a little cheap, but the least capable of any of the characters were there, so I guess it would have been also weird if they'd grown cojones.

I always like at least investigating the found-footage style horror movies because there are enough well done creative ones to keep me interested in what the pretense for a camera-person being the only POV and how the horror is executed. I watched Rec because I recently watched V/H/S, which I loved and strongly recommend everyone go see.

I just noticed Canadian Netflix uploaded one of my all-time fave bad horror movies, Omen III: The Final Conflict. A movie that, among other things, takes the deus ex machina ending literally.

I remain saddened that the original idea of the Halloween series being a related-by-title-only series of Halloween horror flicks never happened because what the market wanted was all Michael Myers all the time because we live in the dark timeline. Stupid market. Season of the Witch had the best evil masterplan ever, but further Halloween films could have had even more delightfully insane ones! The opportunity cost loss is heartbreaking.

I genuinely love Halloween III. I mean, it's terrible, but I appreciate the speed with which Tom Atkins gets into Stacy Nelkin's pants, because 80s horror movies were nothing if not efficient. Also, the opening ten minutes of Halloween III are fucking awesome: credit sequence, John Carpenter synth score, and then dudes that look like Mormons but are actually androids* kill an old guy in a hospital and then walk outside and light themselves on fire. And, yes, the evil masterplan is totally amazing. I like to imagine a direct sequel for Halloween III where the Irish millionaire's company has to tackle the class-action lawsuit against his head-crushing kid's masks.

You know, you could program a great night of Tom Atkins classics. The Ninth Configuration, Halloween III, Night Of The Creeps, Maniac Cop.

* Yeah, I know. Same thing.

Recent discussion made me pick it up on disc and watch again, because obviously. I think I've liked it more each time I've seen it; watching it years apart is crucial.

Things I'd forgotten that had me giggling into my drink: the small final set of characters being introduced by Tom Atkins nearly getting hit by a vehicle twice in a row. Super detective work by just sort of wandering around at night, and the ill-fated friendly town drunk. ("Didn't mean to scare you. I saw that bottle, I thought it looked pretty heavy. I ain't got no diseases, you mind if I have a drink?" deserves a drink. The mormondroids killing him was to truly establish how evil the bad guys were!)

I had not forgotten but still appreciated the hilarious efficiency of aforementioned getting into Stacy Nelkin's pants. I also appreciated how any other film would have made this big tedious subplot about our protagonist's strained marriage, not to mention being much more ham-handed about using his kids as suspense props. And for that matter, would have made Irish O'Warlock a more typical mwahahaing monologuing villain instead of how relaxed and matter-of-fact he was about his scheme.

I also want to see a prequel movie that's all about the Stonehenge heist. I love the Stonehenge heist idea. Other movies would have made it the most ridiculous thing, but in Halloween 3 it's just a minor plot element taken as a given.

If you haven't seen it, Drastic, you absolutely must follow up with Night Of The Creeps. Atkins plays a detective who answers the phone by snatching the handle and barking "Thrill me!" to whoever made the mistake of calling him. It's so great.

I think I need to see this.

Hey, Eduardo X and Drastic (and, you know, everybody else) - you're in luck! TCM is doing a mind-melting double bill of NIGHT OF THE CREEPS and TERRORVISION on Dec 28th, starting at 3am. Warm up those DVRs!

Wonder which ending they'll show for Creeps. Also Terrorvision is a weird movie.

Attack of the Mushroom People.

A friend of mine's personal favorite: Wizard of Mars.

Oh man, Terrorvision. Among its other virtues, it was back when more movies did the James Bond thing of having their own titles as opening theme songs. Cheesy horror movies need to start doing that again. For instance, how much better would Piranha 3D have been if it had a self-consciously santized-hard-rock simple-guitar-riffy opening song with some unknown singer belting about, I don't know, no one could swim free in the land of Piranha...3D! (The lyrics wouldn't and indeed shouldn't require more thought than that just there for this exercise.) I think it would have been at least one hundred. One hundred better.

Attack of the Mushroom People has perhaps my favorite dubbed version line delivery ever, which youtube is sadly failing me on. One of the shipwreck survivor ladies is passing through a scene, and in passing sneering at one of the other surivvor ladies, delivers a fantastic abrupt self-satisfied, "Everybody wants me!" Also the great ending beat of the lone survivor(? I think, it's been awhile) angrily proclaiming that he'd be happier back on the island with the mushrooms, damn you!

"Hey little dude, you like metal? KISS THE BOOT!"

For some reason, I am in the mood to watch Chopping Mall right now.

You guys make me want friends I can DO this with! They're so much better when you have buddies to cackle with!

It was tragic that the party mode feature of the 360's netflix app got killed. A couple years back, a few folks from Qt3 would have occasional bad movie nights over it. I have especially fond memories of Retrograde, in which a time-traveling Dolph Lundgren leaves his love interest gutshot to die slowly and painfully in Antarctica (but it's okay, because time travel means never having to say you're sorry), which makes me start laughing again just to think about. Tagging quatoria for the memory, I do believe he was there for that one.

Also, this scene from "Lethal Ninja" which...there's too much. I'll let youtube sum up.

That got rewound several times for latecomers, because everyone agreed it needed to be seen again.

Yeah Birdemic is what came to mind for me too. Most/all of my picks for this thread would be stuff like that. MST3k-level stuff.

Haha, Drastic, I was indeed there for that. That was part of the Bad Movie Night I started, back at QT3, when Netflix Instant came out with the party mode for the 360, and I saw just how MANY genuinely, sincerely terrible films they had on demand. My instant queue is still half full of planned future selections for the movie night, as well. Hmmm, maybe I should start that back up on Brokenforum. Although these days, it would probably be easier to make it a google hangout.

So is mine.

And we never did get to that Lorenzo Lamas vampire flick!

Hahahaha, oh god. Never mind, plans cancelled forever!

Woah... that sounds AMAZING!