Les Jones

For an experience in truly gut wrenchingly bad films, check out anything made by coleman francis. His "Red Zone Cuba- AKA - night train to Mundo Fine" is nothing short of a hangover, cold bitter coffee and crushed cigarette butts compressed onto celluoid. I dare anyone to watch it and not want to jam knitting needles into their eyes to end the nightmare of having to sit through this "film".

The scene where Castro appears, dressed in an entirely unconvincing black construction paper beard tells you that you are watching a whole new version of what film making should be. I dont think you can go more than 60 seconds without a real howler appearing in this movie.

Plan 9? Ha. Manos? a Home movie writ large. Coleman Francis made really bad movies, over and over and kept coming back for more, and every film just wreaks of body odor.

If you want bad sci fi - check out "beginning of the end" with peter graves. The film is about nuclear charged large sized crickets that attack Chicago. Only the part of Chicago is played by post cards of Chicago that crickets are allowed to crawl over, supposedly simulating their crawling up the sides of buildings. Atleast thats what they hoped it would look like.

Bad, just bad.....

Frank, if you like B movies you've got to see "The Undertaker and his Pals." An undertaker and a pair of motorcycle-riding psychopaths who own a diner figure out a way to increase their profits by killing beautiful young women and serving them in their restaurant. It's sort of like Sweeney Todd with surf music.

You missed 2 true classic bad movies:

Killer Klowns from Outer Space
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (The theme song alone is worth it)

And for new bad movies:

Mars Attacks
Buffy the Vampire Slayer - this is a near miss, but funny

"the undertaker..." sounds like "Cannibal Girls", a 1973 Canadian horror film starring a very young Andrea Martin and Eugene Levy - who went on to do many good movies as well as yeoman work on SCTV. It was directed by the now mega famous producer and director Ivan Rietman of "Ghostbusters" fame.

Its supposed to be scary.
Its not.

"Cannibal Girls" is still in rotation in Canada due only to "Canadian content" laws, if not for that, the film stock might have been burned for its potential as a fuel long ago...

I'm a sucker for bad movies. I believe that making good movies is largely products of accident, good fortune and market timing, but you really have to labor to make a bad movie. I can forgive someone for making "a" bad movie, it happens to everyone now and then. I also contend that you cant make good movies unless you know how to make bad ones. The difference between good and bad directors,actors and producers is that they learn from their mistakes. The people who blow me a away are the ones who make bad movie after bad movie and never learn a thing from any of the experience. You would think that they would take up a class in script writing at the learning annex between making crappy movies, but they dont. Guys like Coleman Francis make film after film of such low quality that you look forward to catching the boom mikes in the scene as a way to distract you from the poor acting and undiscernable plots.

Now, there are bad movies and failed movies, they are not the same. "failed" movies are movies that have all the elements of what could be a great movie, but it just doesnt come together at the right time. Its like listening to a great orchestra playing a bad piece of music or vice versa. You know instinctively what its supposed to sound like, and you know that this aint it. Thats a failed movie in a nutshell.

My test case for this is Sam Peckinpahs " Major Dundee". Check out the cast and the premise on this film, add to that the director and you say to yourself 'Wow! this has got to be great!" Then you watch it and find yourself asking "Hey, what happened?"

Some of the more mainstream and successful Hollywood sci-fi flicks are based on early B-Grade movies. Alien is pretty much a remake of an Italian movie from the 1960s called Planet of the Vampires.

Going further back, Forbidden Planet was based on "The Tempest"

Shakespeare on the Moon. Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You.