You can tell a lot about a culture by sifting through its garbage. Which brings us to the peculiar pleasures of the good-bad movie – a beast that is equal parts blood-curdling badness and giggle-inducing greatness, writes TARA BRADYahead of the Horrorthon at the Irish Film Institute
ARCHAEOLOGISTS just love garbage. After all, nothing reveals more about a society than what goes out in the bins. In cinematic terms, this means that Meir Zarchi's I Spit on Your Grave (1978) will likely be of greater worth to future anthropologists than the big Oscar winners released in the same year. Sure, Coming Homeand The Deer Huntermay well flag the existence of the Vietnam War for the unprimed viewer, but Zarchi's rape-revenge cycle boasts a disembowelling.
For this reason, some 32 years after its original release, I Spit on Your Graveis more likely to generate column inches or muscle its way back on to the theatrical circuit than any of its more prestigious contemporaneous rivals. The logic behind this enduring appeal is simple: I Spit on Your Graveexists on the fringes of a genre that is commonly known as the good-bad movie.
In the grand scheme of things, few cultural artefacts define and encapsulate our age quite like the good-bad movie. A by-product of the marijuana-clouded midnight movie circuit of the 1970s, the good-bad movie shares DNA with the cult movie, though it enjoys a peculiar little subset all to itself.
We know, almost instinctively, what it isn't. Take Todd Browning's Freaks or Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter. Both films strike angular poses and were ignored by the public on release, but no one could say that either of these fine cult pictures was good-bad. Scrape down at the bottom of the IMDb's (highly compromised) worst-films list and we find such crud under our fingernails as Karate Dogand SuperBabies: Baby Geniuses 2.Good-bad? We think not.
The GBM – as we’re about to start calling it – can’t simply be manufactured around the improbability of a mutt doing martial arts. The pulp churned out by Roger Corman for the Latin-American market or the slapstick creature features on the SyFy channel make for occasional kitsch guffaws, but rarely sustain the momentum that comes from being so-bad-it’s-good.
If movies have taught us anything, it's that nobody can legislate for that Springtime for Hitlermoment. The GBM is therefore defined neither by rubber octopus or budgetary constraints but by earnestness. The shower curtain that doubles as a cockpit in Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Spaceis an honest effort, not an ironic gesture.
Camp, and enjoyment of same – the very lifeblood of the GBM – can only properly kick in when there's a chasm between the intent and the actuality, when somebody, somewhere truly believes they're making Citizen Kanewhen all the while they're fashioning Plan 9 from Outer Space.
This is no mere subcultural quirk. Back in the waft of cannabis that surrounded the original screenings of, say, The Rocky Horror Picture Showwas an aesthetic that would coalesce into an entire age of irony.
If it's okay to watch Reefer Madnesswith inverted commas around it, then it's all okay.
It is, perhaps, with this noble ascendancy in mind that lurking between such keenly anticipated titles as Paranormal Activity 2, Bloodand The Pack,2010's Horrorthon programme is peppered with good-bad delights.
Purists might well argue that good-bad is not necessarily synonymous with traditional Halloween fare. But if the grisly death visited upon the modern musical in The Appleisn't horror, then we don't know what is. See you down the front. Go democracy.
Killer klowns and other kut-price klassics: The good-bad highlights of Horrorthon 2010
KILLER KLOWNS FROM OUTER SPACE
Dir: Chiodo Brothers (US, 1988)
In between creating the puppets and effects for Critters and Team America: World Police, the Bronx-born Chiodo Brothers found time to write and direct this demented cult favourite in which, well, you’ve read the title, right?
Armed with man-eating popcorn and ray guns that wrap their hapless victims in candyfloss, the flesh-eating entertainers of the title hide out in a sleepy California town by masquerading as a funfair attraction. Add up the acid-squirting plastic flowers, the murderous custard pies and the vampire popcorn, and you get one pretty durable joke and some truly grotesque clown designs. Like clowns weren’t terrifying enough in the first place.
BIRDEMIC: SHOCK AND TERROR
Dir: James Nguyen (US, 2008)
Where would the good-bad movie be without rank plagarism? Screening for the first time on these shores, James Nguyen’s Birdemic: Shock and Terror seeks to recreate the menace of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds with a heroine who works for Victoria’s Secret (Whitney Moore) and an eyrie of eagles and vultures.
We’re told that no birds were harmed in the making of this picture; that’s probably because they’re quite clearly made from cardboard and 2D doodles. Suffice to say, Nguyen’s film – in which birds keep exploding, for some reason – is not quite as accomplished as the Hitchcock original.
THE APPLE
Dir: Menahem Golan
(US/West Germany, 1980)
You may have imagined that Can’t Stop the Music with the Village People was the worst musical of 1980, but you’re way off. Set in the distant future of 1994, this baffling musical sees two young Canadians journey to New York for the World Vision Song Finals and a tuneless showdown with the evil Mr Boogalow.
During its Hollywood premiere, irate audiences showed their appreciation of Menahem Golan’s curio by tearing up the cinema and throwing their free souvenir soundtracks at the screen. The director soon traded disco sci-fi fantasy for a career in such robust screen offerings as Cobra and Over the Top with Sylvester Stallone.
ISLAND OF DEATH
Dir: Nico Mastorakis (Greece, 1975)
Inspired by the success of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, film-maker Nico Mastorakis sought to up the ante with this demented tale of a psychotic British couple on a killing spree. Island of Death, one of the original video nasties, boasts an anti- hero who is happy to have “romantic” relations with goats in between killing homosexuals for their perceived crimes against nature. A song called Can You Call It Love? plays over the end credits. No, really.
GREMLINS 2: THE NEW BATCH
Dir: Joe Dante (US, 1990)
No film has ever snarled at the hand that feeds quite like Gremlins 2: The New Batch. A riotous mess, the film provides a Looney Tunes-style commentary on and merciless demolition of its predecessor. “I wanted to make sure they could never make another sequel,” Joe Dante told us recently. They didn’t. The Henry IV Part 2 of creature features.
PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE
Dir: Ed Wood jnr (US, 1958)
One of the most touching moments in Tim Burton’s under-rated biopic Ed Wood (also screening as part of Horrorthon) comes when the hapless Z-movie director of the title (Johnny Depp) meets his idol, Orson Welles, only to realise that the man behind Citizen Kane is just a struggling auteur like himself. Nobody would claim that Wood, bless him, wasn’t trying when he wrote, shot, produced and edited this cut-price sci-fi in which aliens raise the dead in order to take over a – you guessed it – sleepy American town. Plan 9 languished in obscurity for two decades until the founders of the the Golden Turkey Awards labelled it the worst film ever made. The grandaddy of good-bad movies.
LOOSE SCREWS: SCREWBALLS 2
Dir: Rafal Zielinski (US, 1985)
Whenever The Simpsons are playing with the ridiculous tropes of campus movies, you can be sure that Matt Groening or somebody under his command is doffing their cap in the direction of Screwballs or this considerably less nuanced sequel, in which four horny teens compete to get a shot at Mona Lott, the new French teacher. That’s just how they roll at Cockswell Academy.
HERSCHELL GORDON LEWIS: THE GODFATHER OF GORE
Dir: Frank Henenlotter (US, 2010)
Back in 1970, Herschell Gordon Lewis established himself as the Godfather of Gore with the release of splatter classic The Wizard of Gore. He has since transcended his own genre to become a cultural touchstone, providing a plot point in Juno and vocals for Carcass. Disappointingly for our purposes, Frank Henenlotter’s hilarious new documentary portrait is far too competent to earn anything more than an honorary place on this list.
- Horrorthon 2010 is at the Irish Film Institute, Dublin from October 21st to 25th. See irishfilm.ie/horrorthon2010
