Let's face it; we all love bad movies in some shape form or fashion. It's okay to admit it because we have all watched one or two movies where we knew the plot wasn't great, the quality just a touch shabby, and the acting at times as dire as the dialogue. Yet in their "badness" there is something inherently enjoyable otherwise the phrase "so bad it's good" simply wouldn't exist. So in the vain of Kim Newman's encyclopedic horror tribute "Nightmare Movies" and Mike Fury's explosive examination of the the action genre "Life in Action", author Rob Hill has brought together some of your favourite titles (and his) in the epic "Bad Movie Bible". If you love reading insightful and fun-filled books on the subject of films then this is definitely the one and you can read my review of it here.If you don't believe that people (and yes you) have and continue to enjoy one bad movie after another then consider how Cannon Films in the 80s and 90s made a decent living on a string of bad movies such as "King Solomon's Mines", and a whole host of titles too numerous to mention. Since the 1950s B Movie king Roger Corman has churned out one cringeworthy title after another more recently with some cheap and cheesy monster trash such as "Sharktopuss". Then there is the king of the "mockbusters" The Asylum who are currently riding high on their "Sharknado" film saga. Focusing mainly on 80s and 90s with over a hundred cinematic and straight to shelf titles across many genres Rob Hill's bible examines the bad movie phenomenon, and why they hold such appeal.
It was at this year's packed out London Film and Comic Con event at the Olympia that I met Rob, a very articulate and intelligent chap whose nerd-like love of these types films was matched only by my own. After some pleading (it really didn't take much) Rob took time out from his busy weekend promoting and signing, to talk to me about bad movies and what led him to put together "The Bad Movie Bible".
Like most people who end up working in film in one way or another I was just an obsessive fan growing up as a child in the 80s particularly in the time of genre movies and then after university I started working in the post production industry because I thought I wanted to work in film. I started working in visual effects spent 15 years doing that. Then whilst that was happening I wrote a couple of puff piece books “501 must see movies” or something like that. I then wanted to try and get a publishing deal to write a book about bad movies, and managed to pull that off, left post production and so for the past year I’ve been doing this full time.
Is the book self-published?
No, I actually got a publishing deal for a series of books all in the same sort of wheelhouse. I wanted to do good bad movies first simply because I’ve always loved these movies but I have never been much of a social media or internet person so I didn’t realise how many people there were around the world who also loved these movies. I couldn’t really find a book that really with it and was a fun guide to it all so I thought that was a way to go. Now we’re trying to decide whether to do a follow up to this or to spin off slightly into other cult movie areas.
Let’s go onto the subject of bad movies. They’re quite an interesting - I don’t want to call them a genre or sub-genre but they are in a class of their own, so perhaps they should be. What is it about bad movies as we loosely term them that hold such appeal?
It is difficult isn’t it? I think a lot of the things that appeal to us about them aren’t things that we necessarily want to admit we feel about these as people. Without a shadow of a doubt when it comes to really bad films there’s a big element of schadenfreude, of feeling like you could’ve done better and laughing at other people’s failures. At the end of the day it’s a basic human tenet whether you want to admit it or not. That’s only the hardcore stuff; before you get to those movies, and I’ve said this to many people before, everyone is a bad movie fan to one degree or another. If you like “Roadhouse” “Dirty Dancing, “Grease” or “Rocky IV” then you’ve dipped your toe in these waters, you ironically enjoy the excessive cheese, violence or whatever it might be. And who doesn’t, a vast generation certainly, have a soft spot for those movies? I think it works on different levels and different extents, and I think there are people who just like a silly, cheesy, crappy movie and then there are people who go for the full fat movies like “The Room”, essentially the complete debacles, and that’s where the schadenfreude definitely plays a big part. I think whichever way you like at it, they are a genre as you say, no matter whether they are sci-fi, or dramas they work on us in the same way. They’re essentially comedies, so really bad movies are a sub-genre of comedy in a lot of ways.
One of the things people often say about these films is that those involved couldn’t have taken it that seriously because they are so bad they must be intentionally so, however it is hard to tell what the film makers intended, do you think that is the case?
It’s doubly difficult to tell particularly going back – nowadays that kind of movie is very well established as with The Asylum’s “Sharknado” series and all that kind of rubbish, but if you go back to the 80s you get these movies where they will inject a tiny bit of irony or tongue-in-cheek humour into it. It is difficult to tell, difficult to judge but it is obvious I think with the movies that are in my book they are 100% serious, nobody wanted anyone to be laughing at these movies. There is certainly a big grey area with certain movies like “Flash Gordon” which I’ve kind of steered away from, but it often can be difficult, so all you can do is research and try to work out where the film makers are coming from.
It’s doubly difficult to tell particularly going back – nowadays that kind of movie is very well established as with The Asylum’s “Sharknado” series and all that kind of rubbish, but if you go back to the 80s you get these movies where they will inject a tiny bit of irony or tongue-in-cheek humour into it. It is difficult to tell, difficult to judge but it is obvious I think with the movies that are in my book they are 100% serious, nobody wanted anyone to be laughing at these movies. There is certainly a big grey area with certain movies like “Flash Gordon” which I’ve kind of steered away from, but it often can be difficult, so all you can do is research and try to work out where the film makers are coming from.
And I guess the biggest surprise of these films is that they have big name actors in them from Christopher Lee to Peter Cushing to, well take your pick really, Joan Collins. They also have big name directors attached, so do you think possibly thinking along same lines that they go into these films knowing they are a bit off key?
Big successful actors end up in terrible movies for two different reasons; one is, a movie like “Batman and Robin” which on paper shouldn’t have been a terrible movie, yet somehow George Clooney and Arnold Schwarzenegger inadvertently found themselves in a big pile of crap basically [I totally agree with this – Ed]. Then there’s a whole other family of actors, which Christopher Lee certainly used to belong to but he managed to pull himself out of it – actors who made a name for themselves in either sport or music or popular TV series. They then have some star power who can’t get work in a proper movie so someone with a low budget and bad script can buy instant credibility by hiring a name. It doesn’t have to be an actor people respect just one they have heard of; Christopher Lee was doing a lot of this in the 80s, Reb Brown a former American Football star is in so many of these movies. One of the most perfect examples of these movies is the star of TV show “Grizzly Adams” Dan Haggerty he is an appallingly bad actor but he was in one show that made him huge and so for the rest of his career he cropped up in half a dozen or so of the worst movies you’ve ever seen each year.
It seems now though making “bad movies” has become profitable. Cannon Films for example did very well making mostly bad movies and now we have studios, like “The Asylum” who are churning them out” day after day. So again we know they’re bad, why are films that are deliberately bad doing so well today?
I think it probably goes hand in hand with the increased interest in genuine, inadvertently bad movies, so a movie like “The Room” makes a lot of money. I am not sure it would’ve done 20 or 30 years ago because I think our sense of humour is a little more cynical, we’ve seen everything so many times now. It’s very hard to make a superhero movie say, with an action sequence which is truly original. So everyone kind of feels like an expert, that they’ve seen it all before and so they’re more willing to say “ha ha you’ve failed at that.” I think the sense of humour of younger people is generally a bit more, not snide, but they’re more willing to laugh at people hurting themselves by accident than maybe it would have been the case a couple of decades ago.
And I guess with Hollywood still trying to take itself too seriously it’s refreshing to have an output that is poking a little fun at the system, like The Asylum does with Mockbusters.
Yes the rip-offs of the big Hollywood movies, but I think that’s why Cannon Films and movies like that are so popular now; people are tired of the ultra slick, kind of almost insulting Hollywood blockbusters of today. The simple pleasures of an action movie where Charles Bronson shoots people in the face, that’s very appealing now.
So onto your book, it’s called “The Bad Movie Bible” and it is a bible really, not just a top 100 list. A lot of thought and insight has gone into this, there’s even a little science to determine what makes up a "bad movie". How long did it take you to research and compile the book?
I spent about nine months from getting the green light from the publisher to printer. That was nine months of very long days and I had done a lot of preliminary work anyway so it’s probably a good year’s worth of work in total.
Well you’ve clearly done a lot of research and you’ve actually managed to interview some of the cast and crew. How did you come up with idea to approach them and what was their response when you explained why you wanted to interview them?
It was tricky because I am not an interviewer but I liked the idea of getting that first hand impression of what it was like to work on the sets. I mean the classic question I wanted to ask was – I asked Whitney Moore this about “Birdemic” - “did you know at the time what you were getting involved with?” At the same time of course you’re confronting these people and it’s not as easy as you might think to go “ha ha you’re in a terrible movie aren’t you, would you do me a favour and talk about how crap you are?” So it was a difficult thing to juggle but surprisingly most of the people I approached have cottoned on to the fact that there is a market out there for something that is so bad and they’re making money out of it a lot of the time so they were quite happy.
So many people have recommended movies and I am still watching at least a couple a day when I am not out promoting the book. I am still finding things that could go into a straightforward sequel with more of the same. At the same time part of me wants to go backwards - if you notice I’ve got this bee in my bonnet about comparing 1950s drive-in B movies to modern disasters. We can say the acting in “The Room” was terrible because it is but you say the acting in an Ed Wood movie is terrible (and yes it is) but if you look at the acting in a good 1950s B movie it is by modern standards terrible too so it’s a case of what are we comparing? I’d quite like to go back and do that otherwise I like the idea of a similarly structured book but looking at the cult movies that really are cult movies; not “The Blues Brothers”, nor “American Werewolf in London” but any number of more obscure wonderful movies that are so clichéd as cult movies.
Just to backtrack then; in your introduction you write about “what makes a bad movie” in doing so you seem to blur the line of the absolutist view of good and bad. Without giving too much away about what you say in the book, could you briefly point out the many aspects of a bad movie?
It kind of ties in with what I was saying earlier that you have your entry level bad movies that have a really excessive action scene which is ludicrously over the top and punching each other in ways that should kill them on the spot. You could call that bad because it is not realistic, and your cheesy stuff would fit into that. Then you could get into technical ineptitude which is a very different thing – the camera’s out of focus, someone wanders onto the set, or the editing gives you a minor neck injury. Then at the far end of the scale you’ve got the alien film makers, the people who’ve seen movies and thought “I can do that”. It’s as if an alien has come from another planet and copied your idea for a movie.
Care to share with me some of your favourite bad movies? I know you’ve listed some in the book, but are there any that hold a special place in your heart?
I was constantly fighting to keep the book not just an 80s action movie list. The thing is I think that’s what people in general seem to enjoy the most as well so I wasn’t too worried about going heavy on that kind of thing but there are so many obscure 80s action movies any number of which that could count as – there is a film maker called Robert Rundle who is very obscure, no one seems to have seen his movies and he only made three. He made a movie called “Cybernator” which is a sci-fi action movie and is utterly ridiculous. I had to drop that from the book because there was just so many similar titles in there – that’s a favourite. In terms of what’s in the book I love “Raw Force” that’s another 80s action movie. Neil Breen an American film maker from Las Vegas who self-finances (he’s made four so far), he is what people think Tommy Wiseau is - narcissism and delusion to the Nth Degree. He is utterly insane, his movies are just fantastic, and he takes them completely seriously.
Thank you Rob for taking the time to speak to me, it topped off what was an incredibly fun weekend. The Bad Movie Bible is available to buy now, along with many of the titles featured in the book. More bad movie fun can be found on
Webiste www.badmoviebible.com
Twitter @BadMovieBible
Also check out some of the best bad movie moments on YouTube
I was constantly fighting to keep the book not just an 80s action movie list. The thing is I think that’s what people in general seem to enjoy the most as well so I wasn’t too worried about going heavy on that kind of thing but there are so many obscure 80s action movies any number of which that could count as – there is a film maker called Robert Rundle who is very obscure, no one seems to have seen his movies and he only made three. He made a movie called “Cybernator” which is a sci-fi action movie and is utterly ridiculous. I had to drop that from the book because there was just so many similar titles in there – that’s a favourite. In terms of what’s in the book I love “Raw Force” that’s another 80s action movie. Neil Breen an American film maker from Las Vegas who self-finances (he’s made four so far), he is what people think Tommy Wiseau is - narcissism and delusion to the Nth Degree. He is utterly insane, his movies are just fantastic, and he takes them completely seriously.
Thank you Rob for taking the time to speak to me, it topped off what was an incredibly fun weekend. The Bad Movie Bible is available to buy now, along with many of the titles featured in the book. More bad movie fun can be found on
Webiste www.badmoviebible.com
Twitter @BadMovieBible
Also check out some of the best bad movie moments on YouTube
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