In this festive period of indulgence, it's only right to get together with like-minded friends and family to watch some really terrible-good movies. Y'know, the ones that you inexplicably love despite a lack of many - or indeed, any - redeeming features.
Behold! What follows is a list of our favourite 'guilty pleasures'. For a round-up of some of the finest moments from these magnificent gifts of unintentional hilarity, check out the video immediately below. You won't regret it.*
*you may experience minor regret
Garbage Pail Kids Movie
For those not fortunate enough to grow up in the ‘80s, The Garbage Pail Kids (or the Garbage Gang Kids in Australia and New Zealand), were a series of trading cards featuring characters with gross ailments who bore more than a little resemblance to popular toy line The Cabbage Patch Kids. In ‘87, a Garbage Pail Kids movie was released, and it was definitively terrible. The Kids in question were dwarf actors wearing terrifyingly immovable rubber masks, forced to sort of bumble around while singing tinny songs about working together and friendship in a grim attempt at satire. It remains one of the most hypnotically so-wrong-it’s-right ‘family films’ to come out of a decade with a notoriously liberal approach to the genre.
Anaconda
Long before schlock like Piranhaconda and Sharktopus turned creature features into horror’s equivalent of cheap porn, there were movies like Anaconda. Po-faced, ridiculously action-packed, and featuring a cast including Owen Wilson, Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez (as an intrepid documentary film director!), Anaconda’s more ‘90s than Chumbawamba. It’s also great fun, principally thanks to a terrifically naff performance from Jon Voight, who delivers lines like “this riiiiiver can kill you in a thousand ways” in a garbled Paraguayan accent he must have thought was good to go after flipping through a Lonely Planet guide.
Last Action Hero
Poor Last Action Hero. The odds were always stacked against it; what with its production troubles and disastrous box office (it opened alongside Jurassic Park back in ’93). But really, Last Action Hero is a victim of circumstance. On the one hand it’s big dumb fun, but on the other it’s a sharp piece of postmodernism that would have sat much more comfortably alongside other genre deconstruction flicks like Scream and The Cabin in the Woods. Plus, Arnie doing Hamlet is something to tick off that bucket list you never knew you had.
Dark Star
The eccentric debut from horrormeister John Carpenter, sci-fi comedy Dark Star was made on a shoestring budget in 1974. It was a student project, and while it's terrifically satirical, it's still as oddly-paced and poorly acted as one would expect from a first-time director trying his hand at a comedy set in space during the '70s. Highlights include an alien beach ball, a bomb who the astronauts address as 'Bomb' and some brilliant special effects that look drawn on by crayons. A deserved cult classic.
Bad Boys II
Just like most of Michael Bay’s efforts, Bad Boys 2 is one of those movies that had too much movie in it. Too many car chases. Too much comic relief. Too many explosions. Yet, like marshmallow fluff, it remains confusingly appealing. From its not-so-humble beginnings – when Will and Martin infiltrate a drug ring dressed as Klansmen, no less – to its bombastic ending, which has the pair invade Cuba – Bad Boys 2 delivers an unrelenting assault on your senses, until you can’t help but love it, crying, shaking and begging for respite.
Invasion U.S.A.
Produced by the historically trashy Cannon Group, Invasion U.S.A. is one of the most bodacious, OTT action movies to come out of the '80s. Starring Chuck Norris at his most endearingly dumb, Invasion U.S.A. was also co-written by the ginger hero, catapulting it into even simpler territory. Bad guys blow up things with guns! Hero blows up bad guys with guns! Cars! Possibly Norris' best film by the skin of a pair of uzis.
Source : ign[dot]com
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