Saturday, August 16, 2008

The Joys of Bad Saturday Afternoon Television

We haven't done one of our favorite bad movie posts in a few. As I sit here procrastinating...insert thought-got to finish this chapter and congrats to a friend who just walked into the light so to speak...there is a great bit of 1980s fare on the idiot box.

Do you remember The Gate? I saw this one with my mom, God bless her patience, when I was about 12:



This made me think of CHUD!:



Do you remember The Devil's Rain, featuring Ernest Borgnine and William Shatner?



A little later, but a classic nonetheless, who else has love for Leprechaun in the Hood?



It is time to clean house! The People Under the Stairs:



You get no reparations!!!!! Damn slave voodoo dolls! Tales from the Hood gets extra points for the fact that the actor who is type cast as the Uncle Tom in every movie in which he appears gets done in pretty quickly:



What other bad "horror" classics should we add to our play list?

4 comments:

All-Mi-T [Thought Crime] Rawdawgbuffalo said...

guess thats why i dont look at tv

Anonymous said...

The entire genre seems dated whenever viewed in retrospect. Horror movies have such a short useful life, even the movies made five years ago seem dated. I'm sure we can all reflect on the I Know What You Did Last Summer movies, the Scream movies, as well as the last films in the Freddy Krueger and Jason franchises with whimsy. Horror flicks may be great in the present but don't age gracefully, losing their luster at a faster clip then the movies that are actually draped on a more plausible framework. This statement proves even more true now with so many films relying heavily on CGI (that's computer generated imagery, for all of you non-nerds)to paint the picture we could only imagine in the past.

I may be a bit jaded from watching too many 'the making of' programs about various movies. Like watching a magician's show then finding out how he did his illusions, it becomes a bit more difficult for me to feign interest. Not to mention the fact that most horror movies ask the audience to swallow horse pills of bovine fecal matter, which is not good medicine in this viewer's humble opinion.

Lady Zora, Chauncey DeVega, and Gordon Gartrelle said...

They don't always age gracefully but you, we, can appreciate them for what they are, no? These bad classics have 2 lives, often they are scary at first to a 10 year old and then to a 30 year old we can laugh, or perhaps appreciate the subtext.

Some are timeless. Watch the original Nosferatu movie, the basis of Dracula and tell me that movie still isn't scary and disturbing as hell!!!!

Anonymous said...

You forgot Killer Clowns from Outer Space. When I first seen this movie I was 10 and it scared the ish out of me. But now that I'm older, I see how ridicolous it is. I mean, turning human beings into cotton candy? I was scared of that shit? Cuz,once you know the tricks and special effects, most horrow movies stop being scary. Damn how the horror genre has died.