If you had cable in the 90's, you can stop reading. You've seen these. This is for everybody else...
Ever realize one of your favorite childhood movies has 17% on rotten tomatoes?
Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou has 54% RT rating. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas has a 50% RT rating. It’s very possible that you love some movies that the critics at the time thought were total garbage. Why? Because you were in the right place and the right time, and the right state of mind and maturity level when you watched them.
Now imagine a 90's kid, pre-netflix, pre-rotten tomatoes, who has basic cable and a programmable VCR. Throw into the mix the fact that there were certain magical times in the year when a PAID channel would offer a free week as a trial. Suddenly you’d realize you had showtime! Or HBO, or Cinnemax, or the Movie Channel. Which means, there’s a non-zero chance that you’ll get to see a NIPPLE once in a while! Sweet! The VCR would be running 8 hours a night (the max length of a VHS tape, at the lowest quality setting) Thus, in a free trial week, I’d amass something like 3-4 movies a night, so ~25 commercial free movies per trial. There were 4 major premium channels. Showtime, HBO, Cinnemax, and The Movie Channel. Each had one free week once per year. So that’s ~100 TERRIBLE MOVIES A YEAR from the age of 12 to 16, for a total of ~400, awful cable movies that I have watched in this manner. I will spare you the details of some of the worst movies I saw during this era and only focus on the best of the worst.
Consider the movie “Weekend at Bernies” where two young men drag a corpse around for the better part of two hours pretending he’s alive, somehow gets funded, filmed, and then released. Some stoner thought the idea up, and some other stoner said “Yea! That sounds like it could work!”, and gave the first stoner money. When the dust settles, the critics lambast it as juvenile and juveniles think it’s great! When the movie bombs, cable networks can buy the broadcast rights very cheaply to fill the empty spaces around the one or two good movies they actually buy each month. But the original stoner idea remains, there waiting to be explored. :) Here in no particular order are some absolute pieces of total shit, with a tasty marshmallow center.
Opportunity Knocks (13% RT score) - Rom-com starring Dana Carvey (Garth from Wayne’s World) as a con man who gets into debt with a local mobster, and decides to take a job conning a nice Jewish family in the north chicago Suburbs, but falls in love with his mark. Best moment is a Napoleon Dynamitesque Kareoke rendition of “Born To Be Wild” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBp-kKju0IA
Clue - (62% RT score) This one actually got a bit of a cult following as all movies starring Tim Curry do. Also starring Christopher Lloyd, and Michael McKean (Spinal Tap, Best In Show, Better Call Saul). Featuring not one, not two, but THREE twist endings, which were shown in different theaters, (at random) and on the later DVD adaptations the audience was allowed to pick which ending they wanted to see. If you do watch this movie you absolutely need to see all 3 endings.
National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon 1 - (17% RT) Oh boy. This is a massive stinker. It’s a spoof of Lethal Weapon starring Emilio Estevez, Samuel L. Jackson, Tim Curry, William Shatner, and half the damn planet shows up in cameo’s. It’s essentially a series of absurd sketches and bits that lead nowhere plot wise, with really dumb jokes, and puns, and slapstick. How could a 14 year old or a very inebriated adult NOT love this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UytZHT1ewnI
Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey - (54% RT) Somehow I didn’t even realize it was a god damn sequel is how stupid 14 year old immigrant me was and I LOVED this movie about stoners, time travel, evil robot clones, ghosts, aliens, heaven and hell, and wanna be rock stars destined to change the world. Featuring Kanu Reeves and George Carlin. Trippy AF. And they’re actually releasing Bill & Ted 3 in the next few months, so definitely don’t see this movie if you don’t plan to watch the next one ;)
Hudson Hawk - (29% RT) What the fuck is this movie? A singing and dancing (seriously) Bruce Willis cat burglarizes museums to get Davinci code artifacts while trying to avoid a rogue CIA team whose members are named after candy bars. Often considered the biggest box office bomb of all time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QRPhSJWxR8 . In case you're not sold yet, Annie McDowell plays an undercover nun. Yes you read that right.
Last Action Hero - (36% RT) Arnold Swartzenegger stars as Arnold Swarzenegger in a movie about Arold Swarzenegger playing Arnold Swarzenegger. There’s a cartoon cat and a magic teleporting movie ticket and a breakdown of the action movie formula. Also has Charles Dance (Tywin Lannister) in his second best villain role ever. :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=og--R3MveME
Oscar - (17% RT) Speaking of Stallone, here’s one where he plays a 20’s gangster trying to go legit, in what is basically a comedic play adaptation with zero action scenes. Featuring the always amazing Tim Curry, and Marisa Tomei. I’ve seen this move way more times than I’d care to admit. It’s so bad it’s good.
Aspen Extreme (22% RT) Why oh why did I love this movie? Please don’t ever watch it. Even if you go on a ski vacation, and you’re in your cabin and you get snowed in, and you realize that there’s no internet, and the only entertainment is a VHS copy of this movie, it’s still only slightly better than glaring blankly into space. It’s basically ski porn about ski instructors in a love triangle with Paul Gross and Peter Berg. But don’t take it from me. Just watch this fan-vid supercut https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP3C-AD2w8s
The Postman (8% RT) If Dances With Wolves and Waterworld had a baby, this would be the result. Actually based on a very popular book, but I didn’t know that at the time, and thought the idea was very original and cool. Every time Donald Trump talks shit about the postal service, I want to mail him a copy of this movie. Also, every time I saw Kevin Costner in his Trump hat I wondered how this moron could miss the point of his own damn movie. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy2TdWIUJFA Oh, and in case you get the sudden urge to watch this little gem, did I mention it’s 3 hours long?
Encino Man (15%) Have you ever heard of the tragedy of Link the prehistoric? Well this is how it starts. https://media1.tenor.com/images/803d1faddc07a0452ec9a6cb496b5583/tenor.gif?itemid=12413653 Pauly Shore and Samwise Gamgee (or Rudy, whichever you prefer) are plagued with that extremely popular affliction of being unpopular in high school. So they dig up a caveman Brendan Fraser and proceed to bring him to their LA high school in order to use him as bait for girls. (spoiler: it totally works)
[link] [comments]
source https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/hihmol/i_watched_these_movies_so_you_dont_have_to/
Comments
Post a Comment