Films so bad, they’re good
Madrid pays homage to ‘trash movies’ at convention
MADRID: You’d think the prospect of bad acting, a terrible script and rock-bottom directing would put movie buffs off. But if Madrid’s CutreCon trash film festival is anything to go by – you’d be wrong.
Lured by such films as the musical Nudist Colony of the Dead and Bollywood’s Action Jackson, some 3,500 people turned up at the fiveday event.
They also came to see one of the holy grails of the bad film world:
Troll 2 – with its rating of just six per cent on review site Rotten Tomatoes, is considered one of the worst movies ever.
CutreCon, which ended on Sunday, is one of several festivals in Europe dedicated to films so bad they’re good, many of which have been pulled from oblivion by the internet, at times earning them and their protagonists cult status.
Nostalgia for the era of low-quality, VHS films, dissatisfaction with mainstream cinema and a general desire to laugh and let off steam have contributed to the genre’s rise in popularity.
Also influential was Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s 2007 ode to trash cinema
Grindhouse.
“The first time I came across a trash film was when I was around 10 or 11, with a film by Larry Cohen called The Stuff, which is about killer yoghurt,” says Carlos Palencia, a culture journalist and CutreCon’s director.
His interest in the genre eventually prompted him to create the festival, now in its sixth year, having evolved from a one-night-only film viewing to the current multi-loca--
tion event.
Keyvan Sarkhosh, senior research fellow at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics who co-authored a research paper on the subject, says there are two types of trash films – the unintentionally bad and those deliberately made to be awful.
The man who perhaps best represents the first category is Edward Wood, whose Plan 9 from Outer Space film about aliens has been dubbed the best “worst movie” ever made.
Wood died in 1978 a poor alcoholic, but achieved posthumous fame thanks in part to Tim Burton’s biopic Ed Wood starring Johnny Depp.
Then come films intentionally made to be incoherent and clumsy for “ironic consumption”, says Sarkhosh.
Cue the recent Sharknado franchise – films about freak storms that see sharks sucked up in water spouts and rained down on unsuspecting city dwellers.
Bad taste? Not so, says Sarkhosh, whose research found that those who watched these movies were highly educated, cultural “omnivores” just as happy to watch arthouse films.
“To enjoy bad cinema, you need to really like good cinema. You need good taste to appreciate bad taste and find the fun side of a movie,” concurs Palencia.
For Angel-Luis Andres, a 40-yearold sales manager who turned up to see Troll 2 at the festival, nostalgia is also part of the appeal.
“My father would bring home a batch of videos at the weekend,” he recalls.
“He always brought back stuff that me and my brother liked – monsters, dinosaurs. These are nostalgia films,” he says, before sitting down for a lively screening.
Others have also found belated fame from their initial embarrassment.
Matt Hannon, a US actor who starred in the direct-to-video film Samurai Cop in 1991, dropped his career straight after.
So desperate was he to be forgotten that when people started saying he was dead, based on the obit of another Matt Hannon, he did nothing to dispel the rumours.
But with the rising popularity of his film some two decades after it was made, he finally came back into the limelight and starred in the sequel Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance. — AFP