Ridiculous Movies (but not B movies)

Singham is worth watching if only to see how different the attitude toward police brutality can be in other countries.

Does Bubba Ho-Tep count? I loved the movie, but it’s definitely ridiculous.

I love it too, but it’s a total B movie.

Why, on a nerd forum, would we call a movie about a werewolf or a mermaid or about shrinking people ridiculous? They’re fantasy movies. It’s like saying a birthday cake is ridiculous for being sweet and non-nutritious, or scotch is ridiculous for being hard to drink in large quantities and non-hydrating. It’s in some sense true, but beside the point.

If someone set out to make a ham sandwich and somehow ended up with a birthday cake though, that would be pretty ridiculous. I feel I’ve explained well enough what the point of this thread is already.

I just saw Weird Science for the first time a few nights ago. They took Pygmalion, Faust, Mary Poppins, an anthropological study of polyandry, an Oingo Boingo single, a man made of poop, an adolescent power fantasy, and an adolescent sex fantasy, and put them all in a magic blender. Magic mutant bikers stood side by side with John Hughes’ weird and squirmy visions of black people. Female people were even stranger.

Holy crap, I just read the plot in Wikipedia. What a freakin mess. And it is of course based on a Heinlein novel. I am not surprised. Well, maybe only that Lazarus Long doesn’t show up in it.

This probably falls foul of the B movie rule, but since I just found my copy hidden in a DVD box for The Wire having lost it for at least five years, I don’t care. Wild Zero, one of the most batshit insane films of all time.

On the quasi-recommendation of Amy Nicholson from The Canon, I just watched Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession. Hoo boy. Nearly every scene of this film is ridiculous. Zulawski’s usual weird gender and sexuality stuff. A doppelganger. Sam Neill channelling Jeremy Irons channelling James Mason. Every major character making Nic Cage’s performance in Vampire’s Kiss look restrained, naturalistic and sane. So much shouting. Oh, and a mind control tentacle monster thing.

Its funny but Possession seems to be a movie that completely escaped my notice but seems to suddenly be turning up everywhere I look. Were I a Jungian I might think that perhaps our collective unconscious is motivating me to watch this. But since I’m just a dude with a possibly unhealthy taste for bad horror movies, I figure it’s just my turn in the barrel.

http://cdn2-www.comingsoon.net/assets/uploads/1970/01/file_578003_spoiler-alert-lede.jpg

I mean it’s on the box art. Also this is one of those films you can’t in any meaningful way spoil. It can only be experienced first hand.

I submit both Remo Williams and Buckaroo Bonzai, but especially Buckaroo Bonzai.

Hell yeah.

I love them both, but I’d still call them both quintessential B movies.

Maybe Remo Williams, but BB had an all star cast. Or at least the cast is good in retrospect, not sure if they were all stars back then.

You’ve put your finger on it - lots of the folk in Buckaroo Banzai went on to larger things, but weren’t really big names at the time. This is pre-Robocop Peter Weller, pre-The Fly Jeff Goldblum, and so on. John Lithgow had been in some things, like The World According to Garp, but I don’t think you could say he was a big name when he did BB.

I approve of this thread.

That’s a very cool little app. Holding out on us, eh?