AtariToday wrote:Also you have to see this on Blu-ray. A lot of work went into restoring the footage and it looks absolutely stunning. If you want to check this out before you throw money down the whole film is currently on youtube. Substandard non-bluray release of course (still tons of fun!)
https://youtu.be/8hqcGK72XYQ
That YouTube link actually has an advantage over the Blu-Ray because it has the original cut of the film (although it's stupidly cropped to widescreen from the already cropped VHS, so you get only a cramped center bit of the picture; better to watch the original rip, which isn't hard to find). The Blu-Ray had to be sourced from Roger Corman's cut, which removed a lot of the sillier details to make it marginally more presentable. Not that the Blu-Ray wouldn't be worth watching in its own right, but it is noticeably less fun. (Edit: I found
a page listing all of the cut footage; this should give an idea of what I'm talking about.)
I don't know if so-bad-they're good cult movies like
Starcrash and
Message from Space are really in the spirit of the thread (I'm sure that everyone who's into bad movies enough to know about
Starcrash loves it for exactly what it is, and they don't remotely appreciate it seriously like the OP does
The Grinch), but I guess that I should at least post my own favorite instead of just responding to others.
Hands down, my favorite bad movie is
Battlefield Earth - I've laughed harder at that movie than at any deliberate comedy. It's unbelievable that a movie this
wrong got a multi-million-dollar budget and a wide release instead of going direct to video. You'd swear that everyone involved in the movie was actively trying to ruin it.
John Travolta's performance is
insane. Every single shot is cockeyed and tinted an arbitrary color. The "plot" is an incoherent mess that turns a mediocre book into something actively insulting. (For example, the humans in the book have to steal the aliens' weapons and vehicles to fight them because the ancient human weapons are unusably deteriorated - in the movie, they fly thousand-year-old Harriers. This is one of the
less stupid changes to the story.) There isn't a scene that doesn't, in detail or (usually) in substance, impress with its idiocy. It's almost thrilling to observe.
For an actual guilty pleasure, I'll go with
C.H.U.D. (which turns out to stand for two different things, one of the lamest "twists" I've ever seen). It's a dumb, trashy John Carpenter wannabe from 1984 about monsters living under New York City. I watched it for laughs, but I ended up actually getting into it - it really gets a lot of John Carpenter's special vibe right, and while the two leads are complete bores, everyone else is interesting in some way or another (especially Shepherd). It definitely isn't a good movie, but there are enough good
things in it that I was happy to play along for an hour and a half. I should watch it again sometime.