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  • Showing only topics in ~movies with the tag "schlock". Back to normal view / Search all groups
    1. Movies you enjoy that nobody else does

      Anyone want to offer movies they enjoy but nobody else seems to? I suppose you might call them "guilty pleasures", but I don't feel guilty about them. Sometimes weird crap appeals to you for some...

      Anyone want to offer movies they enjoy but nobody else seems to? I suppose you might call them "guilty pleasures", but I don't feel guilty about them. Sometimes weird crap appeals to you for some reason you can't quite explain. Maybe it's that there are ideas that in theory work but are implemented badly, bad casting that is still weirdly entertaining in some esoteric way, or a soundtrack that's honestly better than the film itself but oddly holds the whole thing together.

      I'll go to bat for Stephen King's Maximum Overdrive. It's honestly a mess on film, but something about the combined schlock value of all the stuff going on made it weirdly endearing to me. There's plenty of memorable scenes, a great soundtrack (that musical sting when the machines attack somebody lives rent-free in my head), terrible but entertaining performances ("Curtis...is he DEAD?") to say nothing of the bizarrely inconsistent plot/gimmick with aliens causing machines to come alive. To me, it's the definition of "so bad, it's good" because clearly there was craft and intent involved, but when your co-director is cocaine (King admits he was deep in the depths of cocaine addiction at the time), the end result can be a wild card. I still watch it frequently after discovering it on late-night HBO as a kid.

      My runner-ups are George P. Cosmatos' Leviathan and Paul W.S. Anderson's Event Horizon.

      63 votes