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There’s good, and then there’s bad. Then there’s bad, and really bad. And then there’s really bad, and so mind-blowingly bad it loops back around to good again. C’mon, you know what I’m talking about. Buried in everyone’s DVD/Blu-ray collection is that one disc. Maybe several of them. The one that you hide at the very end of the stack, even if you’re one of those obsessive compulsive types that organizes your collection alphanumerically (*ahem* not that I know anything about that). The one that only comes out when you need a cleansing of the palate after a harrowing night watching your 12 Years a Slaves and your There Will Be Bloods. The one you only watch with your closest friends. While amazingly drunk.
The guilty pleasure film has become something of a pop culture touchstone of late. To which I grumpily say, in the manner of an aging hipster, “I liked this stuff back in the ’80s.” You’d think that Tommy Wiseau single-handedly invented the so-bad-it’s-good movie in 2003, or something. Does no one remember Ed Wood? Golan-Globus? For God’s sake, the entirety of Mystery Science Theater 3000, and its descendants, Rifftrax and Cinematic Titanic? Yes, much like the way we stare at the twisted, smoking wreckage of a school bus full of orphans crashed on the side of the highway, we’ve always, as the culture made up of cynical bastards that we are, been unable to look away from the most epic of storytelling failures. We rubberneck at Glen or Glenda and Zardoz as we drive slowly by, giggling and pointing at the metaphorical flaming orphan corpses (otherwise known as any movie starring Dolph Lundgren or Reb Brown). These are the films that are so terrible, so unrelentingly, universe-endingly bad, that their mere existence is a genuine shock. “How did this thing get made?” you wonder in slack-jawed amazement. “How on Earth did this thing actually play in theaters at one time? Did they know they were making the cinematic equivalent of Custer’s Charge? Could they actually have thought this monstrosity was going to be good?”
And, my God, watching these films are just hilarious, glorious experiences. When a film is just bad, you simply tune out and ignore it. When a film is insultingly or offensively bad (see: The Phantom Menace), it evokes bile and anger. But when a film is so awful and poorly made, and, damn it, proud of itself anyway, you love it, and cheer for it. We all love the underdog, after all. This is why the first, second and fifth Twilight movies are utter laugh riots, while the third and fourth ones are miserable slogs. Twilight, New Moon and Breaking Dawn – Part 2 are so terrible they transcend their badness, becoming something wonderful. Eclipse is just competent enough to be stone cold boring, and Breaking Dawn – Part 1 is so incredibly insulting and empty you can’t help but despise it.
As a long-time fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and science fiction, a genre that produces a copious amount of quality schlock, I am quite the connoisseur of this filmmaking phenomenon. And so I would like to share with all of you, gentle readers, some true gems of filmed cheese that you may have missed out on. I’m not going to mention The Room or Birdemic, you should already know about those. Nor am I going to mention the true cheese classics, like the Ed Wood oeuvre, or the Evil Dead films. We’re going to go further afield here, to films that you may not have noticed in theaters or on the racks at Blockbuster Video before they disappeared forever, right into the putrid underbelly of Hollywood, where the shambling corpses of the likes of Roger Corman, Bert I. Gordon, and Cannon Films can be found.
Yor, the Hunter From the Future (1983)
I would be shocked beyond belief if any of you have heard of this one, but Yor is a thing of true beauty. Directed by famed Italian B-movie director Antonio Margheriti, the film is like a competently-made version of the infamous “Turkish Star Wars“. It features blond slab of B-movie gold Reb “Blast Hardcheese” Brown as “Yor,” some sort of barbarian/Joseph Campbell warrior gestalt, the mentally handicapped offspring of Conan the Barbarian and Luke Skywalker. He’s from “the High Mountain,” and likes to jog around the Turkish countryside while a pounding rock anthem sings his virtues. He fights dinosaurs, cave women throw themselves at him left and right, he uses the carcass of a giant mutant as a hang glider, he fights laser-wielding robot zombies, and finally defeats a low-rent Emperor Palpatine, all in the space of 88 amazing minutes. You owe it to yourself to watch this steaming pile of wonderful crap, if only to see every trope of the high fantasy and post apocalyptic science fiction genres get viciously violated in every imaginable way.
The Last Starfighter (1984)
This one is actually personally important to me, as I can relate to it so very much. The story is all about a kid named Alex living in a trailer park somewhere in America, feeling as if he’s destined for greater and better things, but can never achieve them, because he doesn’t live in a world where the rules favor someone like him reaching for the stars. After breaking the high score record on an arcade game called “Starfighter” one night, Alex is accosted by a mysterious man who arrives in a very strange-looking car, who informs him that he invented “Starfighter,” and that Alex’s skills at the game have impressed him. It turns out that the arcade game is actually a “sword in the stone”-style test to find amazing pilots, and Alex has scored better than anyone ever has. In short, Alex gets recruited into an interstellar war, and gets to try to be the hero he always wanted to be. The story is an incredibly sweet-natured and fun coming-of-age story, and while it borrows elements from Star Wars, it’s more of a loving tribute to the arcade culture of the late-’70s and early-’80s than it is another Star Wars knockoff. It also features sequences of gloriously over-the-top adventure serial hamminess, is remarkable for being the first major film to use CGI effects to depict objects that were supposed to be real, and features the late, great Robert Preston‘s last film performance as the Harold Hill-inspired Centauri.
My Science Project (1985)
I’ve loved this film since forever, and no one has heard of it. I recorded it off of a free preview of HBO in 1986, one year after its very brief theatrical release, and watched it about 2,000 times afterwards. It’s a silly little film featuring a slate of actors you’ve never seen before, alongside Fisher “Ben” Stevens, and Dennis Freaking Hopper essentially playing Billy from Easy Rider if he’d survived that movie and become a teacher in his middle age. The plot centers on a mysterious alien artifact that creates massive distortions in local spacetime whenever it’s turned on, and serves fairly competently as a standard ’80s high school story about a guy from the wrong side of the tracks who likes a girl who’s above his station. The film works because of the liberties it takes with the standard tropes, making the “good girl” a raging nerd, making the “buddy” character a slightly unhinged Italian kid who has 6,000 times more personality than the lead, and climaxing not with the Senior Prom, but with a trip through multiple intersecting time periods, complete with Roman gladiators, post apocalyptic mutants, and dinosaurs.
Masters of the Universe (1987)
Frank Langella as Skeletor. Dolph Lundgren as He-Man. And a very young Courtney Cox and pre-Voyager Tom Paris running around with them. I will let that sink in for a moment. This is my gold standard of fun movie cheese. It’s ostensibly an adaptation of the early-’80s cartoon/toy commercial Masters of the Universe, but it’s more accurately a shadow adaptation of Jack Kirby’s “Fourth World” stories, with the Cosmic Key replacing the Mother Box, Skeletor as Darkseid, the Sorceress as the Highfather, and He-Man as Orion. For that alone, it’s worth your time, but add in Frank Langella chewing the scenery with absolute aplomb for the entire length (“I dare anything!! I am Skeletor!!”), and Meg Foster having just as much fun as Evil-Lyn, and you have a true winner. And Bill Conti’s score is amazing.
Over the Top (1987)
Sylvester Stallone plays a truck driver named “Lincoln Hawk,” who tries to win over his estranged son by competing in the World Arm Wrestling Championships, in a film from the producers of The Barbarians and Alien from L.A. I will say no more.
Willow (1988)
Shut up! I love Willow! I don’t care that it’s a low-rent Lord of the Rings, it’s fun! Yes, this Ron Howard-directed film serves as a sort of ominous portent of things to come from George Lucas (in case the Ewoks and Howard the Duck didn’t do that already) in the form of the cheesier jokes, and the very existence of the Brownies. But it’s still a very loving homage to Tolkienian high fantasy, at a time when actually making The Lord of the Rings into films seemed a never-to-be impossibility, and Warwick Davis makes a great hero, a role dwarf actors don’t get to play very often, especially back in the ’80s. What’s the plot? Who cares? It has magic, swords, monsters, evil sorceresses, and generals wearing skulls as helmets. Give it another try, it’s a lot more fun than you remembered, and it’s a great way to introduce younger kids to high fantasy.
Under Siege (1992)
Steven Seagal is a walking human personification of movie cheese, but this, his best film, is definitely the Steven Seagal film to watch. It’s before Seagal descended into puffy “I’m a Zen Master” nonsense, and is actually one of the better examples of the knockoff “Die Hard on/in a BLANK” films (in this case, “Die Hard on a Navy battleship”). For bonus points, it features the inexplicable casting of a real Playboy Playmate, Erika Eleniak, portraying a fictional Playboy Playmate, but not herself. Oh, and did I mention that the villains are played by Tommy Lee Jones and another chunk of human Gorgonzola, Gary Busey? Yeah, this film is ridiculous, and a perfectly absurdist film to put on in the background at a party so everyone can throw popcorn at the scream and yell at the characters.
New York, NY
April 23, 2014
Hyperspace Pasta 
