Awful Movies

            It was a dark and stormy night.         

            Of all the beginnings of all the stories, that one is my favorite.  Perhaps it’s hackneyed.  Perhaps it’s a ghost of what it once was.  Still—it was a dark and stormy night, and the leaves were shivering in the trees.

            It was a Halloween weekend long ago, and our friend Geoff, who we’d just met, was saying, “I’d watch it right now.”

            “You would?”

            “Hell yes.  Y’want to?”

Little did Greg and I know how much our fates were about to change. Without further encouragement, Geoff sprang up the stairs to his room, and came back holding an omnibus DVD of two movies: Troll, and Troll 2.   

The sequel, he explained, had little to do with the original film.  Geoff had been talking about Troll 2, expostulating its grandiosity, aggrandizing its excellence, for two hours.  He popped it into the DVD player, and out from the speakers came the words, “Peter was a courageous boy, but that dawn he could feel fear stick to his skin like dew on leaves.” 

And that my friends, is when the odyssey began.  

            The thing is, some awful movies are ridiculous.  Some awful movies are offensive.  Some awful movies are just so jaw-grindingly boring that you start counting the hairs on your pointer fingers to pass the time.

            Then there’s a small, elite few, a ragged but merry band: the awesome awful movies.  These are the films that, despite a complete lack of reliable acting, coherent scripting, and viable directing, remain adorable.  Case in point: Troll 2.

            “But what did Peter turn into, Grandpa?”

            “Half-man, half-plant.”  Grandpa Seth sat back and smiled knowingly.  “The goblins’ favorite food.”

Written by the wife of an Italian director whose previous resume was filled with (what else?) porn, Troll 2 is the story of a family stickin’ together in the face of doubt, dispute, and quasi-vegan goblins.  These goblins live in an unincorporated township called “Nilbog” (which we soon discover, OMG, is ‘goblin’ spelled backwards!), and seem to spend their time listening to fiddle music, making bespelled cakes, and luring innocent humans to a fate worse than goo.  Okay, a fate as goo.

No simple description can do justice to the sheer lovability of this movie.  Not even if I told you that the goblin queen uses corn-on-the-cob as a tool of seduction—not even if I laid out the scene where an eight-year-old makes a Molotov cocktail at the request of his grandfather’s ghost—not even then will you understand the true magic of this film.

            Maybe you’d understand if I told you that two of the main actors were actually, certifiably psychotic at the point that the movie was filmed.  Maybe you’d understand if I explained that the goblins are finally defeated by a double-decker baloney sandwich.

Then again, maybe not.

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            From the dastardly clutches of Troll 2, we moved on to The Room.  I’ve met someone who was actually forced to watch this movie in a film class, as a kind of crash course in what not to do with the silver screen.

            Though really, what not to do can be summed up in one line: don’t write, direct, and star in a movie whose entire purpose is to show the world  that 1) you’re a catch, and 2) women are evil.  Don’t do as Tommy Wiseau did, and flop six million dollars on this project.

And for heavens’ sake, don’t pan across the entire length of the Golden Gate Bridge every half hour.  We get that the movie’s set in San Francisco.  We got that during the title credits.

The Room is a bit more quotable than Troll 2.  Take this little interlude, for example:

“Honey, do you want me to order a pizza?”

“I don't know.  Whatever you want.”

“I already ordered a pizza.”

Or how ‘bout this:

“Way to go Lisa, you invited all my friends.  Good thinking!”

Or this:

“I’m tired of this wee-urld!”

The Room is one of those movies that I started out hating and came to love better each time I watched it.  The people who made Troll 2 actually knew how to pull a story together—not so with this gem.  There are backtracks and segues and multiple scenes showing the same interaction; there are time lapses and characters who are, mid-film, replaced with entirely different actors.  Somewhere in that tangle is a storyline—but it mostly just involves Tommy Wiseau being every shopkeeper’s favorite customer, getting cheated by his lady love, and tossing around a football with his best friend. 

Tommy Wiseau, who looks like he’s been the victim of a severe chemical burn and wears his hair long, black and greasy, isn’t really the best candidate for this role.  Perhaps one of the most hilarious parts of the script is that no one seems to realize why Lisa, Tommy’s character’s fiancé, would have an affair with the hunky (though half-witted) Mark.  Another classic part of the script is when, towards the end, Tommy’s character shouts “Leave me alone, bitch!  You and your stupid mother!”

Suddenly, his acting becomes much more believable.

The Room is not a movie to watch by yourself.  You’ll end up feeling as if you’re trapped in an alternate reality where no one acts sensibly and your local demigod is a jerk who doesn’t realize that we don’t want to see him naked.  Watch it with friends.

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            Then there’s Hard Ticket to Hawaii.  The story of two babelicious island gals finding love and fighting off a cancer-infected snake.

            From its super-long, super-catchy intro song, to the finale where the snake comes out of the toilet and rips a bad guy in two, this film is sweet to the core.  Yes, the sexy secret agents somehow feel that they have to undress in order to look at evidence; yes, one character randomly talks for three minutes about vitamins; and yes, there’s a scene where someone shoots a blow-up doll with a rocket launcher…  And I call it good, old-fashioned fun!

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To conclude this little description, a bit of advice: these films will never be the same on the page as on the reel.  Go rent, stream, or steal them yourself.