Bad movies are untrustworthy bitches. For every one of them that delivers the unintentional comedy you crave, there are a dozen others that simply erase 90 minutes from your life. That's why I've selected eight of the most awesome moments from eight of the worst movies. I've even gone through every movie that ever existed to save you the trouble of telling me which ones I missed in the comments section.
No Holds Barred (1989)D-d-d-d-d-d-dooooooooookieeeeee ...
No Holds Barred is a movie about pro wrestling where pro wrestling is real. This requires the viewer to suspend his or her disbelief in two different directions at once. It's like closing your eyes and pretending your wife is someone else, and that someone else is pretending they're not Batman. All of Hulk Hogan's movies have an extra layer like that. For instance, Mr. Nanny was an allegory for matriarchal societies and in Suburban Commando, he was a talking dog fire chief the entire time. Deal with that, your mind.
No Holds Barred is the kind of movie you would write if you were trying to get a film director to kill himself. The script reads like a transcription of a toddler getting its stomach pumped and there are so many non-human hormones pumping through the cast members that each set had to be legally zoned as an animal shelter. It's tough to enjoy even for me, and I take prescription drugs for my Hulkamania just so the California state government will allow me near t-shirts.
However, there's a moment in this movie where Hulk Hogan hulks out so hard that 20 years later, it was the first thing coroners wrote on "Macho Man" Randy Savage's death certificate. Hulk Hogan escapes from a limousine by jumping through the roof
and while physics is still trying to figure out what happened, he kills 10 men with pro wrestling. This alone would be amazing enough, but it ends with Hulk Hogan ripping the door off the limo and yanking out the terrified driver. He snarls at him, and not just a little bit. He snarls at him long past the point where it makes sense. It's a good 15 straight seconds of two men making monster sounds at each other. Out of context, you'd swear a rabies doctor had made the world's most unethical sex tape. It goes on for so long that I think Hulk might have forgotten his lines, but that's impossible since his next two lines are "What's that smell?" and "Dookie!?
" followed by history's most intense and hilarious awkward pause.
The Pumpkin Karver (2006)A Harsh Lesson in Farm Safety
It's hard to say why someone made The Pumpkin Karver. It's a slasher film set on a farm where teenagers are partying and a grumpy old man enjoys carving pumpkins. They live in a world where scratching faces into pumpkins is some kind of dynamic field of art, so most of the dialog is about pumpkin carving. The teenagers eventually get stalked by a supernatural ghost monster, who now that I think about, is the one character in the movie that has no interest in pumpkin carving. It's bizarre in stupid, confusing, childish ways. It feels like the filmmaker threw a movie together as an excuse for why he got caught carving dickholes into 3,000 pumpkins.
One character you'll particularly hate is Toga Teen #2. He's supposed to be the comic relief which is strange since the actor playing him has the comic timing of polio. If he worked as a mortuary makeup artist, his boss would describe him as the one with no sense of humor. When he puts his mouth over your asshole, people stop laughing at your farts. The only highlight of the movie comes when this guy leaves the party to climb a tractor combine and pee into a pumpkin patch. Even in a film without an insane reverence for pumpkins, you'd recognize this as horror movie shorthand for "this character is about to die." And holy shit does that happen.
The miserable failure mumbles out a series of anti-jokes as he starts peeing. Most people would stop this once a mysterious stranger starts knifing them in the back, but not Toga Teen #2. He stands perfectly still, continues peeing and wonders who might be responsible for all that knifing. Three chops and half a minute later, the murderer, who is probably as confused by the guy's reaction as the audience is, switches to a new weapon and slices his head off. The head falls directly into what is now a record-breakingly sustained stream of pee. Pumpkin Karver had to really work to get there, but it made it -- this dead asshole was peeing into his own mouth!
Minotaur (2006)The Minotaur's Rude Interruption
In the early days of planned parenthood, abortions were performed by putting your babies into a maze and letting The Minotaur devour their innocence. It's how the tradition of abortion doctors wearing the heads of bulls got started. The film Minotaur tried to capture this whimsy but missed. The dialog is so clumsy and insane that it feels like the actors are trading lines they overheard from hobo conversations. Plus, it's set back in the time of minotaurs, so everyone has his or her own version of a fruity half-British Renaissance Faire accent. One of the most common misunderstandings in Hollywood is that when an actor hears the words "period piece" he thinks, "Oh, like I'm having my period. Cool, I can talk like that. Hark! Wherefore shan't there be a cock upon mine lips?"
Most of the movie is unpleasant people arguing in a dark maze and the rest is the actor who played Candyman with his shirt off, ad-libbing the creepiest things he can think of. Tony Todd and his nude torso hisses about newborn flesh, his seed and of course The Minotaur. And speaking of, The Minotaur shows up about as often as you'd think it would in a film that has the special effects budget of a movie about minotaurs. That asshole is never there. Dammit, Minotaur
, if we liked sitting in a dark maze surrounded by monsters we couldn't see, we wouldn't have cried for help when our parents left us with our birthday magician.
When The Minotaur finally shows up, it's totally worth the wait. The Minotaur may suck in every other possible way, but he has seen Deep Blue Sea, and he has learned a thing or two about dramatic timing. In his best scene, a girl starts telling the other people in the maze how much she hates everything. Unknown to them all, The Minotaur is hiding in the shadows behind her. This is not an easy thing to do when you're 10- feet-tall and your head is a cow. In fact, most minotaur scientists would call into question this entire scene's credibility. But not everything is about you, minotaur scientists.
At the risk of spoiling the only good part of this movie (shown on right), the girl's whining is suddenly and spectacularly interrupted by a minotaur horn blasting through her head and out of her mouth. There are 73 ways to say, "Shut the fuck up" in the Minotaur language, but this one is the most common. What's strange is that the special effects for a spike coming out of a woman's face are good -- far, far better than any of the others in the movie. It's so convincing that I think Minotaur
might have been made to cover up a forklift accident someone accidentally filmed.I won't cue this video up to the cranky girl dying; that way it'll be a surprise when a minute in, a horn explodes her face:
Wicker Man (2006)Nic Cage's Guide to Etiquette
Wicker Man has several unbelievable scenes, but nothing compares to Nicolas Cage dressed as a bear, sprinting across a meadow and sucker punching a woman. American audiences consider it one of the worst horror films of all time, but in Afghanistan, it's been the No. 1 romantic comedy for four straight years.
Punisher: War Zone (2008)Frank Castle's Express Rhinoplasty
The thing that makes Frank Castle so great is his simplicity. Not only does the audience immediately understand him, so does every character around him. When he's about to kill someone, they don't waste time with any pleading or disbelief; they know they're fucked. In Punisher: War Zone he throws a guy named Billy into a glass recycling machine. Now, if anyone else had done this, Billy would be screaming, "No ... this can't be happening!" or "Please! You don't have to do this!" Not with Frank Castle. Billy already knows he's getting ground into flux agent, so he skips immediately to "Fuck you, Castle! Fuck you! My FAAAAAACE!!!" See the difference? Those are last words worth a busy obituarist's time.
The greatest example of this comes later in the movie after an hour or so of truly deranged screenwriting
. A woman and her daughter are being held hostage until tough cop Paul Budiansky (get it?) disarms the hostage taker. While Paul is calling for backup, The Punisher walks into the dining room, calmly picks up the little girl, and sublimates the prisoner's face with a shotgun. Even with police training, most cops would need a second or two to process what the screaming fuck they just saw, but with Frank Castle, this kind of thing is more annoying than surprising. Budiansky is already done yelling, "GODDAMMIT, CASTLE!" before the guy's brains hit the ground. I honestly have no idea how the little girl keeps from laughing.
Troll 2 (1990)Who Needs Acting School?
Everyone involved in Troll 2 was worse at their job than Casey Anthony's prosecutor. Every actor's motivation seems to be "I need more autism medication and I can prove it." The costumes look like the remains of a puppet show brawl, the writing would have to improve to be considered language and the caterer probably cheats on her husband. It waffles between unwatchable nothingness and stunning failure, but became legendary for this scene.
In it, a kid watches a girl devolve into green goo as he loses control of his own nervous system. A woman who is obviously a witch is super excited about the whole thing, but it isn't until a group of pig monsters start finger painting in the girl's remains that he realizes he might be in some trouble. In fact, it takes him so long to figure out he's about to die that when it's time to scream, he's forgotten everything he learned about acting. Please enjoy this cinematic performance that will never, ever be equaled:
Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus (2009)Mega Shark vs. 747
Low budget sci-fi movies are a lot like Final Destination movies -- you only sit through them because you know that at any second, something truly stupid will leap out from behind the boring dialog and tear someone in half. Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus sets a new standard of excellence in all three of those categories: Boring Dialog, Something Truly Stupid and the extremely competitive Tear Someone in Half. The greatest scene of the film starts in the sky. A 747 is cruising above the ocean, oblivious to how badly it has been generated by a computer. The passengers aboard are doing nothing of interest. The film lingers on this abyss of stimuli for an abusive length of time because if they spent $12 to render a passenger jet, you're going to goddamn look at it.
In general, one page of a screenplay equals one minute of movie, and that means three pages of the Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus
screenplay looked like this:
And all of that's perfectly excusable because the next page looks like this:
That generic passenger character is totally right ... holy fucking shit:
White Chicks (2004)Terry Crews vs. Vanessa Carlton
White Chicks is such an abomination that if you put it near a baby, that baby will tell you how you're going to die. It's like a collection of rejected jokes from Andrew Dice Clay's 1985 garbage that someone accidentally used as a screenplay. Shawn and Marlon Wayans disguising themselves as Caucasian socialites has the believability of Leatherface running into a sorority and panting that he's one of them. It's not cute. It's what racists watch when they can't remember what inspired them to hate different cultures. The only reason they didn't call this movie "N-Words Being C-Words" is because Shawn Wayans thought that sounded too much like an educational film.
It's tough to enjoy a movie when you keep thinking that the girls stapled to Shawn and Marlon's faces probably had names... families. However, there is one amazing scene. Terry Crews is in his car on a date with Marlon (probably?) even though he's dressed like the flayed god Xipe Totec in the stretched flesh of man. To dodge his sexual advances, Marlon puts a girly Vanessa Carlton song on the radio. To an idiot, that means comedy. To everyone else, that means the writers thought carefully about which song is the hardest to rape to and fucking came up with something
.White Chicks has nine credited writers, and here's how those well-paid professionals ended the scene: "Latrell likes Vanessa Carlton. He sings the entire song, pantomiming each lyric." If I typed that and handed it to Terry Crews, I'd expect to wake up in a dark place to the distant sound of paramedics asking each other if they'd ever pulled someone's head out of their own ass. But Terry nails it. It is so hilarious and lovable that you'll forget that 36 white organ donors gave their skin to make this movie.
