Guilty Pleasures: Movie Edition

Michele asks "what movies are so, so very bad that you just have to watch them every time they are on"?

Thanks to Ted Turner, there is a steady diet of trash on TV. However, some of it is "good" trash. Though I have seen the following flicks numerous times and even though I own some of them on DVD, I simply can't pass up yet another commercial-filled TNT/AMC/TBS/TCM opportunity to see ...

• Point Break
• Dirty Dancin'
• Fried Green Tomatoes
• Steel Magnolias
• Trading Places
• Down and Out in Beverly Hills
• Animal House
• With Six You Get Eggroll
• Contact
• The Parent Trap (the one with Hayley Mills)
• The Time Machine (the one with Yvette Mimieux)
• Ghostbusters
• The Stand
• Ferris Bueller

I sense you have a list like this yourself. Cough it up.

Comments

[The Heretik]

Point Break? Dirty Dancing? I see a trend here. Why limit ourselves to just two flix with Patrick Swayze. What about Roadhouse and what was the name of that movie where he was in drag? And talking about drag, what about his career?

[Roxanne]

I can't stand John Leguizamo.

[Chris Clarke]

Tremors.
The Blues Brothers.

[Amanda]

Animal House, Ghostbusters, and Ferris Bueller aren't trash--all those are genuinely funny movies! What's the line here between trash and not trash?

[harry near indy]

-- the adventures of ford fairlane
-- donovan's reef (not truly trashy, but cornball)

[Arvin Hill]

My favorite bad movie is a Coppola flick, Bram Stoker's Dracula. My suspension of disbelief is unrivaled, but this film fails on so many levels I can't help but be shocked into hysterical laughter. It's got it all - wooden acting, Gary Oldman on skates, terrible dialogue and the only thing it's missing is... Patrick Swayze.

[Kathy]

I admit it. I can pretty much recite Caddyshack verbatim. Sorry. I don't even play golf.

[Ken C]

(Possible spoilers for bad movies below.)

I don't quite think Point Break is so-bad-it's-good, it's more in a category of "objectively, not so good, but somehow I'm captivated anyway". The skydiving and surfing sequences are very pretty; moreover, there's only two other movies where a character jumps out of an airplane without a parachute, in the desperate hope of snagging a chute (or in the case of James Bond, airplane), on the way down.

Another movie in that category, for me, is Switchback, with Danny Glover as a very congenial serial killer.

Others:
Breakdown, with Kurt Russell
Escape from New York
Big Trouble in Little China (Hmmm...a pattern?)
The Thing (Yes, a pattern)

[Joel]

I don't think Animal House, Ferris Bueller, Ghostbusters,or Trading Spaces are all that bad. A couple of those I'd consider good, but that's just me. My list would include Revenge of the Nerds II, Summer School, and The Ninth Gate and pretty much any horror movie made in the 70's or 80's that involves Satan in some way, shape or form. Oh and Major League.

[BenA]

Showgirls anyone? This movie is a hard-not-to-watch trainwreck in any form, but the reedited-for-broadcast version, with its poorly CGI'd bikini tops, is its own special kind of bad.

[des]

1) Attack of the Killer Tomatoes

2) Boys on the Side

3) Fried Green Tomatoes

4) Shawshank Redemption

5) Footloose

6) Dances with Wolves

7) The Fly [original]

8) Thelma & Louise

9) Any of Eastwood's old Western movies

10) Stand by Me

That was painful cutting it down to just 10!

[doghouse riley]

Road House is a running gag around here, but there's no way we'll watch more than the first fifteen minutes. If I happen to pass the first Die Hard at the right spot I'll watch long enough to yell at the screen, "You've killed, what? eight guys? Maybe one of 'em had shoes that might fit you." Likewise, enough of any of the blockbuster apocalypse duds like Asteroid or Meteor or Real Big Space Rock or Lots of Water Headed This Way, long enough to get tired of blowing raspberries, but especially Independence Day, just to shout, "Who cast Bill Pullman as President of Anything?"

[Joel]

9) Any of Eastwood's old Western movies

Just curious what exactly you're referrring to here. I really hope it's not The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly or any other of the Morricone flicks.

[Scott Robertson]

Mine is mostly 80's films:

Sixteen Candles
Say Anything
Can't Buy Me Love
Back to the Future (first one only)
Terminator (1 or 2)
Any gangster flick (Godfather, Goodfellas, etc)

Nothing too embarassing except the first one.

[Mark Gisleson]

I think you cheated and listed some good movies. I posted my list and expect to eat plenty of crap from my readers over some of my choices. But at least I have the good taste to realize that Point Break is possibly the most asinine movie ever made, and my vote for the worst thing Keanu Reeves has ever done.

[Mark Gisleson]

I think you cheated and listed some good movies. I posted my list and expect to eat plenty of crap from my readers over some of my choices. I want to see the "real" list, the one that doesn't have Fried Green Tomatoes on it.

[Mark Gisleson]

Sigh, done in by typepad again, and then caught editing my own comment. But if I fess up to liking The Princess Diaries, I expect to see Rox come up with a list of real stinkers, not just a Patrick Swayzee filmography.

[Tom]

Point Break, Ferris, Caddyshack, Better Off Dead. I'm sure there's more.

[Crys T]

Any made-for-TV flick starring a former 70s star like Suzanne Sommers or Jaclyn Smith. Or tragedy-of-the-week ones starring Patty Duke.

Also, a really bad film Sarah Chalke did a few years back where she played the "new girl at school" who was accused of being a witch.

[Shiny]

Real Genius is on my list.

So is Ocean's Eleven. (The George Clooney version.) Some may feel that this is a good movie in its own right. Perhaps. But it fulfills the guilty pleasure category moreso.

[Pete]

What no 'Highlander'

A Frenchman playing a Scot and possibly the most famous
living Scotsman playing a Spaniard. All to a Queen soundtrack.

It's a Bad Classic

"Greetings! I am Juan Sanchez Villa-Lobos Ramirez, Chief Metallurgist to King Philip II of Spain.
At your service."

[Jeremy Osner]

"What About Bob" and "Groundhog Day".

[PSoTD]

Any 1950s Ray Harryhausen movie.
Any of the Abbott and Costello versus a myriad of monsters movies.
Repo Man
Airplane (the original)

[Njorl]

I'm a sucker for James Garner's westerns that weren't funny. Showdown at something or other, something about gold and some Wyatt Earp movie. I didn't like his more tongue-in-cheek westerns. Funny thing is, I found the humorous aspects of "The Rockford Files" to be very good.

Okay, I cop to Fried Green Tomatoes and Ferris; there are good things to say about each of those movies. I'm also a sucker for The Craft - lord but that's a bad movie, yet so very much fun to watch. I'm not above tuning in for Highlander or Ghostbusters for the guilty pleasures. My vote for spectacularly bad movie that I occasionally have to watch to remember how spectacularly bad it is......Hudson Hawk. Dunno what happened to that script between the first and fifteenth treatments, but one can almost see the clever idea around which it was once built.