Abominable Advent Calendar Day 1: Countdown of Craptacular Cinema
The day after Halloween, before the candy is gone and the rot sets into the pumpkins, the onslaught of formulaic, saccharine Christmas movie drek begins. It’s glorious if you’re a fan of craptastic cinema like me. But I can only bear so many contrived Christmas romances blanketed in polyester snow, and I have to mix things up a bit.
So if you need break from the meet-cutes, or if you’d just like an introduction to the wonderful world of crap cinema fandom, this Abominable Advent Calendar is for you. Starting December 2, I’m going to give you one craptastic movie to unwrap each day, culminating on Christmas with one of my personal favorite Christmas-themed crapsterpieces. It’s my Yule-Hanukkah-Christmas-New Year gift to you.
Crap or Crapsterpiece?
We all know—or at least have opinions about—what elevates a film from merely crap to absolutely craptacular. A low budget and bad acting, script, editing, costuming, and special effects can make a film poor quality from an artistic point of view, but it might still be entertaining. And there are films with big budgets that are just plain painful to watch. There’s obviously something subjective and intangible beyond budget and the qualities films win Academy Awards for that influences how people feel about a film.
If you start watching bad movies for fun, you’ll make your own decisions about what constitutes a crapsterpiece for you. To get you started thinking about it, here are some of my own crapsterpiece-determining factors.
Factor 1: The Immediate Desire to Share the Schlock
First of all, it’s important to understand that you’re judging your crap-or-crapsterpiece movies on not one but two levels: the fun (if you get any) out of just watching them, and the joy you get in making fun of them. So the number one sign that you have a real crapsterpiece on your hands is that as you’re watching a film, or directly afterward, you want to tell all your other bad-movie-loving friends about it. Bad movie watching is a team sport, folks. It’s best gleefully shared with others.
Factor 2: Schlock and Awe
The best crapsterpieces have little surprises around every corner. Just when you think a film doesn’t have any more WTF moments to offer you—it pops in another, and then maybe a couple more. These can be “I can’t believe they just said that” dialog, anachronistic or utterly impractical costuming, ridiculous plot points, annoying character quirks, or special defects. Yes, I spelled that correctly.
Factor 3: Creative Crappiness
A run-of-the-mill bad film’s errors and problems are mediocre. The script is lazy. The acting is flat. It’s all been done before. In a great crapsterpiece, the errors are a graduate course from MSU—Making Sh!t Up. A crapsterpiece finds new and unique ways to go horribly wrong.
Factor 4: Shoot for the Stars, Hit the Flaming Dumpster
My favorite crapsterpieces are those made by people who genuinely love movies and try to do something great, but in shooting for the stars, end up creating something entirely different from what they planned to. It happens because they overestimate their own skills or can’t see that what they produced isn’t anywhere near as grand as what they think it is. Often these films are objectively terrible, but there’s a sense of joy to them that’s infectious. They’re having the time of their lives, so you do, too, in spite of the dumpster fire onscreen.
Personal Bonus Points List
There are a few additional and highly subjective factors that can boost a movie from crap to crapsterpiece for me. It’s very likely that your Personal Bonus Points List will vary considerably from mine, but I’m including some of my Bonus Point items here simply to make the point that having such a list is both a lot of fun and helpful when you’re trying to define what a crapsterpiece is for you. Here are some of the things that can help elevate a movie to crap greatness for me:
- One or more rubber monsters, with or without a zipper up the back
- Witches and occult practices, especially if they’re even a little bit accurate
- Favorite actors who regularly do schlocky movies or are just dipping their toes into the fetid waters
- Campiness
- Wildly fabulous or wildly garish fashion and/or interior design (giallo is great for this)
- Locations I love, including spooky places, certain foreign countries, my home state, and underwater anything
- Indonesian, Filipino, Hong Kong, Italian, and Mexican shlock
- Sharks, bigfoot, a yeti, or a giant octopus
- No clowns
- The dog lives
Abominable Advent Calendar Movie Categories
To make selecting movies from the Abominable Advent Calendar easier for you, I’m going to tag most of them with the following categories.
Big-Budget Bombs
As the name suggests, these films had everything going for them money-wise, but fell flat. Sometimes the studio misjudged the audience, or maybe there were too many cooks tinkering with the script. Example: Battlefield Earth.
Cash Grabs
These films were made to capitalize on a trend, but the audience didn’t buy it. Sometimes they’re direct ripoffs of better movies. Other times they leech off toys, video games, news stories, or people who got famous overnight. A great example is From Justin to Kelly.
AnythingSploitation
Exploitation movies are almost always schlock. There are many subgenres of exploitation, including but not limited to Blackspoitation (featuring Black casts, popular in the early ‘70s, great example is Scream Blackula Scream); Canuksploitation (exploitation films from Canada that took advantage of the government’s tax breaks for filmmakers, truly terrible example is Things); and even Kidsploitation, which isn’t direct exploitation of kids on camera, but rather films made for children with content that’s more unintentionally scary or WTF than fun. An example that probably put many children and some adults into therapy is Santa Claus and the Ice Cream Bunny.
The Masters
There are some true pioneer directors of schlock. Pretty much anything these folks made is going to be craptacular. Some of these fine ladies and gents are Herschell Gordon Lewis, Jerry Warren, Ed Wood, Doris Wishman, and Don Dohler. Many of Roger Corman’s films, particularly the early ones, also count. Classic example is Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space.
Awful Auteurs
There are some would-be auteurs working today who seem to specialize in pure schlock, whether they know their work is craptastic or not. Neil Breen is probably the reigning king of this group at present, although Tommy Wiseau thinks he should be. An absolutely painful example that also fits the WTF category is Breen’s Fateful Findings.
B-Movie Badness
You might think all b-movies are bad, but that’s absolutely not true. There are plenty of decently put together, highly enjoyable ones. Then there’s Eegah.
Straight to VHS
There’s a whole subgenre of schlock that, if you’re old enough, you might remember finding in the dark, dusty back corner of the video rental store. Straight-to-video films from Video Gems, Rhino, Goodtimes, and a host of others, plus lower-end stuff from companies like Cannon Films provided a dazzling smorgasbord of crap cinema. You could waste your whole Saturday night just choosing. Example: Neon Maniacs.
Made-for-TV Trash
In the 1960s, 70s and early 80s, TV networks wanted to compete with movie theaters and keep people at home watching movies on their couches. There weren’t enough Hollywood movies available to fill every night, so they started creating feature-length made-for-TV movies. These were produced much like longer versions of television shows, fairly quickly and on relatively low budgets, and they varied in quality from very good to absolutely terrible. Sometimes they included morals or lessons like after-school specials, but for adults. Often they were pure schlock. Example: Mother, May I Sleep with Danger?
WTF Were You Thinking?
This category should be fairly self explanatory: it’s for films that are not only bad, but also befuddling. For those films that make you ask, as you’re watching them, more than once, “What the actual f*ck were these people thinking?” or “What drugs were these people on?” Example: Theodore Rex.
Okay, friends, let the holiday schlock-a-thon begin. You can only watch A Christmas Prince so many times, you know.
Message from Space
Demonwarp
Fiend without a Face and Giant Claw
Mystics from Bali
Little Red Riding Hood and the Monsters
Snow Beast
Zachariah
Fatal Deviation
Fantasy Mission Force
The Last Shark
Split Second
The Haunting Passion
Mole People
Star Knight
Pink Force Commando/Golden Queens Commando
Devil’s Rain
All’s Faire in Love
Queen of Blood
Terror in the Jungle
Devil’s Sword
Shocking Dark
Latitude Zero
Who Killed Captain Alex
Blood Beat
