I have a soft spot for crappy movies, given that I'm a big fan of the '80s Sword-and-Sandals stuff. I find a lot of 'bad' movies are quite fun to watch. Trailer for '65' made it look like it could at least be interesting conceptually and fun to live with for an hour and a bit. But I was very wrong. It was a slog and I had no fun at all.
To an extent, I imagine I'll agree with this rant.
This is part of my industry craft rant. Bad movies used to be well-made. Look at Highlander. Even though it was a goofy-ass B-movie, it was well-lit, professionally shot, stylishly choreographed, etc. That's mostly gone now. You get 65, which is painful to sit through.
I think The Transformers: The Movie (1986) is one of the best films of all time because of how it hits me emotionally. I get that I come from a perspective that the vast majority of the population couldn't though.
It is a well known fact that Transformers emotionally destroyed a whole generation of us kids.
Hell yeah. I watch that opening and the death of Prime weekly.
Survivor Type is a must, imho.
My entire personality's based on hyping up movies I feel are being ignored or unfairly derided. My tombstone will probably say, "Liked Halloween III before it was okay to."
So one of my nerdiest traits, a truly high bar to clear, is that I regularly play a film linking game called Cine2Nerdle (terrible name; it is a tragic endeavor trying to tell anybody about this game in person with your actual voice). And in playing it one of the things I've realized is how accomplished so many DPs on low-budget 80s films became. A lot of people started out on cinematography for slasher films or revenge films and ended up shooting big-budget stuff later in their careers. Daryn Okada went from Punk Vacation and Phantasm II to the original Mean Girls and also at one point being the President of ASC. Tim Suhrstedt started with stuff like Android and The House on Sorority Row (one of my favorite underrated slashers; the last act descends into this sort of giallo psychedelia that's pretty unique for the genre) and has been doing comedies with a budget basically since the first Bill & Ted. Craft and institutional knowledge have to start somewhere, and "somewhere" is usually low budget. That's why so many people started out with Corman films.
No, wait; it was Brightburn and Godzilla KotM!
Corman was a film school unto himself. It's similarly funny to look back at James Gunn's early days at Troma.
Granted, I'm an easy lay for Godzilla films, but I enjoyed the shit out of KotM. Sort of a greatest hits of the WWE style of Godzilla movie. The ones following I find pretty awful, but that one's just right.
