Nothing wrong with respecting talent and being enthusiastic about it. Yeah some of that zeal can be irksome, but they found something important to them - I try and be patient with people’s passions (it’s good to have something like that, in this hard life)
Kubrick, I don’t like everything he filmed, and I wouldn’t name him among my personal favorites, but Paths of Glory and Dr. Strangelove are fantastic. I am, however, a zealot for Bunuel and Keaton, so I have my nerd venerations too.
I think people overdo hero worship and its opposite (whatever that is.) I’ve enjoyed, or at least found edifying, everything I’ve seen so far by Kubrick including:
Paths of Glory
Spartacus
Dr. Strangelove
2001: A Space Odyssey
A Clockwork Orange
The Shining
Full Metal Jacket
They’re not all perfect. Maybe none of them are. But I think they are good movies.
Ironically, Kubrick has essentially disavowed Spartacus despite its many accolades, mostly due to the feud he was in with Kirk Douglas over… well… pretty much everything, up to and including who got the credit for writing the screenplay (it was Dalton Trumbo when he was being blacklisted by Hollywood for potential Communist associations or at least the appearance of such; Douglas basically put his name on the credits at the last possible minute so he could basically lift the blacklist on Trumbo).
There was also the fact that he took over from Anthony Mann rather than helmed the project from the start like he expected to.
Perhaps Kubrick, in an alternate timeline, might have consulted with and sought as a mentor the master director Anthony Mann. About, in particular, Mann’s deft use of actors and his able delegation of photographic duties to legends of film, like John Alton.
I really don’t think that ever would have happened. Anthony Mann likely would have told Stan to cram it and do whatever the hell he wanted.
And, no, playing chess at a high level has not been found to correlate to intelligence in any way.
Kubrick was probably a stupid, vain man with a Napoleon complex, but he did manage to make legendary films.
He likely would have made more had he been more intelligent and willing to collaborate with his betters.
Well, I’ve seen bits and pieces of Birdemic - and those are ghastly, but I went with Coleman Francis. He makes most everyone else on this list look decent.
I was today years old when I learned this.
For the one-two punch of Troll 2 (legendarily bad) and Night Killer (somehow even worse and insane than Troll 2) Claudio Fragasso needs a seat at this table.
I have zero respect for James Nguyen. None. Nada. Zilch.
And sadly, he’s just one of a whole new breed of “bad filmmakers” which has circumvented one the last remaining filters in place to prevent completely incompetent movies from being made.
Because technology has advanced to the point where any idiot can now shoot an entire movie on their iPhone, edit it on their laptop, and released it directly on the internet without ever having to convince a single other person that their creation has merit.
Ed Wood, Coleman Francis, and even the makers of Manos may have been hacks… but even their terrible movies required some inherent ability to block and frame a scene, handle a camera and sound (or work around it), get actors (even bad ones) to at least deliver their lines and hit their mark, and editing a movie together back then (even with excessive stock footage) was a time consuming and expensive process, and at the end of the day, even if your movie was bad, it still had to be good enough that somebody somewhere was willing to show it publicly, even if it was the B or C picture at the local drive-in.
As bad as those films are, I still have to begrudgingly respect them for actually making a complete and finished movie. For believing in what they were doing so strongly that they sold off their cars, took out massive loans, or hoodwinked investors, in order to get the funds necessary to make and distribute their films.
There’s a kind of Muppet Show level magic to their madness, which still makes their movies somewhat enjoyable, despite their many many flaws.
Mind you, films like Demon Squad do give me some hope for the future of no-budget amateur films, since despite the shoestring budget, there was still some visible effort and thoughtfulness put into it, and all of the actors clearly had some minor community theater experience and knew enough not to look directly at the camera. That’s the kind of amateur hack film making I can get behind.
Unfortunately, for every one of them, there’s 10 James Nguyens out there who think the world needs to be exposed to their drunken home movies.
While Birdemic is legitimately terrible, I actually thing he has some storytelling ability based on Julie and Jack which is not great by any stretch of the imagination, but I think has a good story embedded in the movie. There’s some real sincerity in that movie that really is held back by James Nguyen’s overall incompetence. And so far as I can see, Julie and Jack is the one film not based on an Alfred Hitchcock movie.
I mean, obviously, you don’t have to agree with my assessment. My respect for James Nguyen doesn’t go very far, but I just wanted to add my two cents.
Well, Things got made with VHS cameras, gore effects a third grade class would decry as lacking effort, and a porn actress whose sole stage direction was “sit here and make it as obvious as possible you’re reading stuff off cue cards. Like, we want blind people to be able to notice.” (To which, I like to assume, she looked at them and said “You guys are real freaks”) and that was back in the 1980s
Legendarily bad things have always found a way to escape, mainly because they inevitably fall into the hands of people like us who have to show them to other people, if only to convince ourselves that this existed and we didn’t hallucinate it in the throes of a NyQuil binge.
Truth. The only difference now is that it’s so much easier for legendarily bad movies to get made and distributed with a minimal amount of effort.
For every Things level disasterpiece released in the 80’s (which still required a not inconsiderable amount of effort), I’m guessing there were 10 equally batsh*t insane films released in the 90’s (after the cheap direct-to-video rental market exploded), 20 in the 2000’s (after digital video eliminated the need for film, home editing software eliminated the need for costly studio equipment, and direct to DVD distribution became even more widespread), 40 in the 2010’s (even cheaper more powerful digital video, editing, and CGI), and it’s just increased exponentially from there.
As I see it, the further you go back in time, the harder it is to find a truly awful (as opposed to “not good”) movie. Not because there weren’t people around who had the idea for something like Things… they just mercifully lacked the resourced and dedication to pull something like that off, and if they did, it was much harder to get it into the hands of people like us.
Nowadays, we all have smart HD video cameras at our fingertips that do most of the heavy lifting and cost nothing to operate, an effectively infinite supply of film and file storage, cheap or easily pirated editing software and digital effects, $20 green screen backgrounds and stock images that eliminate the need for physical sets, and digital media distribution with no real content control control in place beyond the audience’s own self restraint in not downloading a movie called “Fart Masters Go Nutzoid” they found for free on a torrents site.
The only real barriers still in effect preventing a crazy person from making the worst film ever made are the time and energy required to physically record it, and possessing enough equally crazy friends (or porn stars paid by the hour) willing to follow you down into your blacked-out basement and actually put on the rubber clown suit to read the words you scrawled on the cue cards using your own effluence.
In fact, if I put on my ‘Criswell predicts’ hat, I’m willing to bet that final evolution of terrible cinema coming sometime in the next 5 to 10 years will be the elimination of those final two hurdles; as AI generated video from text prompts improves to the point where it finally becomes possible to produce an entire movie without a single living actor or leaving the house and pointing a camera at all. At that point, the only barrier left standing will be “time wasted making this turd”, which I thankfully don’t see going away anytime soon, at least not until we all get fitted for cranial ports like Dr. F and TV’s Frank.
. . .coulda sworn Troma had already made that one. 
You’re correct, but distribution is still a challenge for a lot of filmmakers, especially amateur ones. I have no idea how James Nguyen ever got a distribution deal.
I did not expect Coleman Francis to rank so high.
But yeah, Mr Francis struck me as a very angry little man with the kind of films he made.
I noticed there are a few themes he seemed to really plug into: frontier justice, and taking people down from flying vehicles.
I wonder if that was how he wanted to go out?
Red Zone Cuba is truly a miserable slog. Confused, depressing, poorly directed and written and generally drab; this movie is awful on so many levels. Let’s face it, when the highlight of your film is a theme song sung by John Carradine over the opening credits, there are issues.
To be fair, it’s a pretty good song. But I don’t disagree.
If the movie had delivered on the ride “Night Train to Mondo Fine” promised, you could have ended up with an entertaining film. But Coleman just didn’t have the chops. He was, as observed above, an angry little man, but not much of a motion picture director.
Here’s a proposition: I submit if you gave that tune to Roger Corman and told him to go make a movie, the result would be a cult classic.
Look at that thumbnail. Carradine is owning that 'tache.
Easy, Greydon Clark
