I am a gigantic bad movie fan. Battlefield Earth, Manos: The Hands of Fate, The Shadow, The Beast, Disaster Zone: Volcano in New York; classics all. I’ve watched hours of Mystery Science Theater 3000, allowing Joel and/or Mike and the Bots to subject me to piles of dreck: Escape 2000, I Was a Teenage Werewolf, The Thing that Couldn’t Die, Deathstalker and the Warriors from Hell. I’ve listened to “The Flophouse” and “How Did This Get Made?” as they marvel at The Room, Birdemic, Foodfight!, and Gymkata (“The skill of gymnastics. The KILL of karate!”). I love the listless acting and the scenery-chewing; I love the cardboard props and forced-perspective monsters; I love the motivations of characters the audience isn’t privileged enough to know; and I love the hard crack my suspension of disbelief makes when it finally snaps.
You might think that slogging through hours of mediocre “art” and “entertainment” would amount to little more than An Amazing Colossal Waste of Time for me, but hear me out; I promise I’m going somewhere with this.
