
We are heading into the spooky season for the year, and with that comes an obligation to watch scary movies. Now, if you find that scary movies are not your forte and prefer comedies instead, there may be a perfect workaround for you and your more spook-centric friends. Every season has its bad movies, and the best are the kind that are so terrible, you cannot help but laugh.
Five Nights at Freddy’s is still pending release, and while the trailer looks nothing short of epic, you might be looking for something to tide you over in the meantime. Enter Willy’s Wonderland, a Nicolas Cage fever dream of underwhelming proportions. The movie follows Cage, a janitor in an abandoned Chuck E. Cheese-inspired pizzeria. It is not long before a band of teens show up, hoping to put an end to a series of bizarre killings that have taken place at the restaurant. The movie is hilariously paced, filled with underwhelming and bloody robot deaths and terrible writing. There are things in this movie that may never be explained, but with murderous animatronics like Tito the Turtle, it is worth every confused laugh.
If slow pacing is more your style, you might enjoy the 80s horror flop The Stuff. Horror has always been, to some degree, preoccupied with the concept that the people closest to you may not be who they say they are. The idea that the people around you are imposters in disguise is not new, having been featured in many classics like Invasion of the Body Snatchers or the critically acclaimed miniseries, V. While these classics pose an interesting question, none dare to ask what would happen if evil, living ice cream were added to the mix. The Stuff follows an FBI agent, a TV advertisement director, and a young boy as they fight to uncover the secret behind a suspicious food that has been taking the world by storm, and potentially taking over the minds of millions. The Stuff is an ice-cream look-alike found bubbling from beneath the Earth’s surface near a quarry in Georgia. Of course, like any sane person who sees a mysterious liquid, oozing from the planet’s pores, the quarry workers taste it. The rest is history, and it quickly becomes the world’s most popular commodity. But the question is: what is it doing to our bodies? This movie is rocky from start to finish (no pun intended), the special effects are nothing to be impressed by, the plot leaves much to be desired, and the characters are almost as strange and unhinged as the studio was when they greenlit this masterpiece. All in all, this film is perfect for a bad movie night.
Slashers are a particularly intriguing set of films, and while there is no shortage of terrible ones out there, Chopping Mall is certainly on the list. The movie follows a classic formula, killing off any and all teenagers it deems too horny to survive the full screen time. Only, this movie features a twist: instead of a seemingly immortal man in a white mask, the killers are a trio of cyber security guards that bear a remarkable resemblance to both Wall-E and the Daleks. The Killbots are unveiled at the mall as a new security measure to keep the shops safe from nightly break-ins. However, due to a small, seemingly insignificant mishap at the control station, the aptly named Killbots go on a rampage. The target of these robots is a group of teens who set up camp in the furniture store for a party. What follows is a slaughter-fest of epically bizarre proportions and a ridiculous amount of unintentional hilarity.
Keeping with the almost science fiction theme of the past three movies, the predecessor to Steven Spielberg’s Gremlins is a movie almost always forgotten. Critters is a masterpiece of the alien invasion subgenre, with whacky bounty hunters, a hoard of tiny, destructive alien critters, and a small American town. The deaths in this movie are laughably ridiculous, and for all intents and purposes, the only downside is that it does not have Sting as one of the bounty hunters. Anyone who has seen the 1984 rendition of Dune is already prepared to face the acting style of these two spacemen, and if either of them had been a singer on the side, there would have been virtually no difference between their performance and that of the lead singer of The Police. Critters is a long-running joke that never manages to get old, and if you get through the first one wanting more, there are four more movies and a TV series for your enjoyment.
For fans of Matthew Lillard, Serial Mom is a good motion picture to check out, given that he might not have booked Scream without it. The film follows a suburban family, cutting between the perspectives of the mother and everyone else. The mother goes on a murderous rampage, and everyone else slowly figures it out, although what they intend to do about it is wildly confusing. Her killing spree is inspired by everything from her neighbour not recycling to her son’s math teacher being annoying. When her family finds out, they fluctuate wildly between being wholly supportive and trying to stop her. The plot makes little sense in most places, and with the film marketing itself as true crime, things get even stranger. All in all, the film is whacky, zany, and fully nonsensical.