Just Stop Already! Issue #7: Bad Low Budget Horror Movies

 

  Just Stop Already!

 

Movies are a great art form, but Hollywood is a business, so if something translates into a financial success—whether it’s a genre or type of movie or a trend—chances are it will be exploited and repeated until people are sick of it. But, sometimes producers, writers, and/or directors want to cut corners, or are just desperate to make money, or are creatively bankrupt. All of these factors result in frustrations for the audience that take on many forms, and in this series I explore some of the tropes, trends, bad habits, and financial exploits of Hollywood films. Sometimes when it comes to movies, I feel like saying…just stop already!

 

Issue #7: Bad Low Budget Horror Movies

 

Have you ever looked in the horror category on Netflix or Amazon Prime or Tubi and noticed there are lots of movies that look really bad? In Issue #4 I explored the lost art of the movie poster, and some of the lowest quality pieces of artwork reside in those dark recesses of the streaming world, but those posters actually serve their purpose, which is the inverse of what a good poster is supposed to do. A good poster tells the audience “Yes, you should watch this movie” but a bad poster warns the audience “No, do not watch this piece of trash” and it was the same case with DVD cover art before streaming. I dread the intentionally bad low-budget productions in the horror genre, because at this point they’ve become something of their own subgenre, and just when I think they can’t get any worse, they somehow do.

I have to start with one of the biggest offenders: an entire studio that has dedicated itself to making exploitative trash primarily capitalizing on the big studio movies of the moment. The Asylum is notorious for cranking out movies as fast as possible with intentionally low budgets and a total disregard for the quality of the final product. The very concepts for some of the movies doom them before cameras even start rolling–and yet, they continue to get made because they somehow continue to make a profit. Let’s look at just one example as a case study for why the studio is truly an anomaly. In 2012, there was a film distributed by Universal Studios called Battleship, based on the Hasbro game. Asylum, which did not hold the rights to the Battleship game, made their own movie called American Warships, with a similar poster and generally similar concept. If anyone was even remotely interested in seeing Battleship in the first place, do you really think they would choose to watch American Warships, a cheaper version of the same thing?

Let’s try to think about this logically. People could possibly buy it or rent it thinking it was Battleship and not realizing it was a different movie. Would they have to be pretty stupid to make that mistake? Yes, but that definitely accounts for some of the viewership with these kinds of films. Then there are people who are like the Amazon recommendations: if you liked this film, you might also like…and after they watch Battleship and enjoy it, they seek out American Warships hoping it will be similarly entertaining. Whether or not they will find it entertaining based on their enjoyment of the other film is a crapshoot with low odds. Then, there will inevitably be viewers who just choose to watch the movie without knowing what they are getting into. Maybe they get tricked by the title or cover art (even if it’s bad), the way I was on more than one occasion when I was a kid. What about people who hate watch? They know it’s going to be bad, maybe they even know exactly why the movie exists in the first place and what The Asylum is infamous for, but they watch it anyway, out of morbid curiosity or with malicious intent. Maybe there are a few viewers who watch it because they genuinely like Asylum movies. In the end, all those viewers add up, apparently, to justify the continued production of all these bad movies.

Battleship versus American Warships is an easy case study, but I’m talking about horror movies here, and Asylum has made plenty of horror rip-offs, too, to the point that they are still the main offender when it comes to bad low budget horror movies. Remember Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter? Asylum was not responsible for that one, but they did make Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies, which came out right around the same time. Coincidence? I think not. In 2013 one of the biggest summer blockbusters was the monster action movie Pacific Rim. Asylum made Atlantic Rim. Yikes. In 2017 they made Alien Convergence, which almost sounds like it was an original movie, not one of these mockbusters. Well, there was a sequel to a little movie that same year, you might have heard of it? Alien: Covenant!

Some of the mockbusters from The Asylum that really irk me include Transmorphers, Snakes on a Train, AVH: Alien vs. Hunter, and Mega Piranha, but the one that I despise more than any other is King of the Lost World, a cash-in on Peter Jackson’s King Kong remake. It introduced me to the world of low-budget rip-off films, and while I have seen some truly abominable entries, none have made me as mad as that one. Rip-off films like these compose a big chunk of the subgenre, but there are many, many “original” films that stand out for the same reasons: they are badly made, and the people behind them know that, but hope to trick viewers by using easy bait. One way is to use a generic word in the name often seen in horror titles. Example: Amityville. It’s a real place, there’s a series of mainstream horror films called The Amityville Horror, but that name can be used by low budget movies as an attempt to hook a viewer, even when the name has no business being used in the first place. Examples include: Amityville in Space, Amityville Bigfoot, and, one of my favourites, Amityville Death Toilet.

The Asylum may be the default representative for these kinds of movies today, but long before they were cranking out crap there was a B-movie filmmaker who basically invented the mockbuster subgenre: the legendary Roger Corman. Corman made many original, cheaply-produced films spanning several decades, and even though a lot of them were not very good for their time, some have become minor classics of schlock filmmaking. Attack of the Crab Monsters, Teenage Caveman, and The Little Shop of Horrors are all films he directed in the 50’s and 60’s that went on to have minor legacies, and he produced many more films that fans of schlock filmmaking look back on today as important entries in the genre. But I’m not really talking about schlock filmmaking here, exactly, because there’s an important difference between a low budget horror film that’s trying to be entertaining and an Asylum-type film that is merely a product to be created as quickly as possible with little consideration for how it will turn out.

Corman’s name is associated with films of this nature, which evolved around the time he produced a mockbuster that stands out to me, personally, as a significant example. That film was Carnosaur, which capitalized on the anticipated success of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. It had more or less the same premise of dinos being resurrected in modern day and eating people, and many other films followed that used this framework: they would imitate another film, but do so in a way just different enough to be considered its own thing, even though it was clearly a rip-off. Corman didn’t produce many more films like this, though. Unfortunately, a notable number of them that followed were cheaply made with lame concepts that came straight to video. The Direct-to-DVD craze has died down in the last decade, because now it’s all about Direct-to-Streaming, but the problems remain the same. Some bad direct-to-video/made-for-TV movies he produced later in his career include Sharktopus, Dinocroc, and Dinocroc vs. Supergator.

There are entire sub-subgenres of these kinds of bad movies, too. Bad shark movies have practically carved out their own niche, largely thanks to Sharknado, the one that rose to the greatest infamy of them all, for some bizarre reason. It’s truly appalling how many Sharknado and multiple-headed Shark Attack sequels there are. Here are some of the most absurd titles. Avalanche Sharks. Sky Sharks. House Shark. Ghost Shark. Shark Exorcist. Shark Side of the Moon–there’s The Asylum popping up again! Even though Asylum primarily makes mockbusters, they also make bad horror movies that do not spawn from other specific movies, but as I think is clear now, putting a shark in a horror movie is just an easy way to possibly sell even the worst ideas. For the record, Shark Exorcist is definitely one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen in my entire life.

What else can I say about these intentionally dimwitted, unoriginal, hollow productions? They are a stain on horror cinema and make many general moviegoers turn their nose up at the entire genre, because they think all horror movies are this dumb and this bad, even though that’s not true. There are so many good horror movies out there, and a number of them have been relatively low budget productions in the past couple decades. I don’t think these bad low budget movies will ever actually stop being made, but I wish they would, because if you collected up all the money and resources and effort that goes into them and funnelled it into original scripts with young talented directors at the helm, you would more likely end up with a better film that wouldn’t come off as something that insults the intelligence of the target audience.