I am doing this all by myself, please remember…

As I was looking through some old posts and cleaning up some of what I consider to be the worst previously unnoticed mistakes in them, I noticed that the raw URLs of my posts (as opposed to the Shortlinks) were in some cases insanely long. Anyone who was there to witness when I posted a pair of posts about how awesome RoboCop and by extension its director, Paul Verhoeven, were, knows what I mean here.

Making a film that is shit, on purpose

Every serious fan of films that are so fukking terrible that they are entertaining by accident, at some point in their life, asks themselves whether it is possible to make a film that is so terrible it is awesome on purpose. Films that have come out of production so terrible that they are often more entertaining than most “good” films by accident are legion. Often, it is merely a matter of things going horribly wrong, or people in key positions failing at their job. But hysterically terrible films that were made that way on purpose are so rare, so difficult to find, that it is even a matter of debate as to whether they really exist. The only example I can think of is a Roger Corman production of Fantastic Four that was shot in 1994 and not intended to be commercially released. The only reason it even exists is because certain people held the rights to make such a film and wanted to retain them, which in turn necessitated making an actual film. The total budget of that piece was a mere one and a half million dollars, which in 1994 terms is not even enough to hire enough people to make a two minute superhero film trailer. (For those who doubt this, Terminator 2 was released commercially the previous year, with the kind of special effects that would be required to photo-realistically render Mr. Fantastic’s signature abilities. Even if you leave out Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s average salary around the time, that equates to around seventy to eighty million dollars.)