It ain't easy making a movie, but getting your act together when you've got zero money
or studio backing is damn near heroic.
While we salute any budding no-budget director making the next big, weird thing, not every
cheap movie is worth celebrating.
Unless you're handing out awards unintentional hilarity, in which case these strange films
are some of the all-time champs.
The Lift
You've got almost no money and less than a month to make a horror film.
What do you do?
In 1983, Dutch filmmaker Dick Maas took a simple, everyday object and tried to give
it a terrifying twist.
The Lift features — that's right — a killer elevator that may or may not have been driven
homicidally mad by "experimental microchips" or a lightning strike.
Over the course of nearly 90 minutes, it closes its doors on people's heads, lets people fall
down elevator shafts, and generally kills people in all the possible ways an elevator
could kill people, which is to say not many.
Add in the inexplicable urge that multiple people get to boink while inside an evil elevator,
and the result is a camp classic.
"Take the stairs, for god's sake, take the stairs."
Terror Toons
Give Who Framed Roger Rabbit? a $2300 budget, and direct it to specifically appeal to serial
killers and juggalos, and you get Terror Toons.
It's a sleazy, demented film from 2002 that was shot in three days.
It relied on locations that not only had to be available to director Joe Castro on short
notice, but whose owners wouldn't mind him filming a vomit-inducing sex-and-death romp
in them.
The plot is simple: Satan sends a haunted DVD to a bunch of idiots, but the DVD happens
to feature cartoons from hell who try to kill them.
Combining live action with animation isn't something you can do on the cheap, so the
killer "toons" are guys in masks, and the actual "cartoon" part of the film is barely
even there.
All this, and the film still got a sequel or two.
Piranha II
Yes, this film is credited to James Cameron.
Yes, it's that James Cameron.
And yes, he desperately tried to take his name off of this film, for obvious reasons,
once he was kicked off of the set after just two weeks.
So, what is Piranha II?
The recipe is surprisingly simple.
Take $145,000, completely copy the plot of Jaws, and presto!
You get Piranha II.
Except this time, the grumpy piranhas infesting the waters can fly, and one of the film's
endearing delights is watching a fleet of wire-suspended fish menace badly dubbed Italian
actresses.
And when they attack, their victims have no choice but to hold them against their necks
and flail around, pretending to be mauled to death while probably wondering where their
lives went so, so wrong.
Heck, the Shark Attack board game was scarier than Piranha II.
"It's coming… to get you!"
Still, some good did come of Piranha II.
It was while working in Italy that Cameron had the dream that would become the inspiration
for The Terminator.
Creating Rem Lezar
No hilariously low-budget direct-to-video movie has ever come so close to being the
golden standard of VHS insanity as Creating Rem Lezar.
It's the story of a the world's most useless superhero and his bizarre friendship with
a couple of deeply stupid children.
The film centers on two kids who discover they've got the same imaginary friend: a blue-caped,
gloriously mulleted superhero named Rem Lezar.
So, naturally, they decide to build him out of department store mannequins and junk they
find.
They fall asleep on their creation, there's a lightning strike, and the nightmare homunculus
of dismembered dummy parts comes to life as a handsome man in spandex who takes the two
tykes on a magical journey.
Except Rem Lezar's magic is made up of filming locations that don't require any effort, bizarre
dance sequences, and a couple of unexpected powerpoint presentations where filming obviously
went terribly wrong.
"Hate is contagious.
And you're catching it."
Star Jack Mulcahy went on to star in at least one memorable commercial…
"...proven to reduce the risk of genital herpes."
… but Rem Lezar ultimately teaches us perhaps the most important lesson of all: never trust
a guy with a blue mullet.
Who might have herpes.
"Good night, and sweet dreams, from Rem Lezar."
Escape from Hell
The amazingly awful Escape from Hell represents the magnificent apex of Christ-sploitation
cinema.
Billed as an "evangelist thriller," it follows non-believer Dr. Eric Robinson as he tries
to mess with nature by self-inducing cardiac arrest to see what it's like on the other
side.
It's basically Flatliners, but with a lot more Jesus.
"I think that the real reason that I'm here is because all those times I should have been
paying attention to the sermon, I was paying attention to Leslie Wilson in the third pew."
Instead of choosing to be existential sci-fi, however, Escape from Hell is a depressing
look at the horrors of Christian hell, rendered in gloriously cheap, blue-screened CGI.
The result is an unintentionally hilarious feature-length spectacle of extras grimacing
in front of fake flames, desperately trying to convince you they're in eternal torment.
Although, to be fair, you'll have an exact mental model of the agony they were striving
to recreate once you've sat through all 78 soul-sucking minutes of this film.
Thunder Ninja Kids in the Golden Adventure
Godfrey Ho's approach to filmmaking involved stealing preexisting Z-list ninja movies,
dubbing them into English with a new script, and then shooting and splicing in new ninja
footage he'd shot himself to create parallel plots that almost never intersect.
And Thunder Ninja Kids Golden Adventure is Ho at the absolute height of his questionable
powers.
It's a film that's low on money and sense, but extremely high on ninjas — just like
the following sentence.
The stolen footage Ho includes features ninja kids in some sort of ninja fish-out-of-water
comedy, while Ho's new footage involves two American ninjas trying to retrieve a ninja
Buddha statue and defuse something called "the ninja bomb."
"My friends, please don't joke with me.
This is not the buddha!"
Did we mention this movie has ninjas in it?
By the end, both plots are gloriously unresolved.
But hey, no one can deny that this movie at least fulfilled its stated aim of featuring
all the ninjas.
Blood Freak
Here we have an early '70s sleaze-fest about a pothead biker who turns into a bird-headed
monster after eating genetically modified turkey.
Blood Freak is possibly the only film in history to feature a scene where a turkey-man gets
lucky, despite his obvious flaws.
And his gobbling noises.
Everything about Blood Freak is cheap, including how you'll feel after watching it.
The biker-turkey-man is supposedly a vampire that needs to drink the blood of those terrible,
terrible "weed addicts" to survive.
But the costume budget was so low that, in reality, it's just a dude in a turkey mask
making insane noises while a bunch of dummies scream at him.
To add to the general insanity, the movie's director, Brad Grinter, occasionally stops
the proceedings to appear on camera and explain that what we're seeing is a serious fable
about the dangers of doing drugs.
It's hard not to think that Brad may have misjudged Blood Freak's potential audience
just a bit...
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