We may be cinefiles here at American Pulps but we also really like a good bad movie. In college I used to get drunk and watch Chuck Norris or Steven Segal movies with my friends. I must have seen Lone Wolf McQuade about 4 times, but I can’t tell you how it ends. I just remember a lot of round house kicks and Chuck Norris chugging beer.
Probably the most famous bad movies are Plan 9 From Outer Space and The Room. These two films are really bad, but I think the movies about the making of them; Ed Wood and the more recent Disaster Artist have made them more well known than the movies themselves. No shade, these are terrible movies but for an entertainment factor (which I guess would make it better?) you needn’t go any further than Miami Connection.
Plan 9 From Outer Space is in the public domain so you can watch the whole thing here and see for yourself how bad it really is. It’s cheesy as hell but there are so many campy Sci-Fi B-Movies from the 1950s that it makes this one a little more palatable when comparing it to it’s contemporaries. It also has Vampira and Bela Lugosi so it’s got some star power going for it.
Opposite of star power is The Room, which was released in 2003 so its contemporaries are Gangs of New York, The Pianist, and Adaptation. Here’s some clips from The Room which is really, really bad. The story is so bad and the execution so cringeworthy it makes Miami Connection look like a Kurosawa film. “Oh hi Mark.”
Forget the dialogue, that ADR makes it really hard to watch. And that blocking, man these people move as gracefully as a one legged swan around that green screen on the roof. Tommy Wiseau should teach a Masterclass.
Which brings me to Miami Connection, a movie about a group of orphan-ninja-college students who are in a rock band and take on a motor cycle gang of drug dealers in the city of Miami. As bananas as the premise is, and it’s pretty fuckin’ bananas, it’s kind of a fun ride and the music will get stuck in your head.
Friends through eternity
Loyalty, honesty
We’ll stay together
Through thick or thin
Friends forever
We’ll be together
We’re on top
‘Cause we play to win
They just don’t write them like that anymore. Here’s the the Dragon Sound Soundcloud courtesy of the Alamo Draft House.
And if the music hasn’t hooked you yet, here’s a trailer also put together by the Alamo Draft House. I’d pair this movie with Ginga Ninja out of the Black Hog Brewing Co.
