Recently in film Category

This week's good goes to having both superlative Pensacola pop-rock act Deadly Fists of Kung Fu and Tampa expatriates Joe Popp and Brian McCabe back in town for the weekend. Popp was in Tampa for a friend's wedding, and dragged the rest of the guys in his band The Hornrims down from New York City for a New World Brewery appearance; the Fists did that one too, as well as a Saturday night stint at St. Pete's Emerald Bar that included a Replacements cover, a money shower, and us bouncing some jerkoff in a Hawaiian shirt. (Look, dude, if you're going to threaten a girl, don't point at your cane and plead your limp when her male friends come over for a chat.)

This week's bad goes to bad family news. My mother will be having a fairly serious surgical procedure next week. She's a tough lady, though, and in pretty good health. Plus, they'll be doing that new minimally invasive thing where they just teleport the stuff out of her body through her bones and skin and stuff, or whatever. But if you could spare a thought for Mom Ravis, I'd certainly appreciate it.

This week's ugly goes to, oh, I don't know ... Speed Racer's confirmed flopness, I guess. Or no, wait - let's go with that whole thing about how the price of seeing crappy movies in the theater is going to go up even higher, because all the corn is getting used to make ethanol. Yeah, that's it; corn. Screw you, corn. If I still watched movies in the theater, there'd be trouble.

Hello, what the hell is this? I can understand such classics as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween being remade - after all, they're iconic films, and Gus Van Zant's loving shot-for-shot retooling of Psycho was such a rousing success. And the fanboys love it when you screw their touchstones up all to hell. But Prom Night was a nothing little slasher flick; it only affected me because it was the first uncut horror movie I saw in all its flawed, gory glory at a completely inappropriate age. For me, that severed head rolling across the dance floor is iconic. And we're not going to get that shit with a PG-13 remake staffed with pretty people willing to do pretty much anything short of blowing Satan Himself in order to make the jump from reality TV/the CW lineup (on many levels, they're pretty much the same) to features.

Truthfully, I don't really care that much about the Prom Night. I'll always have the moment I had the crap scared out of me during Hurricane David, ensconced in the master bedroom while my parents threw a fondue party.

But I'm worried about where it will end.

And when the Near Dark remake comes out and pisses all over the original - and it will - I'll be seriously thinking about kneecapping Platinum Dunes. I'll totally fart in their elevator, or Shoe Goo Michael Bay's keyholes, or something.

So, it's obvious there's a huge place in my giant, slightly blackened, morally ambivalent heart for crappy movies with questionable redeeming qualities. But that doesn't mean I don't like good, and even quote-unquote classic, movies. Sure, I'm an avowed horror geek, and I love sci-fi when the trappings don't overwhelm the story. I'm an equal opportunity entertainment/emotional resonance junkie.

A while back, I got involved in a conversation about guilty pleasure flicks at Ybor City's New World Brewery (one of the four or five bars in that sad, sodden, cheeseball district worth patronizing), and my enthusiasm for bad movies was such that it spurred one participant to ask if I liked any good movies at all.

Of course I do. You like movies, you watch a hell of a lot of movies. And while I don't own a buttload of them - why should I, when we've got Netflix and movie-snob friends - my collection includes a bunch of movies I, in my delusions of infinite wisdom, consider timeless.

In the off chance that you care, a list of the ten best movies I actually own follows, along with a list of the ten best movies I don't.

Of the dozen or so folks who remember it, many see this completely over-the-top 2001 alien-invasion spoof as David Duchovny's third or fourth failed attempt to finish the move to the big screen big leagues he started with Kalifornia. I see it in a different, more flattering light; I see it, along with his appearance in Zoolander the same year, as the point at which he stopped giving a crap about following a career arc that didn't interest him in the first place, and had some absurdist fun before continuing to direct, shine in indie fare, and embody complex TV characters.

And Evolution is nothing if not absurd. Critics who note that it pales in comparison to iconic '80s comedy director Ivan Reitman's best work are completely right (derf), but they're also missing the point. Evolution is half-baked, half-assed and smug in the assumption that it isn't entertaining viewers half as much as it's entertaining itself. But, massive box-office grosses aside, that's a pretty good description of Ghostbusters, too.

A year or so ago, I was laid up sick on the couch, watching Van Helsing, because nothing else was on and, let's face it, everyone I know expected me to. Not much was getting through the fever and medicine head beyond some really funny accents and unjustified plot developments - did they go through a mirror to the Ukraine for a Halloween party or something? - yet I was simultaneously disinterested in and vaguely angry at the whole thing. It seemed like a whole lot of money and some impossibly pretty faces wasted on nothing.

At some point, however, a very clear thought shot through the fog like a lightning bolt:

This is probably exactly how everybody else in the world felt while they were watching The Mummy.

Not me, though. I enjoyed director Stephen Sommers' first high-profile outing (Deep Rising shouldn't really count, should it? Shudder) both times I paid to see it in the theater. And the DVD regularly finds its way into my player when I'm in need of something to occasionally glance at while I'm doing something else, or I just plain can't sleep.

Why? Click through for the justification.

I enjoy great film. Seriously, I really do - didn't you notice how I didn't make the "film" plural? That denotes inherent snootery.

But I also love shitty movies. Not shitty movies with absolutely no redeeming values, mind you; there's no room in my brain or DVD collection for the Rush Hour movies, or Delta Farce (if you enjoyed Delta Farce, I've got a garage and a custom-cut length of garden hose waiting for you, your car and your favorite mix tape), or any African-American comedian in a fat suit, or even Plan 9 From Outer Space, which deserves none of the campy, ironic accolades afforded it. Having said that, however, there are flicks in my entertainment center that no one will admit to enjoying except me. Lots of 'em, actually. But there are reasons why I like each and every one of them - mitigating circumstances, if you will, that I feel raise them above the the status of the merely Eszterhasian. They're bad movies, sure, but there's something about them that's interesting or engaging or hilarious enough to make them worth a second or seventh or thirty-third look; it's like a car wreck where there's all kinds of impressive damage, but nobody gets hurt.

So I'm going to champion these, erm, champion-less, differently abled motion pictures here at dirtytricks until I run out of movies, or my attention wanders, or Becks tells me that people are openly mocking her at work. Click through to read the first run-down, on about the ninety-second movie to put a "twist" on Jaws: