Top 14 Guilty Pleasures

J.R. Hudson said:
This is the list of guilty pleasure. These movies fall under the category of 'everyone thinks they're crap, but I still like it'

These are films you watch over and over. They're cheezy, campy, usually panned and may be cult classics

My Top 14 and like most best list's, can change at any given mood'

The Return of the Living Dead
The Breakfast Club
About Last Night
Total Recall
The Frighteners
Footloose
The Fog
Porky's
Valley Girl
Clue
St Elmos Fire
Cliffhanger
The New Kids
The 13th Warrior
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Hey, hey! Don't bad mouth Breakfast Club. This is one of the greatest films of all time. Most folks on this forum WISH they could write a movie like that! My guilty pleasure recently has been Shane Carruth's Primer. Not a crappy movie in my book, but everyone I know seems to really hate it.
 
Tlalconetl said:
Hey, hey! Don't bad mouth Breakfast Club. This is one of the greatest films of all time. Most folks on this forum WISH they could write a movie like that! My guilty pleasure recently has been Shane Carruth's Primer. Not a crappy movie in my book, but everyone I know seems to really hate it.
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I liked Primer. It's not a bad film, it's just not well known. It needed a boost to get it across to a bigger audience. Didn't Ebert recommend it highly?
 
The biggest one that I refuse to appologize for:

Elvira - Mistress of the Dark


I'm also a sucker for anything Halloween themed (even if it's made for kids, such as Goosebumps, etc.)
 
Good thread. I could -and have done- watch all of the following repeatedly. Definitely guilty pleasures.

Starship Troopers
Starship Troopers 2 (!)
The Postman
Soylent Green
Alien versus Predator
Revenge of the Sith
Hellboy

Also, I really loved November, which, while not a guilty pleasure, everyone else seems to hate...
 
bballplaya283 said:
I have no what anybody else thinks of this movie, but I may put The Secret Garden on my list.

It's not that I think it's bad, it's that I wouldn't go around telling people I like it. That movie haunted my childhood. I saw it at a very young age and it was too dark for me or something. Anyway, I for some reason can't get enough of the weird feeling it makes you have.
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There should be a whole other thread about children's movies as "guilty pleasures."

I've got a whole slew of them - and bballplaya there's no shame in liking the Secret Garden. Great movie :)

I'd also add Alfonso Cuaron's A Little Princess. Really loved that as a kid and still do. (Yes, 12 years ago I was a kid.)

Also, from further back, Old Yeller, Milo and Otis, National Velvet, Napoleon and Samantha, Big Red. (We kids were suckers for animals, weren't we?) I've seen all of these at least a dozen times each.
 
My guiltiest pleasure of late would be Transformers. I know it's a heaping pile of trash, but I still enjoyed the hell out of it. Same with Charlie's Angels 1.
 
The latest one was Die Hard 4. Just shut my brain and enjoyed the ride (even the Fighter vs truck and "teleportation to final scene" bits!)
 
Rocky Horror Picture Show (This is the one true guilty pleasure to rule them all)
Legend
Dune
Cemetery Man
Showgirls
Waterworld
Howard the Duck
Neverending Story
Jekyll and Hyde Together Again
ReAnimator






...and John, seriously, how could you call "An American Werewolf in London" a guilty pleasure? It is in the pantheon of all-time great horror flicks, and probably the greatest horror comedy ever. It is pure pleasure.
 
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Elton said:
Rocky Horror Picture Show (This is the one true guilty pleasure to rule them all)
Legend
Dune
Cemetery Man
Showgirls
Waterworld
Howard the Duck
Neverending Story
Jekyll and Hyde Together Again
ReAnimator
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Wouldn't Showgirls be the one to rule them all?
 
David Jimerson said:
Sorta the same question I'd ask about Dune. Certainly not to everyone's taste, but a stylistic masterpiece.
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I think it comes down to the 'weirdo factor'; do friends/family/acquaintances/pets look askance at you for actually taking pleasure in watching the movie? You know, that "you're a weirdo" vibe you'll soak up from others while gratifying that peculiar cinematic predilection.

Dune is sublime weirdness, and it's also just plain bad at times, so to me it definitely crosses over into the "guilty pleasure" zone. 'An American Werewolf in London" is simply hilarious, and truly awesome horror too, so it's nothing to feel guilty about liking at all...at least in my book.

Rocky Horror? Showgirls? Gloriously icky feeling watching both but they do entertain.
 
I agree, Werewolf In London was a great movie, it just had the stigma of being the first to really combine horror and comedy... at least that is what I think. But it gathered quite a buzz, because the Dr Pepper guy ran naked in it.

Dune is just too long.

Rocky horror was also a funny movie, the way they spoofed the old SciFi movies. But, they were the first to really try to showcase MeatLoaf and transvestites, and that may have been too much at the time.

Showgirls... a movie you watch, just to see what all those years of school did for that girl from Saved By The Bell. Incidentally, after Showgirls came out, Dustin Diamond try to regain the spotlight by being in a movie... but nobody wanted to see a naked Screech.




J/K about Screech ;)
 
Overboard
Conan the Destroyer
Kung Pow: Enter the Fist
High Fidelity
9 1/2 Weeks
Okie Noodling
Rock Star
Goodbye Girl
PeeWee's Big Adventure
Hot Shots (also Part Deux)
 
Knight Riders - George Romero. It's about honor and commitment and friendship and courage. And Renaissance-Pleasure-Faire motorcycle jousting. Ed Harris and Tom Savini and Pat Tallman and Ken Foree.

Ultraviolet - Really, who cares who "directed" it? It's a complete mess, something about future vampires who are clones or whatever. But it's got some neat concepts and a couple of laughs and most importantly Milla Jovovich in a series of midriff-baring costumes perpetrating loads of cartoony fully-automatic ultraviolence.

Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone - Lamont Johnson. Peter Strauss and Molly Ringwald and Ernie Hudson and Michael Ironside on planet Road Warrior, fighting for possession of some blonde castaways. At the level of science-fiction Mad Maxfulness, it's fun! And it's got a surprisingly cool low-budget look, too. Plus, it served as the subject of my Senior Thesis paper, in undergrad school - A Deconstruction of Freudian/Feminist Archetypes in 'Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone.'

Big Trouble in Little China - Maybe being Carpenter should exonerate it from the list...but it's just so terribly silly. Still, even with the passage of years it's got some wonderfully magical and creepy stuff that has never been bettered...

The Abominable Dr. Phibes - Robert Fuest. Surreal and horrifying and creatively murderous and weirdly psychedelic. Vincent Price stars as a mutilated psychopath out for revenge against the surgical team that failed to save his wife. Make it a double feature with Dr. Phibes Rises Again. If you dare.

Death Race 2000 - Paul Bartell. It's cross-country funny car racing, with points awarded for pedestrians struck! David Carradine, Mary Woronov, Fred Grandy, John Landis, and Sylvester Stallone in the performance of his career.

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls - Russ Meyer. The moving tale of the girl-band The Carrie Nations: their lives, their loves, their hideous music. But who cares? It's a whacked-out drug-saturated breast-rich romp through some weird tripped-out vision of the 1970s Los Angeles music scene. "This is my happening, and it's freaking me out!"

Night on Earth - Jim Jarmusch. I actually like Jarmusch's body of work, a lot. But while Night on Earth has its moments, in large patches (I'm looking at you, Winona Ryder) it's just embarrassing. Still, Roberto Benigni turning his taxi into a rolling confessional-prison, makes up for an awful lot.

Screamers - Christian Duguay. Low-budget high-concept science fiction, made intriguing by Peter Weller and some reasonably creative application of limited resources. Little stop-motion cuisinarts on legs chase the cast around. It's fun, placing bets on who will get diced, next.

Moon 44 - Roland Emmerich. Michael Pare flies attack helicopters against robot fighter planes on a dark planet with 300 mph winds, with a guy sitting at a console somewhere else backseat-driving. What's remarkable is the look-and-feel they were able to manage, for very little (German) money. Plus, how many sci-fi movies give you helicopters, impalements, druggings, and gay shower-rape scenes? Dean Devlin acts as well as producing. Malcolm McDowell, Leon Rippy and Roscoe Lee Browne, who deserved better.

Streets of Fire - Walter Hill. Michael Pare is a veteran of a future war, who's come home, apparently to the past. Willem Dafoe doesn't like that. It's basically 99-44/100-percent style, by volume. There's some effort toward a plot involving a kidnapped singer, but I don't recommend that anyone spend their time following it.

Event Horizon - Paul W.S. Anderson. A big ol' spaceship goes missing, and mysteriously reappears years later sans crew, prompting a salvage team (Sam Neill, Lawrence Fishburne, Joely Richardson) to venture inside. Did I mention that the ship looks like a depraved glistening black Giger cathedral? Of course it's haunted, by a malevolent intelligence from "a dimension of pure chaos, pure evil." Mostly what it has going for it, is some serviceable creepiness and really nice art direction.

Mitchell - Andrew V. McLaglen. This is a minor cheat: it's really the 'Mystery Science Theater' cover of this movie, that I dig: Joel's last episode, subjected to Joe Don Baker as the hard-drinkingest, slow-drivingest, prostitute-nailingest detective going after corruption and drug dealing in his formerly quiet southern town. See Mitchell lose an argument with a ten-year-old! Thrill to the 15-mph Detroit-Land-Yacht car chase, wherein both drivers carefully signal their turns! Look away quick, if you want to spare yourself the prolonged beer-drenched "love scene" between big fat hairy ol' Joe Don, and Linda Evans! With John Saxon and Martin Balsam.

The Blood of Heroes - David Webb Peoples. Rutger Hauer, Joan Chen, Delroy Lindo and Vincent DiOnofrio are post-apocalyptic touring rugby players who stage deathmatch ball games for the radioactive dirt farmers, until they decide to get off the hick circuit and go back to the big city. It's lots of Joan Chen rolling sexily around in the dust, kicking the shinola out of her opponents. What more can I ask?
 
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Sad Max said:
Knight Riders - George Romero. It's about honor and commitment and friendship and courage. And Renaissance-Pleasure-Faire motorcycle jousting. Ed Harris and Tom Savini and Pat Tallman and Ken Foree.
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OMG, it's been a LONG time since I saw that...definitely a guilty pleasure

Sad Max said:
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls - Russ Meyer. The moving tale of the girl-band The Carrie Nations: their lives, their loves, their hideous music. But who cares? It's a whacked-out drug-saturated breast-rich romp through some weird tripped-out vision of the 1970s Los Angeles music scene. "This is my happening, and it's freaking me out!"
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And Roger Ebert wrote the screenplay...

Another movie that could be added to the guilty pleasure list is:
Cherry 2000.
 
I'm embarrassed to have liked Dodgeball. Humor doesn't get any more base than people getting hit in the nuts, but damnit if it didn't make me laugh.
 
C'mon. A guilty pleasure has to be a film you KNOW is bad, but you get some juvenile pleasure from it anyhow. It has to be somehow EMBARRASSING to admit you like it! You can't list Pee Wee's Big Adventure or Primer, which are brilliant ground-breaking films.

How 'bout one of mine: Steel Magnolias...while it has great performances, it's still saccharine, manipulative and EMBARRASSING...for a guy at least. And yes, I am gay.
 
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