Hello all and welcome to Schlock Attack!
With your host - King Seesar!
This site is a space where lovers of bad movies can unite, relax, and enjoy my reviews, suggestions, and various discussions concerning the great things about bad movies and television.
(Please bear with me and I am moving content from two other versions of this website to consolidate it here into a much better, highly organised page. Thank you for your understanding and please - read on!)
On this site you will be able to read about cold war science fiction, Japanese giant monsters, Gothic fangs and guns entertainment, horror madness in various forms, and martial arts goodness from around the globe among other things. I will be posting reviews, comments, suggestions, and various related trivia and other Easter eggs, as well as tips on grabbing some of this hard to find material as I find it.
What makes me the expert? Maybe nothing. Nothing other than having hosted what I called “Bad Movie Night” every other week at my home for over 19 years (partially providing stadium style seating in my living room, thanks to a great roommate!) and the experience of having worked in video rental stores or being a projectionist in theatres for over 22 years. I do not consider myself completely knowledgeable though - that is part of the reason for creating Schlock Attack! I welcome reader’s comments and suggestions, so that we can all benefit from these postings and gain a fuller knowledge base and understanding of what is truly great about bad movies and television!
Along those lines, let me say one or two things here: I am sure that while some of the categories I have designated to use on this blog will be widely accepted, but there will certainly be times when it can be disputed or that a film or TV show will fall into multiple categories. Please don’t flame me or other visitors if there is a disagreement concerning nit-picky hair-splitting category opinions. This is a place to have fun and roll with the ridiculous entertainment brought to the forefront of conversation. If you don’t like my descriptions of categories, voice an alternative opinion, but please keep it civil.
Secondly, please keep to the topic at hand when posting comments or suggestions. Feel free to email me with things relevant but not yet discussed or questionable in nature. I don’t mind that at all! Also, I am happy to link to or acknowledge other sites that have similar content and I welcome submissions (although, please understand that I have the right to refuse or edit them if you send them to me.)
Let me say a word about the films and TV shows I choose to discuss: I have a rating system for the quality of movies and a rating system for the “schlockiness” of a movie. While I expect to discuss all levels of quality on this blog, I intend to mainly discuss only one of the “schlockiness” categories here.
My quality of movie scale is based on whether or not I feel ripped off paying to see the movie in question, marked by the number of Ghouls where more Ghouls is betters than fewer Ghouls. The categories are as follows:
6 Ghouls - I would have paid even more than full price to see this movie
5 Ghouls - I felt fine about paying full price for this film
4 Ghouls - I would feel good about paying matinée prices for this film
3 Ghouls - I recommend waiting for the dollar cinema for this one
2 Ghouls - Rent this movie, if you have an extra buck and nothing to do
1 Ghoul - Only watch this one if you get to see it for free on someone else’s television
0 Ghouls - Don’t even bother with this one
Now that we have that established, let me explain the “schlockiness” system. I feel like there are four levels of “schlockiness”. These types are 1.) Movies that have no schlock factor and are great movies - usually art films or well-done high dollar Hollywood, etcetera. 2.) Movies that are not schlocky enough to be bad, but too schlocky to be good. 3.) Movies that tried hard not to be schlocky, but failed miserably and are completely absurd and full of schlock! and 4.) Films that are trying to be schlocky and lost the natural entertainment value they would have gotten if they hadn’t tried so hard. I love films from categories 1 and 3, but I avoid 2 and 4 like the plague. This blog will be concerned almost entirely with type 3 films ad I will mention this rating system much while writing this blog, as it will be assumed that most films will be type 3.
Phew!
That was cumbersome! Let’s get that bad taste out of our mouths with an anecdote about how I got into all of this. There is a little tid bit of the story that I am sure I share with most of the readers here and that is that I have been watching movies like this since I was a child. I remember my dad calling me into his bedroom on Saturday afternoons to watch Jet Jaguar team up with Godzilla to defeat Megalon or to see Gordon Liu learn “scaffolding-style” kung fu at the monastery to defeat the bad guys in town. What I suspect I don’t share with many readers is holding a dream job that led me to start inviting my friends over to watch bad movies in the mid 1980s. I landing a job working for a video store as a reviewer or promotional tapes! All I did was take home a box of 30-40 video tapes per week, plough through them, and report to the store owner as to whether or not I felt the students at university near by may rent them or not. Wow! It was great! The first two films I pulled out of the box were Octaman, a Mexican horror flick about a half man, half octopus legend, and Raiders of Buddhist Kung Fu, the aforementioned Gordon Liu at his “worst” (or best depending on what you are looking for in a movie.)
I called three of my closet friends on the phone and said, “You bring the muffin mix and I will make some homemade ice cream. Get over here. Now! You won’t believe your eyes!” They came over promptly and we baked and churned and watched rubber tentacles swat at dummies of Mexican workers and poorly done slapstick comedy mixed with poorly choreographed martial arts (not Gordon Liu, really, but his supporting cast wasn’t very supportive, if you get what I mean.) We laughed until we had headaches and the ice cream was gone (orange chocolate chip, if I recall correctly.) The next week we watched more and three more people came; two weeks later ten people came and started bringing pot luck foods, et cetera. And that was that. Bad Movie night had begun.
This lasted until I had to move away from the South of the United States to pursue a master’s degree in Ethnomusicology at University of Hawaii. Now I am moving again very soon, this time to London for more scholastic fun.This blog, in a way, is going to partially take the place of Bad Movie Night until I can get settled enough to start it up again. I hope you all enjoy this blog and the suggestions that I make and even more so, I encourage each of you to start your own Bad Movie Night and enjoy all the rotten, ridiculous, horrid films out there that have brought me so much “pleasure” over the years.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank some of the key people that made Bad Movie Night happen, if I may: Stacy Rumph and Jon Black for bringing the strawberry muffin mix that first night; Matt and Johanna (recently married! Congratulations!) that supplied untold numbers of rotten films for the watching; Kim Jones and Chad Boyd for letting me host this madness in our house for untold years; Michelle LeCompt and John Snead for not missing a BMN that I can recall; and most especially, my late brother Sean Johnson, possibly the greatest connoisseur of bad movies known to man!
Thanks for reading and look for the first suggestion and review to appear this week!
Will Connor
bravenet.com