I watched this wonderfully terrible B-movie from 1989 on MST3K last night, and it was surprisingly, counter-intuitively, inspiring to me.
I love these Corman movies. They are terrible, but they are an essential part of the entertainment industry, if for no other reason than the opportunity they present for producers, writers, directors, actors, and crew to get experience when there aren't tens of millions of dollars at stake. They give actors who, like me when I did shitty pieces of shit Deep Core 2000 and Python, are struggling to find A-list work, but still want or need to perform, or to express our artistic selves.
Most of these movies are totally forgotten about five minutes after they are released. Some go on to become cult classics, many of them get riffed by MST3K and all of its offshoots. They are crap, but they are IMPORTANT crap, because they are part of the ecosystem of crap that powers this company town I live in.
These movies all have a certain look to them. The lighting is flat, the shots are always wide and staged weirdly, so they only have to film one angle, instead of setting up twice for close ups or over-the-shoulder shots. The color is a little off, the costumes are a little cheap, the sets look like cardboard. There is ALWAYS stock footage that doesn't match the film grain. There is pointless nudity, because of course there is. The blood is way too red, and kind of looks like paint, because it is. There's one explosion, because that's all they could afford.
I love it. I want to make a movie like that, inspired by the intention behind Black Dynamite. Yeah, an outrageously bad, super (fake) bloody, you-can-see-the-wires horror movie that feels like something you found in the dollar bin at the video store in 1987. We'll shoot on VHS, in Bronson Cave, and the old LA Zoo. It's gonna be a post-apocalyptic zombie story, where the protagonists all wear costumes that are knocked off from The Road Warrior. It will have just enough pointless nudity to put a censored still on the box, which will get horny teenagers to rent it. The story is a by-the-numbers five hander set in a bunker, to save money on sets. The characters are all paper-thin archetypes. It's probably a shameless rip off of Day of the Dead, with some twist that we'll tack on to convince ourselves we're making something original. I'll be the aging, once-promising actor who the producers can get on the cheap, and I'll be surrounded by actors who are too good for the movie, because smart low budget filmmakers always fill out their cast with extremely talented performers who are looking for experience and want to build their resumes.
It's going to be so terrible, and it's gonna be so great.
