Silly Movies

In the same way that I have a thing for obnoxious grind metal (the new Mastodon album is really good), I also have a thing for amped-up, utterly ridiculous action movies. They are, I suppose, what you might call guilty pleasures. These are films that, though not necessarily high quality movies, do what they intend to do well. They work within the limits of genre, but they don't recognize traditional cinematic boundaries about how to approach genre—they're resolutely over the top and unashamed about it. In college, we referred to them rather simply as "silly movies," for that's exactly what they are. But that doesn't mean they're not also tremendously entertaining.

My favorite silly movies are probably the first two Blade films, the Paul Verhoeven sci-fi flicks (Robocop, Starship Troopers, Total Recall), and Predator. It's difficult to mount a defense of the real cinematic quality of any of these films, yet they're all hugely entertaining. Part of the trick is that while none of them take themselves really seriously, neither do they sink into self-parody. In each, the concept is ludicrous and therefore so is the execution. But at the same time, the films don't get all post-modern and start winking at you—they play out their absurd scenarios with relatively straight faces. Snakes on a Plane did this fairly well too, I'll add, leaving the obvious jokes to the audience (who're much more adept at making them anyway) rather than trying to make the movie too self-conscious.

Another thing that's important in all of these films is that they all make sense, at least in their own crazy kind of way. I mean, obviously, the idea that we're surrounded by ultra fashionable gangster vampires who engage in massive shootouts and sword fights with a hulking, armored guy who looks like Wesley Snipes is total nonsense. But once you get past the lunacy of the concept, the first two Blade films are relatively cogent, plotwise (the second one especially). Just as important is that all of these films make visual sense; Blade: Trinity doesn't make the list because not only is the story incomprehensible (viruses, Dracula, Nightstalkers, oh my!), the photography and action choreography are maddening. Julian Sanchez just posted a good bit on writing he describes as "a stupid person's idea of how a smart person sounds." Trinity's direction might be described as "a stupid person's idea of how a cool movie looks."

Some people want to include movies like the X-Men series or other higher-budget, more mainstream fare in the same class, but I don't think that it quite works. There's something fundamentally wacky, something lowbrow and somewhat out of control, about these movies that you don't see elsewhere. You might call it the Spirit of John Carpenter, whose early 80s schlock masterpieces Escape from New York and The Thing really set the tone for the mid to low budget silly movies of today.

I don’t really have any current connections to make, except to say that the modern television environment seems a prime place for such gleeful silliness. But for the most part, we get outright goofy stuff like Stargate SG1 or the awful new Blade series on Spike. The only thing that comes close is 24, which, in recent seasons, has taken its implausibility to even more outrageous levels—and, I’ll note, done rather well as a result.