Category Archives: News

News

Why are there no good (properly good) female superhero films?

When it came to finding a suitable ‘bad film’ for our collaboration with What The Frock!, we were shocked that every female-led superhero film is on a sliding scale of awfulness…

Catwoman

Let’s face it – most ‘so-bad-they’re-good’ films are exploitative. Whether it’s Lisa in The Room representing how awful women are to men, or the female characters in most cult films being there purely to take their clothes off, the fairer sex rarely comes off well.

This is particularly true of female-led superhero films.

While the world of comic books is populated by a plethora of strong female characters, when they are translated to the big screen, they are often found wanting.

While there has been an improvement in recent years, many of the current slate of female superheroes (Black Widow, Mystique) still play second fiddle to their male counterparts (Captain America, Wolverine).

For the most part, this is because film studios have no idea what to do with female superheroes. To them, their target audience for these type of films is teenage boys/men, so ‘strong female’ is replaced by ‘scantily clad’.

Supergirl

If you look at the likes of Barb Wire, Elektra, Catwoman and their ilk, the idea of female empowerment seems to have come from the brain of a 12 year old boy. And I’m doing 12 year old boys a disservice by saying that.

Characters are poorly defined, motivations often revolve around men and if the plot does make an attempt to appeal to women, it is done in the most patronisingly insulting way – I’m looking at you Catwoman and your stupid storyline about a deadly skin cream.

Unsurprisingly many actresses have seen their careers nosedive after appearing in many of these films. It’s amazing Charlize Theron can still headline a film after Aeon Flux.

However of all the female superhero films made, Supergirl stands alone, in our opinion, in not being borderline insulting.

Sure, Kara Zor-El is stunningly naive, just wants a boyfriend and seems to forget that her entire world is under threat so that she can attend a prep school, but at least it’s done in the most mind-boggling, non-sensical way imaginable.

Thank God, Jennifer Lawrence is standing out from the pack with her Hunger Game films, but it’ll be interesting to see how the forthcoming Wonder Woman portrayal is handled and whether Marvel will ever get round to putting Black Widow (or even Ms. Marvel) front and centre, instead of behind the rest of The Avengers.

Get tickets for our Supergirl screening here. 

News

Who is Weng Weng?

If you’ve seen the trailer to our next screening, For Y’ur Height Only, you may be wondering just who the hell Weng Weng is and why is this the first time you’re hearing about him? Well, let us hit you in the nut-sack with some knowledge…

Weng Weng

At the peak of his fame, Weng Weng, was the most famous Filipino celebrity of his generation, however 30 years on, he is barely remembered. As a result, a number of urban legends have sprung up around him. Some say he married a porn actress, others believe he was actually a real-life secret agent, while others have stated he went on to become a professional karaoke singer.

Intrigued to find out what happened to the diminutive superstar and why he has been forgotten by the Filipino film industry, Australian film-maker Andrew Leavold spent 20 years trying to find him and the last seven making the documentary The Search For Weng Weng to get some answers.

Born in Balacaran in 1957, Weng Weng (birth name Ernesto de la Cruz) was the youngest of five brothers. He was born with a condition known as primordial dwarfism and in the words of his brother Celing,was “no bigger than a coke bottle”. This meant that young Ernesto spent the first 12 months of his life in an incubator.

“He was not expected to live,” said Andrew. “But when he did, it was declared a miracle and Weng Weng was dressed as the Christ-child figure at the head of Baclaran’s yearly Santo Nino parade.”

For Your Height Only

Weng Weng grew up to become obsessed with martial arts and trained almost daily. He was cast by film producer Peter Caballes in a bunch of novelty kid films and was almost cast in a film as a midget Superman, but the idea was scrapped. Peter Caballes then introduced Weng Weng to the King of Philippines Comedy, Dolphy, who cast him as his kung-fu kicking sidekick in his spy caper The Quick Brown Fox (1980) and western parody Da Best In Da West (1981).

Weng Weng’s fame grew and he was made an honorary Secret Agent by future President General Ramos, and was presented with a badge and a 25-callibre pistol. This event was the direct inspiration for the film ‘Agent 00’ which, along with For Y’ur Height Only, would make him a global superstar.

The “absurdist masterpiece of gloriously bad cinema” became one of the Philippines’ most successful exports, and Weng Weng was soon The Philippine’s ‘biggest’ cinematic export. A sequel was quickly churned out (The Impossible Kid (1982), but as the box office failed to match that of its predecessor, Weng Weng’s time in the spotlight soon came to an end.

Speaking to Leavold, Weng Weng’s brother said “the family was poor before he became famous, and afterwards remained as poor as ever.”

Weirdly General Ramos decided that Weng Weng could still be an asset to the country and put him through paratrooper training in order to “send him on infiltration missions where his size would be used to its maximum advantage.” While this meant that Weng Weng was actually sent on some undisclosed missions, he also meant he was frequently seen walking around the Arrivals Lounge in Manila Airport, acting as a human “Welcome To Manila” banner.

While Weng Weng died of heart failure on 29th August 1992, Andrew Leavold is still trying to find rumoured lost films that have yet to see the light of day to ensure Weng Weng’s unique legacy to cinema is never forgotten.

For more information on Weng Weng and Andrew Leavold’s documentary, go to www.searchforwengweng.com

Get your tickets to For Y’ur Height Only here.

News

The Room… anyway, how’s your sex life?

After six months of requests, the Bristol Bad Club finally screened The Room.

We filled out the Bristol Cathedral Choir School's Cresswell Centre

My life is separated into two time periods. My life before I saw The Room and my life after I saw The Room.

The first time I watched Tommy Wiseau’s magnus opus, I was changed forever.

I no longer looked at cinema the same way again and sought out every book, article and review about how it was made, in order to make some sense of what I had witnessed.

Continue reading The Room… anyway, how’s your sex life? →

News

The night Bristol Bad Film Club met Tommy and Greg…

How Tim and I met the stars of ‘the Citizen Kane of bad movies’ – The Room.

The BBFC with Tommy and Greg

It all started with an email in early November.

For months, we had known that at some point we would have to show The Room, so I was deep into researching how we would go about getting permission. Full screening rights for The Room lie with Tommy Wiseau and if he doesn’t want you to show it, you can’t show it. He’s also notoriously hard to get hold of.

I contacted the Prince Charles Cinema in London, who famously do regular screenings of the cult classic, in order to pick their brains and it was then I read the most awesome sentence ever.

“Well, Tommy and Greg are coming to London in February to present some screenings here, so if you want to ask him face-to-face, there’s your opportunity.”

TOMMY WISEAU AND GREG SESTERO ARE COMING TO LONDON?!

That was all I needed to hear. Quickly, an email was sent out to the Bristol Bad Film Brain Trust (the group of people who are regularly forced to endure the latest monstrosity that I have uncovered) informing them of this amazing news.

Their response was equally ecstatic, with one even putting forward an elaborate plan to kidnap both Tommy and Greg in order to have them at our future screening.

Tickets were promptly purchased and over the intervening months, I finally managed to get a screening licence for The Room (although that was an epic feat in its own right).

Tommy Wiseau

Finally the day came and eight of us made the trip to London (complete with Tube strikes) in order to see if meeting Tommy and Greg would be as awesome as we had always imagined.

They did not let us down.

In front of a crowd, Tommy is everything you’d expect him to be. Confident, funny and with one eye on the pretty girls. Greg is, understandably, fully aware that this is Tommy’s World and he’s just living in it, but seems to enjoy meeting the fans of his most infamous role.

There was also a Q&A. Sure that they must have been asked the same questions ad nauseum regarding spoons, footballs and ‘Why is it called The Room?’, I decided to try something a little different…

Keen to get Tommy and Greg to film an intro for our screening, Tim and I slipped out as the film got underway. We’d been told that Tommy and Greg hang around the bar for the film’s duration.

Not only did they sign our merchandise and pose for photos, but they both seemed genuinely interested in our screening. Tommy even mentioned that he had never been “to the country of Bristol” and would love to go, therefore we should show the film every month. Once he heard it was a charity screening, he furnished us with a bunch of free bags, and was keen to point out he also designed them himself.

As for the intro? Well, he essentially directed us on how it should be done, but then he was the only ‘qualified’ director out of us.

He also blessed Tim, who had decided that the one thing missing in his life was Tommy Wiseau underwear.

As we left the screening, happy that we’d met them both and that they were both as nice as we’d hoped, we noticed Tommy was out front playing football with the crowd who were waiting for the next screening.

Well aware of the devotion of his fans, Tommy was not going to let them down and whether you like The Room or not, you have to admire his boundless enthusiasm.

News

Dare you enter The Room?

This month, we’re showing ‘the Citizen Kane of bad movies’ – The Room. But why has a film that is so bad become so popular? And how, after ten years since it first came out, does it continue to sell out around the world?

Great story Mark

Last year, co-star (and producer) Greg Sestero wrote a book called The Disaster Artist detailing how The Room came to be. In his hilarious book (which we highly recommend you get), Greg details how he met Tommy Wiseau at an acting school and was draw to the man’s bizarre accent (is he Austrian? Eastern European? No one actually knows…), his ‘unique’ style of acting and his passion for films. The two soon became friends, resulting in Wiseau’s last-second offer to Sestero of costarring with him in The Room, a movie Wiseau wrote and planned to finance, produce, and direct—in the parking lot of a Hollywood equipment-rental shop.

The shoot was a circus. Apparently, Wiseau spent $6 million of his own money on his film, opting to buy equipment outright, rather than hire it, which is the industry norm. However over eight months, which saw crew and assorted actors frequently fired, The Room came to life… like some sort of resurrected corpse.

Like a resurrected corpse, it made no sense, as Tommy insisted everyone stick to the words that he had originally written.

Despite the concerns of all the cast and crew, Wiseau rented a Hollywood billboard featuring his alarming headshot and staged a red carpet premiere. The Room made $1800 at the box office and closed after two weeks. One reviewer said that watching The Room was like “getting stabbed in the head”.

But that was not the end…

Of the few people that saw the film, a handful realised the magnitude of the film’s unintentional hilarity. This prompted a series of midnight screenings in and around Los Angeles that allowed The Room to solidify its reputation as a cinematic experience, although not in the way Wiseau intended.

Before long, The Room had worldwide cult appeal and was being shown in cinemas all around the world, with audience participation on a par with The Rocky Horror Show.

And now, finally, we are showing it in Bristol!

Get your tickets here… you won’t regret it.

News

That damn gang and their stupid cocaine

Last Thursday, at The Cuban in Bristol, we showed our first film of 2014, Miami Connection, to a crowd over 180 people. 

Our fifth film overall, this was by far our largest: our previous largest screening had been to ‘just’ 110 people. With over 150 advance tickets sold for Miami Connection, this is hopefully a sign of things to come for 2014. Bristol has developed a taste for bad cinema, and we’re the guys with the menu.

I (Tim) kicked off with a brief welcome, before handing over to a couple of reps from the Travelling Light Theatre Company, the charity we were sponsoring for this screening. After a short video briefly outlining what they do, co-founder Ti introduced the film itself.

With a video explaining who Miami Connection writer, star, and all round awesome guy, YK Kim actually is, the audience was well prepared for the awful, awful majesty of what was to follow.

From my vantage point at the back, the audience reaction was unparalleled. Quite how many knew what they had let themselves in for, I don’t know. But I do know that many, many people went home with their lives changed after this event. Battling back tears of joy, I heard one audience member say with disbelief, “I am SO GLAD I came”.

This is what Bristol Bad Film Club is about. We didn’t start the club to make money, we started the club so we could travel through time. No, wait, that was the DeLorean. We started the club to watch bad films and have a good time. Watching a bad film on your own is OK. Watching a bad film in a group is immense. Watching a film in a group, with a drink and some food, and a great setting is the best.

One of the highlights of the evening was the visceral reaction to the trailer for what we have coming next. A custom-made teaser trailer made by Gaby Staniszewska delivered exactly what we needed. A resounding YES at the first glimpse of, followed by more recognition at the second glimpse.

Because, in February, we are, finally, showing…

News

Bad Films Doing Good

When Ti and I set up the Bristol Bad Film Club, it was – let’s be honest – to see brilliantly bad films on the big screen. What we didn’t expect was the hugely positive response we have had from the people of Bristol and its surrounding area.

This wasn’t a venture we set up to make money. It was for the love of cinema, especially really bad cinema. So, since it wasn’t to make money, we figured that we could give something back to the community in the unlikely event it made some small amount of profit.

Because of YOUR support and love of bad films, we have been able to donate the frankly phenomenal sum of over £1,100 in 2013, split across the following charities:

Awamu – a charity helping children with HIV in Africa;

 

 

The Whiteladies Picture House Campaign – Bristol’s very own Kickstarter-assisted campaign to restore a beloved cinema;

 

Help for Heroes – helping those who suffer life changing injuries sustained in the line of duty, and;

 

Millie’s Trust – providing Paedriatric First Aid to help reduce the instances of cot death, following the tragic death of the girl who gives the charity its name.

The charities are not all promoted at the screenings themselves: they are not necessarily appropriate to be discussed before or after what is essentially a night of comedy. But these are charities with focuses that are important either to us, or to someone connected to us, and they deserve the recognition and the funds that, through your help, we can provide.

In 2014 our charities continue to be diverse, and important. We may not make a big thing at all our screenings about it, but it is one of the real-world outcomes of your attendance at our screenings.

Thank you.

 

Tim