If you’re a real fan of movies that means you’re a fan of ALL movies, the good and the bad. For every one great film there’s about 400 bad ones. If you’re an up and coming filmmaker/screenwriter doing all you can to hide them from yourself, you might actually be hurting doing more harm to your developing skills than good. Youtuber D4Darious posted this video explaining just why watching bad movies is actually more helpful to filmmakers than just watching good movies.
The video basically discusses how watching a bad movie makes it easier to point out the flaws and that watching other peoples mistakes is a much cheaper way to learn instead of making those mistakes yourself with your own films. Check out the video below and then keep reading because I agree a billion times over with what this gentleman is saying and have my own take on the matter.
Netflix is a HUB of terrible films and I always say at the end of my podcast, “I watched (name of terrible movie) so you don’t have to”, but I might be changing that after watching this video:
I’ve always appreciated someone who enjoys bad movies, it’s always been something I’ve done with my friends for fun and I’ve even applied D4Darious’ theory into writing my own things. When I’m stuck on trying to do something different or unique I ask myself what are the cheesy things I’ve seen in movies and then cool things I’ve seen in bad movies that have been done poorly… Then, how can I improve upon them. So Darious isn’t far from the truth how these shitty movies can be a valuable tool in the filmmaking process.
Netflix has its great movies and it’s always good to watch them when you want to feel inspired or if you want to cleanse your pallet after watching all 8 original Halloween movies… like I did this weekend. It wasn’t easy. Halloween 6 and Halloween Resurrection are both on Netflix and only further this youtuber’s point. You can watch these movies and make fun of them, or you can sit there and try to figure out what worked and what the filmmakers did wrong. Even though I am not a huge fan of the original, I can still appreciate what it did to horror and creating a new version of terror that has become the slasher movie. But there’s something that went wrong with Halloween Resurrection in particular that strayed so far off from the original path it became an amazingly funny and entertaining movie.
Something fun that I would recommend you do is find a movie on Netflix that SOUNDS cool, ignore the horrible rating, then play a game with your friends to find out where it went wrong and how they could have done it better. Do that a few times and before you know it you might have figured out what your next screenplay is going to be about. Boom.
So think about some of your favorite terrible movies like Troll 2, The Room, Shakma, Wizard of Oz 2 and share them below. If they’re on Netflix that’s an added plus! Otherwise you can check out all the bad movies on Netflix we’ve discussed on this site that are “so bad they’re Netflix” here!
