What makes a movie “good”? Groundbreaking craft? Complex characters? The simple ability to entertain? Ask eight people to define a good movie, and you will get eight different answers. The mental processes that result in the thumbs up or down verdict are defined by complex factors, both personal (i.e., individual taste) and social/institutional (i.e. the established criteria). Despite the ever-expanding film canon and the numerical verdicts of Rotten Tomatoes, there is no fixed formula to separate a good film from a bad one. Film pioneer May Deren argued that most acclaimed films are “bad,” in that they fail to utilize cinema as an absolute art form: no matter how technically accomplished, these films follow dramatic structures borrowed from the stage - film is reduced to a transmitter of complex plays. From this purist’s definition, only a film that crafts an experience exclusively possible through the motion photography and editing instruments can be “good.”
The vast majority of film lovers do not abide by such rigid definitions of cinema. A good film is one that embodies refined craft, insight, taste, and superb artistry from all departments. The criteria that defines good drama is applied to film criticism: a good movie has complex characters that change in response to conflict, all guided by action reflecting thematic concerns. Most importantly, a good film is engaging enough to sustain audiences through the format’s time commitment. If a film checks off these prerequisites, it can comfortably rest in many a movie lover’s canon of quality cinema.
But what of those films we love that do not meet these standards? Movies that abandon these “rules” for the sake of something unhinged, weird, or shocking? These films often garner their own cult followings and recognition - but for the most part they are dismissed as “schlock”: entertaining but meaningless exercises in questionable taste. For lovers of midnight madness and so-bad-its-good humor, schlock is a badge of honor worn by films that care not a whit about artistic aspirations – but many of these films have their own meticulous styles, themes, and approaches to cinematic art. In other words, they’re good movies, maligned by their aesthetics, modes of production, and/or intent. Below we take a look at five films that are proud schlock through and through, yet harbor craft, subtextual insight, and sublimity worthy of the highest art. They challenge the very idea of what a “good movie” is; and in the process, illustrate that cinema is more mysterious and powerful than any critical criteria could accommodate.
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5 Pink Flamingos (1972)
New Line Cinema
Can a film be so lowbrow that it becomes highbrow? Probably not - but it can become so mind glowingly transgressive that it challenges the very notions of what art, decency, and society are - which is a feat many works of art only aspire to. John Waters’ Pink Flamingos, a masterpiece of trash, is one such film. Waters was not looking to make a movie that was liked. To him, entertainment was about bad taste, and the greatest acclaim his magnum opus could receive was disgust. “If someone vomits watching one of my films,” Waters wrote, “it’s like getting a standing ovation.”
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The story follows a vile family who competes with a couple from Baltimore to be declared the filthiest people alive. Needless to say, both parties make a compelling case: the film includes chickens killed in a bizarre assault (the assault was simulated; the chicken death, unfortunately, was not), the eating of dog feces (also real), and the black market sale of babies to lesbian couples. Waters’ trash aesthetic is almost as nauseating as the actions he depicts, defined by “homemade Technicolor,” purposeful film reel damage, and rough editing. It all comes together to create a piece of hyper-real nihilistic humor, punker-than-punk and twice as glamorous.
Inspired by fifties kitsch, the underground films of Kenneth Anger, and drag shows, Pink Flamingos is a taboo-breaking middle finger to a hetero-normative society’s mores. Those who have the stomach for it will find a strangely innovative defining text in the Queer Cinema canon. Spearheaded by Waters (an icon of gay counterculture) and queer trailblazer Divine, the film didn’t do anything to normalize queerness – nor did it want to. Its queer politics are in sharp contrast to the gay suffering and assimilationist narratives that defined the beginning of queer film: Pink Flamingos doesn’t try to win over a culture that finds its creators disgusting - it embraces that revulsion and calls it beautiful.
4 Hausu (1977)
Toho
The premise of Nobuhiko Obiyashi’s Hausu sounds like any generic horror schlock-fest: a group of teenagers bunk in a dilapidated mansion and face a supernatural presence. Whatever can be said about the film that follows this premise, it is not generic. A kaleidoscope of commercial-influenced glamour photography, floating heads, artificial sets, and hungry pianos, Hausu is commonly cited as one of the weirdest movies ever made. This is no doubt true: the tone is difficult to pin down, and each new scene presents an off-kilter element to keep the audience scratching their heads. Rather than aiming for gothic spookiness, Obiyashi’s aesthetic is glossy, hyperactive, and colorful. His first feature film following a career directing commercials, the filmmaker used all the tools he developed for selling products and applied them to create a world where cats play piano and clocks spew blood.
The film had a difficult production, with Obiyashi directing because no one at Toho wanted the job. It received hostile reviews upon its release in Japan, with critics blasting it as an affront to serious filmmaking upheld by giants like Kurosawa and Ozu. In an interview for the Criterion Collection, Obiyashi maintained that children responded well to the film from the beginning (he wrote the script with his daughter as a reflection of her fears and fantasies), and the world eventually followed in suit: Hausu became a much loved oddity.
Hausu is notable as more than a really weird movie. Obiyashi may have gotten his start in commercials, but he only gravitated to them as a way of getting filmmaking experience: one look at his other films reveals an avant-gardist interested in manipulating cinema to create intentional sensory experiences. The film is a kinetic masterpiece, and despite its glossy surface, it is motivated by somber ideas: the legacy of the nuclear bomb, and the innocents’ confrontation with the trauma of the past. The youthful exuberance of the kids and the cinematic world they live in is in sharp contrast to the ancient evil they encounter - this is a reflection of the generation gap between those who lived through the trauma of the war, the bombing, and its aftermath, and those who grew up removed from these events in the economic miracle. In one of the movie’s many surreal flights of fancy, the girls see a nuclear explosion, and one remarks that it looks like cotton candy. This strained relationship between innocent materialist present and scarred, despairing past guides the film’s aesthetics, grounding its chaos and camp into something surprisingly meaningful - and absolutely bonkers.
3 Kuso (2017)
Brainfeeder Films
Music producer Flying Lotus made his feature directorial debut in 2017 with Kuso, a loose anthology of stories set in a post-earthquake Los Angeles. The city of Angel’s inhabitants have become mutated and carcinogenic, and they waste away in the remains of civilization. In addition to main plot threads focussing on a solicitous sentient boil, a rapper who seeks an abortion from a doctor with a talking bug in his anus, and the mystical friendship between a boy who can’t control his bowels and an orifice in the woods, the film is interspersed with abstract animations and vignettes that further develop its stomach churning world. The film itself seems to be broadcast from a digital network of decomposing TVs and computers, the final despairing communications of a subterranean culture on the verge of extinction.
Based on reputation alone, it’s tough to know whether Kuso is subversive art or lowbrow garbage. Those who decide to watch it will learn the answer: it’s both. Vile, muddled, indulgent, deliberately difficult to like, Kuso’s surreal juvenilia and gross-out gags are nevertheless bound by an undercurrent of despair and revulsion that feels unique to its era. Even when the film falls into funks of vulgar freneticism, its antics are bound by an aesthetic/thematic world that has been meticulously thought through.
Though its social satire is more oblique than other afro-surrealist absurdist commentaries of its era (e.g. Sorry to Bother You), Kuso has much to say about race, gender, class, and decay - or, if it doesn’t have anything to say, it has much to make you feel. There’s also a strange sweetness that runs through some vignettes, focussing on the achievement of intimacy in a world that is diseased. For all its bile and brimstone, the movie’s affront to the senses is softened somewhat by Flying Lotus and friends’ incredible soundtrack, featuring a killer introductory sequence rapped by Busdriver.
2 The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
Bryanston Distributing Company
Slashers get a bad rap. While there are no shortage of cheap and tasteless tales of promiscuous teenagers chopped to bits by a masked assailant, genre classics like Halloween (1978), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), and Black Christmas (1974) are superbly directed, subtextually rich, and dripping with suspense. If they are considered schlock, it is simply because the broader critical body has long harbored hostility toward cheap horror films. While these movies are happy to operate within the scope of exploitation/teen horror, the cinematic experiences they create ought to be lauded as an example of what filmmaking can achieve: it takes master craft to lead an audience effectively through a scare fest, and the above-mentioned films also contain subversive political/psychological/social subtext tied in with their thrills.
Even when we consider the artistic merit of the major texts in this much-maligned subgenre, Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacrestands out. On one hand, the film is an exploitation shocker to its core: it is light on budget, heavy on sadism, never hesitates to ogle its female stars, and limits itself to a simple primal story. Yet those who find the film’s violence gratuitous need to take another look: there is hardly any bloodshed on screen. The feeling of violence is one created by sound design, harsh editing, and implication. Its misleading reputation as a tasteless, ultra-violent film is a testament to its cinematic craft; and if it isn’t tasteful, it’s certainly impressive.
But the film’s art-house appeal goes deeper than superb craft. Its depiction of a naive liberal youth facing a dispossessed and cannibalistic America captures the disillusionment that swept over the US in the seventies as effectively as any New Hollywood auteurist vehicle. The film taps into the sense of rot in the heart of the American Dream, whether that be Vietnam, consumerist destruction, violent conservatism, or the displacement of the working class. The documentary aesthetic reinforces the sense that we are seeing something very real, something we shouldn’t, a window into the grinding, blood-soaked gears of American capitalism.
1 Suspiria (1977)
Produzioni Atlas Consorziate
Italian horror films of the twentieth century beautifully embody a blurred line between art and schlock. Particularly with the advent of the giallo (the Italian’s Freudian precursor to the American Slasher, cloak and dagger mysteries told in decadent colorful detail), the horror films that came out of Italy were rudimentary in terms of their wooden acting and nonsensical stories; yet these sadistic fever dreams were wrapped in some of the most sophisticated and evocative filmmaking anywhere in the world. Their phantasmagorical flights of fancy and lovingly detailed murders were captured with lush photography, acrobatic camerawork, uncanny art direction, and a dream logic that could be attributed to the surrealists as easily as the plot-hole-ridden ethos of low budget screenwriting.
While gialli like Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace (1964) balance prurient sleaze with psychological insight, and supernatural thrillers like Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond (1981) tap so effectively into the subconscious that they can be forgiven their nonsensical plots, no film reaches the heights of artistry and violent camp achieved by Dario Argento’s occult horror Suspiria. Its story follows a young ballerina who travels to Germany to attend an elite school, only to find it run by a coven of witches – but viewers shouldn’t enter Suspiria looking for narrative cohesion. The plot moves in strange, uneven directions, dropping off into scenes that occasionally make no sense at all. The dialogue is strange and childish, delivered by actors who seem to be sleepwalking. The soundtrack is overbearing and edited strangely: when protagonist Susie exits the airport in the opening moments, we cut between inside and outside - when we are outside, Goblin’s unnerving lullaby plays full force, while inside there is no music at all.
Yet all of these choices are what makes Suspiria so effective. That opening scene establishes two worlds: the world from which we have arrived, and the world of Suspiria - and once we’ve crossed the threshold, there is no turning back. Suspiria is most powerful when viewed as a coming-of-age Technicolor fairytale: through an overlarge set and strange dialogue, the grown women at the ballet academy seem to be children, and are treated as such by the staff. The few students who show signs of maturity either live outside the academy or are killed. Through this lens the film’s strange rhythms can be understood as the hypnosis placed over these women, holding them in a childlike state of subservience that is eventually violently overcome - but that’s only one way to look at a nightmare drawn straight from the id. Suspiria succeeds because it ignores so many storytelling conventions: it settles for being nothing less than its full, hallucinatory self.
