My friends from the fencing team in a Milwaukee, WI suburban catholic high school were bored. We wanted to watch a movie, but didn’t want to spend theater prices. So we went to Blockbuster (!!) in search of something…. else.

No, not that you gooner.

We invented the rules on the car ride there:

  • None of us could have seen or even be aware of the movie
  • None of us can recognize any of the main actors in the film
  • Sci-fi or fantasy since those seemed to have the cheese we wanted

As we strolled along the shelves where most patrons don’t bother, there it was. Like a (scuffed) diamond in the rough: Cube

And it was glorious. lol

Bonus points: Two friends and I moved out to Denver, CO in the middle of college to go snowboarding and finish school (in that order). One of us became a manager at Blockbuster right at the beginning of the switch from VHS to DVDs. For whatever reason, his store started with the least rented titles they had, and their solution was to just throw all the VHS in the garbage.

One day he just showed up from work with ~ 4 or 5 huge garbage bags filled to the brim with the crappiest VHS films Blockbuster deemed unworthy to return to a distributor.

Around a week later he did it again.

It was the absolute (free!) jackpot of gloriously bad films.

  • Valmond@lemmy.worldEnglish
    16·
    2 days ago

    I think it was a really bad movie, people moving between 2 boxes for 1 hour, using cheap stereotypes (IIRC the “autist” cracks the code and can leave, sigh).

    • SteveEnglish
      12·
      2 days ago

      I’m not sure you watched the movie. Or maybe you weren’t paying attention. He’s not the one who cracks the code. And that’s not even why he gets to leave.

        • SteveEnglish
          9·
          2 days ago

          He got to leave because the others were too busy fighting each other. He was the only one that wasn’t intentionally antagonizing anyone else.

    • ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      35·
      2 days ago

      Agreed. Cube was a terrible movie. That doesn’t mean it’s not popular though, as demonstrated by the endless stream of Marvel barf coming out of Hollywood.

      • SteveEnglish
        8·
        2 days ago

        A “bad” or “terrible” movie isn’t simply a movie you don’t like.

        I can acknowledge the talent, skill and quality craft, that went into Top Gun: Maverick. But I still didn’t enjoy it much, and thought it was all too obvious and predictable a story. Which made it boring.

        Nothing with a $200M budget and wide theater release is a “Bad Movie”.

        Well… Other than Megalopolis. But that’s a special case.

          • SteveEnglish
            1·
            2 days ago

            The story wasn’t very good. But the rest of the film making was top notch, like all Snyder’s movies.

            • Azathoth@fedia.io
              2·
              2 days ago

              I actually disagree. The script was a disaster, which you pointed out, but super basic stuff like coherent editing was missing too. There were constant jarring cuts after scenes would end abruptly for no apparent reason. Sound and particularly dialogue mixing was atrocious too, which isn’t a problem unique to BvS (looking at you Christopher Nolan) and doesn’t on its own disqualify a movie from being good, but as part of a whole picture it deserves a mention. The acting was comically bad in many places. Overblown post processing made some scenes look muddy even though that effect worked well for other scenes. A lurching, uneven pace is often more a fault of the director than the script itself, and this movie suffered from it in spades.

      • Valmond@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        2 days ago

        Yeah Marvel/DC is the fastfood of movies.

        Only utterly deranged class movies by how much money they make, it’s like lauding mcdonalds because they gain lots of money.