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Not every film can be a blockbuster or Oscar bait. Combining low budgets, slapdash scripts and second-tier actors, B-Movies are the fast food of the entertainment industry—somewhat satisfying during consumption, then in retrospect, a bit of an embarrassing choice. But like their culinary counterpart, they have their fervent devotees, who, to continue the analogy, the public generally regards like that dude who only eats Big Macs.
The genre spawned during the Great Depression when movie ticket sales plummeted. To keep attracting crowds, studios began releasing double-features: an “A” picture with big stars ran first followed by the “B” movie that acted as a low-risk training ground for promising talent to get comfortable on both sides of the camera. Eventually, some stingier theatres started showing the thrifty films back-to-back, and recognizing the demand, studios in the 1930’s cranked out roughly 4,000 B-movies—about 75% of all the films made during that period.
The style waned in popularity as the economy rebounded, but the broad genre has persevered and boasted some big names early in their careers. Francis Ford Coppola started out as a B-Movie director, and The Godfather was headed down that path until the bearded auteur convinced every killer actor working at the time to sign on. So dismiss the genre at your peril. The bad ones have their moments and the good ones can cleanse the palate after a sucky film that takes itself too seriously.
Currently, Netflix has a pretty diverse stock of these campy romps. Among them, the entire Sharknado trilogy; a lakeside horror featuring zombie beavers; an arachnophobic nightmare; the hillbilly slasher send-up, Tucker and Dale vs. Evil; four direct-to-DVD Hellraiser installments; Trailer Park Boys: The Movie; and Kurt Russell’s iconic turn as Jack Burton in Big Trouble in Little China—a role that the Rock will reportedly revamp. Here are those and a few others that comprise the choicest 25 B-movies on Netflix right now:
Big Trouble in Little China
Director: John Carpenter
Stars: Kurt Russell, Kim Cattrall, Dennis Dun, James Hong
This film flopped when it debuted in 1986, collecting $9 million less than it cost to make. But this campy flick has attracted a cult following for Kurt Russell’s swole, but almost completely incompetent hero, Jack Burton. In this campy hit, Burton and his friend, Wang Chi, go to pick up Chi’s lady love from the airport. But when she gets kidnapped by a fearsome Chinatown gang, the unlikely duo plunge into a strange underworld lorded over by the semi-immortal sorcerer, Lo Pan.
The film skips along a semi-seriously, featuring wacky showdowns with a levitating eyeball-dotted fleshy sphere and a hairy, quintessentially '80s monster. Russell’s mullet and tank top game are on point and he drops money one liners like, "May the wings of liberty never lose a feather," and "Okay. You people sit tight, hold the fort and keep the home fires burning. And if we're not back by dawn, call the president."
John Dies at the End
Director: Don Coscarelli
Stars: Chase Williamson, Rob Mayes, Paul Giamatti
This loony cult flick acts as a potent warning not to dabble with mystery drugs. After getting injected with "Soy Sauce," John (Rob Mayes) starts to come unstuck from this dimension. The wiggly, sentient drug then makes its way into John’s friend David, and the two of them go whipping through alternate universes until landing in a brutal society ruled by an organic, artificially intelligent menace named Korrok. Produced for less than $1 million, the film became an instant cult classic for its oddball humor, occasionally gross gore, and distinctly ridiculous plot.
Sharknado 1-3
Director: Anthony C. Ferrante
Stars: Ian Ziering, Tara Reid
Not to be the guy who looks for factual accuracy in this Syfy-original trilogy, but the title is technically inaccurate. Tornados happen on land. And the shark-laden wind storm that sweeps through Los Angeles starts in the Pacific ocean, which makes it a cyclone. Not that that matters, or that any of the rest of this movie matters other than as an increasingly absurd parade of CGI-nonsense that culminates with the movie’s hero, Fin, bifurcating a dive-bombing shark with a chainsaw (what else?). The sequels ups the ante by finding more ways for sharks to attack from unconventional angles and dropping in stunt cameos by C-Listers like Kurt Angle, David Hasselhoff and Frankie Muniz.
Zombeavers
Director: Jordan Rubin
Stars: Rachel Melvin, Hutch Dano, Cortney Palm
After a barrel of toxic ooze leaks into a beaver-filled lake, the thick-tailed rodents gain a zombified immortality and an insatiable bloodlust. When a sextet of promiscuous high-schoolers venture to a lakeside cabin, the mutant critters descend upon them with buck-toothed fervor, chewing through phone lines, tree trunks, and (ahem) body parts in a bonanza of gore. Bill Burr makes a brief appearance in this one-joke flick that gets wrung dry of every possible gag.
From Dusk till Dawn
Director: Robert Rodriguez
Stars: Quentin Tarantino, George Clooney, Harvey Keitel, Cheech Marin, Juliette Lewis
The second most unbelievable thing about this movie is that vampires run a strip club to lure patrons in for some casual bloodsucking. The first most unbelievable plot point is that Quentin Tarantino and George Clooney were cast as brothers. The phenotypically dissimilar duo play career crooks who hijack a pastor’s RV and ride it to the Titty Twister. At the rendezvous spot, the pair meet a connect who has a place for them to lay low in Mexico. Cheech Marin stars in a bit part as Chet Pussy, a gregarious club promoter who advertises a wide array of vaginas and 2-for-1 sales with manic glee. But when the sun goes down, the non-vampires must set aside prior grievances and band together to bring down their fanged foes with silver bullets and sharpened crucifixes.
Galaxy Quest
Director: Dean Parisot
Stars: Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver, Alan Rickman, Tony Shalhoub
In a superbly casted send up of Star Trek, Tim Allen stars as Jason Nesmith, a big-headed, Shatner-esque captain of a fictional space crew. At a convention 18 years after the show left the air, Nesmith basks in a fan's adoration. But the rest of the crew chafes in his shadow, especially Alan Rickman as Alexander Dane, an accomplished thespian who openly loathes that he is best known as Nesmith's humanoid sidekick by the show's fans. But things take a turn when imperiled aliens mistake the fictional cast for the real deal and beg them to help defeat a intergalactic warlord. To boot, Galaxy Quest features Justin Long in one of his first ever silver screen roles as a devoted dweeb.
The Human Centipede
Director: Tom Six
Stars: Dieter Laser, Ashley C. Williams, Ashlynn Yennie, Akihiro Kitamura
This meticulously executed concept horror film misleads the uninformed viewer with a cliché opening. At first, we're introduced to a set of naive victims whose car breaks down in a remote area without cellphone reception (of course). But the plot takes a turn for the nauseating when they get drugged by a psycho surgeon who attempts to create a human pet by conjoining three people—mouth-to-anus.
This Dutch nightmare-giver leaves most of the graphic details to the imagination and salvages some artistic merit from Tom Six’s inspired writing and directing, the tragic sympathy inspired for the victims, and a haunting method performance by German actor Dieter Laser. Roger Ebert refused to rate the film, writing, "The star rating system is unsuited to this film. Is the movie good? Is it bad? Does it matter? It is what it is and occupies a world where the stars don't shine."
Barbarella
Director: Roger Vadim
Stars: Jane Fonda, Ugo Tognazzi, Anita Pallenberg
In 1968, self-assured French director Roger Vadim made a movie in which his then-wife, Jane Fonda, played an oft-nude space babe that bops about the galaxy boning hunky extraterrestrials. Barbarella soon acquires a taste for the sexy enterprise, just as Earthlings have supplanted the conventional in-and-out variety with a hand-to-hand mental connection method. The climactic scene features Fonda trapped in the "Excessive Machine" (Orgasmostron in the French version) by a frumpy bad guy who attempts to kill her with pleasure. But she conquers the foe with her newly insatiable appetite that can take far more than the machine can give. The sixties were a horny time, man.
Pound of Flesh
Director: Ernie Barbarash
Stars: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Darren Shahlavi
Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice confronted anti-Semitism in the Renaissance and completely revamped the way a comedy could be constructed. This 2015 Canadian thriller hijacks that titanic play’s plot "pound of flesh" device, but its cultural contributions don’t match the source. That is, unless you count the ways they make Jean-Claude Van Damme look like he’s not well into his fifth decade on this planet. Essentially, black market bad guys jack Van Damme’s kidney, which he was going to give to his ailing niece. This organ theft gives the Belgian ass-kicker all the motivation he needs to deploy a dizzying series of roundhouses as he works his way through brothels, back alleys, and billionaire estates in a race against the dire survival of his family.
WolfCop
Director: Lowell Dean
Stars: Leo Fafard, Amy Matysio, Jonathan Cherry
Lou Garou (a pun on the French word for "werewolf") is a burnt-out cop boozing and snoozing on the job when he stumbles upon a cult in the middle of a ritual sacrifice. Next thing he knows, he wakes up in bed with a pentagram scar on his belly, regenerative powers, and hyper-alert senses that make him far better at his job—a renaissance that surprises everyone.
The trade-off: He turns into a wolf when the moon comes out, a change that somehow has no negligible effect on his sex life. He also must consent to being locked in jail for the small town’s safety. But when a roving band of pig-masked bandits take over, the authorities set him loose, and he savagely shreds bad-doers and corrupt politicians while maintaining his still-intact human intelligence. The pun-y tagline says it all, "Here Comes the Fuzz."
Cowboys vs Dinosaurs
Starring: Eric Roberts, Vernon Wells
Directed by: Ari Novak
Oil spills, mine collapses, and flammable drinking water have all resulted from man’s insatiable desire to extract precious things from the ground. In this New West tale, the greedy capitalists’ inner earth explosions yield long-dormant dinos that include slinky velociraptors, rampaging triceratops, and a ravenous T. rex. This flick fusses for a little with peripheral things like (yawn) plot and character development, but then we get a couple fun scenes with The Dark Knight’s Salvatore Maroni (Eric Roberts) as a greasy drunk.
Finally, the dinos break loose and it’s up to the cast of soap-opera-good-looking people to blast them back into extinction with lassos, shotguns and flaming arrows. The cowboys also ride horses while fighting, which seems silly. Like, to a dino, that’s basically a cheeseburger mounted on a larger cheeseburger. But whatever, in 2011, Steven Spielberg and Ron Howard produced Cowboys vs Aliens, cast the super-British Daniel Craig in the lead role and spent $163 million on it, which is way more ridiculous than this.
Avalanche Sharks
Director: Steven Santiago
Cast: Alexander Mendeluk, Kate Nauta, Gina Holden
"They swim through the snow like other sharks move through water," a young woman says in the trailer for Avalanche Sharks, a disaster film that looks at the dire, yet totally unexpected consequences of an avalanche. After a snow boarder causes the huge disaster, a "snow shark" is unearthed. The shark, a prehistoric creature, soon finds itself feeding on various people at a ski resort. Wanting to keep the situation a secret so they don’t lose business, the resort goes on to host their annual Bikini Snow Day, which results in a bloody day that no one can escape—because of the avalanche.
With its absurd title, Avalanche Sharks seems like a companion piece to Sharknado, perhaps even becoming a parody of the parody disaster film about sharks and tornadoes. Hopefully this doesn’t become a trend because the idea of an earthquake shark film or a volcano eruption shark film doesn’t seem sustainable. Then again, who knows?
Another Gay Movie
Director: Todd Stephens
Cast: Michael Carbonaro, Jonah Blechman, Jonathan Chase, Mitch Morris
A sort of spiritual sequel to American Pie, Another Gay Movie follows four friends who are about to graduate college and have yet to the lose their virginities. The major caveat? They’re all gay. What ensues is a campy, often cringe-worthy film that really doesn’t differ too much from the the movie it emulates. There’s Andy, the sex-obsessed weirdo who masturbates using various fruits and vegetables. He’s pining after his math teacher. Then there’s Jarod, the bro of the group who is superficial and looking for guys that are very much like him. There’s also Griff, a nerdy guy who happens to be in love with Jarod. And lastly we have Nico, who is super flamboyant, and like the “Finch” character in the American Pie films, ends up with someone way older than him.
It’s a campy, all over the place, and offensive film, but to its credit, it has no shame in putting itself out there and being upfront about its intentions.
Big Ass Spider!
Director: Mike Mendez
Cast: Greg Grunberg, Lin Shaye, Patrick Bauchau, Ray Wise
A giant fear of spiders seems like a pretty normal thing for most people, but a fear of a giant spider is most definitely unlikely. Big Ass Spider! Is a movie that takes your day-to-day fear and magnifies it by 10. The film follows an exterminator (Greg Grunberg from Heroes) who is bitten by a poisonous spider on the job. At the hospital he’s tasked with getting rid of this weird spider that has crawled out of a body in the morgue. He soon learns from military officials—among them Twin Peaks’ Ray Wise—that the spider has been injected with alien DNA, and that it will continue to grow in size and kill everyone in its path. Set on being a hero and winning the girl, a lieutenant played by Clare Kramer, he sets out to get rid of the spider before it kills the rest of the city. Lookout for a pretty hilarious but terrifying ending.
Dead Snow
Director: Tommy Wirkola
Stars: Vegar Hoel, Stig Frode Henriksen, Charlotte Frogner
It’s hard to say where the idea came from, but knowing there’s a film out there about a group of students who go on a ski vacation and get attacked by undead zombies is as enticing as it gets. Dead Snow, a Norwegian film, follows seven students who are on vacation during the Easter holiday. At their secluded cabin, they're visited by a mysterious hiker who tells them that a nearby village used to be occupied by Nazis, who were killed by locals near the end of the war. The students soon come to learn that these Nazis are still around...as zombies. While it takes them some time to figure out their motives, the students—or what’s left of them—eventually figure out what the undead Nazis are after. That’s essentially the premise of the zombie film, which features tons of gore, including several shots of human intestines.
Raze
Director: John C. Walker
Stars: Zoë Bell, Sherilyn Fenn, Doug Jones
Taking the Hunger Games premise to a much darker place, Raze follows a group of 50 women who are kidnapped by a sadistic husband and wife, played by Sherilyn Fenn (best known for her Emmy-nominated work as Audrey Horne on Twin Peaks) and Doug Jones (an actor and contortionist known for his creepy work on Pan’s Labyrinth). The pair tell the women that they must fight each other to the death, all for the entertainment of some wealthy onlookers. If they refuse to fight or if they die, the people they love will be shot to death by a sniper.
While the film certainly isn’t the first to have such an idea, it’s cast (which includes badass stuntwoman Zoë Bell) at least makes it entertaining enough. And like other films with this familiar plot or ones interested in exploitation, it also has some pretty complicated ideas about gender and class.
Tucker & Dale vs. Evil
Director: Eli Craig
Stars: Tyler Labine, Alan Tudyk, Katrina Bowden, Jesse Moss
There’s something surprisingly sweet about Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, a horror-comedy film about a group of bratty students who spend a weekend camping and meet two harmless and friendly hillbillies, Tucker and Dale along the way. The kids are skeptical of the two figures and think they are up to no good, which allows for a series of misunderstandings that leads to a lot of violent, gory accidents. The film mostly follows Alison, who after an accident ends up being taken care of by Tucker and Dale. The rest of the students assume she’s been kidnapped, who end up dying one by one in their failed attempts to "rescue" her.
Whether or not you take the film—which premiered to positive reviews at Sundance—as a cautionary tale on how to treat people, it’s still fun, violent, disgusting, and ultimately a satisfying story that ends on really sweet note.
The Prophecy
Director: Gregory Widen
Stars: Christopher Walken, Elias Koteas, Virginia Madsen
The Prophecy is the best Christopher Walken movie—period. Better than King of New York. Better than Seven Psychopaths. Definitely better than Pulp Fiction. You can disagree, but you’d be wrong. Director Gregory Widen (of Highlander fame) managed to create the most Walkensian role possible: a troubled, quip-y, murderous archangel with slick black hair and a distaste for authority. It’s incredibly cheesy—as if a plot hinging on “the war between the angels” could be anything else—but it's still self-aware enough to be enjoyable. There’s fighting, there’s small-town-Americana, there’s Walken licking a table at a crime scene. There’s also four sequels. Just don’t watch them all at once.
Hellraiser III-IX
Director(s): Scott Derrickson, Rick Bota, Victor Garcia
Starring: Doug Bradley, Stephan Smith Collins
I will go to my grave protesting that Hellraiser is actually a great movie. Pinhead is one of the most bizarrely compelling horror movie villains ever put to screen, and Clive Barker commits fully to an exploration of sadomasochism ("pain and pleasure, indivisible!"), forcing the audience to confront their own attraction to blood n' guts n' hook-wielding, leather-clad maniacs.
So Hellraiser isn’t exactly a b-movie. Hellraiser II is also, actually, pretty good. Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth is decent, and (lol) even has its own music video. Hellraiser IV is bad but fun-bad, and it was at least released in theaters and had some involvement from Barker himself. Hellraiser V through Hellraiser IX… didn’t. They are as "B" as "B" can be. If you don’t think you can sit through all four of these straight-to-DVD masterpieces, at least check out the eighth (Hellraiser: Hellworld), which is rife with chat-room fear-mongering and features a very meta Hellraiser-themed rave, where superfans go to die. See you there!
Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest
Director: James D.R. Hickox
Starring: Daniel Cerny, Ron Melendez, Jim Metzler
There are nine Children of the Corn films (ten if you count the upcoming release!) and all of them are terrible. Unlike Hellraiser, which started out strong, the only redeeming part of the entire COTC franchise was the very first scene of the very first film. Still, Urban Harvest, more than the rest of the bunch, is worth a watch. Along with having the best title, COTC III is set in Chicago, which is way more interesting than "Gatlin," a.k.a. Faketown, USA. The crop plot line is also better integrated. Instead of just acting as a visual ploy, the corn in Urban Harvest is of a "special strain," which grows sweet and yellow even in rancid Chi-town factory soil, though plans to profit from it go awry. It isn’t a surprising movie. But you don’t watch a COTC to be surprised; you do it for the bloody sacrifices, the campy dialogue, and the evil children donning Future hats.
10.0 Earthquake
Director: David Gidali
Starring: Henry Ian Cusick, Cameron Richardson, Chasty Ballesteros
There are three things everyone wants from a disaster movie: bridge collapses, hotties-in-distress, and ham-handed moralizing. 10.0 Earthquake has all of that in droves. Plus, it’s funny, or at least marginally self-aware. Here, California begins to collapse thanks to years of greedy and unethical fracking, while (of course) a group of beautiful teens pay the price. Director David Gidali trots out every trope the genre allows for, from the characters (a disheveled, socially inept scientist-genius with an impossibly hot wife), to the plot (a camping-trip-gone-wrong), to the consequence (sex=death). But that somehow doesn’t even matter. The effects are fun, the dialogue is goofy, the fracking is definitely bad. And who doesn’t want to watch an oil-rich billionaire get crushed to death in smoggy LA?
Trailer Park Boys: The Movie
Director: Mike Clattenburg
Starring: Robb Wells, John Paul Tremblay, Mike Smith
O, Canada! Bless you for bringing us Ricky and Bubbles and Julian and Lahey et all. Trailer Park Boys is a genre unto itself, with 10 seasons of the original series, three feature films, two live specials, and two Christmas specials—all on Netflix. While hugely successful, TPB is still something of a cult phenomenon beyond Canada’s freezing, hazy border. Suffice it to say, if you like the show, you’ll like the movie. And if you hated the show, you’ll hate the movie, too. The rest of us will get more of the wonderful same: cigarettes and dope and mustard and baloney.
ABCs of Death
Director(s): Kaare Andrews, Angela Bettis
Starring: Ingrid Bolsø Berdal, Iván González, Kyra Zagorsky
Another entry in the increasingly popular anthology-horror genre, the ABCs of Death actually has a pretty interesting premise. Twenty-six directors from 15 countries each created a short film depicting death and dying as it relates to one word. The words, of course, each begin with a different letter of the alphabet. The result is decidedly mixed. Not every entry is as strong as the others, and seeing such disparate styles of filmmaking in such quick succession can feel strange. But some do rise to the challenge (H is for Hydro-Electric Diffusion, T is for Toilet), and it’s cool to see all the different styles of approach. Plus, if one doesn’t land? Just skip to the next!
500 MPH Storm
Director: Daniel Lusko
Starring: Casper Van Dien, Michael Beach, Sarah Lieving
Another champion of the disaster-porn genre, 500 MPH Storm opens with an array of giant colorful polyester balloons—which is fitting for a movie that could mostly be passed off as "hot air." There’s lots of shouting (and even more hand-wringing) as a high school science teacher and his family try to escape a "hypercane" that could "wipe the US off the map." The whole catastrophe is the result of a fumbled experiment by DC scientists. Fire and brimstone follow. It’s not exactly a shock that 500 MPH should seem so staunchly anti-government (director Daniel Lusko also made 2014’s nightmarish Persecuted), or that our rugged outsider protag should be the one to save the day (and to save his family, and America at Large). But whatever, these are B-movies, not texts to be analyzed. The explosions are loud and plentiful enough to numb your brain either way.
Age of Dinosaurs
Director: Joseph J. Lawson
Starring: Treat Williams, Ronny Cox, Jillian Rose Reed
Did we really need another Jurassic Park? Or, rather, did we really need this bad knock off? Age of Dinosaurs would say yes—and say it confidently. At the least, dinosaurs are an infinitely exciting monster, especially when they’re done-up in discount CGI. Age of Dinosaurs is another gem from B-movie factory The Asylum, known for their work on Transformers (or, actually, "Transmorphers") and The Day the Earth Stood Still (or, uh, "The Day the Earth Stopped"). Try to enjoy Age of Dinosaurs they way you might a spot-the-difference puzzle. Extinct reptiles back for more? Yes. Hyper-intelligent raptors? Yes. Claiming that "there is no cause for alarm" in the face of obvious danger? Yes. The hubris of man? Of course. A clever, engaging script held up by lasting performances and award-winning effects? Maybe not...