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.
Low budget movies with cheap special effects and awful dialogue absolutely count. I don't know if those two fit that description, but I'm guessing they do.
Cube is a good movie because it tried something new on a low budget, pulled off a decent script, and there were a lot of subtle details that made it thought provoking and not just gore for the sake of gore. The sequel was terrible though, because it had a terrible plot with stupid plot twists.