How to Choose a Mockable Movie

You’d think it would be as easy as finding a bad movie and setting it to start, but it’s not. There are subtleties to this movie-mocking business. Nuance and stuff.

For example, if you haven’t been mocking movies very long or in a structured fashion, you might not know that it helps if the movie you’re mocking isn’t too awful. Why? Because awful films are frequently awful because they’re boring. There are only so many ways you can count down the minutes left in a film and have it be funny. The same goes for saying, “Wait. What?”, which is the reaction to the other sort of perfectly awful film–the disjointed mess.

When things happen in your movie and they appear to at least be meant to be connected, it much easier to mock the ways in which they fail. A decent rule of thumb is that your movie should have a rating in the 2.5 to 6 star range on IMDB.

Additionally, you don’t really want a movie that is mocking itself. Every time you make a snarky prediction about where the movie will go (thinking of course that no movie will ever go there), it will. This is less fun than it sounds. Damnit, if I’m going to watch a bad movie with Tiffany and Debbie Gibson in it, I want to be the one to make the stupid song-title jokes. It’s my game, and the movie isn’t offering enough in the way of plot or character to make up for taking my fun.

One thing that movie did do well was provide a high body count. While this isn’t necessary for hilarity’s sake, you should understand that you’re going to be watching a bad movie. This usually means bad character writing and frequently means bad acting. You will get tired of the people on the screen. Watching them disappear can be cathartic. Predicting how it’s likely to happen can be hilarious.

Bad science is less satisfying than gratuitous deaths of annoying fake people, but it is endlessly mockable. The smartest thing Stargate SG-1 ever did was employ literal hand-waving to keep the necessarily unscientific explanations of weird and dramatic things to a minimum. Bad movie makers aren’t that smart. Science fiction of any era is likely to make the science literate squirm…and cackle.

With all that in mind, we’ve chosen a movie for the next Mock the Movie Twitter event, this Thursday at 8 p.m. CDT. Presenting…duh, duh, DUH…Roger Corman’s The Wasp Woman:

This cult classic features a truly diabolical villain – a cosmetics company founder and CEO.  Our boss lady is willing to do ANYTHING to boost sales, and that includes shady wasp science.  Well, we all know how these shady science schemes go…

“A queen of beauty by day…

              a lusting queen wasp by night!”

When will people learn that diabolical plans involving dubious science never, ever work? Hopefully never, or we wouldn’t have movies to mock!

Head over to The Journal of Are You Fucking Kidding to find out how this movie-mocking game is played. Then join us on Thursday. You don’t have to suffer alone–or in silence, but you do have to suffer for your mockery. Doesn’t that sound like fun?

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How to Choose a Mockable Movie
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4 thoughts on “How to Choose a Mockable Movie

  1. 3

    I LOVE The Wasp Woman! I actually still have a copy on VHS that I pop in now and then (yes, I still have a VHS player in the house!), especially if drinking has been involved.

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