Guilty Movie Pleasures

I’d rather read than get all the audio-visual equipment movie-ready, but sometimes I have a hankering to watch actual moving scenes instead of imagining them in my head. These movies are ones I watch whenever they’re on TV and I’m slowly collecting the DVDs so I can watch them commercial free sometimes.

1) Better Off Dead: It doesn’t get any better than this early 80’s movie. I lived in Germany at the time this movie came out and a friend of mine got me hooked on it. We watched it at every sleepover and party. We quoted dialogue at school and made ourselves giggle whenever we did. The Asian Howard Cosell wannabe, Rickie’s mother squeezing the French girl’s cheeks together to make her say “Christmas, Chrrrriiiiizzzzmaassss”, Rickie jumping after his balloon at the school dance, the juvenile newspaper boy who just wants “my two dollars”, the younger brother who is a mix of Hugh Hefner and a mad scientist, the absent-minded but loving mother who vacuums the house and nearly strangles her son, the father in the moose suit, the best friend who is trying to score some drugs and says ‘buck up little camper” all the time, the animated David Lee Roth hamburger, and so many other moments of pure foolishness and giggledom.

2) Night of the Demons: When I was in college, I was PERSONALLY invited to this movie by Angela, the main demon. The invitation in my general college mailbox (how I miss that mailbox of constant notes, secret sorority sister things, roses and mash notes from boyfriend and other admirers, newsletters, etc) said that “Freddy and Jason were too scared to come” but me and my friend surely weren’t. We took our pillows, got someone to drive us to the boondock movie theater, arranged to be picked back up, showed the invite, and found our seats. We settled down and watched close to two hours of pure movie horror cheese but what fun it was. I’ve made it a tradition to watch this every Halloween. One of the lead characters is a B-movie/possible porn queen so this gives you some idea of how campy it is. The special effects were decent (not good, but decent), the house was truly creepy, and despite the newbie bad acting, it all worked. Of course the blonde virgin lives and so does the superstitious black kid, but the mean spirited old man, who puts razor blades in apples, gets it and his wife was the one who baked the pie with the leftover apples. I love how she pats him with a little good-natured smile after his head has fallen into his plate. She meant to pop him off.

3) Flash Gordon: This is another movie from my pre-teen years. We lived in Germany and always visited this family that would get videotapes from the States with three movies apiece on them. So we’d be downstairs watching movie after movie and Flash was one of them. Because I was the eldest and the bossiest, I made sure we watched it every time we visited. Flash has extremely bad special effects, super exaggerated costumes, very stereotypical characters, and the entire soundtrack is by Queen. It rocks! A young Timothy Dalton is in it but I prefer(red) Sam J. Jones. If they were trying to make a moving comic book, they succeeded. If they were trying to make a serious sci-fi action movie, they missed.

4) Dangerous Liaisons: This movie is a guilty pleasure because I can watch again right after I’ve already watched it. It is also one of the rare movies that follow the book it’s based on pretty closely besides being visually stunning. I find John Malkovich in the role of Valmont extremely attractive (long hair, ah). His voice alone can send me into the stratosphere. The three core actors (Glenn Close, Michelle Pfeiffer, and John) are totally believable and I forget I’m watching actors playing parts. Not so with Keanu Reeve and Uma Thurman – they’re newbies and very stilted but as they’re playing young clueless people, I don’t mind so much.

5) When Harry Met Sally: I watch this one every time it comes on TV, every time. The only reason I own it is because my friend K got me a movie at Wal-Mart for a Christmas present and it was a movie I didn’t want to own (bad movie – she thought I would like it coz it was “scary”). She said I could exchange it, so I did. It was a “bargain” movie and apparently “W H M S” fell into that low level category. I figured I should get it so that eventually when TV stops putting it on, I could still watch it. Somehow the incongruous pairing of Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal, the odd way they keep popping up in each other’s lives, their respective match-making efforts for each other backfiring into their friends pairing up, and the little homey details of their “lives” just makes me want to curl up on the couch with a cup of hot cocoa, 3 cats, and a down cover while it rains or snows like the dickens outside.

6) Clueless and Legally Blonde: I love these because they aren’t trying to be serious, they aren’t trying to impress, and they are both just poking good-hearted tongue-firmly-in-cheek fun at Jane Austen and blondes respectively. Not to mention the fashionista in me takes in all the clothes. Oh, and Alicia and Reese have fabulous-to-die-for hair in these movies. “As if!” and “Like it’s hard!” are two of my favorite quotes.