Celebrating cinematic crap

As a lad, Timon Singh would traipse along to the Cotham Hill video rental shop with his dad. It was here that he learned one of life’s most important lessons: “The worst film often has the best cover art. I’d be drawn to stuff like Inseminoid, which is about astronauts landing on a planet and being attacked by space vampires. I quickly realised that these films were absolutely hilarious.”

Later, Ti enjoyed inviting pals round for double-bills of bad movies. “For a while it was nothing but shark movies, because there were so many of them,” he recalls.

It soon dawned on him that there was nowhere in Bristol for aficionados of cinematic crap to indulge their peculiar cravings in an atmosphere of communal celebration. “The Cube has the Hellfire Video Club, which does very culty psychedelic films, like Croatian cannibal movies. That’s great, and I often go to their screenings. But I wanted a film club that showed things like Troll 2 and The Room [Tommy Wiseau’s legendary jaw-dropping feast of movie-making ineptitude]. London has the Prince Charles Cinema, but Bristol didn’t seem to have an equivalent.”

So Ti, now working as an editor in a creative agency, teamed up with fellow bad movie enthusiast Tim Popple, music supervisor at Bristol Cathedral, to set up the Bristol Bad Film Club (drolly also known as “the other BBFC”). Their first event – Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space, obviously – drew 50 people to a room above the Lansdown pub last August. One year on, 500 punters turned up for an outdoor screening of Masters of the Universe in Victoria Park, Bedminster. Next up is diabolical killer kitty cat flick Uninvited, starring shameless George Kennedy, shown at the Doubletree Hotel on Oct 25 as part of BristolCon 2014.

Ti and Tim realised early on that this was never going to be a money-making venture. So they took the decision to turn it into a charitable enterprise. “Bad films doing good is a great angle,” reasons Ti, “and a lot of venues agree to reduce their rates.” The club frequently donates to appropriate causes. Profits from ‘Birdemic: Shock and Terror’ went to the Slimbridge Wildfowl Trust. ‘Uninvited’ will benefit the splendid Holly Hedge animal sanctuary in Barrow Gurney.

Would you say the shared experience is the key to making the Bad Film Club such a success?

That’s exactly it. When you’re watching a bad film by yourself, it can be a slog. But when you’re in a group, everyone else is suffering too. That’s when people really get a kick out of these films. They’re often the result of one person’s vision – and that person’s vision just happens to be completely insane, or well beyond their creative talents.

Is there not also an element of feeling intellectually superior to the film-makers?

Erm. . .I think it’s more schadenfreude. You’re getting pleasure from other people’s incompetence. I mean, none of us has made a film, and I can’t imagine it’s particularly easy. But you know the basics. I know that if you’re filming a fight scene and the wig that your lead actor is wearing falls off, it’s probably a good idea to re-shoot that fight scene. But in the film Samurai Cop, that’s exactly what happens.

Is the success of the Club also tied into the Secret Cinema phenomenon, where screenings become events staged in imaginative locations?

Possibly. When we first started, we were just looking for smallish venues. Our second screening was Samurai Cop. I learned that the old police station in Broadmead had been turned into a creative arts space, which is now The Island, and they had a jail where we could do a film screening. The idea of watching a police film – no matter how bad it is – in an old police station was kinda cool. So where possible we’ve tried to carry that on. We showed Star Crash, which is a Star Wars rip-off with David Hasselhof, at Bristol Planetarium. That sold out in 10 days.

Have you looked at Arnos Vale cemetery? That would be a cracking place to show a horror movie.

Yes, we have. It’s quite limiting about what you can show at Arnos Vale. They don’t mind you showing horror films, but they don’t want anything that deals too much with the occult. People or animals rising from the grave would probably be out too. There are so many great bad films that I’ve yet to sit down and think, ‘What would Arnos Vale let us show?’

How hard is it to track down the screening rights to the films you want to show?

It can be insanely difficult. The thing about many of these films is that the era of bad films is essentially the late 70s to 80s, when VHS took off. Lots of studios realised that home entertainment was the future. You could produce loads of cheap films that would go on video hire shelves. They would be shoulder to shoulder with the blockbusters and could make just as much money. That’s why studios like Troma were such a big success. The problem is that while Troma is still going, a lot of these studios collapsed, or the rights shifted, or they were bought up by other companies. Also, a lot of them just weren’t released on DVD. So you’ve got to find a VHS, or hope that someone has ripped it digitally. Then you’ve got to find the producers or the directors, many of whom have died. It can be a nightmare. We’re showing a film called Deadly Prey which is a prime example of an action film that was made in the 80s. You can’t get it on DVD. I tracked down the director, David Prior, and he told me he didn’t have the rights to the film, but the producer David Winters does. So I contacted him. He’d just come out of hospital after having a major heart attack. He wanted 500 dollars for us to screen it. I told him that was ridiculous, but I knew of another bad film club that wanted to screen it. If he was willing to give us a discounted rate, that would be two film clubs in the UK showing his film. He agreed to that, but then he said he doesn’t have any copies of the film. Luckily we had our own copy.

How do you deal with the directors’ egos? Presumably you don’t just phone them up and say, “I’d like to show your terrible movie at my bad film club, so everyone can guffaw your uselessness.”

I am definitely more tactful. When we were getting the rights to The Room, I’d been warned that Tommy Wiseau – the star, director and writer – does not like anyone referring to his film as a bad film. It’s a ‘unique vision’. So emails were very carefully worded. When I’m contacting directors, I say I run a cult film club in Bristol that puts on charity screenings. Some directors are very well aware of how their films are regarded. Arlene Sidaris, who owns all the rights to her husband Andy’s films, knows that people love his schlocky, tantalising footage of Playboy models as secret agents. She knows exactly where that catalogue of films falls into the market. But there are others that are a little bit more . . . deluded. We have to be very careful not to burn our bridges, especially with people like Tommy, because the film is so popular and we want to do annual screenings of it.

Surely that’s the very definition of a bad director – one who doesn’t know his film is so awful?

Well, when he first made the film he described it as his version of the American Dream and he was comparing it to Tennessee Williams. Now, because it’s viewed as this massive disaster and people go to the screenings to laugh at it, he’s rebranded it as a dark comedy. He never wanted people laughing at his film, but at the same time he can’t deny the amount of money that he gets from people putting on screenings.

Do you have a hit list of films you want to track down? What’s the Holy Grail of bad films?

We’ve shown a lot of the big ones, but there are so many out there and I keep discovering new ones. There’s a film called Megaforce from the 80s, which was one of the films that was the inspiration for Team America – it’s all about a multinational force who ride motorbikes that fire missiles. It’s absolutely ridiculous. We tried to get the rights to that and we found it was owned by a Chinese company. They wanted £2,000 for us to screen it. We just laughed at them. So there are films like that. Let’s just say that I have an extensive list.

What about the advent of the Syfy Channel, which churns out knowingly awful monster movies? Are they ruining the fun?

I think it’s muddied the waters to a degree, because people come up to you and go, ‘Are you planning on showing a film like Sharknado or Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus?’ I have to say no, because while those are bad movies, they are deliberately bad. They’re tongue in cheek, they’re winking at the camera. And they’re not as endearing. They can be good fun, but I think films that were made to be serious action movies or to carry a message – like Birdemic, where the director is trying to address global warming, but does so in such a ham-fisted, technically inept manner – they just give you so much more in terms of entertainment than stuff by the Syfy channel.

For more information about the Bristol Bad Film Club, and to book tickets for Uninvited, see Bristol Bad Film Club