Favourite Low Budget Flicks and/or B Movies

[dragon wench]

The recent thread alluding to "Napoleon Dynamite" (*shudder*), made me start considering relatively low budget movies I actually have enjoyed.

One of my all time favourites, just because it is so campy and warped is:
"Lair of the White Worm."

Here is a summary/review from Amazon:

Amazon.com
Wittily updated from one of Dracula author Bram Stoker's lesser-known horror novels, The Lair of the White Worm is a camp classic that only Ken Russell could have delivered. It's got all the perversity one expects from the bombastic director of Tommy and Altered States: sensible plotting, intelligent dialogue laced with double entendre, graphic imagery with Boschian intensity, and a mischievous disregard for good taste and decorum. In other words, it's heretically hilarious, especially when skeptical Lord D'Ampton (fresh-faced Hugh Grant, in one of his earliest films) begins to suspect that seductive neighbor Sylvia (Amanda Donohoe, game for anything) is connected to the local legend of a monstrous serpent that feeds on sacrificial virgins. Evidence mounts with the help of a local archaeologist (Peter Capaldi) and two endangered sisters (Catherine Oxenberg, Sammi Davis), and Russell infuses Stoker's grisly plot with his inimitable brand of blasphemy, including a gouged eyeball, a venom-splattered crucifix, Roman soldiers raping nuns (in a delirious hallucination sequence), and some of the funniest one-liners since Young Frankenstein. Prudes beware; everyone else…enjoy! --Jeff Shannon --This text refers to the DVD edition.

Description
In a remote corner of England's lavish Peak district, a young archaeologist, Angus Flint, unearths a mysterious skull. When Angus escorts Eve and Mary to "holiday" festivities at Lord James' castle, the sensuous and snakelike Lady Sylvia Marsh seizes the moment - and the skull. Lady Sylvia brings the skull down into the dank recesses of her gothic mansion where she engages in the erotic worship of her pagan god, the White Worm. Since the worm hungers for the sweet taste of virginal flesh, Lady Sylvia uses her unique charms on Eve - the town's closest offering - and prepares her for the ultimate sacrifice as the snake writhes in anticipation.

And here is a website: http://www.geocities.com/lairof/frame.htm







Any other entertaining B grade/low budget films?

[Pepster]

That story sounds oddly familiar. Maybe it's Deja Vu... Did it have something to do with a guy donning a suit a spiked armour, causing the worm to kill itself when it tried to crush him in its coils?

I vaguely remember it from when I was a kid.

[slade]

Does "Willow" fall into this category?
I did enjoy it when I first saw it.

[Athena]

I like Brad Pitt too but I dunno if he falls into the category... Hmm

The Blair Witch! (Did anyone say that yet?) Damn, you peepz watch way too much IFC. (Ducks out)

[Magrus]

[QUOTE=slade]Does "Willow" fall into this category?
I did enjoy it when I first saw it.[/QUOTE]

I wore out the tape I watched it so much as a kid.

Lair of the White Worm sounds interesting. Maybe I can get my hands on a copy for cheap.

[fable]

Repoman. To quote a synopsis online:

"Otto (Emilio Estevez) is a Los Angeles punk, a loser with no direction and no role models. But he discovers a code of honor and higher purpose when he joins a select group of latter-day knights: the repo men. As a fledging apprentice, Otto slowly learns the ways of these high-caliber, overmedicated auto repossessors. And when a $20,000 bounty is placed on a mysterious missing car, Otto eludes the police, feds, religious cultists, and other repo men in a frantic search for this holy grail. Could one man's destiny lie in the back of a 1964 Chevy Malibu? Alex Cox's feature-film debut boasts a clever, satirical script that combines the larger-than-life edginess of urban L.A. with a bizarre array of science-fiction conspiracy theories. The film also features a strong soundtrack by an array of early 1980s punk and new wave bands and a terrific lead performance by Estevez."

This is choice stuff.

[C Elegans]

Not sure what falls into this category. The way I am used to defining it, a B-movie is per definition a bad movie, whereas a low budget movie is any movie simply with a low budget. Judging from Hollywood-movies, budget doesn't seem to have any correlation to quality. Some movies I really love, like "Once were warriors" from New zeeland, Branagh's first movie "Henry V" or Kurosawas early work, are certainly low budget movies, especially compared to Hollywood productions.

[Ripe]

Sam Raimi's "Evil Dead" trilogy, Ed Wood's "Plan 9 from Outer Space" are definetly low-budget and they pretty soon become so apsurd that you start enjoy watching them (or you become so disgusted that you stoped watching them, there is no middle ground with those movies).

Also, early, pre-Madonna, movies by Guy Ritchie ("Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barells" and "Snatch") were great experiance. Same goes for Peter Jackson's "Heavenly Creatures", Terry Gilliam's "Twelve Monkeys" (even if I'm not sure that this is low-budget). And the list could go on and on and on...

You may wish to check a imdb.com's top 250 movies here - a lot of them were considered low-budget when they were filmed (and a lot more would be considered low-budget by today's Hollywood standard). And by checking that list I'm shocked that I watched only 170 of them. I thought I'd seen more.

[ch85us2001]

The original gone in 60 seconds That was REALLY low budget! Plus all the cars were cool

[TheAmazingOopah]

-Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction: Classic.
-I don't know if Jackie Brown was still low budget, if so, that one's cool too.
-Lock, Stock & 'Two Smoking Barrels: Tarentino movie with a c*ckney accent
-Clerks: Kevin Smith's best, shows that dialogues *can* fill an entire movie
-Monty Python & The Holy Grail: Sometimes a bit too absurd for my taste, but the second half is hilarious
-The Blair Witch Project: The story is sometimes a bit lame (understandable, since they had no real script), but the movie can be scary as hell (the noise of laughing kids running around your tent in the middle of the night, in a forest that is deserted for miles; now that's creepy! ). Good idea for an movie, too.
-Interview: This is a Dutch movie by the late Theo van Gogh (got assassined last November, greatgrandson of the painter Vincent van Gogh). The movie is extremely low budget, though it really didn't needed much money. It's about a journalist who has to interview a soap opera star, something he really wouldn't like to do. It's only talk, talk, talk, and in this case a bit too much of that, but the plot twist at the end is quite surprising.
Buffalo '66: Don't know why I like this movie so much, but I really enjoyed it. About a guy (Vincent Gallo, who also wrote the screenplay and score, and who was also the director) who kidnaps a young woman (Christina Ricci), and forces her to pretent she's his wife in front of his parents. The guy is a ****, who just complains all the time, and the girl just lets him push her around all the time. Still, they really both start to grow on you. It's this shy romance between two lonely persons, like in Lost in Translation, that makes the movie so beautiful. A movie you should watch after midnight, when you're in a melancholic mood. Christina Ricci is great.

(I don't think Twelve Monkeys is a low budget flick, though it's great nonetheless. I'd never thought that the director of the Monty Python movies can make something this serious and straight forward)

[VonDondu]

I agree with Fable. Repo Man is a great movie. The first time I saw it, I was completely exhausted because it was the end of a school term and I had just taken the GRE after finishing final exams and a couple of term papers and I hadn't slept much that week. All I wanted to do was collapse on the couch and watch something on cable TV, and Repo Man was like a gift from aliens to me. It made me laugh, and an off-beat movie about a young person who was trying to figure out what to do about his future was exactly what I needed.

"B-Movies" are not synonymous with "low budget movies", by the way. Waterworld and The Postman are two of the most expensive movies ever made, but they still qualify as B-Movies. (They never would have been made if Dances with Wolves and The Bodyguard had not been so successful at the box office.) I didn't care for any of those movies. The only big budget flop that I can think of that I really liked was Ishtar, which is vastly underrated for pure entertainment value. I guess people just couldn't stand to watch Warren Beatty play a dumb, unsexy character.

Speaking of big-budget B-Movies, I tried to watch The Adventures of Shark-Boy and Lava-Girl in 3D the other day, but I couldn't finish it, even though I usually like children's movies. I usually like Robert Rodriguez's movies, and of course his first movie, El Mariachi, has probably received more acclaim than any other low bdget movie.

[dragon wench]

Oops! Sorry about the confusion. I'm aware that "B movies," and "low budget," movies are not necessarily synonymous, which is why I used the slash (/) along with the and/or.

I should have been more precise, sorry about that