Trash

After watching the movie The Room and enjoying this masterpiece of low-budget production, inspiration for another rant somehow naturally follows. Legend has it that the movie began one day in 2003 when the immortal Tommy Wiseau began approaching men and women at the bar in a bar in a city in Canada. Don't jump to conclusions, he's not a bisexual (most likely Tommy, like every immortal, is asexual) but a film enthusiast who, carried away by the movies with James Dean (!?), decided to make his own movie.

And so Tommy approaches someone at the bar and starts `Hey...do you wanna play in a movie huh?` It is not known how the women reacted to that question, whether they thought it was a fat start or an invitation to shoot cheap porn...however, Tommy was honest and did end up making a movie that immediately found itself on various lists of the worst movies of all time. Why is the movie so bad, if it is rumored to have a budget of six million dollars? Because the movie has no head or tail, to put it in a northern way, it seems like clumsily edited filmed parts and the whole fled in fear of Tommy Wiseau, perhaps because of his appearance.

But maybe Tommy wants to convey to the viewer that appearances are deceiving, so such a creepy character with scars on his face, some Aztec hairstyle, a look as if he was planning to stick a screwdriver in your kidney and an accent that could be the result of living in a German village or possibly from Siberia... he turned out to be a real good guy, a real man, romantic to the core, prone to sexy scenes with candles and all that corny situation.

Life is unpredictable and because in the world, besides sincere film fans who are horrified by such works, there are also those (like me) who are insincere and adore films where you are consumed by the shame of others, where there are so many mistakes that they turn into comedy, where the potential for humor, confusion and laughter is so strong that they immediately decide that they actually like such a film a lot and that is how such a film becomes a cult. The founder of this phenomenon is Ed Wood, a transvestite-director-producer-actor who in the fifties made terribly bad sci-fi horror films but today is a respected director of trash films thanks to the unforgettable biographical film with Johnny Depp and Martin Landau who won an Oscar for his role as Bela Lugosi (a Hungarian actor-scoundrel-legend-vampire).

Let's be clear, not every bad film is a trash film, because to be one it must possess that charm of the difficult to explain "its so bad its actually good" or at least know how to make the viewer laugh and cheer up. Macedonian films, for example, are so bad they are actually just bad. In the past, Japan was not known as an exporter of Anime, Manga and Hentai, but as a source of serious trash production. Godzilla, as an evergreen monster, led the onslaught of Asian trash around the world. For the uninitiated, it's something like a Tyrannosaurus that mutated due to radiation and started attacking cities.

It is also worth noting that films are divided into feature films and television films, and according to quality, into A, B, C and D productions (which is often also called Z because it is the last letter in the Latin alphabet and naturally symbolizes something low, bad, cheap)...

A-production is known and loved by everyone, there certain strict standards must be met in terms of budget, acting, technicalities, post-production and all that, after Waterworld and Titanic the amounts spent on films have grown dramatically to over 200+ million dollars per film. B films are weaker in terms of all the above parameters, but are still professionally made. With C we already have a mixture of professionals and amateurism, and D (Z) is already total amateurism. In TV movies, there are those that can comfortably fit into an A-list film production (Pancho Villa, for example, with Antonio Banderas and Jim Broadbent), expensive and excellently realized films that could also be shown in theaters and not be limited to the small screens.

There are also films that are difficult to classify, such as "Clerks" with Kevin Smith, which was shot for $28,000 but for that money is phenomenal, that gap in the classification has been filled by terms like independent/auteur/indie or something like that. The culmination was the horror with the camera in the forest (The Blair Witch) which cost a handful of dollars and gained cult status and a nice income or the one with a guy who turned out to be Jesus and took place in a shack where good conversations took place due to the phenomenal script (The Earthling)... Another category is straight-to-video films (formerly VHS tapes, today DVD or in Nigeria straight-to-CD) where there is no distribution of the film through cinemas and there is no broadcasting on TV but it can only be rented from video stores or bought and watched. Usually these are heavy action with a basic premise that inevitably leads to breaking spines.

Geographically, there are several centers (Bollywood) that have a long and glorious tradition of stamping out heavy thrash. Hong Kong is one of the countries that produces films in a factory, on tape, from start to finish, filming and production took a maximum of two weeks, the genre was dominated by the aforementioned spine-breaking with the help of quasi-Kung Fu, the fight scenes were filmed in slow motion (the actors raise their arms and legs like turtles) and then they sped it up in the editing to make it seem like some Kung Fu experts were fighting and not scoundrels. On top of that, a generic impact sound is also edited, which I believe is familiar to anyone who has seen at least one such film.

There is also Turkey as a place where legendary thrash films were produced, the Turkish Star Wars is a classic example (you can watch it on YouTube) where the Seljuks stole entire scenes from the original by cutting the film (the expensive scenes with spaceships, for example) and the other is semi-amateur thrash, the main actor is normally the Turkish James Bond - Murat Karamurat (not his real name, but it stayed that way in paradise, like Bruce Lee, for example). In the Turkish thrash subgenre, we often have violations of the laws of physics, so Murat knows how to fly if necessary. Or lift a nine-ton rock. Cuneyt Arkin is the name of the most famous Turkish actor (this comes as the most famous Andorran footballer) and in his career he has beaten at least 99,000 film antagonists and filmed about 300 (!) films. One wonders if he ever went home at all or slept in the studio...

One should not make the mistake of putting all action films in the trash category. Although it is extremely tempting to characterize films featuring a gallery of anti-talents such as Schwarzenegger, Chuck Norris, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Van Damme or Steven Seagal as trash - they are not. In terms of production, they are well-made, the budget is strong and, in addition to the main actor who seems funny - there are usually solid actors in the casting who "pull" such a film out of the trash category. Steven Seagal is especially characteristic, a stupid and clumsy appearance and a complete illiterate actor who could not convincingly play even a corpse and who was simply born for cheap trash films but, by some incomprehensible twist of fate, dawned in expensive and well-produced films...

Perhaps the trash phenomenon was best captured by a certain director from Nigeria who claimed to be the best director in the world. When asked if he was better than Martin Scorsese himself, the guy replied something along the lines of "let me see that Scorsese make a movie in 48 hours! Give me 5,000 dollars and in 48 hours you have a finished movie and cut CDs with the movie ready to be sold on the shelves". Nigeria is by the way the country where the most movies are made in the world today.

Recommended viewing - The works of Ivan Rogers, especially the movie called "One way out". That thing cannot be described through text, It must be seen.

(Roger Mortis, 145)