CHUD’s 50 Best Guilty Pleasures
Originally Published in 2007
Featured Writers: Nick Nunziata, Micah Robinson, Devin, Faraci, Russ Fischer, Jeremy Smith
The CHUD.com Top 50 Guilty Pleasures.
We’ve all got those little flicks that we know are wrong, but feel so right. And after our preceding list of disappointment, we decided to cleanse the palate by honoring our favorite guilty pleasures. These are films that are flawed and often completely indefensible, but we can’t help but love them anyway. As before, from a master list of over 100, the involved parties (Devin, Jeremy, Micah, Russ, and Nick) all killed off a choice for each one we claimed. As a result, we’ll run a big list at the end of this of the ‘ones that got away’. So, here are the Top 50 Guilty Pleasures. Two a day, every week day for five weeks. In no particular order:
Day One: Avengers | Phantasm
Choice Pullquote: “When everyone else was singing the praises of cult/geek favorites from the same year like Rushmore or The Big Lebowski, I found myself wearing out a rental copy of this film and wondering what could have been had it been left intact.”
Day Two: D.C. Cab | Dead Heat
Choice Pullquote: “During a chase in Chinatown an entire Chinese butcher shop gets re-animated. I’m talking dead ducks, pigs on platters and even random animal organs that come to life, get upset and launch themselves across the room at people.”
Day Three: The Beast Within | Silver Bullet
Choice Pullquote: “What other werewolf movie could end with the surviving characters trying to explain the dead naked preacher in their living room?”
Day Four: Star Trek V: The Final Frontier | Under Siege
Choice Pullquote: “From the very first blade swipe, we’re treated to 5 minutes of one-sided Seagal brutality where he kicks McGill’s ass up and down train cars and kitchens before snapping his neck just for fun…all without McGill landing even a glancing blow.”
Day Five: The Adventures of Ford Fairlane | The Sword and the Sorcerer
Choice Pullquote: “Prince Talon, crucified over the bad guy’s dinner table, rips free of the nails and kicks multiple posteriors. Take that, Jesus!”
Day Six: Mallrats | Mobsters
Choice Pullquote: “I recognize too much of myself in the subhuman losers that populate the film, and yet I still never got to nail Joey Lauren Adams.”
Day Seven: Orca | Jason X
Choice Pullquote: “This is a coin flip between the whale beckoning Nolan into icy waters with its flipper or Bo Derek getting her leg chomped off by the persistent predator. I’m going to go with the latter, especially since it’s a flimsy excuse to inflame Nolan’s whale-hatin’ rage.”
Day Eight: Krull | The Manitou
Choice Pullquote: “After the shrunken Misquamicus exits his neck bride, freezes a hospital, the Manitou-free chick gets topless and fights the Indian (who has now become an orb) in space. Outer space. In her hospital room.”
Day Nine: 1776 | Street Fighter
Choice Pullquote: “1776 proves that guilty pleasures aren’t just stupid exercises in boy-oriented genres, but that they can also be movies that appeal primarily to a crowd of gay history majors.”
Day Ten: Kiss Of Death | Indecent Proposal
Choice Pullquote: “Prestige exited stage left once Nicolas Cage is onscreen displaying more ham than the casting couch for Babe.”
Day Eleven: Mean Guns | Heavy Metal
Choice Pullquote: “Even with the idiotic and frequently boring framing sequence (which does boast a fantastic opening, as the Corvette lands and drives to the house) the movie cooks along like a Milwaukee meth lab. “
Day Twelve: Any Which Way You Can | Toraue
Choice Pullquote: “The film is giddy, gloriously so, and director Joseph Kahn has crafted something strange, special and essentially useless, like a dog that shits tin. Very shiny tin.”
Day Thirteen: Into The Blue | Convoy
Choice Pullquote: “The real fun and somewhat guilty pleasure of the film is in small moments, whether it’s a legendary skirmish between a shark and an underwater mop, the sizzling torment inflicted on Josh Brolin, a stunt double tit-grab, or the crotch destruction of a villain via shark.”
Day Fourteen: Demolition Man | Bad Boys II
Choice Pullquote: “He takes action choreography to such a new level of amorality and wastefulness – just imagine the costs of the first chase scene, when he even throws a fucking boat into the mix! – that you feel like this is the action spectacle Caligula would have made, except maybe with more horse fucking or something.”
Day Fifteen: Can’t Buy Me Love | I Come In Peace
Choice Pullquote: The villain of the movie often dispatches folks with the line “I Come in Peace”, to which Dolph retorts “You Go In Pieces, Asshole” before shooting some face.
Day Sixteen: Highlander II: The Quickening | Belly
Choice Pullquote: “You can spend an entire weekend digesting the various permutations of this movie and on Sunday night you’ll be worse off than if you’d dedicated the same 48 hours to a bender with meth and the tranny bouncer down at the local drag club. At least it’s safer, if only barely.”
Day Seventeen: Batman Forever | Jaws 3D
Choice Pullquote: “I would sooner give up wiping my ass than renounce the power and the glory and the MacCorkindale of this visually shoddy second sequel to one of my favorite movies of all time.”
Day Eighteen: XTRO | C.H.U.D.
Choice Pullquote: “In no small part due to this film, the word CHUD is a noun, a verb, an adjective, a pluran noun, a homonym, an acronym, a synonym, an antonym, and a henrypym.”
Day Nineteen: House of the Dead | The Secret of My Success
Choice Pullquote: “It’s like a ’70s/’80s Euro sex comedy without the nudity or comedy.”
Day Twenty: Xanadu | Maximum Overdrive
Choice Pullquote: “I own the soundtrack to Xanadu because ‘Magic’ is a truly wonderful song and for that song’s magnificent running time all I can think about is two pipes. The pipes of Olivia and the meatpipe I ought to be ingesting. They should package the DVD in a little closet.”
Day Twenty-One: The Chase | MegaForce
Choice Pullquote: “MegaForce can see the future. It knew Antonioni and Bergman were going to die on the same day. It knows your PIN number. And it gave you that awful nickname in 4th grade.”
Day Twenty-Two: Red Dawn | Pump Up The Volume
Choice Pullquote; “Red Dawn becomes doubly fascinating when viewed today, since Milius based many of the teen guerilla’s techniques on the Mujahedeen fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. You’ll recognize many of those tactics still being used in Iraq and Afghanistan today, except against us – all Red Dawn is missing is a bunch of IEDs.”
Day Twenty-Three: Clue | Yor: The Hunter From The Future
Choice Pullquote: “Women are mere vessels to enter and shoot off into. Men are savage and covered in soot and dried dung [not their own, which frightens me]. The creatures of the time are awkward and could be evaded by Stephen Hawking on an off day. “
Day Twenty-Four: Commando | Halloween III: Season of the Witch
Choice Pullquote:
“His tears are made of testosterone. Pain is nothing to him. And unless
he’s related to you or sticking his dick inside you, to know him pretty
much means you stand a good chance of expiring painfully.”
Day Twenty-Five: Fire and Ice | 10 to Midnight
Choice Pullquote: “The whole movie is predicated on nudity: Gene Davis plays Warren Stacey, a creepy kid who’s been jilted one too many times by the girls from the secretarial pool. So he does what any other red-blooded American male would do when their pride and sexual prowess are challenged: he slays the bitches in the nude.”
