Acting and acting styles
- Highwayman school of acting: Stand and deliver (their lines)
- Ikea school of acting: Rather wooden, often out-acted by the furniture.
- Am-Dram: (abbr) Amateur dramatics, what most Bad Movies aspire to.
- Ham-Dram: Hammed up Am-Dram.
- SPAM-Dram: Acting that is not palatable enough to be Ham-Dram.
- A Roman accent: “What kind of accent is that!? It’s sort of generic American going via Welsh, Scouse, Pakistani, Klingon and Pirate.” “Roman! It’s roamin’ about all over the place!”
Types of bad Movies
- 3BM aka BBBM: (abbr) Big Budget Bad Movie. “A big budget does not a good movie make.”
- Unwatchable: “I’d like 90mins of my life back, please.”
- Gorefest or Splatterfest: Severed limbs spurt blood like hosepipes and rubber heads will roll.
- Asylum film productions: This company churns out hundreds of films in rapid succession. Without Asylum BMN would have ran out of films to watch a long time ago.
- A Friday-nighter: A film so Bad that it is worthy of BMN.
- Kitsch: The tacky chintzy cousin of the more entertaining ‘Camp’ which bad films should aspire to.
- Schlock: Cheap, hurriedly produced to cash in on whatever’s trending.
- Mockbuster: A certain type of film which has a very similar name to a popular blockbuster film and is often released at about the same time but that is where the similarity ends. Eg Transmorphers movie was released at the same time at the Transformers movie. Also see Asylum film productions.
Misc
- BMN: (abbr) Bad Movie Night, usually held on Friday nights.
- Whatever happened to Coke Bimbo?: When characters mysteriously go missing and is never heard from or mentioned again. From a film (I can’t remember the name) [ It was a Roger Corman one but that’s as far as I can go as well – ed ] where a blonde bimbo steals a large supply of cocaine from the mafia, dives off the boat for a pleasant swim [ Topless – ed ] and is never heard from again.
- Beer: The most essential component of BMN.
- The McGuffin: The magical item that drives the plot forward. Eg the briefcase in Pulp Fiction, the monkey in Outbreak, the money in Psycho etc.
- Deus ex machina: Literally translates to “God from the machine” the plot device, often a machine or antidote, that all too conveniently wraps up all the loose ends in the plot to bring the movie to a conclusion. Eg, by reconfiguring the transporter in far too many Star Trek Voyager episodes.
- “I’ve lost the plot!”: “Don’t worry, so have we. Drink!”
- “Drink!”: “Drink!”
Scales and their units
All scales run from 0-5 where 5 is the most extreme case.
- Weirdness or WTF-ness: Cronenbergs.
- Badness: Rotten Tomatoes.
by X-Marks-the-Plot