Troll 2, Mr. Vampire bring students together Sunday nights

My latest article is up on the University of Chicago Arts Page:

Residents of Snell-Hitchcock take part in a decade-long tradition called Bad Movie Night.

Among the residents of Snell-Hitchcock Hall, third-year Mandy Stafford is the girl with the endless mental catalogue of some of the worst movies ever produced. She uses this knowledge to preside over a decade-old tradition known as Bad Movie Night.

Stafford screens a film every Sunday night in Snell-Hitchcock’s Rec Room; though they are no cinematic masterpieces, for her and the 10 to 20 students who gather for the event, they are far from a waste of time.

“The point is once a week everyone can just do something stupid,” says Stafford. “I don’t think that’s something people get to do enough at this school.”

First-year Jen Woolley agrees. “They’re so bad that they’re good to watch,” she says. “Some people bring schoolwork; I knit.”

Stafford’s choices range from the fantastical to the truly absurd. Upcoming screenings include Troll 2 and Mr. Vampire.

Second-year Levi Foster, who stopped by for the showing of High School Musical, 2, quips in here: “Wait a minute, Mr. Vampire is a legitimately good movie. It’s campy as hell, but a legitimately good movie.”

One subject of debate among the group of regular viewers is what makes a movie “bad.” Twilight and High School Musical, for example, were box-office hits; but neither escaped Stafford’s bad movie line-up. “They’re both bad enough to be funny, and that’s important for bad movie night. Some movies are literally unwatchably bad, and we don’t screen those. The favorites year after year are the ones that people find quirky and ridiculous.”

Clearer rules govern the movie selection-process, which Stafford inherited from Margot Spellman, AB ’08: The movies should be “earnestly bad,” she explains, unless “you can tell the film knows it’s bad, and yet still comes out even worse than [the directors] intended—like Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter.”

In contrast, “there’s Plan 9 from Outer Space. The director thinks it was the greatest thing ever committed to film, but it was just awful.”

There’s also Wild Zero, a film Stafford struggles to summarize concisely: “Aliens turn everyone in the world into zombies. The protagonist is the biggest fan of the band Guitar Wolf. Does that make sense?”

The answer doesn’t matter, as long as the film has achieved a necessary combination of unintentional humor and notoriety. But Stafford does have her limits:

“One movie I refused to play this [school] year was the Star Wars Holiday Special. People always come out to it en masse, but it is just an abomination. Truly the most horrifying thing ever committed to film.”

Stafford speculates that Bad Movie Night has remained a dorm tradition because it is low-commitment, and convenient. “You just come to a movie at 10 p.m. on Sunday in the Rec Room, and it’s been like that since the beginning. Week nights are hard nights to hold events because people are actually doing homework, and on Friday and Saturday people want to go out in the city.”