After FilmFour, it's film flopsOwen Gibson, media correspondent
Friday March 11, 2005
The Guardian
Fans of the "so bad it's good" school of film-making are in for a treat with the launch of a channel devoted to the worst movies ever made - but stars such as David Jason are unlikely to be laughing after seeing their early efforts exhumed.
Two hundred straight-to-video stinkers, TV movie turkeys and high-profile flops have been rescued from the vaults for the launch of Bad Movies in the spring.
The schedules will include Plan 9 From Outer Space, the infamous 1959 Ed Wood directed sci-fi movie that invariably appears on lists of the worst ever films, and Big Valley, a western starring the Six Million Dollar Man Lee Majors.
"You get the feeling that the film was put together by a quarrelsome committee of third-graders, and aimed at an audience of chimpanzees," says one typical review of Plan 9 on the Internet Movie Database website.
David Jason, the star of TV's Only Fools and Horses, appears in White Cargo, a 1973 offering about white slaves, while a youthful David Hasselhoff appears as Boner in the US high school comedy Revenge of the Cheerleaders.
The service, which will initially broadcast from 9pm to 9am every night, hopes to become cult late-night viewing for students, insomniacs and others turned off by the Hollywood blockbusters available on mainstream movie channels. If it proves a success, it will launch around the clock.
The News of the World's film critic, Paul Ross, brother of BBC1 chatshow host Jonathan, will link the films with a wry commentary. Bad Movies, along with a sister channel Matinee Movies, will launch on Sky Digital at the end of next month.
"We've got a vision that there's a gap in the market for us to grow ad-funded film channels that aren't trying to compete with the mainstream. Without being too Gerald Ratner about it, we'll take great pride in showing complete crap," said Ashley Faull, a founder of Sit-Up TV, which operates shopping channels with a turnover of £200m a year. It will invest up to £5m in attempting to establish the new channels.
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