Talking To: Bristol Bad Film Club

Bristol Bad Film Club has been ongoing since 2013. Set up by film lover Ti Singh, each month the club showcases a notoriously bad film (the badder, the better) at Bristol Improv Theatre. With all proceeds going to charity, the film club offers a unique experience - the audience paying a fiver to watch a film about killer bees, a lion mauling Kathy Griffiths or watching Sylvester Stallone’s bodyguard act.

We sat down with the organiser of Bristol Bad Film Club, Ti, to discuss why he wanted to showcase some of the world’s worst films, how cinema is subjective and if he thinks he’ll ever run out of bad movies!

Where did your love of film come from and how did the film club become a monthly event?

As a kid, I loved genre films. My dad had a pharmacy just down the road from the local video shop so he would often rent videos and would fall for the covert art of the videos. I grew up watching all these crappy B movies. Then I went to university and me and my housemates would stay up watching these movies on BBC2 and Channel 4. Then in 2013, I watched Samurai Cop and The Room with ten of my friends and it was then that I thought about how there should be somewhere in Bristol that shows them. In London, you’ve got the Prince Charles cinema but we don’t have that here, so I decided I’d love to set up a film club that only showed bad films.

The first event we did was Plan 9 from Outer Space, which was in the public domain so we managed to show it in a room above a pub that had an AV set up. We put tickets on sale for a fiver each and it sold out! That was in August 2013 and we’ve been running ever since. I’m from Bristol and I was working in a really boring job at the time so I felt like I needed some creative outlet, so this provided a great distraction.

What’s your favourite bad film?

You get these films which are rediscovered, and stuff like Miami Connection where even the concept is insane. It’s about a group of orphans who are in a rock band and they also do Taekwondo together; all of their songs are specifically about Taekwondo and they get caught up fighting drug-smuggling ninjas on the streets of Orlando. Insane, right? It’s written, directed and starring Y K Kim who wanted to make a film about his love of Taekwondo just like Bruce Lee did, and it lead to this. The concept of these films is always more insane than the films themselves.

Samurai Cop is another great one. An Iranian director fled Iran during the ‘79 revolution, came to America and decided to make an action film like Lethal Weapon. He got Sylvester Stallone’s bodyguard because he kind of looked like Stallone and then partnered him up with a black actor. At one point they thought the film was wrapped but they came back for reshoots and he had to wear a wig which is so obvious, and then at one point the wig comes off and they just left it in there…

Is there anything you look for when deciding on what to show each month? How do you decide?

It just has to be entertaining. People are going to be watching it for 90 minutes, they’ve paid a fiver and I want them to watch something that they’re not going to be able to view anywhere else. I used to get my friends around to watch a few and to test which one they liked the least, but they soon got enough of that so now it’s more word of mouth, what other film clubs around the world are watching and what I think would be a good watch.

What do you think of Bristol’s arts sector and its relationship to film?

There are so many film clubs across the city and so there’s something for everyone. It also helps that we have Aardman here and TV shows being shot at Bottle Yard Studios. Bristol, as a very arty, liberal city, always has people who want to be involved with what’s going on, and that’s great.

All films created are a passion project for either the director, writers, crew or actors – do you think “bad” films are just subjective to the audience?

All of these bad films come from a genuine place; they want to make a film because they love it. It’s not like these mockbusters where they are deliberately bad, but it is incredibly subjective.

There are a lot of films these days which are critically panned. From a purely technical point of view, these films are very good, however, they might just be boring and you can forget them. However, the films we show are technically very bad, but they’re enjoyable. You can go and see a two and a half hour Transformer film and think the effects are great but you come out and you’ve forgotten the plot. Whereas films like Samurai Cop have boom mics coming down and wigs being set on fire, and whilst it’s insane, it’s never boring.

What would you say is the best decade for bad films? And why do I have the impression that you’re going to say the 80s?

It is definitely the 80’s. Action movies are really at the forefront, so many distributors were pushing to get them made so they could get them out onto VHS and into foreign markets so they could sell anywhere. 50’s monster films are also great! Any film where nuclear power is causing crabs to mutate and people are clinging onto scantily clad women is always going to be a great bad film.

How do you find the films you are going to screen? Is it hard work trying to acquire the rights to show them?

It is definitely not hard getting the rights to them! There are distributors all around the world which have a back catalogue of B movies. Sometimes it can be hard to get licenses because the film is owned by the producer who you have to track down and they are very surprised you even want to show their movie.

Do you think you’ll ever run out of bad movies?

Absolutely not. We’ve been going for seven years and we can keep going for another few decades. I’ve got a plan to show a Chuck Norris film in May and that will be the first Chuck Norris film we’ve done and that man has done so many terrible films, we could just do a Chuck Norris year.

Has there ever been a big reaction from the audience when watching one of these films? And what would you say the most popular film has been that you’ve screened?

Yeah, it’s always a nice atmosphere as everyone has a beer and watches it together. There’s often cries of disbelief, but it all adds to it! I really wanted to make it a collective experience.

The most popular film we’ve shown is definitely The Room, it’s one where people bring their friends along and we’ve screened at a bigger venue like the Redgrave Theatre. We’ve had Tommy Wiseau and Greg Sestero here and they always sell out. Roar did really well as well. We screened that at Windmill Hill City Farm and the film was produced at a time when you lived in 1970s Hollywood and had lions roaming about as pets. Noel Marshall and Tippi Hedren had about thirty pet lions and they made a film about them, and each crew and cast member were maimed during shooting. We’re watching a man get jump-tackled by a lion on an outdoor screen surrounded by goats; the audience loved it.

All of the profits go to a selected charity – what made you decide to do this? Do you pick a different charity each time?

It’s a different charity each time. Sometimes we support one charity for a few months, so during the winter months all the money went to Help Bristol’s Homeless. Sometimes the charity is loosely connected to the film, so for The Bees we’re giving it to Wildscreen.

People are paying £5 for a bad film, they can be like, ‘well, the film was crap but all the money’s going to a women’s charity, so I won’t be complaining about how I’ve just wasted 90 minutes of my life!’

What projects have you got in the pipeline?

The next film is going to be War of the God Monsters, which is a Japanese kaiju film. We’ve also got a friend, Tom Vincent, who works at Aardman and is a big kaiju fan, to introduce the film to give it some context. We always try to introduce the film with some knowledge of the film so the audience can truly understand what they’re watching. It’s usually me who does this but luckily Tom has agreed to do it for this month!

We’ve also got Greg Sestero, who wrote The Disaster Artist coming to Bristol next month. We know Greg quite well, he comes every couple of years, so that’s one of our next events at the Watershed. We’ll be doing a screening of The Room and he’s directed his first film, a disaster film, Miracle Valley, so we’ll also be showing that as well.

Do you find that other projects have stemmed from Bristol Bad Film Club?

We have actually launched a festival in May called the Forbidden Worlds Film Festival. We’re doing it at the IMAX screen at the Aquarium and it will be twelve films over two and a half days. We’re tying it into the anniversary of 20th Century Flicks, which is Bristol’s last video shop.

We have a couple of the big films from 1982 such as Blade Runner and Mad Max 2 to appeal to the more sophisticated viewer. Then we have films like Basket Case, The Challenge and Dracula as it will be the anniversary of Christopher Lee being born. We also have one talk which is going to be on the history of 3D cinema and we’ve got a few requests out for guests which might be coming, but I have to keep that quiet for now!

We’re hoping it will be a yearly thing and if we can prove that the IMAX screen is a viable venue because at the moment all of their equipment is broken, then we can get funding.

For more information on monthly screenings of Bristol Bad Film Club, click here: https://bristolbadfilmclub.co.uk/

For more information on the Forbidden Worlds Festival, click here: https://www.forbiddenworldsfilmfestival.co.uk/our-venue