Cinema Fiasco

Cinema Fiasco and the Art of Bad Movies

There are so few good movies it makes sense to learn how to enjoy the bad ones.

Cinema Fiasco is a comedy show that features screenings of classic bad movies accompanied by the incisive and hilarious commentary of film buff comedians Geoff Wallis and Janet A. McLeod.

Janet and Geoff have been watching bad movies together since their teens and what they don’t know about awful acting, dreadful dialogue and crappy special effects isn’t worth knowing. The hours they have spent watching ’50s monster epics, women-in-prison spectaculars, ’80s splatter movies and phony documentaries about Bigfoot have honed their appreciation into a fine art and developed an aesthetic that forms the basis of their show.

Good movies are assessed by a set of standards almost completely alien to the bad movie aficionado. To successfully appreciate a bad movie one must be aware of the following:

1. Explosions are extremely exciting.
2. Nudity is an effective substitute for talent.
3. CGI effects are inferior to someone wearing a gorilla suit or a bat dangling on a string.
4. Nighttime scenes are best shot during the day with a blue filter over the camera lens.
5. Classic dialogue (e.g. “Let’s get the hell out of here!”, “This place gives me the creeps!” and “You’ll never get away with it!”) is essential.
6. Actors who will do anything for money make the best stars.
7. The presence of Italian zombies, killer nuns, lesbian vampires, masked psychos, horny stewardesses and 32-year-old teenagers is a sure sign you’re onto a winner.
8. Shouting and screaming communicate all the important emotions.
9. Extras who can’t act are worth their weight in gold.
10. Extras who act too much are worth much more.
11. An inappropriate pop song on the soundtrack is always welcome.
12. Martial arts are the only arts worth funding.
13. The more characters dead by the final credits the better the movie.
14. The best film producers copy successful movies but do so for a quarter of the price.
15. Indigenous people should never be played by actors of the right ethnicity.
16. Any movie in which a dance craze is used to defeat evil is a classic.
17. A scantily clad woman holding a gun is a trenchant statement.
18. The boom mike is your friend and good to see.
19. Cars are better the faster they go.
20. To be a great bad movie you must be able to talk through it without missing anything.

Cinema Fiasco has been bringing the joy of substandard cinema to the masses for the past five years. Details of their ventures can be found at: http://cinemafiasco.com/

© Geoff Wallis 2013

NORTH BY NORTHWEST – NEW RESTORATION

Brand New 4K DCP Restoration of Hitchcock’s classic caper of mistaken identity!

Stanley Kubrick Retrospective

Stanley Kubrick: his name alone is almost a genre and he is one director whose collection shouldn’t be seen on anything less than a cinema screen. Kubrick himself said he never wanted his work to be seen on television (can you imagine his disgust at the culture of viewing movies on laptops and mobile devices?) [...]

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

The man with the whip returns to the big screen for his final dalliance and this time he’s searching for The Holy Grail. And his father! When Indy’s dad sends him a diary and a map with clues leading to the Holy Grail, he and Marcus Brody hot foot it to Italy. When they find [...]

Margot Kidder Q&A + Superman Screening

Meet Lois Lane in person! That’s right, we are very pleased to announce a live on stage Q&A session with none other than the original Lois, Margot Kidder. With an acting career spanning more than thirty years, Kidder has appeared in a number of screen favourites including horror fans’ early slasher flick Black Christmas (1974), [...]

BATMAN (1966)

Holy toledo Batman – it’s an evening of spandex! *POW!* *THWACK!* *WHAM!* You heard right folks, we’re bringing the bat back to the big screen. And we want YOU to get dressed up in your shiniest spandex finest. *WOW!* We want this to give Adam West the biggest bat-welcome we can muster and the only [...]

AN OLDIE BUT A GOODIE

The K Faktor proudly presents an evening with Bill Oddie. It’s been 8 long years and now Bill returns to the country that created Rolf Harris for a series of entertaining and enlightening shows. It’s Bill live and unplucked! A night of fun and a trip down memory lane! Come as your favourite character from [...]

THE MASTER – IN 70MM!

Experience the year’s most talked about movie the way it was meant to be seen – in 70mm Print Format!

The NeverEnding Story

Can it really be almost 30 years since young Bastian hid in that old attic to discover The NeverEnding Story? Wolfgang Petersen’s movie was not initially a box office success but became one of the highest ever selling movies on home video, giving it the cult following it has today. Released in 1984, The NeverEnding [...]

Michael Haneke Mini Retrospective

With the release of what we are sure will be this year’s greatest film, Amour, we are pleased to celebrate cinema’s most terrifyingly talented auteur, Michael Haneke, with a short retrospective of some of his most challenging and confronting films. Haneke is notorious for using cinema as a social and political tool, turning the lens [...]

20 YEARS OF BARAKA

Celebrate the 20th Anniversary of Baraka the way it was meant to be seen – in 70mm Print Format.