Bad Movies – they make the perfect Xmas gift! Check out these five cheesefests as possible presents…

The Giant Claw (1957)

After Warner Bros. had a hit with giant ants in 1954’s Them!, all sorts of giant low-budget bugs, arachnids and lizards descended on nuclear-paranoid middle America. The silliest by far was The Giant Claw, a humungous buzzard from a parallel dimension that’s approximately as frightening as Gonzo. Indeed, the creature bears more than a passing resemblance to that Muppet as it feasts on parachuting fighter pilots and hot-rodding teens. This cheese-fest wouldn’t have been nearly as entertaining had director Fred F. Sears, who’d had hits with Rock Around The Clock and Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers, gotten his first choice, Ray Harryhausen, as the film’s special effects artist. But cheapo producer Sam Katzman nixed the idea and thus the movie centers around a feathery puppet whose wire controls are so obvious you fear attacking model aircraft will crash into them.

Available as part of Sony’s fancifully titled “Icons Of Horror” collection that features — bonus! — three of other Sam Katzman’s B-grade monster movies. Amazon price: $19.99

For the other four, check out my piece at Movieline

Artists of all stripes repeat themselves, whether through themes, motifs or hues, and James Cameron is no exception. So the question I’ve been asking myself as I count down the days to Avatar’s debut is this: just how much of the long-awaited 3-D space blockbuster was predicted by the man’s inauspicious debut, 1981’s Piranha Part Two: The Spawning?

The notion sounded kind of silly, even to me as I dragged the musty old VHS from its dust-coated shelf in the Bad Movie archives. After all, how could a sequel to a Roger Corman Jaws rip-off that was made for a pittance nearly 30 years ago have anything – anything — to do with the quarter-billion dollar Movie That Will Revolutionize Cinema As We Know It™?

Read the rest of my investigation – sure to excite the Pulitzer Committee – at Movieline

For a certain percentage of the population, Robert Pattinson as Edward Cullen is the Sexiest Man (Kinda) Alive. For the rest of us, he’s much too emo to get worked up about. But all is not lost! With Extreme Makeover tips from even the crappiest vampire-themed flicks, he might sparkle for everyone yet!

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In 2012, a definite Bad Movie We Love, the Earth is being superheated by “mutant neutrinos” supposedly linked to a planetary alignment predicted by the Mayans. First, Gaia explodes in a fiery rain of molten B-movie cheese, and then a magnetic pole switcheroo causes a tectonic boogaloo that unleashes tsunamis big enough to inundate the Himalayas. It’s the very best in schlock science and mysticism from Roland Emmerich, whose last picture, 10,000 B.C., had it that the mammoths built the pyramids. But while 2012 shamelessly appropriates sequences and tropes from just about every major disaster movie of the past, oh, forever, there are still a few crapocalypses too silly for even Emmerich to pilfer. Or maybe… just maybe… he’s saving them for 2013?

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