WEHT bad movies on TV?

It used to be a couple of years ago, every Saturday at noon my local
UPN affiliate played movies.

The movies they played were quite often the aboslute WORST movies ever
made. One was some early 80s Charlie's Angles knockoff called
Velvet(it's on IMDB). It was so awful, I watched with full attention.

Nancy2...

All the bad movies are now on Lifetime, masquerading as "new" and
"topical." I've never seen so much out-and-out bad acting, scripts and

record hunter...

What she said.

I must never look at Lifetime on a Saturday afternoon. Never. Ever.

directing - kind of the Harlequin Romance novels of the TV world, only
worse.

et472...

But they can't be "kind of the Harlequin Romance novels of the TV world"
because there were/are real "Harlequin Romance movies" made for
tv.

I don't know how many were made or even if any have been made
recently, but I've seen some since they got filmed in Canada so
they count as Canadian Content, so they end up on network tv
here in Canada.

They actually weren't bad, just not really great.

They occasionally played some low-budget Sci Fi movies, or something
involving roller disco, and so on. Movies that didn't age well at all
were played in full force, and I loved it.

arnold kim...

Personally I miss the days of badly dubbed Hong Kong martial arts movies
aired every Saturday and Sunday afternoon on Fox 5 (WNYW). I think I caught
Jet Li's Fist of Legend there a couple of years ago, but it wasn't the same.

I think the WB 11 may have had a Godzilla movie marathon one weekend in the
late '90s (probably to coincide with the Matthew Broderick version) but
nothing like that since then.

Arnold Kim

et472...

You should come to Canada. Here, the CTV runs movies Thursday, Friday
and Saturday nights at midnight, and then on Sunday afternoons. The
same small group of films keeps getting replayed, and they are at
the very least second tier films. I think a lot of them are chosen
because they were made in Canada, and hence count as Canadian Content.
Most of them never played in theatres, and if they did, they'd have
had short runs and few would remember them.

Zombie Elvis...

Chicago has a nice outlet for cheesy scifi movies in two local sister
stations WCIU and WWME where various iterations of the Svengoolie show
predate MST3K by almost twenty years. Svengoolie airs such camp
classics as Plan Nine From Outerspace and Robot Monster about twice a
years with generous helpings of Vincent Price and American
International films.

Years ago, the local CTV outlet was pretty independent, running things
that weren't on the network and picking movies (and running lots of
them, at one time there were two or three movies some nights overnight).
Then they came under greater control of the network, and the good movies
went away. No more variety, no more themes, just a handful of forgettable
movies.

Going back further in time, you could switch between several stations
on Friday & Saturday nights and watch 3 bad movies. USA's Up All Night
comes to mind, where Gilbert Godfried and Rhonda Shear hosted some
exceptionally bad movies. Being an MST3K fan, I enjoyed them. TBS and
TNT were the other 2 stations playing similar movies to get your
attention.

But nowadays, they have all gone extinct. Why? From a produciton
standpoint, it's cheap to do(except for licensing, I guess). Sure, play
some good movies on TV stations, but play some bad ones too. They
deserve some lovin' too. Play Laserblast, play IMDB's bottom 100, play
MST3K-covered movies. I'm surprised the Sci Fi channel doesn't get in
on some of the bad Italian-made movies.

Hey MyNetwork, I think I just solved your programming problem. Forget
"Fashion House", re-hire Elivra and play some z-grade movies! It would
be a welcome change from "Movies at Home". Have Mike Nelson guest star.

Ahh, if I had a network of my own, I'd set aside Friday & Saturday
nights and play awful movies for a 4-hour block.