Madrid’s CutreCon Festival celebrates worst films ever made

Five-day event screens some of the worst films in history

MADRID: You’d think bad acting, terrible scripts and rock-bottom directing would put movie buffs off. But if Madrid's CutreCon trash film festival is anything to go by, you'd be wrong.

Lured by such films as Nudist Colony of the Dead and Bollywood's Action Jackson, some 3,500 people turned up at the five-day event. They also came for Trolls 2, which is considered one of the worst movies ever, as well as Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse.



CutreCon, which ended Sunday, is one of several festivals in Europe dedicated to films so bad they're good, many of which have been pulled from oblivion by the internet. Nostalgia for the era of low-quality VHS films, dissatisfaction with mainstream cinema and a general desire to laugh have contributed to the genre's rise in popularity.

"The first time I came across a trash film was when I was around 10 or 11, with a film called The Stuff, which is about killer yoghurt," says Carlos Palencia, culture journalist and CutreCon's director. His interest in the genre eventually prompted him to create the festival, which is now in its sixth year and is now a current multi-location event.

Keyvan Sarkhosh, senior research fellow at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics who co-authored a research paper on the subject, says there are two types of trash films: the unintentionally bad and those deliberately made to be awful.



The man who best represents the first category is Edward Wood, whose Plan 9 from Outer Space has been dubbed the best worst movie ever made. Wood died a poor alcoholic in 1978, but achieved posthumous fame thanks in part to Tim Burton's biopic Ed Wood, starring Johnny Depp.

Then come films intentionally made to be incoherent and clumsy for "ironic consumption," says Sarkhosh. Cue the Sharknado franchise: films about freak storms that see sharks sucked up in water spouts and rained down on the city.

Sarkhosh found that those who watched these movies were highly educated, cultural "omnivores" just as happy to watch arthouse films. "To enjoy bad cinema, you need to really like good cinema... you need good taste to appreciate bad taste," concurs Palencia.

Angel-Luis Andres turned up to see Troll 2, due to nostalgia. "My father would bring home a batch of videos on the weekend. He always brought back stuff that my brother and I liked," he says.

The laughter got so loud during Troll 2 that it became hard to hear the film. During a scene of a séance to communicate with a dead grandfather, the audience spontaneously erupts into a rendition of Happy Birthday.

A 2009 documentary about the film's rise to cult status said one of the actors was a patient at a psychiatric hospital and auditioned while on leave. Though it initially went straight to video in 1990, Troll 2’s new-found popularity has meant that its director Claudio Fragasso will direct a sequel.

Others have also found belated fame from their initial embarrassment, for instance actor, director and screenwriter Tommy Wiseau, whose 2003 drama The Room bombed. But sure enough, this too has achieved cult status. Hollywood star James Franco has directed a comedy film about it called The Masterpiece.

In an interview, actor Seth Rogen- who plays in Franco's film –acknowledged there was something "oddly brilliant” about it. "There is something you have to give credit to, because of all the shitty movies, he made one that people still watch."

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