'Sharknado,' 'Samurai Cop' & Other "So-Bad-They're-Good" Movies [Podcast: Over/Under Movies]

Welcome to another edition of Over/Under Movies, the podcast in which we choose one overrated film and one underrated film — similar in tone, genre, style, or however we may see fit — and we discuss them.

On this episode, my co-host Oktay Ege Kozak has chosen two movies as a means to launch into a larger discussion about what goes into making a great “so-bad-it’s-good” movie. We start with “Sharknado,” the first chapter in the successful schlock series that started on the SyFy Channel in 2013 (a fifth one is arriving this summer, in case there was any confusion how popular these movies seem to be). My co-host and I are massive fans of hilariously bad movies, but we are quick to point out the cynicism in a movie like “Sharknado” that is purposefully terrible, as opposed to being a noble failure.

 READ MORE: The 20 Worst Films Of 2016

The buzzword of “noble failure” brings us to “Samurai Cop,” Amir Shervan‘s 1989 disaster piece “Lethal Weapon” knockoff about a cop (Matt Hannon) who is trained in the Japanese arts, despite the film giving us no evidence of such. We both agree that the film is laugh-out-loud hilarious from start to finish, but we get into the specific nuances of why “bad” films like “Samurai Cop” — made with untamed ambition and ineptitude in equal measure — are those special kind of bad movie gems that only come around once in a blue moon. This provokes a discussion where we namedrop other very special movies like this, including “Things,” “Miami Connection,” “Dangerous Men,” and the granddaddy of them all, “The Room.”

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