WELCOME TO THE BUNKER. I'm Vince, I'm 36, I sell insurance during the day in New Jersey, and at night I descend to a finished basement with a 27-inch TV, a VCR, two hundred tapes and a recliner that has seen things. My wife calls it the Bunker. She does not come down here. That's fine. Down here, the monsters are made of rubber, the spaceships are on strings, the acting is a cry for help, and I have never been happier.

This page is for people who understand that a movie can be a total failure at everything it set out to do and STILL be one of the best nights you'll ever have on a couch. If you think "so bad it's good" is a contradiction, read my theory at the bottom and then get back to me. If you already know, welcome home. Grab a chair. There's a rubber octopus in it. Move the octopus.

The plot, such as it is: Aliens, worried that Earthlings are about to discover a bomb that will blow up the universe, put into effect their ninth plan (the first eight apparently didn't take): raising the dead to get our attention. This produces a grand total of three zombies, one of whom is Bela Lugosi, one of whom is the TV horror hostess Vampira, and one of whom is a giant bald Swedish wrestler named Tor Johnson, playing a police inspector. Also there's an airline pilot, some cops, and Criswell, a TV psychic, narrating from a desk as though he's about to sell you a bond.

Why it's legendary: Where do I start. The flying saucers wobble on their strings. The graveyard is cardboard and the tombstones tip over when people brush them. Scenes go from night to day and back again in the same conversation because Ed shot the outdoor stuff whenever he could. And the big one: Bela Lugosi died in 1956, before the movie was made. Ed had a few minutes of silent footage of him, shot for something else, and he used every frame of it, and for the rest of the movie "Lugosi" is played by Ed's wife's chiropractor, a taller man, holding a cape over his face. For the whole movie. It is the single most audacious thing I have ever seen in a film, and Ed clearly thought nobody would notice.

The Bunker verdict: This movie was crowned the worst film of all time in the Golden Turkey Awards book back in 1980, and it's been wearing the crown ever since, and I'm here to tell you the title is wrong. The worst movie of all time is boring. Plan 9 is never boring. Every single shot has something wrong in it, and most of them have three things, and the dialogue is written by a man who had heard human speech described to him. It's 79 minutes and it's perfect. If you only ever watch one movie off this page, this is it. (And yes, the Johnny Depp movie about Ed Wood from 1994 is wonderful, and you should see that too, but see this one first so you get the jokes.)

The plot: Ro-Man, an alien conqueror, has wiped out all of humanity except for eight people, who are hiding out in a canyon behind a ray-proof force field. Ro-Man spends the movie trying to finish the job and phoning home to his boss, the Great Guidance, for instructions. He also develops feelings for one of the surviving girls. Things become complicated for Ro-Man.

The monster: Here is what you need to know about Ro-Man. Ro-Man is a man in a gorilla suit wearing a diving helmet with antennas on it. That's it. That's the whole design. The budget was said to be under twenty thousand dollars and I believe every penny of it. Ro-Man's headquarters is a cave with a table, a device that blows soap bubbles (I'm not kidding, it's a bubble machine and it's central to the technology), and a television set he uses to call the boss. The movie was shot in about four days, mostly in Bronson Canyon outside Los Angeles, the same rocks you've seen in a hundred other cheap movies and TV shows, and it was released in 3-D, so at least the bubbles came right at you.

Bonus points: The dinosaur fight is stock footage from a completely different, much older movie, with real lizards wearing fins glued on. And, no kidding, the music is by Elmer Bernstein, who went on to score The Magnificent Seven and about a hundred other real movies, and who I hope got paid.

The Bunker verdict: A gorilla in a diving helmet agonizing over whether he must kill the girl he loves, delivered with total sincerity, is the purest thing in cinema. Sixty-two minutes. Five skulls, and I'd give it a sixth for the bubble machine if the scale went that high.

The plot: A giant bird from outer space, described in the film as being "as big as a battleship," is knocking planes out of the sky, and neither radar nor the Air Force can touch it because it's surrounded by a force field of anti-matter. A square-jawed engineer (Jeff Morrow) and a mathematician (Mara Corday) have to figure out how to shut the force field off before the bird eats New York. Lots of stock footage of jets, lots of men in uniforms pointing at maps.

The bird: This is the whole reason the movie is on this page. The first forty minutes are a perfectly competent, kind of serious 1950s monster picture: good actors, straight faces, real suspense, the bird kept off screen. And then they show you the bird. It's a puppet. It has a long scrawny neck, a mohawk, giant googly eyes, a beak full of teeth, flared nostrils, and an expression of permanent outrage, and it looks exactly like a turkey that has been through something. The story that's always told, and I have no reason to doubt it, is that the puppet was built cheaply in Mexico and that the cast had never seen it until the premiere, and that the audience laughed, and that Jeff Morrow, who'd been playing the whole thing dead straight, slipped out of the theater before the lights came up. I have watched this movie eleven times and I still laugh out loud every time it goes "squaaawk" and eats a parachutist.

The Bunker verdict: Four skulls. It'd be five but everyone in it other than the bird is actually good, and that's a point off on this scale. Best watched with someone who has NOT seen the bird yet, so you can watch their face.

First, the title. "Manos" is Spanish for "hands." So the title is "Hands: The Hands of Fate." That's the level we're operating at. Buckle up.

The plot: A family (dad, mom, little girl, poodle) driving through the Texas desert takes a wrong turn and ends up at a lonely house looked after by Torgo, a twitching, staggering caretaker with enormous knees, who works for "the Master." The Master is a man in a black robe with giant red hands on it, and he has several wives in nightgowns who spend a large chunk of the movie having a wrestling match in the sand. The Master wants the mom. The wives argue about the little girl. Torgo wants the mom too. The dad wants to leave. Nobody leaves.

The legend: Harold P. Warren was a fertilizer salesman from El Paso who supposedly made this on a bet that anybody could make a horror movie. He wrote it, produced it, directed it, and played the dad. It was shot with a hand-wound 16mm camera that could only run for about half a minute at a time, which is why no shot lasts longer than that, and it had no sound; all the dialogue, for every character, was dubbed in afterward by a handful of people, including the little girl, who is clearly voiced by a grown woman. There is a couple in a car by the side of the road who kiss for what feels like a month and have nothing to do with anything. There is a full minute of driving footage under the opening because, the story goes, the titles were supposed to be over it and nobody put them on.

It played in El Paso in 1966 and vanished, and stayed vanished until Mystery Science Theater 3000 did it in 1993 and it became the most famous bad movie of the decade. I got my tape from a guy in a newsgroup for a blank and postage. Best trade I ever made.

The Bunker verdict: Five skulls, and the only movie on this page that I think might actually be a curse. Torgo's little walking theme, which plays every time he appears, will be in your head at work on Tuesday. You have been warned.

The plot: The children of Mars are sad because they watch too much Earth television and have no fun. The Martian leader, Kimar, consults an ancient wise man, who tells him what Mars needs is a Santa Claus. So the Martians fly to Earth, kidnap Santa from the North Pole (along with two Earth kids who saw too much), and bring him to Mars to build a toy factory. A grumpy Martian named Voldar wants Santa dead. A goofy Martian named Dropo wants to BE Santa. Santa laughs a lot. Everyone is wearing green greasepaint and a helmet with a piece of pipe on top.

Why it's on the list: The Martian costumes appear to have been made from wetsuits and things found in a plumbing aisle. The robot, Torg, is a cardboard box with a cardboard box on it. The polar bear that menaces the kids is a man in a polar bear suit that looks like it was bought at the same store as the Martians' helmets. The whole thing was shot in an old airplane hangar on Long Island. And the theme song, "Hooray for Santy Claus," sung by a chorus of children, is one of the most relentless pieces of music ever recorded and I dare you to get it out of your head before New Year's.

Trivia for your bad-movie night: The little Martian girl, Girmar, is played by a very young Pia Zadora, who grew up to be an actress and singer and, one assumes, has a complicated relationship with this film.

The Bunker verdict: Four skulls. Every December this plays in the Bunker with eggnog, and every December my wife comes down for exactly the first ten minutes, says "no," and goes back up. It's tradition. It's a Christmas movie for people who feel that Christmas movies should have a Martian in them, and I'm one of those people.

The plot: Tomatoes rise up and start killing people. The government assembles a crack team of specialists, including a disguise expert and a guy who never stops swimming, to stop them. A newspaper reporter investigates. There is a song called "Puberty Love" that is so awful it becomes the weapon that defeats the tomatoes. That's not a joke I'm making. That's the plot.

The controversy (in the Bunker): Here's my problem with Killer Tomatoes, and it's the reason it only gets three skulls. It's bad ON PURPOSE. A bunch of guys in San Diego made it as a joke, and it's funny, and I like it, but a movie that WANTS to be bad can never reach the heights of a movie that was trying with all its heart to be good and failed, because the failure is the art. See the theory. Ed Wood believed in Plan 9. The Killer Tomatoes guys were winking the whole time. It's the difference between a guy slipping on a banana peel and a guy telling you he's going to slip on a banana peel and then doing it.

Still, though: The helicopter crash near the beginning was a real accident during filming (nobody was seriously hurt), and they left it in and wrote around it, which is the most B-movie thing imaginable and I respect it enormously. The tomatoes themselves are just, you know, tomatoes, rolled across the ground by somebody off camera. The whole thing cost less than a nice car. And it spawned sequels: the 1988 one, Return of the Killer Tomatoes, has George Clooney in it, years before he was George Clooney, and there was even a Saturday morning cartoon.

The Bunker verdict: Three skulls. A good time, a great party movie, and the "Puberty Love" scene alone justifies the rental. But it knows what it is, and in the Bunker, that costs you.

I have been hosting these since 1991. Learn from my mistakes.

1. Four to six people. Fewer than four and it's just watching a bad movie. More than six and nobody can hear the dialogue, and the dialogue is the point.
2. Never start with the best one. Open with a three-skull movie to warm up the room. Save the five-skull movie for second. Nobody makes it through a third; don't try.
3. Talking is allowed. Talking OVER is not. You may comment. You may shout. But when a line is coming that everyone needs to hear, the host says "shh" and everybody shushes. Being the host means knowing when the lines are coming. Do your homework.
4. No one who hasn't seen it gets told what's coming. Do not say "wait for the bird." Do not say "watch his knees." Let them find it. Their face is your reward.
5. Snacks must match. Killer Tomatoes gets a plate of tomatoes. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians gets eggnog and green frosting. Robot Monster gets bubble solution, and you'll be sorry.
6. Rewinding is allowed once per scene. Some things need to be seen twice. Chiropractor-with-cape, for instance. But once. This is a VCR, not a courtroom.
7. Respect the movie. This is the big one. We laugh AT it, sure. But somebody made it. Somebody mortgaged something, borrowed a camera, talked their brother-in-law into wearing the gorilla suit, and believed in it. That's more than most of us ever do. You laugh, but you laugh with love, and you never turn it off early. Ed Wood deserves that much.
8. The host picks. Democracy does not work for movie selection. It never has.

People who don't get it always ask the same thing: why would you watch a movie you KNOW is bad? Here's my answer, worked out over about two hundred tapes and a lot of late nights.

Bad and boring are different things. Most bad movies are boring: competent, forgettable, gone by breakfast. The movies in the Bunker are something else. They are bad in a way that is surprising. You genuinely cannot predict what the next shot will do wrong. That's the same thing that makes a good movie good, honestly. It keeps you awake. It just gets there from the other direction.

Sincerity is everything. The great bad movies were all made by people who thought they were making a good movie. That's not an accident; that's the whole ingredient. Ed Wood thought Plan 9 was important. Harold P. Warren thought Manos was scary. Phil Tucker thought Ro-Man was frightening. The gap between what they were reaching for and what ended up on the screen is where the comedy lives, and the wider the gap, the more skulls. When the filmmakers are in on the joke, the gap closes, and it just becomes a comedy, and comedies have to be, you know, funny on purpose, which is much harder. (See Killer Tomatoes above.)

You can see the seams. A big studio movie hides everything: every trick, every dollar, every decision. A movie made for eleven thousand dollars in four days hides nothing. You can see the wire holding up the saucer, and that means you can see the guy holding the wire, and that means you're watching people MAKE A MOVIE, live, right in front of you, with the wheels coming off. I find that more moving than most of what wins awards. Sue me.

And it's a shared thing. Nobody laughs alone at a bad movie. It's built for a room. The laughs are the sound of six people all noticing the same thing at the same time, and that's about as close to church as the Bunker gets.

So, no, I'm not watching them ironically, whatever that means. I'm watching them because they're the most alive thing on the shelf. Now go rent Plan 9. I'll wait.