Top 10 Guilty Pleasure Film Franchises

You’ve been that person walking out of the theater smiling while the rest of the crowd passing by seem to be throwing their tickets away in disgust. You liked the bad movie. You’re not alone. We’ve all been there at some point, and it’s not a bad thing. Everyone deserves to indulge. Even the most hardened of cinephiles have a few skeleton’s in their closet – acclaimed critics included.

Roger Ebert liked The Zookeeper, A.O. Scott found “an amazing kind of emotional integrity and intensity” in the Twilight franchise, and Richard Corliss wasn’t afraid to say he enjoyed Clash of the Titans. Everyone has standalone indulgences like Zookeeper or Titans. There are hundreds of bad movies filled with just enough nostalgia or fun to keep you coming back for more. The choices become less clear when you start looking for the great guilty pleasure franchises though. Making one bad but ultimately enjoyable film isn’t so difficult, but duplicating that same kind of “bad but good” balance over three, four, five, six, or even seven installments is downright remarkable. I seek to honor these decade (or more) long bad habits.

As the gentlemen of the Filmspotting Podcast often remind us; these types of lists need guidelines. Without some parameters to work within, finding a clear set of applicants and criteria to judge them by can be difficult. This list has four rules: no horror movies, there have to be at least three entries, the leads can’t get replaced, and the films have to be major studio productions. These rules are here for a few reasons. I didn’t want a list dominated with one genre (horror) that makes awesomely bad its bread and butter – that is for another list. Two films isn’t enough to be a real franchise.Pure money grab sequels don’t deserve any chance of recognition here, and I didn’t want to open the flood gates for the scores of low budget camp that might qualify. Here is the list.

10. Crank

Okay, so I’m starting off on a bad note – breaking one of my own rules. I’m letting co-directors Neveldine and Taylor sneak their Crank films into this top ten on my sincere hope that Chev Chelios will survive to die(ish) another day. Jason Statham isn’t so confident, but movies like Crank are about defying the odds so I think it’s appropriate to keep the dream alive. If it wasn’t for the question mark over the series’ future Crank would almost certainly be higher.

About the actual films now. Well, film sounds a bit misleading. “Orgy of ass-kicking caught on camera” might be a more apt definition. The things that make the Crank movies so bad – the absence of concepts like plot, acting, and good taste – don’t really enhance the cult status of these movies like others in this top ten manage to do with their shortcomings. At times the dialogue feels like the grating of nails on a chalkboard,  and there are moments, like when Statham essentially rapes Amy Smart in the middle of Chinatown, that are deal-breakers for many.

For the rest of the world though Neveldine and Taylor deliver some of the most frenetic and pleasing action available today. They have an inventive visual style (apparently involving filming scenes with camcorders while roller blading) that makes every big fight scene feel like it’s about to jump off the screen. It’s not the kind of powerful stuff you bring up while sipping pinot noir at your friends dinner party, but when you need to check your brain at the door after a brutal exam or a hard day of work Crank is there for your mind numbing pleasure.

9. Resident Evil

This may be the first time in director Paul W.S. Anderson’s life that one of his films has been recognized in a “best of” list. Hopefully historians looking back will keep the topic in mind…

On Anderson’s best days, he is the long lost third Wachowski brother; on his worst days, Anderson is lucky to be called a rich man’s Uwe Boll.  The Resident Evil series finds him somewhere in-between.

Despite being adapted from the acclaimed survival horror video game series of same name, there is no real horror to be found here beyond a couple cheap scares in the original. These movies are pure action, total absurdity, and never-ending crap. For this list,  it’s as guilty as the guilty pleasures go. The rail thin plots and occasionally silly visuals keep people teetering on brink of eye rolling from one scene to the next.

But then Milla Jovovich blasts her way onto the screen and, instead of rolling, your pop instead in reaction to what is an undoubtedly awesome display of badassery. As far as female crime fighters go, Milla ranks right up there with Sigourney Weaver and Linda Hamilton in The Pantheon of Female Action Stars. She may not be able to string two convincing lines of dialogue together consecutively (probably why she worked so well in The Fifth Element), but that hasn’t stopped her from going all out in whatever crazy battle Anderson places her in.

Jovovich is great a kicking, punching, and shooting. Anderson’s best skill happens to be making those three things look as cool as possible on screen. It boils down to little more than a basic level of pleasure, but, consider also, this is one of the few watchable films adapted from a video game. This is THE guilty pleasure franchise for millions of gamers who wait in vain for a film that will do their pastime justice.

8. Harold and Kumar

Harold and Kumar are the timely inspiration for this list, but don’t think for a second that they don’t deserve this spot.  Comedy can be tricky to judge because humor is so dependent on personal taste (or lack thereof), but what shines through for this list are the kinds of comedies who are willing to give up a little (or a lot in most cases) in the way of plot and and consistency to find the best jokes.  H&K is just that kind of series.

It was the film that launched [probably a lot more than] a thousand munchie runs to fast food chains everywhere. It’s not the first Cheech and Chong inspired film, but it has something most films hinging on “high” humor lack, a brain. Mind you its not a particularly big one, but Kal Penn, John Cho, and the ubiquitous Neil Patrick Harris bring a sense self-aware irreverence and even a touch of pathos which has kept H&K barely afloat in a treacherously repetitive sea of weed jokes that the ever disappointing sub-genre is known for.

The movies tend to throw buckets of jokes at the wall in the hope that some will stick.  As said before, they do it better than most, but what really saves the series from comedic mediocrity is NPH.  The man can do no wrong.  I won’t ruin it for you if you haven’t seen the newest installment, but the way they work his coming out of the closet into the film is hysterically funny.  Harold and Kumar will make you cringe, but you can’t help laughing too.  Expect that to be a trend on this list.

7. The Naked Gun

Leslie Nielsen’s slapstick brand of humor doesn’t work for everyone. It’s a kind of humor which doesn’t seem to be appreciated by too many younger people. For the youthful this might be just Dad’s guilty pleasure. But half the point of a guilt pleasure is that it’s not for everyone.

As with many of the guilty pleasure comedies, the sequels here are little more than recreations of the original with new settings to spice up the jokes a bit. There are times during The Naked Gun films where the jokes get so bad it’s hard not to cringe, but that’s what makes them awesomely bad instead of just plain awesome. Leslie Nielsen is willing to push the audience to the brink with any joke. Take the minute long toilet humor gag. A lot of people just yawn, but for some, that’s the funniest thing the will ever see on screen. What do they care if the populous thinks it is tasteless drivel? Guilty pleasures are about you, the movie, and having fun – nothing else.

Looking back now the Naked Gun series does benefit from more than simply crass gags. They had O.J. Simpson! There is a very funny kind of poetic justice in watching O.J.’s character (Officer Nordberg) get devastated by pain gag after pain gag for three straight films. Sure it doesn’t quite make up for him getting away with murdering two people in cold blood, but it does add an extra (pun infused) guilty pleasure angle to any revisiting of the series; one that anyone can appreciate.

6.  Austin Powers

Do you think when Quintin Tarentino offered Mike Myers a part in Inglourious Basterds he had to explain to Myers that he wasn’t on Saturday Night Live anymore? I do. Every Myers film is like a long form SNL skit. So if you think of his movies like big themed episodes of SNL then the choppiness makes sense.

Like about half of SNL’s sketches there are some scenes in the Austin Powers films that just don’t work. Sometimes it seems like a result of a story not built for ninety minutes of development, and other times it seems as though Mike Myers was a little too involved (playing numerous roles) to step back and see the jokes clearly. Some of Myers self-acted villains simply whiff.  The likes of Fat Bastard and Goldmember slide down the slippery slope from just-plain-funny to just-plain-gross with nasty antics like their crude flatulence and skin eating respectively.

Once you get past Myers obsession with the costume and makeup department though there is a lot to like. These films are filled with low brow comedic brilliance. The hard Bond parodies in the evil lair with Myers, Will Ferrell, Mindy Sterling, and the rest of the supporting cast  are top notch. It makes you wish Mike Myers had brought in more outside talent instead of casting himself so much.

It is the cast that makes these movies worth revisiting time and again. No, they’re not putting in Academy-worthy performances, but these are talented actors letting loose and having fun. You can see it in every scene. Leading the way of course is Myers who may take things too far on occasion, but his undeniable enthusiasm is infectious. Add to that Verne Troyer as Mini-Me who is gut bustingly funny in every scene he occupies, Mindy Sterling who kills it as the creepy German villain Frau Farbissina, and Michael Caine who lets loose in the third installment as Austin Powers’ philandering father and you have a recipe for an unapologetically good time.

5. James Bond: The Roger Moore Years

Speaking of Bond, James Bond…

Technically this is cherry picking part of a series, but each Bond has brought with them a new interpretation of character which allows their time as Bond to stand on its own, much in the same way different actors have reinvented Dr. Who over the decades.  Everyone has their favorite (Connery) and the one they would rather forget (Lazenby). Roger Moore is neither. He occupies a special place in Bond lore as the most polarizing Bond.

Moore’s Bond years receive guilty pleasure status because no self-respecting fan of 007 would say they liked the campy tongue-in-cheek style of Moore’s films best, but, in truth, there are many people (myself included) who find their inherent silliness to be some of the most fun they ever have watching Bond films.

During Roger Moore’s run as James Bond we got to see Nick Nack (the inspiration for Verne Troyer’s Mini-Me), Bond dressed as a clown, Jaws making “the grill” a fashion statement, Jaws falling in love, the gondola speedboat/car, the infallible Christopher Walken as a villain, Roger Moore’s mole, a film actually titled Octopussy (I’ve seen it ten times, and I still don’t believe it’s real. Even the porn industry would think twice before using that title.), Bond girls going for the fifty plus year old Roger Moore, and, of course, Bond in space!  I’m not defending the irreparable damage Moore’s films did to the Bond image, but try to look past that fact and just appreciate the awesome amount of absurdity present in Moore’s seven film run.

4b. Rocky

Sylvester Stallone is a guilty pleasure. Just about every movie he has ever made qualifies. It’s not that he makes purely bad films; Sly just has an imagination and cinematic sensibility too big for conventional stories. So of course he can’t just have one franchise in the top five; Rocky and Rambo both deserve recognition.

Don’t let the Academy Award for Best Picture deceive you. The Rocky series is anything but cinematic royalty. It’s a basic rags-to-riches story with some great moments, but not much more. Taxi Driver or Network or All the President’s Men should have won that year, but something was in the water that year and Rocky won (if you need more evidence check out Roger Ebert’s review where he calls Sylvester Stallone a “Young Marlon Brando.”).

These films are quintessential 70’s and 80’s schlock. Each film finds a way to top the last one’s montage cheesy montage; the ultimate sequence being Rocky’s hilarious training sequence in the middle of a frigid Soviet village (pushing horses, walking through snow, and sawing logs) being mixed with Dolph Lundgren in the high tech Russian lab (lifting weights, working on menacing machines, and using liberal amounts of red lighting). Lines from Lundgren, Mr. T, and Sly himself are the kinds of quotable moments that make the great guilty pleasures resonate with us for our whole lives.

Still, Rocky gets put a notch below Rambo for its inability to maintain the awesomely bad brand. Stallone managed to pull it off four times in a row, but the fifth film in the franchise is patently unwatchable, and his recent effort was a boring disappointment.

4a. Rambo

On the other hand, the Rambo franchise benefits greatly from the series latest installment – title simply Rambo. It’s not a good movie by any means, but it ranks so highly on the unintentional comedy it’s makes it difficult not to enjoy it. The combination of over the top violence involving cross bows and the (seemingly) heavily medicated Sly Stallone combine for at least a 9/10 on the scale.

Stallone’s signature action franchise has always been known for its action and not much else. This is probably for good reason, but, like Rocky, when you watch these movies again the dialogue and barely there plotting aren’t the kind of detractors they were upon first release. Today, the painfully robotic dialogue between Murdock and Rambo serves as comic relief in a series generally devoid of humor.  This is the kind of stuff that makes guilty pleasure gold. The best guilty pleasures transcend their film’s faults and turn them into some of our favorite memories.

3. Will Ferrell’s Film Career

Hey, don’t give me that look.  This is less of a stretch than counting on a third Crank movie getting the green light. Will Ferrell may give his protagonist different names and identities in Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Blades of Glory, Semi-Pro, and Step-Brothers, but, at their cores is the same big, dumb, misogynistic, and past their prime character.

Ferrell suffers from the same SNL syndrome as Mike Myers. The difference between the two men and their relative location on this list is their consistency. As stated before, Myers has a great knack for ensemble humor, but he suffers greatly from some downright repulsive lows when his own jokes don’t land as intended. Ferrell surpasses Myers because he reaches the same highs of laughter in his quasi-series, but his lows, while still plentiful, are not nearly as bad.

What really makes these films guilty pleasures is their complete willingness to momentarily break from the realm of cinematic license, plotting, and continuity to get a laugh. Unlike Harold and Kumar, these films are set up with plots that are greater than going from point A to point B, and unfortunately that causes a lot of those divergences to leave you scratching your head instead of laughing hysterically.

They lack the consistency of their contemporaries Wedding Crashers and Old School and they’re nowhere near the level of masterpieces like Stripes, The Producers (the original), and Arthur (also the original). Where they fall short of these films in heartfelt storytelling and substantive messages though, they make up for in laughter. Ferrell’s films (if they do nothing else) make you laugh early, and they make you laugh often.  That’s enough for number three.

 

2. Star Wars (I, II, & III)

Hold your venom, just for a moment. I know the wounds still haven’t healed from the greatest mistake in modern film history (unless someone gives M. Night Shyamalan another chance) because I feel them too.

The Star Wars prequel trilogy is wrong in so many ways. It stained the reputation of one of the most beloved film franchises of all time. It gave Hayden Christensen a career.  It turned George Lucas from a film prophet to a film pariah.

The movies themselves have a lot of bad. The aforementioned Christensen is a natural stiff, but making him deliver all his lines to big green boxes and x’s on the ground made him catatonic in these films.  The Gungans are silly and more unfit for the series than the Ewoks were with their goofiness and poorly considered racial subtext. And lets not forget Darth Vader’s big reveal at the end of Revenge of the Sith being one of the most laughably bad (not in a good way like some of the other picks on this list) film scenes in recent memory.

These are all well established reasons the Star Wars prequels have been deservedly written off by the masses so far. If you publicly admit to enjoying them you’ll be shunned. This is why they’re the quintessential guilty pleasures though! It’s not just the “go against the grain” mentality that should motivate you either. Let me make the case for for why you should be enjoying these not-so-classics of film.

They are freaking AWESOME! Who cares if Lucas didn’t recreate the magic of the originals. When you give these movies a fair shake they’re a flat out blast. Sure they are bogged down by pseudo-political intrigue and acting weakened by the Kryptonite-like green screen, but everything else is so damn cool.

George Lucas may not know much about emotion and honoring your own work, but the man has a bold imagination. The pod racer sequences of the first film are dazzling (and the N64 game was pretty fantastic too), there are many more lightsaber duels which never get old, and Lucas never fails to direct the ambitious battle scenes in anything but the most enjoyable way. From a purely visual standpoint these films are top of the line.

Then you add Natalie Portman who, by the third film, has established herself as one of the most beautiful women in the world (I guess that’s still visual).  You add supporting parts by legendary badasses of film like Liam Neeson (Taken) and Samuel L. Jackson (the GOAT of cinematic badasses). You add Ewan McGregor who gives a performance that’s almost good enough to mask the stink of Hayden Christensen – what I’m saying here is there is a lot to like.

Star Wars I, II, and III may not fill any meaningful void in your life, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have value.  These movies are wildly imaginative and entertaining from start to finish.

1. The Fast and the Furious

The Fast and the Furious saga is one of the greatest rags-to-riches tales in American history. Over the course of ten long years and five films the series went from being a modest guilty pleasure player at the box office – catering mostly to the tuner car crowd – to being the the best summer blockbuster of 2011.

The credit has to go to director Justin Lin. After the abysmal 2 Fast 2 Furious – the best thing to come out of 2 Fast 2 Furious was the title. Since it came out I exclusively refer to each new installment as x Fast x Furious. It’s a lot of fun. I suggest you do the same. — almost sank the ship he was given the reigns to direct the money grab third installment Tokyo Drift (3 Fast 3 Furious). Surprising to just about everyone (except those who have seen Lin’s excellent debut film Better Luck Tomorrow) was how competent it was. Not good by any means, but it was better than 2, and it gave us the lovable character Hon (more on him later) who helped qualify it for guilty pleasure status.

Universal Pictures liked what he did so they gave Lin the green light to direct the latest two entries. Fast and Furious (4 Fast 4 Furious) was nothing special – possibly the most mediocre and least awesomely bad of the bunch.  What it did manage to do was make tons of money which guaranteed a fifth chapter.

This is where The Fast and the Furious series earns its top spot.  For anybody who has stuck by these movies and carried the guilty pleasure guilt for ten years, Justin Lin actually makes it pay off. Fast Five (5 Fast 5 Furious) is shockingly self-aware. So aware of itself in fact that it manages to condense every awesomely bad moment of the series into a tight two hour blockbuster that pleases newcomers and old faithful alike.  It’s a pleasing payoff like no other guilty pleasure franchise has.

If you’ve never seen a F&F movie before then to you the fifth film was just a big, loud, and dumb version of Ocean’s Eleven. You had a blast watching Vin Diesel and the especially yoked Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson finally fight each other like you always dreamed – the movie was fun. On the other hand, if you’ve been shamefully enjoying the franchise all this time Lin does a fantastic job of bring back all of the best characters from each film and playing up their awesomely badness in just the right way.

Hon, the lone Tokyo Drift representative, is the greatest payoff of all for the guilty pleasure crowd. Lin is friends with the actor who plays Hon (Sung Kang) and knows the fans love him so he gives him a cameo in 4 and a full on role in 5. The one problem here is this: Hon clearly died in the third film Tokyo Drift.

Rather than ignoring this clear continuity breach Lin plays it up to great guilty pleasure effect (because doing things that should be okay is what makes guilty pleasures so fun) by jokingly making Fast and Furious as well as Fast Five prequels to Tokyo Drift.  Towards the end of the Fast Five Hon breaks the forth wall in spectacular fashion with the winking line “Yeah… We’ll get there [Tokyo]… Eventually.”  It’s the highest form of fan service, and it feels so good in the best guilty pleasure around.

If you love guilty pleasure franchises as much as me then do watch the F&F series all the way through. It’s so bad and so good all at the same time. By the end of Fast Five any reservation you had will be gone – replaced by elation for the best guilty pleasure on film.

Some franchises like Police Academy just missed this list, but which other franchises did I forget that deserve recognition? Comment below!

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