10 Successful Low Budget Films (That Weren't As Good As You Think)

10. Clerks (1994)

Clerks is actually a good movie: if you were ever a teenager in the '90s desperate for something more interesting to watch than Forrest Gump and Angels In The Outfield, it is kind of hard to pretend that this movie didn't have a huge hand in your development as a frustratingly jaded 20-something film viewer. It is a movie with great dialogue that really does represent the classic low-budget ethos well, and its success is a great motivator to a lot of struggling filmmakers. It also launched the career of Kevin Smith, but whether or not that is a good thing is entirely dependent on your own personal preferences. What can't be argued is that Clerks does a fantastic job of representing the attitude of the typical "slacker" and does it better than any big budget movie ever would. With all that said, Clerks isn't one of the funniest movies ever. You wouldn't notice that from the praise though. It holds an impressive 88% on Rotten Tomatoes, and has the same score as Ferris Bueller's Day Off on IMDB. It is somehow ranked above Office Space AND Airplane. Even Roger Ebert liked it - presumably, his favourite scene was not the rattling off of as many pornos with the word "cum" in it as they could think of - and Empire rated it the 4th greatest independent film of all time in any genre. Even questioning Clerks sets off some sort of alarm that has angry mobs descend upon you, which is mostly because a lot of its most vehement fans seem to think "quotability" always means quality, and if that were true Adam Sandler would have won an Oscar for Billy Madison. Clerks is a movie where nothing really happens and nobody learns anything, which is a fantastic statement on life but not such a great thing to do in a film. It is also hard to forget that the original cut of Clerks featured an ending so hackneyed that no amount of pithy lines about oral sex could have saved it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERDGH7SpzZ8