10 Terrible Movies Everybody Loves
7. Miami Connection
Miami Connection director Y.K. Kim really made a movie about college teenagers who live together, play music together and fight ninjas together and expected it to be a blockbuster. That right there is the recipe for a certain kind of Good Bad movie which, eventually, is what Miami Connection became.
Released in 1987 and horrifically panned, the movie went unseen for decades until a particular eBay purchase of a reel in 2012. This led to screenings and a viral reignition of interest. And how couldn’t it, with a premise like that? What the 1980s wasn’t ready for was perfect for the ironic tastes of that later era.
Sometimes we forget that at the heart of things, a movie just has to be fun. Despite its awkward acting, pacing and effects, Miami Connection has buckets in the fun department. It genuinely has cheesy pop-rock songs about being “friends for eternity”, and the bond of the band Dragon Sound and their devotion to taekwondo and guitar solos is adorably earnest.
Kim said in an interview that he spent $1m on the film, bankrupting himself in the process, and then spent two decades trying to forget it after it failed. However, what appears on screen is hard to deny as a cast and crew having the time of their lives creating an awesome, campy karate movie.