Category:C Movie Review

From Zanecorpwiki

B Movie, to my mind, is a largely positive term. Not Hollywood, but often fun and usually interesting. B movies are naive, the best are optimistic, but they're not stupid. Whether consciously or through a kind of ineffable transcendence which is hard to explain, the B Movie knows what it is.

C Movies a different beast. They have neither the self awareness nor the blithe assurance of transcendence. Whereas both B and C movies are poor in many ways (acting, special effects, action sequences, plot, etc.), the B movie will--either intentionally or instinctively--play this up. The C movie moves along as if there's no problem.

C movies are not necessarily bad (good/bad is mostly an orthogonal question), they just don't have anything unique. They may be interesting as snapshots of some past era--their ignorance of what they are does impart a kind of honesty. C movies are often a great lesson in film making, media, and communication because the mistakes they make are so obvious as to be spotted by even the novices. One of the truisms of the C movie, however, is that individually, they have nothing to say. Even though I love C movies, but I don't love any particular C movie because they're not really any difference.

As far as I'm aware, C movies are by and large a Western and specifically US phenomenon.^[1] Part of the very idea of the C movie is that you've got enough money to waste on a conventionally bad movie.

One hallmark of C movies is too much dialog. It's a combination of bad writing, poor directing, and overall the lack of maturity necessary to realize that not all actions and thought need to be explicitly announced. Actions and thoughts which we would normally indicate in everyday life by a shrug or a look are narrated. Words become a stand-in for emotion.

At worst, the scripts are nothing more than collections of cliché. There's a bland shallowness to the movies. B movies can also be described as shallow, but it's more positive. A kind of naive shallowness often related to a focus on a message or style. Some intent. The C movie is just flat. Potentially interesting plot twists are met by the actors with the almost the same intensity and expression as when they order lunch.

Notes

1. ↑ My knowledge of international cinema is above average, but it does not extend so far as to the necessarily remote world of relatively unknown, low budget films. The idea that C movies are a Western/US thing is a somewhat educated guess, so take it with grain of salt and let me know if I ere.