Trash movie

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Trashfilm ( Engl. Trash , garbage ') is a term that is of poor quality for movies style low budget is used. Trash films usually receive negative criticism in the media and find their audience among a group that specializes in these films.

Features that allow a film to be classified as a trash film are, for example, very poor acting, sparse and fake-looking equipment, cheap special effects in which the real cause of the simulation can be recognized, as well as illogical storylines with flat dialogues. There are also films that intentionally use these features as stylistic devices.

While trash films are also seen by people who expect a film that is qualitatively equivalent to a mainstream production, the genre is particularly popular with a group of viewers who view trash films from an ironic distance and who amuse themselves with amateurism . In this scene, certain films can achieve great cult status . Trash films from the 1970s and 1980s are particularly popular.

Trash film in its cultivated form

An important pillar of trash film in its cultivated form is the conscious use of bad style elements in order to make use of their comic moments. These arise when seeing unsuccessful scenes and are based on a kind of natural “malicious joy”. Examples of bad style elements are a shaky camera, bad sound, bad costumes, inappropriate locations, insufficient props, and so on. The fan of the trash film is very well aware on a meta level that the amateurism was intended and did not result solely from a lack of talent.

A second important pillar of the cultivated trash film is the demarcation from the commercialization and technical perfection of large Hollywood productions, which in most cases tell trivial stories with enormous effort. Trash films thus offer an ideal platform for all forms of parody .

A third pillar is subversiveness . Deliberately ignoring social and cinematic rules in trash films is an effective form of protest. It is not uncommon for trash elements to be used to convey social criticism.

The formal language of the trash film can be applied to all genres of conventional film. In this respect, a diverse number of sub-genres of trash film can be recorded. Popular sub-genres are monster films, splatter films, period films or commercials. Realizations in the context of sports reports, political programs or funeral television are also conceivable.

history

The American director Ed Wood is generally considered to be an early pioneer of trash films. In the 1950s, he was posthumously voted “worst director of all time” in the book Golden Turkey Award , among other things because of his bad films . However, Ed Wood is a typical representative of involuntarily bad productions, who was convinced of the quality of his works all his life. Further examples of involuntarily bad productions are James Cameron's Piranha 2 - Flying Killer , Tommy Wiseau's The Room , or, from the recent past, Ulli Lommel's Daniel - The Magician .

In the meantime, trashy music videos have also been recorded, sometimes they only break through in the music charts (e.g. Grup Tekkans Wo Are You, My Sunlight ?).

Commercial films also make use of the stylistic devices of trash films. In the 1960s, for example, everyday items such as irons and bathroom fittings were apparently used as spaceship props in the German TV series Raumschiff Orion . The British comedy troupe used in the 1970s Monty Python Trash elements in their films, which increased its quirky humor, in the United States was Bill Rebane with its horror films like Return of the giant spiders as "Master of Trash Films". In Germany, Helge Schneider landed big box office hits in the 1990s with his trash films ( Texas - Doc Snyder keeps the world in suspense , 1993 and 00 Schneider - Hunt for Nihil Baxter , 1994). The American filmmaker Quentin Tarantino also regularly uses the stylistic elements of the trash film that are formative for him in his big Hollywood blockbusters ( Inglourious Basterds , 2009, Django Unchained , 2012). Comic-like depictions of violence flow into his work as much as elements of art cinema.

At the end of the 1960s, American B-film authors first used trash elements to convey socially critical messages. Pink Flamingos by John Waters (1972) ironically defied practically all the conventions of good taste that were in force at the time, also with the goal of giving dissenters and outcasts greater social capacity. Christoph Schlingensief's films Das deutsche Kettensägemassaker (1990) and United Trash - The Column (1996) have made well-received trash productions that, in a cheeky and tasteless manner, aptly parodied important political issues at the time and thus his role as a serious political provocateur of the German film industry. and the world of theater.

features

The trash film as an involuntarily bad production is essentially based on three requirements:

  1. Lack of financial resources.
  2. Lack of talent.
  3. The intention of the creators to make a "good" film.

However, the latter is not an absolute necessity; Trash films are often the result of the fact that those responsible are simply indifferent to the quality of their work. This attitude can be seen, for example, in numerous direct-to-video productions .

In trash film in its cultivated form, a virtue is made out of this necessity:

  1. The lack of financial resources is made a principle.
  2. The lack of talent is generously ignored.
  3. The intention of the creators is to produce trash.

In this way, the trash film may achieve a profit-to-cost ratio that can be far higher than that of the commercial film. In English the phrase arose: “ No-Cost Production is better than Low-Cost Production. "(In German: A production that costs nothing is better than a production that costs little.)

With the help of this categorical cost reduction, a radical democratization of film production is attempted. Anyone can make a trash film. Due to its shabbiness, the trash film resists political instrumentalization and defies any interpretative sovereignty. The trash film thus pursues a similar concern as the independent film .

Important directors and producers

Mention should be made of Lloyd Kaufman , who founded Troma together with Michael Herz in 1967 and appears again and again in films (most recently with Slither - Full of Slime ). Another trashregisseur is often named Roger Corman , who had produced a lot of inexpensive films, especially in the 1960s / 1970s, and sometimes directed them himself. But he has also made some more substantial films over the years.

Other "Trash" directors:

Important actors

The following are to be mentioned as outstanding actors on the trash film scene:

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ "Ed Wood: The Best of the Worst" . Legacy.com. Retrieved November 23, 2017.
  2. ^ "10 great films that influenced Quentin Tarantino" . British Film Institute website. Retrieved November 23, 2017.