Secondhand Screenings Presents: Guilty Pleasures

What does it mean to have a guilty pleasure? Whatever harmless escapism you indulge in should be ridiculed by a majority. Should a man feel slight shame for analyzing hours of My Little Pony? Should a woman be put through any embarrassment for late night Belgian Waffle romps? Will the parasitic cinephiles halt their judgmental eyebrows and snickering brown-nosery for never considering Francis Ford Coppola and Jackass films as both respectable artforms? If the media makes you happy, enjoy it — plain and simple. For this edition of Secondhand Screenings, we’re looking at the critically-panned / societally-hated black sheep of the entertainment circuit that are some of our writers’ timeless classics.

Click
Director: Frank Coraci
Columbia Pictures
Released: 06.23.2006

There are good movies and there are bad movies, but I would say the more important distinction is whether or not I feel like it was a waste of time. This movie, as “bad” as it is, is not a waste of time. 

I return to this movie once every few years, and I couldn’t tell you why, except for the fact that I find it deeply entertaining, with Adam Sandler (Happy Gilmore, Little Nicky) at his best. If you’ve been living under a rock and you’ve never seen Click, Sandler is a busy father who spends all his time working, much to the chagrin of his out-of-his-league wife played by Kate Beckinsale (Love & Friendship, Jolt). After an argument with his wife, he goes to Bed Bath & Beyond and ends up walking into the Beyond section (genuinely a great bit) where he meets a mysterious figure named Morty (Christopher Walken, King of New York, Catch Me If You Can) who sells him a remote that can pause and skip time. Of course, he immediately abuses it and, long story short, it all culminates in a touching lesson that you have to take the good with the bad and that’s what makes life special. 

I am not ashamed to say this movie has made me cry — it also made me laugh. It also had me scratching my head when they let Rob Schneider play an Arab man complete with kaftan, keffiyeh and brown-painted skin (woof). Besides that nonsense, it’s a great movie with a good lesson and an appearance from Henry Winkler (Happy Days, Sabrina the Teenage Witch). Watch it! —Cam Elliott

Condorman
Director: Charles Jarrott
Walt Disney Productions
Released: 07.02.1981

There are movies from your childhood that you should never revisit as an adult, because they aren’t going to hold up well. By all rights, Condorman should be one of those movies, but I still have fun with it.

Condorman stars Michael Crawford (who went on to Broadway immortality as The Phantom of the Opera) as Woody Wilkins, a comic book creator who becomes entangled in a real-life espionage mission after helping his CIA agent roommate, Harry (James Hampton), with a document exchange. When a Soviet agent, Natalia Ranbova (Barbara Carrera), decides to defect, she demands the CIA send Woody, who uses the opportunity to try out his wildest comic book gadget ideas in real life, all on the taxpayer’s dime (and each one of them is more useful than a ballroom). Soon, Woody is flying around Europe in an experimental winged suit, battling assassins and trying to live out his superhero fantasies. It all plays very much like James Bond crossed with Super Friends. It flopped at the box office and was pounded by critics, while being thoroughly ridiculous on every level. I still find it to be superior to most of the Roger Moore films of the era, and Henry Mancini’s rousing musical score is embedded in my DNA. I won’t say that the critics of the day were wrong, but neither are those of us who have held onto this movie as a joyful treasure for over 40 years. —Patrick Gibbs

Dead Island 2
Directors: David Stenton, James Worrall
Dambuster Studios
Released: 04.21.2023

Why do we find comfort in the blood splatteriest of gruesome media? There are the most ironic ways, like the bright pink kawaii culture from Japan indoctrinating the Saw franchise into some cutesy DeviantArt. There’s the “That kind of makes sense” sort of way, like Ms. High School Popularity having a twisted obsession with true crime podcasts and documentaries. And then there’s the pending danger of impressionable pre-teens mentally scarring themselves to find the most depraved of clips on a late-night dive through LiveLeaks. Perhaps it’s human nature to crave such chaos, but only when it’s an arms-length away or depicted through the safety glass of a computer screen. It’s car crash television, and we’re all tuning in! That’s why I find my anxiety level depleted and a sense of euphoria heightened when I crack open a zombie’s brain matter with a meat cleaver in Dead Island 2. 

It’s been 15 years since a deadly virus put the Banoi Archipelago on permanent lockdown. Now, an outbreak has made it to the mainland — smacked dead center in Los Angeles. After the entire city has been put under quarantine by the US military, six playable “Slayers” board the last airplane out of dodge before it’s shot down during the evacuation. Surviving the plane crash and supposedly immune to the virus, it’s up to you to brave the blood-stained streets of Southern California with whatever weapon you can find and discover that there’s more afoot than just a city-sized horde of the undead.

Dead Island 2 was in development limbo for most of the 2010s, but once it rose from its slumber… fans of the original were “meh.” The game brought a rinse-and-repeat, first-person shooter drive with clunky mechanics and repetitive graphics, which landed as hard as the paddle weapon from the first game for gamers — not very effective. Above all, the biggest gripe was the idiocracy that Dead Island 2 didn’t take place on an island, unless you count North America as one big ass “island.” However, the game is on me to the fact that I’ll still browse gameplays before my trips to Venice Beach. Although saturated in hype and generically unoriginal, Dead Island 2 is still my comfort game.

Besides, since the SoLa DLC dropped, there’s only one way to pregame Kilby Block Party. —Alton Barnhart

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Director: Toby Haynes
Cuba Pictures, Feel Films, Attraction
Released: 06.13.2015

I read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke in November of 2024, and as I was sitting there with the 800-page, footnoted tome open in front of me, I thought about how great it would be as a fantasy period drama and how someone should totally make that. Then I found out that my wish had already come true. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is a seven-episode magical Regency-era mini-series that stays mostly true to its Hugo award-winning source material.

We’re introduced to a large cast of eccentric characters, beginning with Mr. Segundus (Edward Hogg, Jupiter Ascending, The Yellow Tie) and Mr. Honeyfoot (Brian Pettifer, Amadeus, Damaged), who both wish to know why magic is no longer practiced in England. In their search for answers to their question, Segundus and Honeyfoot encounter the book-hoarding Mr Norrell (Eddie Marsan, Happy-Go-Lucky, The World’s End), who is a living, breathing practical magician. Norrell then endeavors to restore magic to England – the respectable kind of magic, of course. But in the process, he awakens a kind of magic that is not, as he would deem it, respectable at all and spends the rest of the series trying to hide it. Norrell soon gains an apprentice, Jonathan Strange (Bertie Carvel, Dalgliesh, The Tragedy of Macbeth), who is his opposite as well as his equal. Impulsive and brazen, Strange upsets everything Norrell believed about magic, winning accolades on the Napoleonic battlefield and doing spells by intuition rather than by study. Conflict ensues between them and mixes with the consequences of Norrell’s earlier shady spell that involved a twisted bargain with a dangerous fairy.

The characters are the beating heart of this story. Norrell and Strange’s relationship is complicated as it moves between friendship and enmity. The TV adaptation did a great job with them, even succeeding in making Norrell a little more sympathetic to the audience than he is in the book. A few changes made to the storyline altered themes and rubbed me the wrong way a bit, but it is ultimately one of the best book adaptations I’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing. It was a low-budget production, but the result is pretty spectacular. The iconic greenish cinematography and otherworldly score make for a magical experience that I can’t help but return to over and over and over and over again. –Rebekah Bowman

Left Behind
Director: Vic Armstrong
Stoney Lake Entertainment
Released: 10.03.2014

Left Behind  is the worst movie I’ve ever seen. The basic plot is that Nicholas Cage (yes, THE Nicholas Cage) is airline pilot Rayford Steele whose daughter, Chloe, has come to town for his birthday. Rayford is going to miss his birthday party because he’s been called in to pilot a flight to London. While piloting, the rapture happens. God’s faithful have been brought to Heaven leaving everybody else on Earth to tough it out. Now if that doesn’t sound interesting enough, let me interest you in some of the most un-special special effects you’ve ever seen, and acting so wooden Noah could make a second ark out of it.

I first saw Left Behind in theaters with two of my best friends and have never been able to forget it because it’s maybe the only “so bad it’s good movie” that I actually enjoy watching. Maybe it’s the nostalgia of remembering watching it with good friends, maybe it’s the fact that as I’ve grown up I’ve come to appreciate ham-fisted propaganda that movies like this peddle; I can’t say with certainty but I can say that re-watching it for this piece delivered unto me an easy way to laugh through a little less than two hours of an evening which is about as much of a higher purpose as I think this film could realistically have. —Hans Magleby

Pee-wee’s Playhouse
Director: Wayne Orr, John Paragon
Broadcast Arts
Released: 09.13.1986

Ten years ago, when my sisters and I still stayed at our dad’s house, we sat on our shared air mattress in the living room and selected a new movie on Netflix: Pee-wee’s Big Holiday. We watched the opening scene where he gives an alien a friendship bracelet, said “What the fuck is this shit?” and promptly turned it off. Five years after that, we gave it another chance, got past what turned out to be a pretty irrelevant dream sequence and laughed our asses off. Thus began my obsession with Pee-wee Herman, and I was soon after blessed with a thrift God find: a box set of the entire Pee-wee’s Playhouse series. Pee-wee’s Playhouse is your classic children’s show: talking furniture, puppets, friendly neighbors in caricature costumes (before he ruled over the desert of the real, Laurence Fishburne was Cowboy Carl) and magic. It’s just so much stranger. Pee-wee’s frantic energy and the shapes and colors in that house (the attention to detail in the set design is mindblowing) make you feel like you’re on drugs. But it also feels like a walkable community when the other members of the neighborhood come to say hello. Some of my favorite bits are when we get to hear from Penny, a whole-ass clay-mation short portraying the relatable stories of a rambling little girl, and when the King of Cartoons shows up to show us an old-timey cartoon. I’m not sure how much of a guilty pleasure this really is, since the real ones know it’s art. But for those of you who reacted the same way I did when I first met our wacky, wonderful host, give him another shot. The secret word of the day is SLUG — ahhhhhhh!!!!! –Braxtyn Birrell

Waiting…
Director: Rob McKittrick
Eden Rock Media, Element Films, L.I.F.T Productions
Released: 10.07.2005

My young and impressionable baby sister somehow got her hands on an old DVD/VHS combo player recently, much to my jealous dismay, from a mysterious old man (who may or may not be a wizard) that no longer had use for it. With it, came a plethora of hits from his own personal collection. Hits like Fried Green Tomatoes, Blue Velvet and of course, the entire first season of Hannah Montana. Amongst the scattered relics and gems, lies in waiting, Waiting... Upon learning my parent’s other offspring hadn’t seen the disgusting masterpiece for herself, we popped it in and braced ourselves for the best (worst) movie of our lives.

Waiting… follows a day in the life of the crew working in a franchised restaurant called Shenaniganz (sans Triple Dipper or Blooming Onion unfortunately) . We have dweeb waiter Dean (Justin Long, Barbarian, Tusk), womanizer Monty (Ryan Reynolds, Deadpool. Green Lantern) new kid Mitch (John Francis Daley, Freaks and Geeks, Horrible Bosses) and a smattering of other employee stereotypes you’d find in the restaurant industry. They play disgusting games like “Penis Showing Game” and get up to antics where they hide saliva, pubes and the like in rude customers’ food. While Monty is showing Mitch around, and flirting with the underage hostess, we watch as the insufferable Dean mopes about as his friends all have better paying jobs than him. We also watch as Dean decides whether or not to take up an offer from his manager Dan, the position of assistant manager at Shenaniganz. This flick has everything, toilet humor, realistic depictions of working in the service industry and (hold for gagging) a Dane Cook appearance. 

Sounds like an absolute stinker, right? Well it is, but that’s the beauty of it. It’s crass, stupid and beyond politically incorrect. Though that being said, Waiting… holds a soft spot in my heart, it’s one of the movies I remember watching over and over with my parents and thinking “wow so this is what adults get to watch” and laughing at jokes that went over my head. It’s also one of the movies I first introduced to my partner when we first started living together and now here I am six years later introducing my little sister to this shitty slice of life.I would also argue, it’s relatable to anyone who’s ever worked in any sort of service industry. We’ve all been there and done that just like this group of raunchy characters have. It’s not the best film ever made, but it certainly could be worse. Check it out wherever you can find it and experience a true gem from the early aughts! —Yonni Uribe

Read more special editions of Secondhand Screenings:
Last Call for Secondhand Screenings!
Screenings So Bad: A Secondhand Screenings Special

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