This one is for all my English speaking fans…both of them.

As you may know, I’m a BIG fan of motion pictures. I watch every type…yup even some chick flicks. My favorite type is comedy and the stupider the comedy, the better. The simpler it is, the more fun for me. If you see some of my favorites you would be amazed. I even have them apart from all the other because these are films that not even my wife would like to see again.

I’ve spent years of study of the hard craft that is filmmaking…yes, I went to College to learn about TV, radio & Film Production. I’ve seen the first ever films made and some of the latest, some of which pale in comparison with the ones made in the early 1900’s.

Anyway, back to my point. I found about the common factor in all the “bad” movies I love for so long.

It’s called The Cannonball Run Effect. For those of you who don’t know this movie classic, it is about a group of people racing illegally across the USA and the first to arrive gets a big money prize. The movie is starred by the biggest actors of its day (1981) and was mostly improvised. Obviously, the director kept the best improvisations and when asked, the actors and director all say that “that was the most fun I’ve had making a film”

There. There is the killing blow…fun.

As soon as I hear this sentence spoken by one participant of a movie, my hands get itchy and I can't wait for the movie to come to the theater. Of course, 30% of these films are really bad even by my low standards. The rest are underrated jewels. They must have even a single moment or a laugh for me to remember it forever…and look for it on the bargain bin at Wal Mart.

In a moment, I can have an epiphany compared to a person that can find seconds of a long lost Buster Keaton stunt in pristine condition. Go out and buy or watch They Call Me Bruce, Caveman, Army Of Darkness, Brain Donors, Jekyll & Hyde Together Again, Super Fuzz, Yellowbeard, Zorro: The Gay Blade and a long etc. Watch in amazement how an executive at a major studio approved these scripts to make it to the big screen.

You have heard about these big, epic, Oscar winning films. “It was so hard to make”, re-doing scenes, over budget, clashes between the director, actors and producers, Divas asking for bigger trailers, CGI to erase the hits of time on their faces or to add a complete detailed world as a background that costs thousands of dollars a second. To make it worse, the endless rewrites of the script.After a few decades of filming the same movie and fights about money comes out a masterpiece, the Library Of Congress begs for a copy and everybody involved in it can ask for a few millions more for the next one.

The ones I like are made sometimes cheap, sometimes expensive and almost never make their money back. To me, these underdogs are made with more heart than the big ones. It’s all about fun. If people don’t like it…well we don’t make another one and go back to work at Ponderosa. If they do, great! Let’s make another one with more money and maybe repeat the formula that made us good in the first time.

They are mostly a labor of love, the writing took most of the life of the writer and the studios expect the same success to be written in a year or two. Not good for these filmmakers but thankfully most of them can repeat the success.

 The rest, back to Ponderosa.

The Cannonball Run Effect is not present in all movies. Some of them never get it, but some will get it during the whole production. The effect is 50-50 without question…the movie comes out really good or really bad. I laugh at almost everything so even the really bad have a redeeming bit.

Hey…I can wait a month to go and see “The Dark Knight”, but I went on opening weekend to see “Disaster Movie”

That sentence will give you the best summary of all I wrote up there.