As much as I love good film — the transformative power of a story well told, the otherworldly experience of settling into the dark as the lights come up on someone else’s dream — there is something to be said for the bad ones out there.
To be clear, I’m not talking about the hundreds of generically bad movies that get put out every year that simply don’t work for whatever reason. (Ironically, perhaps, those films rarely suffer from a lack of budget — so many terrible films manage, like tire fires, to look beautiful as they burn.) Instead, I’m talking about those rare birds, so often underappreciated in their time, that are only rediscovered after their own era has faded into a hazy nostalgia. These are the bad films that are treasured by true film and pop culture nuts, because they become time capsules that capture our collective obsessions at their most absurd. We look back at them and shake our heads and wonder what we were thinking, and we leave the theater laughing, believing — wrongly — that we’ll never make those mistakes today.
This week, West Springfield’s Rave Cinemas gives moviegoers a chance to relive one of the greats from the 1980s when it brings in Miami Connection for an Oct. 1 show as part of the RiffTrax series. Like so, so many great/awful ’80s films, this one features — get your bingo card ready — ninjas, motorcycles, cocaine, a rock band, and college girls (as a bonus, it also tacks on a “long-lost father” subplot).
The story gets underway with a drug deal gone bad, broken up by a gang of motorbike-riding martial arts masters who make off with a load of coke and head to Orlando to live it up. There, the ninja crew get involved in a squabble with the resident rock band/Tae Kwon Do outfit Dragon Sound (having the same guys in both groups presumably makes practices easier), whose bassist is dating the sister of one of the ninjas. In case you’re wondering whether things get any more normal the further you go along, the answer is definitely no.
As one might guess, Miami Connection was not a great hit when it was released. Truth told, it nearly forced producer/star Y.K. Kim into bankruptcy, and when Drafthouse Films first tried to reach out to the filmmaker in hopes of a re-release (a programmer at Drafthouse had discovered the film in an eBay auction), Kim kept hanging up on them, assuming the calls were someone’s idea of a joke. But they finally prevailed, and today Miami Connection enjoys a small but cultish following on the bad-film circuit that RiffTrax mines so effectively. Featuring a crew of TV writers (creators of the Mystery Science Theater series) who trade witticisms as the film unfolds, it brings one of the best parts of watching bad movies — the fun that comes from making jokes about them with your friends — to the big screen.
Also this week: One of the truly great films of the ’80s — The Princess Bride — will also screen at Rave (as well as sister theater Cinemark in Hadley) on Sunday and Wednesday this week. A mix of fairy tale, comedy, and coming of age story that has rarely been equalled, it is that rare film that truly has something for everyone in the family. Cary Elwes and Mandy Patinkin lead a perfect cast that includes Wallace Shawn (“Inconceivable!”), Peter Falk, and Andre the Giant, among others. For so many, it is the sort of film that, as soon as you see it on television, demands that you stop flipping through the channels and watch it through to the end, no matter how often you’ve seen it before. Why not take the chance to see it on the big screen instead?•
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.
