Unabashed B-Movie Fan

A lot of the time, characters are shown watching stereotypically "bad" movies with titles like The Curse of ______, The Attack of ______, or The Night of ______. This is possibly to keep the focus on the title characters and prevent a Show Within a Show from developing, or simply because the writers themselves enjoy that kind of movie. More recently, though, it may be because so many of the pre-1964 B Movies have fallen into the public domain and can be used as a Show Within a Show without triggering any copyright concerns.

One of the biggest reasons writers do this, though, is that it can serve as an easy shorthand for a character's cultural values (or lack thereof). If a character is depicted as enjoying old B-movies, it is usually meant to indicate to the audience that they are low-brow and uncultured. These movies are notorious for being So Bad, It's Good, so the typical logic goes that anyone who enjoys watching them must have low standards for what constitutes a "good" movie. If you want to cement your character's status as an outcast from normal popular culture, having them be a fan of old B-movies is a common way to do it.

It also helps that typically B-Movies are Exactly What It Says on the Tin. For example, a more "cultured" movie title like Citizen Kane doesn't immediately tell you that it is a mystery-drama about a deceased man's life. Whereas if the characters watch a movie titled "Killer Lobsters from Planet X", you know what to expect and don't have to spend much time elaborating on what they are watching, so that the story can move on.

May be a case of Stylistic Suck, especially if the B-movie doesn't actually exist outside the world of the characters. Revenge of the Sequel may ensue. Sister Trope to Saw "Star Wars" Twenty-Seven Times, when a character's unabashed fandom of these movies involves numerous repeated viewings. See also Gory Deadly Overkill Title of Fatal Death. Can overlap with - or defy - Kids Shouldn't Watch Horror Films.

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Examples:

Advertising

• The 1998 Got Milk? commercial "Return of the Milkman" is played out like this, in the style of a retro kitschy black-and-white horror movie about a milkman, killed in a milk truck accident, who rises from the grave as a mummy to take milk from a supermarket.

Comic Books

• Blacksad: In Arctic Nation, Blacksad meets the missing girl's mother at her workplace, a drive-in theater where she works as a waitress; while waiting for her to show up, he watches a movie about giant killer ants menacing the United States (an allusion to Them!). Ultimately subverted, as he's just bored and killing time, and refers to it as crap that can't really be called a movie — though he also acknowledges he's not necking like all the teenage couples parked there.
• Robin (1993): Stephanie Brown is a fan of cheesy Sci-Fi. When she and Tim Drake go on their first date she takes him to a show where the audience is all in costume, so that they don't get any odd looks for going as Spoiler and Robin.

Comic Strips

• In Calvin and Hobbes, Calvin is constantly trying to convince his parents (and sometimes his babysitter, Rosalyn) to let him watch sleazy exploitation movies with titles like Cuisinart Murders of Central High, Vampire Sorority Babes, and Venusian Vampire Vixens. Of course, he never actually gets to see them, except in one instance where he locks Rosalyn outside.
  • In a Sunday strip, he imagines himself as Godzilla rising from the sea (his bathtub) to defeat Megalon (his mother).
• In The Far Side, insects watch "Return of the Killer Windshield", worms watch "Beak 2: Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Go Back into the Topsoil", potatoes watch "masher" films, and bottles of ketchup watch some kind of ketchupy slasher film ("Don't worry, Billy. They're just actors. And that's not real ketchup.")
  • Another comic gives us a scene from "Return of the Nose of Dr. Verlucci".
    Egad! It's the disembodied nose of Dr. Verlucci! Returned from the grave on the anniversary of the night we all betrayed him!
  • Caption for a city being invaded by killer ungulates: "Scene from the film Giraffes IV: This time, they're not just looking for acacia leaves."
• Shows up often in Garfield strips, particularly the older ones. One strip features several panels of ads for movies like "The Monday that Wouldn't Die" and "The Attack of the Incredible Slobber Monster". Jon then asks Garfield if he wants to go to a movie called "Slime Pit Zombie Chain Saw Massacre", to which Garfield agrees "as long as there are no Mondays" in it. The screen is not shown, the dialogue Narmy, the characters Genre Blind (with the occasional Genre Savvy character), and Garfield himself gives them the MST3K treatment.
• In a 1960-era Peanuts comic, Linus and Lucy are looking over the movie listings in the paper and see "I Was a Teenage War Monger" and "I Was a Teenage Camel Driver" - Linus comments "It's hard to choose between such obviously quality motion pictures!"
• Jeremy from Zits has shown a similar obsession occasionally.

Fan Works

• In Coreline, one of the recurring characters, security officer Roger Hackett, is one of these. His A Day in the Limelight short story, Blizzards and Bookstores, showcases that it's a type of relaxation technique to have a film playing in the background as he does his work (and then mentions he has played Megaforce about six million times as a relaxation technique). It also is a serious Berserk Button for people to mock him for this - you probably will have it easier if it's aimed at how bad the films are in general (ex. "Megaforce has one of the lousiest green-screen scenes in Eighties film", not "you are an idiot because you like Megaforce").
• In the infamous badfic My Immortal, protagonist Ebony is apparently fond of the equally infamous film Shark Attack 3.
• In Speed and Purpose, Sonic is most excited to get a TV so he can watch x-rated horror films like Killer Zombie Penguins.

Film — Animated

• A promo for Inside Out has the emotions' reactions (mostly Fear's) to Riley watching a horror movie called The Shoes of Doom. Movie posters seen in the dream studio advertise her nightmares like schlocky B-movies, only with titles like "Dad's Driving Scares Me" and "Grandma's Vacuum."
• In The Iron Giant, Hogarth watches The Brain That Wouldn't Die! and gets kind of jumpy, leading him to investigate some mysterious sounds outside.
• Lilo & Stitch uses these a lot. A clip of Earth vs. the Spider shows up on TV on display in a store window, catching Stitch's attention. In the sequels and first TV series, the entire ʻohana ends up watching movies like this on various occasions. It's no wonder Lilo comes up with ideas like pretending a bug laid eggs in her doll's ears to explain its oversized head.
• Norman Babcock from ParaNorman is fond of gory, cheesy zombie movies. While he's only seen watching one at the beginning and end of the movie, his room is filled with posters and memorabilia.

Film — Live-Action

• During the Good-Times Montage of 10 Cloverfield Lane, Michelle and Emmett watch the VHS of a fictitious movie called Cannibal Airlines.
• In The Babadook, Amelia is a habitual watcher of whatever is on TV late at night, and is seen watching Skippy the Bush Kangaroo in one scene and the '60s horror movie Black Sabbath in another.
• In BMX Bandits, Goose is a fan of slasher movies with titles like Kiss the Blood Off My Tyre Iron, and keeps regaling his friends (and, at one point, the crooks) with their plots.
• In the Framing Device for Creepshow, an unnamed boy - played by Joe Hill - is shown to be wild about horror films and especially comics. While Joe Hill's actual father, who wrote Creepshow's screenplay, would no doubt approve of all this, his father in the movie - played by Tom Atkinson - does not, and slaps his son for being into "that horror crap". The whole sequence is clearly meant to invoke the moral panic around horror comics in the 1950s that lead to the formation of The Comics Code.
• In The Deadly Spawn, Kid Hero Charles is obsessed with older monster movies, mainly those from the '50s, and it's implied that this gives him the emotional training he needs to make it through the low budget monster that's going on around him.
• In Donnie Darko, Donnie goes to see The Evil Dead (1981). It was originally supposed to be C.H.U.D., but they couldn't get the rights. However, later in the film he does refer to someone he doesn't like as a "chud".
• Bert I. Gordon liked to Product Place his B-movies in his other B-movies. Earth vs. the Spider has a scene where the hero talks about how much he wants to see Attack Of The Puppet People while the marquee of a movie theatre shows an ad for another Bert I. Gordon movie, The Amazing Colossal Man. Attack of the Puppet People also features a viewing of the Colossal Man as well.
• Orson Welles' F for Fake uses clips from the Ray Harryhausen scifi flick Earth vs. the Flying Saucers to represent the panic Welles allegedly caused with his The War of the Worlds broadcast decades earlier.
• Becomes a major plot point in the original Fright Night (1985), where the hero recruits his favourite horror actor to help him fight a vampire. The actor's name - Peter Vincent - is itself a homage to real-world horror actors.
• In Gremlins, Billy falls asleep watching the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), with the famous screams of "They're here already! You're next!" nicely coinciding with Billy's unwittingly instigating the entire gremlin rampage. Billy also has posters for Them!, Beginning of the End, and Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior in his room. Throughout the movie, characters are also seen watching non-B movies like It's a Wonderful Life and the largely-forgotten Clark Gable movie To Please A Lady, and there's a key scene at a movie theatre showing Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
  • Pointedly averted in Gremlins 2: The New Batch, where Robert Prosky's character, a cable TV Horror Host, is portrayed as deeply unhappy with having to watch Invasion Of The Octopus People (starring Robert Prosky) with a cheap dragon puppet, and would much rather be a news anchor. There's also a scene of film critic Leonard Maltin being murdered by gremlins while giving a negative review to a B movie called... Gremlins.
• In Lord Love a Duck, T. Harrison Belmont is the producer of beach movies such as The Thing that Ate Bikini Beach. Every one of his films has the word "bikini" in the title.
• Matinee explores this trope in detail, focusing on the premiere of a very silly B-movie (mostly a pastiche of Them! and The Fly (1958)) at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and how, to a lot of the characters, it's a very necessary release from the constant unease of the Cold War. John Goodman's character, the movie's director, waxes lyrical about why goofy escapist trash is actually extremely important.
• In The Monster Squad, the hero wants to go see a holiday-themed slasher film called Groundhog Day. This became Hilarious in Hindsight (and slightly confusing) a few years later when the actual film Groundhog Day - a charming romantic comedy with elements of Magic Realism - was released.
  • More broadly, the entire Monster Squad are huge fans of monster movies, particularly the Universal Horror body of work.
• The B-Movie The Monster That Challenged the World from 1957 has appeared in at least two other horror films; Piranha (the original 1978 version, being watched by one of the guards from the military camp) and Motel Hell (it's the movie being played at the drive-in).
• My Name is Bruce is a meta-example of this trope, the movie being about B-Movie star Bruce Campbell as himself meeting a bunch of B-Movie fans to help them get rid of a local monster. This is funny because it is by itself also a B-Movie.
• There's a scene in Troll 2 of Elliot and his friends watching the real Italian movie Grunt!, which features a gorilla who uses a crystal ball to fly around. Of course, Troll 2 is hardly any less stupid.
• In New Moon movies the characters go see a movie called Face Punch.
• In the original A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), the heroine watches The Evil Dead (1981) to try to stay awake. This doubles as a Shout-Out, since one scene of The Evil Dead has a visible poster for Nightmare director Wes Craven's earlier film, The Hills Have Eyes (1977).
• Randy Meeks, the resident Meta Guy of the first two Scream films, is a movie geek who is specifically into horror, especially B-grade '80s slashers. He is the first person to figure out that the killer is imitating a horror movie, and lays out a set of rules for surviving one (don't have sex, don't drink or do drugs, don't say "I'll be right back"). In the fourth film, Kirby Reed takes his place as his Lad-ette Distaff Counterpart, while the fifth introduces his niece Mindy Meeks-Martin, who is as much a horror buff as her uncle was.
• What Felix's career seems to have degenerated into in S.O.B., although it is mostly lowbrow comedies rather than campy horror films. His eulogy mentions movies such as Chicken at the Wheel.
• WNUF Halloween Special invokes this when a recurring Kitschy Local Commercial for a dentist's office features clips from Nosferatu and Carnival of Souls; although both of these movies are actually really good, they still fill the role of "old black-and-white horror movie", and their use in a cheesy Halloween-themed commercial for a dentist doesn't exactly inspire dread. That being said, they're also both in the public domain, so no-budget UHF advertising would readily use them over something else that would cost actual money.
  • There are also ads throughout for (completely fictional) weird old TV shows and TV movies with names like Sarcophagus (a horror movie about a mummy), Armed to Strike (a cheap action movie), and Galaxy Pilot and the Lazer Brigade (an embarrassingly low-budget Space Opera).

Literature

• Dave Barry likes to make fun of classic literature in this way, mentioning such titles as Hamlet II: The Next Day (noted for its Shower Scene) and Moby-Dick vs. the Atomic Bat from Hell.
• Captain Underpants's Extra-Crunchy Books o' Fun each had a story featuring a villain named Hairy Potty. The second Hairy Potty story was called The Night of the Terror of the Revenge of the Curse of the Bride of Hairy Potty, which ends with a teaser for The Night of the Terror of the Dawn of the Day of the Curse of the Late-Afternoon of the Son of the Bride of Hairy Potty.
  • One of the books also has a brief scene of George and Harold watching a Japanese monster movie on TV. From the illustration, it appears to be something involving Gamera.
• The Dresden Files: In Proven Guilty, supernatural beings that feed on fear take on the form of that Verse's Expies of various horror-film villains. One of the films imitated is titled "Nature Red", which is at least minimally literate as B-movie titles go; the others come from slasher-style series which play this trope to the hilt. Molly is the biggest fan among the main cast, to the point of helping organize the convention that attracts the beasties in question.
• In The Ear, the Eye and the Arm, Arm draws on his viewings of I Was a Teenage Werewolf to scare off a gang of superstitious witch-hunters. Apparently in 22nd-century Africa, B-movies from the 1950s are still running on late-night holovision. (Or it was remade under the same title, which would certainly not be unprecedented.)
• The Snark Theater frequented by the protagonists of Daniel Pinkwater's Snarkout Boys stories seems to show an eclectic mixture of obscure foreign films and American B-movies. According to The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death, a typical double bill might consist of Vampires in a Deserted Seaside Hotel at the End of August (in Serbo-Croatian with subtitles) and Invasion of the Bageloids, in which Earth falls under attack by "rock-hard, intelligent bagels from outer space."
• Two examples exist in the United States Of Monsters universe with Straight Outta Fangton protagonist Peter Stone and Bright Falls Mysteries lead Jane Doe. The former has an encyclopedic knowledge of vampire movies (despite being a vampire himself) and the other worked in the last Blockbuster in Michigan where she gained a vast knowledge of terrible horror movies. Given they live in an Affectionate Parody universe of monster movies, it makes them both very Genre Savvy.

Live-Action TV

• In The Big Bang Theory, Penny has had roles in the (fictional) B-movies Serial Ape-ist and Serial Ape-ist 2: Monkey See, Monkey Kill''. Howard found and watched the first film, probably enjoying Penny's Shower Scene. Amy and Bernadette found and watched the second film, where Penny had a more substantial role. By their reactions, the film was So Bad, It's Good.
• On Charmed, Phoebe's favorite movie is a B-horror movie called "Kill It Before It Dies"; in the episode "Chick Flick", a demon's powers cause the characters to become real, then the sisters to be trapped in the movie.
• On one episode of Community, Abed hosts a showing of the '80s movie Kickpuncher, which appears to be a bad Mad Max/Robocop mash-up. Abed and Troy even film a Fan Sequel for The Stinger. It features Kickpuncher's nemesis, Punchkicker.
• In the Nickelodeon teen series Drake & Josh, Josh works at a movie theater with a marquee filled with movie titles like 'Cave Mom' - each title indicating a more schlocky movie than the last.
• On Forever Knight, Nick Knight likes to watch old horror movies, particularly ones about vampires.
• Justine from GLOW is specifically a fan of the works of GLOW's director, B-movie legend Sam Sylvia. While there turns out to be a ulterior motive for her interest, she does stick to her love of movies and ends up getting a movie deal at the end of show for a script she wrote.
• In How I Met Your Mother, Ted and one of his girlfriends go to see Plan 9 from Outer Space on a date, and in another episode, as part of a two-minute speed date, they watch a few seconds of Manos: The Hands of Fate.
• In The League of Gentlemen, Ally and Henry are essentially a subversion of this trope. The two are gore-obsessed teens who judge a movie on "how many killin's it's got". Despite this, between the two of them they've watched such critically acclaimed films as Se7en (although they didn't like it because it only had seven killin's), Richard Eye Eye Eye and Trois Couleurs: Bleu. If, at some point in the film, somebody gets killed, they'll watch it.
• M*A*S*H used this as a Running Gag. Almost every movie mentioned as playing on a given day was some lousy B picture. On the rare occasions the camp was getting a good movie, it was usually a plot point. E.g., in "The Moon Is Not Blue", they want to get The Moon is Blue (a film notorious at the time for its use of the word "virgin"), and instead get State Fair. We see clips from both, and they end up bored by both. (Ironically, history has decided State Fair is marginally the better film.) They didn't care if it was good or not, just that it had been labeled "obscene", which had to be better than the horrendous G-rated schpeel they've gotten nonstop.
• In Monster Warriors, Kreeger runs a video store devoted to obscure B-grade science fiction and horror films. In particular, he is a huge fan of 1950s director Klaus Von Steinhauer and is a walking encyclopedia regarding Klaus and his oeuvre. This makes him the perfect person to advise the Monster Warriors when Klaus starts creating real monsters based on his old films and unleashing them upon Capital City.
• On the Animal Planet series, The Most Extreme, clips from B-movies and horror flicks are used to demonstrate talents that a particular animal has.
• Red Dwarf. Lister's favourite movies include Revenge of the Surf-Boarding Killer Bikini Vampire Girls and Vampire Bikini Girls Suck Paris. Another episode features Attack of the Giant Savage Completely Invisible Aliens, which is just as daft as it sounds. According to Rimmer, the movies are shown to the prison population as a Cool and Unusual Punishment, but that doesn't stop Lister from liking this one as well.
• During one scene in the Stargate SG-1 episode "Point of No Return", we briefly see O'Neill watching a black-and-white UFO movie.
  • What we see of the Show Within a Show Wormhole X-treme! is essentially a TV version of this. In-universe, it's a show based on the real show's main characters, and out-of-universe it's an excellent parody of the show itself and of science fiction in general, especially '60s-style campy sci-fi — with plenty of Stylistic Suck to go around.
• Star Trek: Enterprise: Apparently B Movies are shown on Movie Night on the Enterprise as well, though this is only referred to in conversation. The one film we do see them watching, The Wages of Fear, is a very good movie... but still arguably a B-movie with minimal licensing costs.
• There were movies in some Seinfeld plots, many of which were B movies like "Sack Lunch", "Checkmate", and "Prognosis Negative".
  • "DEATH BLOW! When someone tries to blow you up, not because of who you are but, for different reasons altogether."
  • "Rochelle, Rochelle: One Woman's Erotic Journey From Milan to Minsk".
  • The famous episode "The Chinese Restaurant" has the gang trying to quickly get dinner before attending a screening of Plan 9 from Outer Space.
• Star Trek: Voyager:
  • Tom Paris and Harry Kim are big fans of the campy B-serial The Adventures of Captain Proton, and frequently take on the roles of Captain Proton and his sidekick Buster Kincaid (respectively) in the holodeck (the program being in black and white, including Tom and Harry themselves.)
  • In one episode, Tom recreates a 20th-century movie theater in the holodeck so he and B'Elanna can watch Revenge of the Creature. At the end of the episode, many characters have gathered to watch a double feature which includes 'Attack of the Lobster People'.
• In Stranger Things, Mike and his friends are very much into sci-fi and horror movies, and play regular Dungeons & Dragons.
  • The local science teacher, Mr. Clarke, is also a big nerd who fully supports these interests, and one scene in the first season shows him watching The Thing (1982) on VHS with his girlfriend.
  • Implied with Jonathan Byers, who has a poster for The Evil Dead (1981) on his bedroom wall. In one scene, his lousy, absentee dad tells him to take the poster down because "It's inappropriate."
  • In the third season, Lucas uses the difference between The Thing and the '50s original as his go-to analogy to explain why he prefers the New Coke to classic Coca-Cola.
  • It's also clear that the writers themselves are also fans of this kind of content, and Stranger Things wears its genre influences proudly on its sleeve.
• In the episode "Hollywood Babylon" of Supernatural, Dean is revealed to be a fan of low-budget Horror movies.
• In The X-Files, Mulder claims to have seen Plan 9 from Outer Space 42 times, and claims he finds the movie useful for shutting down his brain's logic processes, allowing for intuitive leaps.
  Scully: You've seen this movie forty-two times? ... That doesn't make you sad? It makes me sad, Mulder.

Music

• The opening of Michael Jackson's "Thriller": On a date, Michael turns into a monstrous werewolf, lunges toward the girl, and the Fakeout Opening ends, revealing Michael is watching a B movie on a date. Then the music starts up and the whole video transforms into a B movie.
• Oddly enough, the band Monster Magnet (not named after the Zappa song, but just the toy of the same name) give shout outs to comic books and B-movies in their songs, "Goliath and the Vampires" and "Ego, the Living Planet" being examples.
• An album by a dub musician Scientist, itself called Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires (Which you may well know from the K-Jah station in GTAIII) has all its songs named in this fashion.
• This is central to the image of White Zombie and Powerman 5000, whose respective frontmen Rob Zombie (who later went solo with a very similar style) and Spider One are brothers. Both bands are rooted in an embrace of classic B-movie camp, with White Zombie's lyrics based on Universal Horror and '70s exploitation films while Powerman 5000 focuses more on homaging '50s Sci-Fi Horror and Alien Invasion movies. Both Rob and Spider later became Promoted Fanboys, with Rob becoming a horror filmmaker in the '00s while Spider produced the Horror Comedy series Death Valley.
• "Weird Al" Yankovic:
  • "Nature Trail to Hell" is presented as a trailer for one...in 3D!
  • "Attack of the Radioactive Hamsters From a Planet Near Mars" is also B-movie inspired, although the song itself claims to be referencing actual events.
  • Another song, "Slime Creatures From Outer Space", just screams b-movie.
• Frank Zappa loved B-films, especially cheap monster movies, and referenced them a lot in his work, sometimes only in the titles.
  • "Return of the Son of Monster Magnet", from Freak Out.
  • "Return of the Son of Shut Up 'n' Play Yer Guitar", from Shut Up 'n Play Yer Guitar
  • "Cheepnis" from Roxy & Elsewhere is an entire ode to B monster movies. In the spoken preamble, he specifically singles out It Conquered the World as a point of inspiration.
  • "The Radio Is Broken" from The Man from Utopia is a homage to B-science fiction movies.

Video Games

• The Para-Medic from Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater is obsessed with (real) B Movies and Japanese Toku, and talks about them a great deal to the main character, who isn't obsessed with B Movies. To be fair, she does like some classic movies, but there's no excuse for anyone, fictional or not, trying to convince an unsuspecting soldier to see Plan 9 from Outer Space or The Alligator People.
• One of the lines you can hear in Portal 2's Perpetual Testing Initiative involves Cave mentioning watching a movie called "Attack of the Killer Ants". He fell asleep shortly after it reached the part where they attacked the nation's sugar reserves.
• The main character from Secret of Evermore was obsessed with movies and would equate any encounter he had to being "Just like" various movies, most of them either starting with Attack of... or ending with ...from Planet X. Or just plain weird titles like Mars Needs Lumberjacks or Acropolis Apocalypse.
• The loading screens of War of the Monsters have a B-Movie poster for the level of choice, and generally has a B-Movie-like feel to the game. The menu screen is even a drive-in theater.

Visual Novels

• Last Chance in Xollywood: Jarl is not only a huge movie buff but also he has a soft spot for B-Movies. Throughout the game he will reference all kinds of bizarre alien flicks and compare whatever happens while working on Love Dies Screaming to them.

Web Animation

• Homestar Runner:
  • Strong Bad has expressed a fondness for "triple-R" rated movies like Women's Penitentiary Bakesale Nightmare, the Fists of Knuckles series, and Axe-Gun: Legends of the Brain-Outener. Similarly, the Cheat Commandoes have expressed a love for a series of Exploitation Films called Pony Fights.
  • The Strong Bad Email "unnatural" further parodies this type of movie, with Bubs mutating into a giant kaiju called King Bubsgonzola Supreme.

Webcomics

• In Broken Plot Device, Liz, who is a lizardwoman, sometimes plays at being a female Godzilla to amuse herself.
• Ennui GO! has Renee, who loves to watch bad and outright strange movies from various genres and eras, often delivering in-depth critical analysis on them. It's a trait she apparently picked up from her father Chuck.
• Homestuck:
  • John Egbert loves terrible movies like Mac and Me and Little Monsters, though his favorite is Con Air. He eventually grows out of this during the Time Skip when he watches Con Air again and suddenly realizes "THIS MOVIE SUCKS!". That being said, he learns to love it again when he realizes he doesn't have to stop liking it despite its bad quality.
  • Jake English is also a fan of cheesy action movies, but he and John do show an interest in some actually famous and good films, notably Avatar and Ghostbusters (1984) respectively.
  • Karkat Vantas loves awful romantic comedies with long, spoilery titles. Unlike the other kids, his films are all noted to be of terrible quality.
• Mountain Time offers Trampoline Tony and the Man-Eating Lettuce from Toronto, Blood Orange, and Apocallipsis (which is presumably about an ellipsis that ends the world), among others.
• Schlock Mercenary has a bunch of fictional media within the setting. Many of these are all sorts of awful.
  • The Jack San Robo series is heavily implied to be a horrible mindless action flick.
  • Fashion Assault is every bit as stupid as one would expect from the title.
  • The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Pirates (retconned into The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries due to copyright) is either brilliant and hilarious or incredibly trite and mindless.
• Star Power briefly features a show called "Psi-Cop" at the start of Chapter 16. What little we see seems to be in this vein, considering the classic Damsel in Distress scene, the protagonist uses "mind swords" and, as is revealed later, the bad guy is named Corporal Crime. From their reactions, they're well aware of its camp nature, but Danica sees it as a Guilty Pleasure and the others find it So Bad, It's Good.
  "This show is so stupid."
  "Then stop watching it."
  "I can't."

Web Original

• Solidly in The Cinema Snob's territory, as his portrayer is a fan of such schlock (specially of the exploitation kind) and the character is supposed to call out The Movie Buff who looks down on such material.
• Obscurus Lupa reviews mostly "Z-grade" films from the eighties and early nineties. She is plainly in love with that material, although some films aren't fun even from a camp standpoint.

Western Animation

• The title characters of The Angry Beavers are fans of these types of movies. Such choice titles as Viking Women from Venus (Who will become the bride of the volcano?!) and The Oozing Flesh *gag*... of the Rotting Hand. A Halloween Episode revolved around the monsters from those movies coming to life at the mansion of Oxnard Montalvo, the star of all these movies. Another had them finding some discarded film of an incomplete Oxnard Montalvo film...and then deciding to complete it themselves.
• Bob's Burgers
  • Bob in particular seems to be a big fan of old B-movies. He and Gene bond over their shared love of the Banjo Spaghetti Westerns (which spoof the Django movies), and with Louise over the Hawk and Chick films (parodies of the Lone Wolf and Cub samurai films). He also takes Tina to a screening of Vampire Disco Death Dance, a campy horror musical where the audience is encouraged to go in costume and throw things at the screen - an obvious parody of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
  • "The Deepening", a Jaws rip-off shot in the town where the show takes place. It features a younger, more handsome Teddy as a lifeguard.
  • Teddy is a big fan of The Ham and Egger, a blatant Rocky rip-off, which Bob does not hesitate to point out.
• Ed of Ed, Edd n Eddy is obsessed with B-horror movies and comic books, which, given his intelligence and grip on reality, does not bode well for his behavior. Especially when it rubs off on others. Cheese-ball movies like these appear to be popular enough in the show's world that stuff like "Robot Rebel Ranch" still plays at the local multiplex.
• Gravity Falls:
  • At the end of "Summerween", the gang watches a horror movie marathon, which includes a film called The Fear Guy From Terror Town Street that apparently consists of alternating shots of a screaming woman and a growling, obviously fake alien.
  • "Into the Bunker" opens with Dipper and Wendy watching a cheesy zombie movie called Nearly Almost Dead But Not Quite! The Stinger features a selection of bad movies showing on Gravity Falls Bargain Movie Showcase, such as Attack of the Exclamation Points!!!!!, Ghost Turtle, Planet People from Planet Planet and Help! My Mummy's A Werewolf (and its sequel Help! My Mummy's a Werewolf 2: This Again).
  • Inverted in "The Inconveniencing", where Grunkle Stan ends up becoming very invested in the highbrow, extremely dry costume drama The Duchess Approves.
• Lilo & Stitch: Lilo is a fan of these films and loves to watch them marathon-style. In the first movie, Stitch is also entranced by the film Earth vs. the Spider, because of all the destruction. In an episode of Lilo & Stitch: The Series, Lilo wants to see a monster movie called Attack of the Bones, and she also enjoys a film series called Wasp Mummies. In Lilo & Stitch 2: Stitch Has a Glitch, the 'ohana watch Them! for family fun night.
• One of the background TV movies is Assisted Living Dracula on Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
  • ATHF has a lot of these, such as the "Vegetable Man" and the creepy puppet thing the Plutonians were watching, and most are included as DVD extras.
• In Phineas and Ferb, Dr. Doofensmirtz inspires a plan after watching a low-budget horror movie about giant killer cats, though what the viewers see is footage of real-life kittens crawling and playing on top of a set made out of cardboard. This was very likely a parody of the laughably bad Night of the Lepus.
• ReBoot season 1 brings us the episode Wizards, Warriors, And A Word From Our Sponsor, in which Mike the TV saves the gang from a shadow monster by blowing out the light. When asked how he came up with that idea he replies: "Tonight! Dr. Goldsmith vs. the Shadow Monsters part 4! Only on BMMN, the Bad Monster Movie Network. I like that."
  • The games can be seen as a video game version of this.
• On Regular Show, Mordecai and Rigby watch Ello, Gov'nor, an old British horror film about a haunted taxicab. Mordecai was not impressed, but Rigby, who chose the movie in the first place, is freaked out and thinks the cab from the movie is out to get him. In his defense, it is, although it turns out to be the Video Store Clerk in a British Taxi Costume.
• In Sabrina: The Animated Series the local drive-in was playing "I was a Teenage Mutant Lobster Zombie From Outer Space" in which a teenager was mutated into said creature. Though where he obtained the spaceship from is never explained.
• Every film by Vincent Van Ghoul in Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated.
• In Shaun the Sheep, both the Farmer and the sheep seem to like low-budget horror films.
• In Static Shock, two of the characters are seen watching "Attack of the Zombie Cows". Other than the title, it is not seen...but you can hear it, and it consists of glass breaking, screaming, and mooing. Again and again and again.
• In the 1987's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the turtles are often watching cheesy monster movies on TV. This got Down Played in the 2003's series where Michelangelo is the only one who is a b-movie buff.

Real Life

• The ultimate Real Life movie title of this sort belongs to a Gag Dub of Night of the Living Dead (1968) called Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror of the Attack of the Evil, Mutant, Hellbound, Flesh-Eating, Subhumanoid Living Dead, Part II.
• B-Movies tended to run the gamut from the sublime to the ridiculous. Several B-Movies have in the course of time become accepted as legitimate works of art. The reason for this being that because it was regarded as Beneath Suspicion, filmmakers had more leg-room to explore interesting content and themes. Especially in the '60s to '70s, several major filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola openly discussed their love for these films and authentically cited them as predecessors, while arthouse darling David Lynch has cited b-movie legend Ed Wood as his biggest influence. And of course, Coppola and roughly a dozen other major filmmakers got their starts working for Roger Corman.

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