One of my favorite pastimes is watching terrible movies with friends. I find it more fun than watching good movies with friends, because when I’m watching a good movie, I actually want to pay attention to it, which seems a little counterintuitive when I’m with a group of people I want to engage with. This preference has really crystallized for me during this pandemic, where contact with most of my social circle is limited to the digital realm. When my friends and I get together over Houseparty, we don’t want to watch anything important that we have to pay close attention to, but we also don’t want to sit around and talk about how scary the world is and how miserable we are. All we want, really, is to watch awful movies and provide each other with running commentary about how awful they are.
So, here are five absolutely fucking terrible movies I’ve watched with friends while social distancing — all of which are available to stream on Netflix right now, if you’re feeling masochistic. I’m going to include some comments from my friends about some of these films, starting with this quote from my friend Allan, who was present for all five viewings: “All of these movies are so utterly forgettable that I originally asked to be excluded from this article as I had no recollection of having watched any of them.” In contrast, my friend Kelly, who watched only 15 minutes of one of these movies with us, said of the experience: “I don’t anything anymore.” That turned out to be a typo, but it resonates with me anyway.
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