Guilty Pleasures

First on the agenda: low brow film pleasures....those guilt-ridden fests that cause any cookie-cuter cinephile to squirm and squander with distate. Sure, they're not exactly flying in the realms of high art, but hey, screw deepness. Screw meaning. Screw anything that would crimson the cheeks of an intellect with pride. I want cheap, bargain-bin entertainment. I want formulaic celluloid turd smeared onto every pixel of the screen.

80's action flicks
Genre conventions:

1. Steroid ladden actors with questionable thespian abilities. Commonly seen draped in leather jackets, american-badassery jeans and the quintessential white cotton oil-spillage vest.
2. Poofed up hair with its own gravitational orbit. A speckling of mullets. Permed-up hair that uses enough hairspray to make a sieve out of the ozone layer.
3. An exponentially increasing body count.
4. The eurotrash villain with a cheese-curdling accent, a disused warehouse hideaway and a blood-thirsy steroid-ladden aide to exchange punches with the disgruntled true-blue hero. The aide usually dies by falling into a barrel of sizzling liquid in the warehouse. The hero sighs and regurgitates some wry one-liner.
5. Weapons look like household appliances. Grenade launchers, flame throwers and uzis are the norm. Anything that fits into a holster doesn't cut it. Big balled heroes need big ass machinery.
6. A midly homoerotic male bonding session mid-film.
7. A video montage set to some middle-of-the-road soft-rock or synthesiser music.
8. A title that includes one or money of the following: 'Death' 'Action' 'Mission' 'Blood' 'Soldier' 'Kill'.
9. The poster involves a tango-tanned condom-full-of-walnuts action star grinding against his gun.
   

Childhood favourites

We've all been there. Decked out in the too-cute-to-boot superman pyjamas and fluffy animal slippers, armed with a strawberry slurpie in hand and bulging our eyes in front of the television screen to watch innocent, dreamy pulp smeared before us. We may have outgrown the superman pyjamas but not the films.

Killer animal flicks

A genre that is built on starry-eyed writers poking into an animal encyclopedia and turning any pug-faced creature into a human flesh guzzling beast.