I originally wrote this piece with a specific bad movie (Final Fantasy) in mind. However, inspired by one of my favorite hubbers DJFunktual's hub entitled The 50 most embarrassing guilty pleasure movies explaining the difference between Good-bad and Bad-bad, I realize that the technique (throwing a movie themed party with minimal expense and planning) is quite generalizable to other bad-bad movies, and the trappings can vary depending on the genre of the movie.

This hub will tell you how to take an ordinary bad movie rental night and transform it into a festive, fun, and social occasion that you can treasure for years to come. I have also updated it to reflect some technology that didn't exist when I originally wrote it. Ready? Lets go.

I have sons that play video games, so it was inevitable that we should rent "Final Fantasy: The spirits within." I don't wish to reiterate why this movie is awful. If you want to know why this movie sucks and all the facts about who does the voices etc., here is a serious review by the Grouch. Read it first if you don't believe me that the movie sucks. This is how we transformed this bad movie into a memorable party for our family, some neighbors, and both our sons' friends, some of whom were drinking age at the time and some of whom weren't. The key is that this party plan can be adapted for ANY SUCKY MOVIE!!!

1. The TARP -- Absolute requirement for all such parties Put down a plastic tarp over the floor of your viewing area. This will be useful later for catching the vomit when you view nauseating scenes such as CGI characters making out with eachother, vapid dialogue, really stupid anachronisms, and utterly transparent product placements, among other things. And of course your guests may also vomit because they drink too much beer, or for no reason at all. And then there are the non vomit-related party messes: broken things from people crashing into them, spilled beer and food. You have no worries -- the tarp catches it all. Planning ahead is a good thing.
2. Popcorn buckets -- Required, Decorations: optional. Save up your large tupperware-oid yogurt or ice cream containers, paint cans, large bown grocery bags, or use your good bowls if you have enough. Hell, I don't care. If you have a Martha Stewart type in your gang you can enlist their aid to decorate the containers with movie-themed decorations. The really creative ones can create their own derivative art, either freehand, or with serious shooping, or by simply drawing crude horns, glasses, mustaches, penises or whatever, on official movie graphics. The less creative among you can just print them straight out of the download pipe. You could even invite the guests to bring their own decorated containers and award a prize for the best one. I include in the hub a handy-dandy graphic from "The final fantasy" to get you started. In order to get images from any movie, do an image search in Google on the title of the movie, find the image or images you like, download print them out and have at it. This is fair use. Do not try to publish or sell your derivitave art, no matter how good it turns out. This is copyright infringement.
3. Popcorn -- required Pop a huge batch of popcorn and give everybody one of your prepared containers full of it. The popcorn (if made correctly) can be quite delicious, and it also works very well to throw at the screen when the pathetically bad actors (or CGI's) deliver lame lines like, "We haven't got time for that!" with poor timing. I recommend old-fashioned pan-popped popcorn as opposed to the greasy microwave type. It's much more economical, and that fake butter stuff they put on microwave popcorn is bad for you and worse for your curtains and your large flat-screen plasma TV. Decide who is going to be in charge of popping popcorn and refilling the containers. This task can be rotated so that one person isn't stuck in the kitchen all evening.
4. Costumes -- optional Ask your guests to come dressed as their favorite movie character. This works best when the characters wear nutso costumes. If the movie has characters that dress in T-shirts and jeans, don't bother with this because you won't be able to tell if your guests are in costume or not.
5. Your own commemorative movie -- optional but highly recommended if you have the gear for it Set up your video recorder to point to the screen. Assign one of your guests to be in charge of it. Normally it will be pointed at the movie, but when the movie gets boring, your film person is welcome to pan over the guests. This is more effective if the guests are wearing costumes or doing something hilarious such as throwing up or lighting their farts.
6. Avatars: highly recommended If you have any action figure toys or dolls that are in any way remotely related to the theme of the movie assign them to various members of the audience a la Mystery Science Theater 2000. When the guests speak up, they are encouraged to pop the toys up over the bottom of the picture.
7. Beverages: required Pour beers for any members of the audience who are of drinking age. Home brews are best, of course, but any alcohol works in a pinch.
8. Optimize your viewing -- required Draw the blinds and dim the lights.
9. Explain the rules -- required You are now ready to start up your DVD player (or your VHS player if you are, y'know, like a dinosaur from the 90's.) Before you start it, explain to your guests that the rules are: Whenever something stupid or vapid happens they are required to pop up their action figure and make a smart-assed remark. Below are some sample smart-assed remarks to get you started. I recommend watching Mystery Science Theatre -- that will get your creative smart-ass remark generator primed.

• "Ooh is that a wrist-mounted Palm IIIe?"
• "Get that camera off my crows feet! I didn't have TIME for my moisturizing treatment!"
• When the macho female character says "Get a girlfriend!" to the prototypical sexist male chauvinist pig, reply for him, "OK, can I have yours?"
• "Hmmm is that a cross between a giant squid and a milipede AND a king cobra?"
• Try to identify the location where the scene was shot. Corner of 42nd and 5th maybe? Badlands? Grand Canyon?
• If you're not good at coming up with witty and topical smart-offs in real time it is perfectly fine to randomly blurt out lines from other movies or TV shows, related or not. For example, a vapid Mulderish line like, "Samantha, is that really you?" could hardly go astray.
• When they use made up words like "bioetheric energy" say, "Is that anything like ethernet?"
• Ruin the plot by saying: "No No you fool, don't you realize the monsters can reproduce in the bioetheric pipes?" Actually you can't ruin the plot.
• Cheer loudly whenever there's a gratuitious explosion.
• Comment loudly whenever any basic rules of physics are broken. "Hey hold on! if it's in space how can it be in flames, since there's no air in space."

That's basically the program: your guests make as many smart-assed remarks as they can think of on the fly and you record it all. If you're the competitive sort, you can even keep score. Don't worry about outshouting any important dialogue. None of it is important. Remember this is a bad movie. Later on, edit the footage down to a 3-7 minute distillation of just the best wisecracks and post it on Youtube. I can't do this part currently because my hub pages haven't provided me with enough money for a new videocam and our old one has been broken for a long time. So how about a stumble, so we can fix that? The last time I did one of these was before Youtube existed, and it's VHS. When you see my bad movie night video on Youtube, you'll know I've made the big time as a hubber. Hint Hint.