Halloween Special

 
Section 1: Bad Movies
Welcome back non binary friends and also everyone else.
It’s Halloween again, that deeply spooky time of year. Halloween is a time for frights, a time for chills, but most of all, a time for getting beer and pizza, and watching some bad movies with your pals.
I've been a bad movie lover since high school, when my friend Georgia used to buy kung fu and horror movies from poundland in 4 movie bargain sets. Yes, 4 movies for a pound. 25p per film, and really, much much more than they were worth. 

Georgia at a family dinner after seeing The Hobbit Part 3
Georgia and Ash and I would get together and just watch two or three terrible films back to back, transfixed and unable to escape, for hours and hours. I've seen dozens and dozens of films now, not expecting them to be good, not even expecting them to be competent, not even necessarily expecting them to be entertaining. Because that's the thing about watching bad movies: a huge portion of your time is spent not laughing uproariously or in awe of the unintentional comedy, but deathly bored, and some films just don't get better or have any good bits, and you just get to end feeling like you just ate a cold greasy meal that cost too much… and for it to be worth that, the good bits, the gold you can find must be really compelling. 
So after a decade of Mystery Science Theatre, of Bad Movie and Chinese Takeaway nights, and of slowly discovering the whole community of people who love subjecting themselves to painfully low quality films just like I do, I think it's time to ask:
What the fuck? 
The Room was written, directed and produced by Tommy Wiseau in -- what do you think this is? Fucking amateur hour? We’re not talking about The Room, we’re gonna talk about some fucking bad movies. Some movies that will convince you The Room deserves a fucking Oscar.
Neil Breen is a film maker who, after Wiseau, has become probably the most well known and most watched in the world of So-Bad-Its-Good cinema. Youtuber Adam Johnston from channel YourMovieSucks made a video shining a light on Breen after Breen’s third film, Fateful Findings. Even at that time, Adam could see clearly, and pointed out that Breen’s first film Double Down and third film Fateful Findings were essentially the same plot: Neil Breen plays a genius amazing hacker, who is also a bad guy and also maybe a cyborg and he exposes all the corruption of the ruling class with his amazing hacking and/or assassinations. Adam couldn’t have known back then that Breen’s fourth film would be essentially identical to his second film, or that his fifth film would be almost the same premise as his first and third films. If I had to make my best bet, I’d say his sixth film, just like his second and fourth, will feature Breen as an omnipotent non-human saviour entity sent to evaluate the sins and deeds of mankind who then kills a bunch of people and leaves. I am confident in this guess.
The worst thing about Breen’s bizarre saviour complex is that somehow he’s winning - we get to the end of his movies and we’re all chanting his name as it appears two dozen times in the credits.
https://twitter.com/cubmoth/status/1157032045132038144?s=19
Breen is a really interesting case to look at because he’s an example of a few running themes in bad film land. First off, his films are so fucking boring. I sincerely recommend watching Neil Breen’s films in reverse order. His latest is by far the most fast-paced, action packed, and outright watchable of his films, and you should really build up a tolerance slowly by watching him get less experienced each film.
Secondly, Breen communicates his political views in the same way as a lot of other trash cinema directors. That is to say: badly. Pretty much independent of what the politics are they’re trying to communicate, the communication of those politics is always impressively terrible. It’s either about as subtle as a birthday cake full of snakes or just plain baffling. Or even better, sometimes it’s both.
In Double Down, Neil Breen is the bad guy of the film as well as the protagonist, which was so unaddressed that I just had to have that told to me, and he hacks all of the politicians and exposes their crimes. So is exposing crimes and corruption bad? Is it good? Is it bad because bad guy cyborg Neil Breen did it? Or is it actually good and does bad guy cyborg Breen doing it make him less bad than we thought?
At the start and end of Bret McCormick’s RepliGator - a film about a machine that turns people into smokin’ hot b-b-b-baaaabes until they achieve orgasm at which point they turn into lizard people who turn people into zombies by biting them… yes - there is a shot of a newspaper that says “US Army Infiltrated By Transsexuals”. So like, what does RepliGator have to say about trans people? Are they smokin’ hot babes who go full gator when they cum and then turn men into their zombie minions? Is that the message of RepliGator?
Even when these films have good intentions behind them, you’re really not going to find one that strongly and clearly sends out a positive political message. Neil Breen sure seems to hate corruption in the government and exploitation, but his solution to this is, invariably, for lots and lots and lots of people to die. Is that what he actually thinks should happen? Who knows.
Another running theme, common to Neil Breen’s works, The Room, RepliGator and more is the self-insert character. In these films, usually the director, who is usually also the writer, will often have written themselves in as a cool hero character of some kind, a saviour or action man or innocent victim betrayed by the world, or failing that just somebody who gets to touch boobs.
The exploration of trash cinema is very often an exploration of the wild characters behind the films, and where you can't say The Room without Tommy Wiseau, and you can't say “how could you have done this how could you have committed suicide?” without Neil Breen, you can't say Ninja without Godfrey Ho.
Ho has made an immense amount of media, at least dozens if not hundreds of films, and over half of them have Ninja somewhere in the title. 
How can any filmmaker be this prolific, you ask? The answer is of course flagrant, shameless plagiarism. Godfrey Ho’s preferred method of constructing a film is to shoot enough material for about half a feature length, steal - and I mean steal - the footage from a relatively unknown film, unreleased project or foreign cinema piece, and then dub over the stolen footage and edit together to imply a link between the two stories. For example in Ninja Terminator, two characters share a phone call at one point, and that’s really the main thing tying the narrative threads together.

Richard Harrison receives a call on The Garfield Phone in Ninja Terminator
His studio’s opening logo just uses a section of the soundtrack from Star Wars! Godfrey did you think nobody would notice?! It’s STAR WARS, GODFREY!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZIv2_Tem14 
In part because of his horrific plagiarism, and in part because he was working in secret with his main business partner’s competitor, Godfrey Ho released a tremendous amount under fake names.
Here are, about half of Godfrey Ho’s known pseudonyms:
Tim Ashby; Duncean Bauer; Leo Beckman; Andy Berlin; Dwight Bolinger; Bob Chan; Wallace Chan; Willace Chan; Patrick Chase; Alton Cheung; Tommy Cheung; Gleen Clegg; Glenn Clegg; Daniel Clough; Eric Coleman; Hans Coltman; Robert Edison; Ralph Fillmore; Philip Fraser; George Hurst; Larry Huton; Larry Hutton; Benny Hyman; Edgar Jere; Carmel Johnson; Robert Johnson; Gary Kay; Benny Keung; Ho Chi Keung; Antonin Gasner; Bob Green; Martin Greenfield; Benny Ho; Geoffrey Ho; Raymond Ho;  Benjamin King; Ted King; Ted Kingsbrook; Chris Lam; Herbert Lam; Robert Lam; York Lam; Bruce Lambert; Derek Law; Joel Law; Barry Lawson; Charles Lee; George Lee; Henry Lee; Martin Lee; Frank Lewis; Joe Livingstone; Rogar(sic) Markham; Cary Nelson; John Newman; Anthony Pa; Burt Peterson; Jerry Sawyer; Victor Sears; John Shaw; Kurt Spielberg???
And of course what my friends and I call him, which is simply GoHo.
What’s magical about GoHo having so many pseudonyms (and possibly more because he himself can’t remember all the ones he used) is that you can just happen across one of his movies. You can just be watching something you think will be a fun, dumb, schlocky film and directed by Godfrey Hall will appear, and you’ll just get a suspicious feeling.
GoHo made about 10 films a year solidly for about 10 years, which is incredible - that's like an averagely productive YouTuber. It’s an incredible backlog to work through, and we’ve been watching his films for so long that they’re a part of our daily life. We can’t see someone in a cagoule without saying “Nothing! A ninja is just a myth!” 
There’s a draw in GoHo’s work that shouldn’t be understated - it’s fucking cool. This is worth looking at because a lot of shitty films that you watch will be bad along the axes of filming, writing, direction, or something else but nonetheless have incredibly solid action, practical effects or general aesthetics. 
Godfrey Ho’s fight scenes are undeniably impressively choreographed, and while he certainly exists in a ninja niche, that isn’t inherently bad. Ninja are something a bit like God Zilla, where the conventional wisdom might be to show the thing as little as possible for maximum effect, but is the conventional wisdom right? Or maybe does it just fucking own to see three ninja battle to the death over the Golden Ninja Warrior statue which will grant them invulnerability and control of the ninja empire? I’ve got my answer.
Whatever else trash cinema does, it’s certainly capable of showing you - speaking in cinematic terms here - the coolest fucking thing you ever saw in your life.


Richard Harrison and baby Ash as various Ninja Masters
There’s a ritualistic feel to watching bad movies. After the movie ends, everybody usually looks at each other in amazement and bafflement trying to comprehend what they just saw, and most likely next they’ll all just try to tell each other the whole movie. These films tend to create a Rashomon effect because they’re just so fucking weird. You probably know the cognitive psychology experiment from 1999 to do with selective attention, in which participants are shown a video and told to count the number of times a ball is passed, and then asked whether they spotted the gorilla that casually walked right through the shot. Godfrey Ho films are like two hours of the gorilla video.
The first time I watched Revenge of the Drunken Master, and the THE END card came up, Georgia and I looked at each other and burst into hysterical screaming crying laughter. We couldn’t stop howling and crying for two solid minutes until her dad came downstairs to make sure we were alright.
Yeah, Revenge of the Drunken Master is a Godfrey Ho film that has nothing to do with the Jackie Chan classic Drunken Master. It’s probably one of Ho’s best works. It stars Johnny Chan.
There is a rich tradition of trash cinema being created as attempts to capitalise on the name-recognition of bigger movies. You probably know Dawn of the Dead, but did you know Dawn of the Dead was recut for Italian audiences as Zombi? And that Italian copyright laws at the time pretty much let you make any fucking movie you want and call it the sequel to anything else that ever existed? Because that’s how you get Zombi 2 and Zombi 3.
Of course in the UK it had to be re-released under different titles because you can’t just pretend these are Dawn of the Dead sequels, and that’s why in the UK they’re called Zombie Flesh Eaters 1 and 2. Of course the UK eventually decided that unrelated sequels were fine apparently because eventually a totally unrelated film called After Death then got released as Zombie Flesh Eaters 3.
And in America, where Dawn of the Dead was actually made, you definitely couldn’t pretend these were sequels to that, so Italian Zombi 2 became Zombie, Italian Zombi 3 became Zombie 3 just to be helpful, and Zombie Flesh Eaters 3, AKA After Death became Zombie 4: After Death. And then, in the ultimate power move, the American release added not a zombie film but a film that was originally supposed to be a zombie film before the original nazi zombies were just swapped out for birds. Zombie 5: Killing Birds.
But for the truly ultimate experience, you should be getting the Edde Entertainment release of the Zombie series, because this is where the real galaxy brain stuff comes in. The series goes: Zombie 1, which is in fact Italian Zombi 2; Zombie 2, surprise, it’s just Zombi 2 again! They released the same film twice in the series!; Zombie 3, which was an Italian Zombi 3, but not the one I mentioned earlier put a pin in that; Zombie 4, which was a film called A Virgin Among the Living Dead (...okay); Zombie 5, which was another film from the same director as the previous one; Zombie 6, which was actually Antropophagus 2; and of course Zombie 7, which was actually Antropophagus 1. But before you get too concerned about that - don’t worry, Antropophagus 2 isn’t a real sequel to Antropophagus 1, it’s just from the same director.
Now take that pin out and let me just say, that there may be more films sharing the title of Zombi 3 than there are Spider-Man films, or maybe even than there are Marvel films… or maybe just films… maybe all films are Zombi 3. Maybe this is Zombi 3…
For my money the best Zombi 3 is the one alternately called Nightmare City, where zombies pour off a plane and overrun a city, but then at the end it turns out to be a dream, but then the dream starts coming true in reality anyway. Magic.
None of these films are particularly high-brow art, and they don’t really carry forward the spirit of George Romero Jr’s original films, but if you’re looking for a scene where a zombie fights a shark, I don’t know where else you’re gonna get it.
One thing that’s truly a treat is when you encounter a big budget movie that truly, deeply sucks. Discovering something that had the financial backing, and had a whole movie studio worth of people to stop it at some point and say hey, this sucks, we should do something and still somehow made it to release, is pretty magical. I’ve seen Suicide Squad six times, which is probably more times than fans of DC movies have seen it. It’s probably more than anybody involved in the whole production saw the final cut of the movie. I’ve seen it enough times to notice that Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s Secretary of the Treasury, was an Executive Producer, but hey - as weird as that is, that’s been pointed out before.
What I haven’t seen anybody talking about is how the other EP is called Richard Suckle, and he’s the head of Atlas Entertainment. Some weird fucking Libertarian money guy called Dick Suckle is out there ruining movies. What the hell? Is this my nemesis?
Another perfect example would be the Michael Fassbender murder mystery film The Snowman about detective Harry Hole (???) who hunts down a serial killer who makes snowmen with the corpses of his victims. About a quarter of the film is missing, especially towards the ending, a huge B plot is meant to be flashbacks and that is not clearly communicated at all, a big piece of evidence is some beans on the floor, which is inexplicably funny to me, and during the final denouement, when Harry Hole is in a hostage situation and lives are on the line, a misogynistic serial killer asks him if it’s right for a woman to get an abortion, and rather than just lie to the murderer, Harry all but directly looks into the camera and says “A woman has a right to choose”. Woke bae 2018, I adore this movie. The Snowman, like a lot of big budget trash cinema is a slow rising level of nonsense, rather than a garbage rollercoaster, but it really does just ramp up and up and up and by the end it’s hilarious.
When I say a big chunk of the film is missing, I mean that it simply wasn’t filmed. It isn’t there. As you get towards the end of the film you just jump suddenly from scene to scene in an incredibly alarming way. There is something about the cinematography in general, largely I think  affected by this lack of material, that fails to communicate ideas in the way films normally do. For example the opening sequence of the film is a flashback to the killer’s childhood, which then cuts straight to Harry Hole sleeping on a bench looking hard-done-by. The first time I saw the film I only got to see the start and I legitimately thought they were just trying to tell me that Harry Hole was the killer. They’re not. He isn’t. I’ve wracked my brains about this one, and I just can’t put together why they’d do this intentionally. Are we supposed to compare him to the killer? They aren’t really very similar. Are we supposed to just think he is the killer? That’s factually debunked shortly afterwards, so… no?
Section 2: Bad on purpose
Let’s say it up front: most bad on purpose movies suck. When sequels to massive cult hits in trash cinema get crowdfunded, they usually try way too hard to recapture the magic of the original, and when bigger companies like Netflix try to put out something that seems like it’s meant to be bad on purpose, it feels… well it feels almost exactly like watching that Pepsi advert for the first time.
I was planning to talk about Funhouse Massacre here but I’m getting less and less sure it was actually bad on purpose. Did that movie just really suck?
The point is, bad-on-purpose is for the most part, a pipe dream. Bad movies just have to exist on their own terms. They have to come to you, you can’t force them. Unless you’re Jim Jarmusch, in which case yes you can apparently.
The Dead Don’t Die, 2019 horror comedy by Jim Jarmusch starring Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton and my husband, is a bad move done on purpose, and done really well. It reuses shots, the narrative and dialogue are ridiculous, some of the performances are stiff to the point that you have to know it’s deliberate, and best of all the movie ends with an actual honest-to-god speech from a moralising loner outsider, and practically everyone else who saw it hated it. The other people walking out of the theater hated it, other people I know who saw it hated it, but it’s really really really good.
Here is my deeper analysis on The Dead Don’t Die that absolutely has to be cut for time from a video:
You need to think about what the purpose is to breaking the fourth wall, because it can be easy to get used to it as something that makes an easy joke without needing a setup or punchline. In actuality, breaking the fourth wall often serves very specific purposes in the messaging of a film or show.
Right out the gate, Adam Driver’s character Ronnie breaks the fourth wall by acknowledging that the song they’re listening to in the car was also the theme song of the movie and also near the end of the film explains that the reason he has been saying the whole time that it won’t end well is that he has read the script. Ronnie is a young, socially conscious liberal who drives a smart car. This will remain relevant.
Bill Murray’s character Cliff on the other hand, while being well meaning is part of the older generation and just clearly doesn’t have his finger on the pulse in the same way, and so reacts to Ronnie saying that he read the whole script by saying that he was only given the scenes he is in.
On a surface level the film seems quite misanthropic - all the zombies wander round naming their lifetime vices “fashion” “coffee” “chardonnay” - but as the named vices continue to be more obviously ridiculous (“candy” “bluetooth” “guitar”) it becomes so absurd that it can only be deliberate and by the end the hermit character, the bitter old man living in the woods is watching the final scenes through binoculars and narrating that the people were too consumerist, too materialistic. This however is obviously, by this point, not the message of the film and certainly not the cause of the undead plague - in fact it has been made perfectly clear throughout the film that mega corporations have been ruining the environment and then lying to the people, and that this is the cause of the spooky goings on.
So in this sense there is a narrative and a meta-narrative to this film; a diegesis and a meta-diegesis. In the diegesis, Cliff and Ronnie are cops fighting a zombie apocalypse, but in the meta-diegesis, they are actors playing cops fighting a zombie apocalypse, and in this meta-diegesis, the film you are watching isn’t made by Jim Jarmusch but by Tom Waites’ character - but not the old man living out in the woods character, the character he plays in the meta-diegesis. Tom Waites’ old man is a classic self-insert character, and if The Dead Don’t Die were the B movie zombie horror we are being presented with, then Tom Waites’ old man would actually be played by the writer/director.
In this way The Dead Don’t Die is a pastiche and a parody of the B Movie Zombie Horror. While it is itself a zombie horror with a sociopolitical message in the vein of Night Of The Living Dead, it critiques the individualistic way that we are told to understand our responsibilities over climate change, environmental damage and life in general. Zombie movies can fit into a trend where they engage in social critique, but in an ugly misanthropic way that blames individuals, saying essentially you are living a bad life and you need to wake up. You’re like a zombie when you just look at your phone all the time.
So let's talk about trust and audience responsibility. Yes! I started by talking about Neil Breen so I could trick you into my media analysis nerd shit! Yes!!
It can be appealing, with the inherent comedy of trash cinema, and the garbage themes and politics that completely reject analysis, to assume that movies like these require by definition a passive viewing experience. That you just have to switch off your brain and let Neil Breen happen to you. Just enjoy the Breensperience. Just GoHo with the flow.
However, the thing that The Dead Don’t Die showed me more than anything else, is that an audience has to do work to make a bad movie fun to watch. If you don’t do the work you won’t have a good time, and that’s something that I think kinda runs counter to a basic assumption a lot of people make in media analysis: that an audience has no responsibility for their experience at all. It is a fairly standard position to take that when somebody makes something all the responsibility rests with them for how it goes down with their audience, and I think this is patently untrue to anyone who has ever seen a YouTube comments section.

Like this one. What the heck is this? I don’t mean them calling me pretentious - that’s entirely fair - I mean this Applebees thing. I didn’t complain about Applebees in the video… I didn’t mention Applebees in the video. Before this comment, I’m fairly certain I’d never said “applebees” out loud at any point in my life. Please somebody explain if there’s an applebees meme I don’t know because I’ve searched and there’s nothing and I need this misery to end.
We’ve all seen it, folks. They comment telling you that you should have done the thing, but you did do the thing. Or they tell you that you shouldn’t have done the other thing, but you didn’t, and you’re just angry and confused. Really it’s a lot like watching a Neil Breen film.
And that’s probably why most bad-on-purpose films are Big Stinky and not fun at all, and why The Dead Don’t Die is so good - because to make your movie bad on purpose you have to achieve a level of subtlety that makes the bad things feel like easter eggs, secret bonus things that the audience figured out for themselves. That’s the only way to recreate the joy of finding these films.
And I think that audience responsibility is the biggest reason why you can’t just watch absolutely anything and make it funny. 
When Georgia, Natalie, Ash and I went to see Tommy Wiseau’s new film, Best F(r)iends - get it? It’s like friends, but also like fiends - we were obviously nervous about this being a boring bad-on-purpose film, trying to force Wiseau’s weirdness out, but it turns out he was cast in the perfect role to capture his strangeness without making it too gimmicky - he plays himself. In my opinion, nobody at all should bother seeing The Disaster Artist, because Best F(r)iends, released at the same time is the far superior telling of the making of The Room.
Sure, in Best F(r)iends, Tommy and Greg aren’t making a film called The Room, instead they’re robbing gold off dead bodies from Tommy’s funeral parlour and selling them to a fence in a very obviously Breaking Bad inspired storyline, and there are various other elements bizarrely exaggerated or reworked, but this is just the superior story.
Back to our anxieties: The movie was directed by someone whose usual gig was music videos, and it really showed. The first five minutes of the film is a wordless, chic narrative of Greg Sestero as a homeless guy trying to beg spare change in LA, who notices Tommy Wiseau in his pearly hearse and follows him to his funeral parlour. At this point, minutes into the film, with all the nervous giggling out of the way, I think it’s fair to say the whole audience was feeling the same way: Is this just going to be fine? Is it going to be… good? What’s happening?
And then Tommy says his first line, with flawless delivery.
“Are you going to stand out there, like a statue of liberty?”
And the entire audience erupted, screaming and howling and crying looking at each other for answers that nobody had. It was going to be okay, Tommy had saved us.
Tommy was at that screening - he gave an introduction and Q&A with Greg Sestero and the director of Best F(r)iends, and there was a meet and greet afterwards.
And obviously I know what you want to know, so here you go: in real life, Tommy is absurdly energetic, and a little scary, and a cartoon character, and also somehow the realest person in the world.

Natalie and I, and Georgia, get to meet Tommy Wiseau at the screening of Best F(r)iends
Section 3: Bad Everything
There’s this Samsung Galaxy Gear ad that’s really stuck in my head for the last 6 years. I saw it because it was bad and people were sharing it because it sucks, and I saw it when I was first working in the marketing industry. Something that strikes me about it when I think about it now is, it’s funny because you know how ads work and it sucks. Like, you know that ads are supposed to create a sense of aspiration and a need for a product and this just super duper ain’t it. The ad tries to make out the guy who has the smartwatch as this smooth-talking chad, and the guy with the phone as a pathetic loser, even though the girl also has a phone, and like, it’s 2013, nobody has a smartwatch, are you just trying to insult people what the heck?
It would be so easy to do this right. You could literally just have someone dancing to a song that lots of people like and they’re wearing the watch and it would sell. Just do the scene from Flashdance god damn it.
I think it’s interesting, looking back, that this was being shared around between people who knew advertising and could see a million better ways to do this that doesn’t involve painful blow-by-blow scenarios demonstrating over and over that phone are dumb and bad and smartwatches are great. Like seriously, a literal incel/chad meme would have been a better ad for the watch than this….
I think it’s interesting because of that drive to point and say they’re doing it bad.
In Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge (Yes that is where I’m going with this Neil Breen video) Foucault lays out a discursive perspective on history - one where we don’t look at great men discovering uncharted territory and achieving feats of derring do, but one where since the dawn of time people have been arguing about one thing or another in discursive communities. A discursive community is a group drawn together by discussion, so there’s a group of people and then a topic that unites them like Star Wars fans and discussion of Star Wars or my friends and never being able to shut the fuck up about Louise.
Certain communities though, discuss things only in a particular way, and we could call these groups Communities of Derision. Bad movie fans would definitely be one.
Most of online political discussion works this way too. We look at the people who have the wrong opinions and we draw derisive pleasure from knowing that they’re doing it wrong. Now, I’m not trying to be any kind of centrist about this when I say that every group does this, that’s just factually the way people operate. The atheists look at the creationists and laugh, the sceptics look at the sjws and laugh, the sjws look at the manosphere and laugh, but without using any racial slurs or misogyny or homophobia so at the end of the day there is a clear winner.
When Chapo Traphouse do a reading series and highlight articles from shitty conservatives, like one of their most popular episodes, Rod Dreher’s The Exorcist the comparison to bad movie audiences becomes incredibly clear.
In my last video I talked about Ben Shapiro’s terrible novel  - there’s even an overlap there because… wait there isn’t a movie of True Allegiance yet? Hollywood I am begging you… get Zack Snyder to direct it, it will be atrocious and I will see it in theaters six times.
A lot of the online left is a community of derision, and I think when you look at it through that lens, in comparison to trash cinema fans, it’s pretty interesting. Of course, as I’ve said before, the online right are basically doing the same to us, but for reasons that I don’t care to go into here, we’re right and they’re wrong.
Just like bad movie fans, the figures we are most interested in are the people with the horribly horribly wrong ideas - the ones we can point at and they’re doing it bad - but it’s always those with more perceived power, be it the power to make a movie, the power to influence politics, or just more subcrimber on youmtub. In this way these communities prefer to punch up, or at least do what they perceive as punching up. 
So what else can we say about a Community of Derision? Well, I think like other discursive communities, the benefits of discussing, analysing and understanding something are pretty compelling. I’m not quick to say that a community of derision is particularly good at producing anything itself, besides the occasional good parody, although the derision itself can provide enormous joy to people. I think the most important thing to take away from looking at communities like this is that no matter what else they do, they bring people together.
Am I really trying to say the real Godfrey Ho was the friends we made along the way? I guess I am. The real Godfrey Ho was the friends we made along the way!
Happy Halloween!