Bad movie? I’m soaking in it!

For my title, I borrow a laugh line from the folks at Mystery Science Theater 3000 (the line was repurposed from a 70s Palmolive TV ad). I've seen some bad movies more often than usual over the past couple of months which has led me to speculate on the genre of bad movies: What makes a movie bad? Why do we watch them? Do people make bad movies on purpose? Is there an aesthetics of bad movies? I'm going to think about these questions today, then spend the next few entries reviewing the bad movies that got me into such heavy philosophizing.

I think the phenomenon of viewers deliberately seeking out and enjoying bad movies began in earnest in the late 1970s and early 80s when film critic Michael Medved and his brother Harry published two books that celebrated (or at least brought to film fans' attention) bad moviemaking: The Fifty Worst Films of All Time and The Golden Turkey Awards. Their tone was snarky, making it clear that they "enjoyed" these films in an ironic, campy way, and film buffs were soon seeking these movies out.

They included Hollywood A-movies such as Airport 1975, the musical version of Lost Horizon (pictured at right), and the 1976 King Kong, but their focus (and mine) was on low-budget B-movies (or Z-movies as some have called them). Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space became the breakout film from the Medveds' batch, a movie that was so obviously bad—cheap sets that practically fall apart on screen, a range of acting from indifferent to over-the-top, a script that made no sense—that it really was fun to watch, mostly to make fun of, though I also think it gave viewers a sense of superiority, a feeling that they could make a better movie that poor Ed Wood made.

And that might be the biggest reason why these kinds of movies are fun to watch. The ones I've been watching recently truly make me think, ya know, if I could have had another pass at that script, or if I could have directed, or even acted in, that scene, it might not have been worthy of Orson Welles or Robert Altman, but it would have been a damn sight better than it is now.

Now I'm going to separate Bad (capital "B") Movies from bad (small "b") movies. Ineptness is key to Bad Movie production. To my mind, a garden variety bad movie is one that most likely has a good-sized budget, time-tested talent on and behind the screen, and gets most of its sets, effects, and other aspects of physical production right, but is just, well, bad; the plotline is stupid (A.I.) or a dumb ending ruins all that came before (Signs) or some piece of casting is totally wrong (Sofia Coppola in Godfather III) or things become incoherent near the climax (the superhero action movie of your choice). Of course, all of these are in the eye of the beholder—for me, Eraserhead and Pi are both films that are less than coherent much of the way through, but in interesting ways that make you want to watch them again. Sofia Coppola does have her defenders—and she is not the only problem with that movie. Somewhere, someone must have liked Signs and A.I. (no one I know). The musical of Lost Horizon deserves its own category; it had a big budget but was so very misguided from the beginning that the considerable talents of Liv Ullmann, Peter Finch, John Gielgud and Burt Bacharach can't save it. It's watchable only as a Bad Movie despite its stellar production values.

Bad Movies have little going for them in production, scripting or acting. A low budget doesn't automatically mean Badness—some Poverty Row movies of the 30s and 40s are good little movies in spite of the strikes against them (see Edgar G. Ulmer's great noir Detour), and the Roger Corman horror films of the 60s work quite well, perhaps because Corman spent most of his money on Vincent Price (see above). But the movies the average person thinks of as Bad are marked by ineptness in production, acting, cinematography, effects, or all of the above.

The movies I'll be discussing that inspired this blog post are all fairly inept productions, laughable at times, and are all marked by weak acting and scripts that badly need revision. Yet something about them is compelling. Sometimes it's something good, like the sincerity of the filmmakers, an actor or two who stands out, or the germ of a good idea. Sometimes the whole thing is so jaw-droppingly inept that it really does become entertaining, or might be good fodder for Bad Movie riffers (MST3K, RiffTrax), or for those who like to talk back to, or along with, the actors on the screen. (However, Rocky Horror is not a Bad Movie, nor is it, I think, a bad movie. It's a niche audience movie—fans of sci-fi/horror/musicals—that somehow broke out of its niche). The four movies I'll be reviewing are Journey to Paradise, Mr. Scrooge to See You, Birdemic, and the most notorious bad movie of all, The Room. See you in a day or two.