The Good/Bad Movie

I’ve got a thing. Kinda had it for years. I like bad movies. Not like, ‘bad’ bad movies. A bad movie is a boring movie, regardless of budget, stars, directors, or screenwriters. It’s just… terrible, with no redeemable features.

I like good bad movies.  

What is a “good bad movie”?

Such a good question, glad you asked.

Pull up a chair.

A good bad movie is Tommy Wiseau’s ‘The Room’, is ‘Showgirls,’ is most of Bela Lugosi’s late 30s-early 50s films (for several different reasons). It’s everything Ed Wood was connected with. These were the kind of films I’d catch in the late, late show, usually in black and white, a lot of times running about an hour, programmers. I think picked out the books of Harry and Michael Medved (The Golden Turkey Awards, Fifty Worst Films of all Time, Hollywood Hall of Shame) and Forgotten Horrors (not about bad films, but obscure ones). The movies were mostly cheap, odd, and silly.  

But that is not what made them good/bad movies. No…

A 'good bad movie' is a movie made by people desperately trying to make a good, serious, or comedic movie. People who came together to make the best movie they could. And frankly, maybe they did. They reached, but they missed. Yes, maybe this piece of dreck is the best they could do.

It is not someone trying to make a 'bad' movie; I’ve seen those and they are always tedious. It's the vision, the passion, the attempt to make art and fail utterly that's fascinating. These movies may be incompetent, but they are never boring or tedious.

Maybe because, as an actor and writer myself, I tend to sympathize with and understand failure more than success. Why something succeeds can be mysterious, and we can usually figure out why something went wrong.

Maybe it's not understanding the complete failure that's attractive. We can see it, but those within inches of it could not. Or, some of them could not. Usually, those with little power and say might have seen what was coming, but who listened to them?

Thus, today we have million-dollar 'midnight movies', films that do cost millions (hello Michael Bay) and that are cynical, boring crap. They aren't made with the passion (and incompetence) of Glenn of Glenda, or Plan Nine from Outer Space, but with an eye to just making more money.