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Unsurpassed Travesty said on August 1st, 2015 at 3:23 am

This is an excellent analysis of a phenomenon which tragically I’m incapable of enjoying. For whatever reason I’m unable to turn off my analytical capacities when I watch movies, which means that when I sit through a movie which is ‘hilariously’ terrible I’m persistently aware that I’m watching something terrible. Ditto MST3K and Riff Trax.

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Lupus753 said on August 1st, 2015 at 1:13 pm

The only So Bad It’s Good movie I remember seeing without MST3K or a similar production was The Room. I watched it to get an understanding of the tell-all book The Disaster Artist, by Greg Sestero.

The movie was great, except for the sex scenes that drag on for far too long. These types of movies are only enjoyable if new types of awfulness show themselves.

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Try Legend of the Rollerblade Seven if you ever get the chance. You may never forgive me, but you will always remember it.

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kingderella said on August 1st, 2015 at 7:32 pm

Is Rocky Horror the exception that proves the rule?

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Rand Brittain said on August 1st, 2015 at 8:28 pm

I feel like this doesn’t explain the 1967 version of Casino Royale.

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Cookie McCool said on August 1st, 2015 at 11:11 pm

This is exactly the rationale I have for loving the GI Joe movies but I’m not sure how well it really holds up.

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Brian Smith said on August 1st, 2015 at 11:17 pm

The first time I ever saw “Plan 9 From Outer Space” was on TNT’s old “MonsterVision” series hosted by Penn and Teller. Penn gave a spirited defense of the movie, saying that if he had the choice between watching “Plan 9” or, say, best picture Oscar winners “Gandhi” or “Out of Africa,” he’d choose “Plan 9” every time.

And I’ve been thinking about bad movies a lot lately because of a conversation I had with a woefully misguided friend who asked me what I thought was the worst movie of all time:
Me: “Well, ‘Plan 9 From Outer Space’ is the obvious answer, but it has a lot of fans. Even ‘The Room’ is fun to see with a lot of people. Maybe ‘Manos: The Hands of Fate’?”
Friend: “No, the worst movie of all time HAS to be ‘Edward Scissorhands.'”
Me: “…”

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As a fairly longtime connoisseur of bad movies, I concur with you 100% on why a bad comedy can’t be enjoyed. In many ways, I think it’s fair to have an adversarial approach to watching bad movies–if you appreciate it on the level it intends to achieve, it wins. Your goal is to overwhelm its intent with ridicule. But if you laugh at a comedy, regardless of whether you’re laughing for the reasons the film intended, that means that it wins.

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Rand Brittain said: “I feel like this doesn’t explain the 1967 version of Casino Royale.”

To be fair, I don’t feel like anything satisfactorily explains the 1967 version of Casino Royale.

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Jack-Pumpkinhead said on August 2nd, 2015 at 9:18 pm

@kingderella, no, it’s made as a farce. It’s made to be laughed at. Honestly, my biggest reason for not watching this is the near-religious status it has with some fans.

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Albert Pyun’s Cyborg and Sword and the Sorcerer.

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It’s funny that this only holds for film (for me, at least). A videogame built along these lines would be too frustrating, and a book too much of a time investment. TV works in small doses, though that applies to the other media as well.

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Oh, there’s definitely no such thing as a good bad book. Books require you to put actual work into finishing–you can disengage emotionally from a movie, and it’ll still finish at the same time as if you were riveted to it. But a book you don’t care about just sits there waiting for you to get back to it. It’s _dreadful_.

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kingderella said on August 4th, 2015 at 4:50 pm

@ jack: but thats my point exactly.

compare:
“no, it’s made as a farce. It’s made to be laughed at.”

to:
“Which is, by the way, the last thing that makes a good bad movie. It has to be aiming for seriousness. You can’t make a good bad comedy. Because ultimately, a good bad movie succeeds because it’s enjoyed on an ironic level–you are deriving satisfaction and meaning from something other than the filmmaker’s literal intention.”

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Jack-Pumpkinhead said on August 4th, 2015 at 8:15 pm

I should probably admit one thing first; I’ve never seen Rocky Horror because the crew around here who runs the midnight showings has tried peer pressuring me to the point of I never want to see this film.

Going back to John’s point, if the intention of a farce is to make people laugh, & you’re laughing at it, the film succeeds. And now there are people who laugh at it not because they find the film funny or terrible, but because they’ve been told “you have to like this film & laugh at it”.

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Years ago, my MA supervisor in English ran a graduate course under the title “Very Bad Books of the 17th and 18th century.” I never saw the syllabus, and I imagine it would have been excruciating to take (even good 17th and 18th c novels are a challenge for a modern audience) but he said he’d never seen other professors so invested in his course design.

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Jason Barnett said on August 4th, 2015 at 11:03 pm

Unsurpassed Travesty- I’m pretty much the same way. I enjoy some MSt3K, but mostly things like the shorts and the stuff that isn’t that terrible. Like Catalina Caper and Skydivers. I guess the boring movies that try to be exciting or the unfunny comedies

I’m also pretty sure I’ve never watched a cult favorite movie

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@Seavey: “Oh, there’s definitely no such thing as a good bad book. Books require you to put actual work into finishing–you can disengage emotionally from a movie, and it’ll still finish at the same time as if you were riveted to it. But a book you don’t care about just sits there waiting for you to get back to it. It’s _dreadful_.”

But what if a book is riveting because of how hilariously bad it is? There are no shortage of books that amaze simply based on how many rules they break, some of which are so central to literature that you never even realized they existed.

Then again, I also think it’s possible (though incredibly hard) to make deliberately So Bad It’s Good works. Atlanta Nights, for instance.

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Admittedly, it’s only a sentence and nowhere near a full book, but there *are* the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction contests every year where people write intentionally bad introductory sentences to fictional novels. Quite a few of these, to me at least, fall into the ‘so bad it’s good’ category. (Named, of course, after George Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who is famous for his opening line “It was a dark and stormy night”.)

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In the right mood, I would argue Dan Brown can fit the “so bad it’s good” bill.

In a shorter format, there is of course the legendary Eye of Argon…

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Good Bad Book (A representative sample):

Crimson Tears of a Werewolf: Adventures of a Werewolf Hunter and Huntress, by Dragan Vujik, Russian superman.

http://www.amazon.com/Crimson-Tears-Werewolf-Adventures-Huntress-ebook/dp/B006VA0F8K/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1438826340&sr=1-2&keywords=crimson+tears+of+a+werewolf#reader_B006VA0F8K

I defy you to read the sample and not be enthralled by this author’s amazing grasp of the bloodthirsty feral heart within us all.

“Darkness resentfully witnessed light usurping an incrementally larger portion of the twenty-four hour cycle.”

KABOOM KABOOM CRACK KABOOM KABOOM BANG BANG KABOOM

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Tim McGaha said on August 8th, 2015 at 11:04 am

Zardoz. Oh, God, Zardoz. Not even Boorman remembers what the Hell that was supposed to be about.

But you’ll never see anything else like it.

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Radio host Irwin Chusid used to have a show on WFMU called “Incorrect Music” which loved to play bad music that (sometimes) was rather fun, if painful. He had the same criteria – sincerity.

It went far, far beyond Shatner’s cover of Mr. Tambourine man. There was just something about hearing people perform so earnestly, refusing to let anything stop them. For example, Shooby Taylor’s “Stout-Hearted Men” or Tom Arico’s “Baby on the way”. (Listen with extreme caution. You may want to warm yourself up first with the Langley Schools Music Project cover of “Space Oddity”.)

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I’m a little late to the party, but I know of at least one successful attempt at making a good bad movie: “The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra”. That movie was a perfect recreation of cheap 1950’s sci-fi, and you could laugh with it and at it at the same time.

I think it actually fits with your thesis about sincerity. The filmmakers weren’t just trying to make a bad movie; they were trying to make a period piece. Rather than merely seeking to make something silly (see: Sharknado) they were seeking to create something authentic, to transport the viewer back to those days when man-in-rubber-suit was the finest in special effects.

I think that vision is what it all comes down to. “Green Lantern” had no vision, and it’s a bore to watch. “Plan 9 from Outer Space” had a glorious vision (that it utterly failed to achieve) and it’s magnificent.

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Halloween Jack said on October 15th, 2015 at 4:13 pm

I think you’re correct, and a good illustration is in the contrast between PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE and BRIDE OF THE MONSTER. Both are bad, but the latter is bad in predictable ways: the acting is bad, the effects are bad, the lighting is notably terrible. Only Ed Wood could have made PLAN 9, but BRIDE is the kind of bad horror film a lot of people made at that time.

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Halloween jack said on October 15th, 2015 at 5:04 pm

Regarding CASINO ROYALE, I agree that it can’t be explained in light of Seavey’s theory. Enjoying CASINO ROYALE ironically is a bit more inside baseball–you have to enjoy being aghast at the hubris of everyone involved in that freakshow of a production.

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