A Taxonomy of Bad Movies

           

            There’s a phenomenon amongst film enthusiasts that may surprise you. A whole lot of people, otherwise sane and of good taste, willingly seek out and choose to watch bad movies, the worse the better. I am one of those people, and, what’s more, I regularly coax my friends into subjecting themselves to bad movies alongside me. If you’re not one of my fellow cultists, this may seem like the height of poor entertainment choices. I disagree.

            In this essay, I want to argue that bad movies do the same thing that experimental films do, only by accident. They challenge the aesthetic and formal standards that we normally apply to film and in that way challenge our ideas of what makes movies ‘good’ or ‘watchable,’ entertain us with the unexpected, and challenge our aesthetic categories. I also want to argue that not all bad movies are equal. So, like any post-Enlightenment intellectual, I’m going to sort them into neat little categories and talk about how these movies do or don’t fulfill the best of bad movies’ aesthetic ends. I will argue that there are three kinds of bad movies worth watching (and not just watching but exalting, collecting, curating, watching publicly, and sharing), and two kinds of bad movies that aren’t. Additionally, there are two kinds of good movies that may be mistaken for bad movies but differ in their intentionality; nonetheless, they still accomplish some of the things that bad movies do and appeal to a similar audience.

            I hope that audience can be you.

Category 1: Good Bad Movies

1a. The B-Movie

            The B-Movie isn’t just a movie about a bee, nor is it an abbreviation for bad-movie. Historically, B-Movies were the second film on the double-feature bill, in music parlance the opener to the headliner. These movies weren’t necessarily bad – in fact, some were more popular than their A-movie counterpart and went on to be better known, just like the opener isn’t worse than the headliner, only less famous. But B-Movies often were cheaply made, and they usually weren’t striving for cinematic greatness. Instead, they were made to fill a niche, and (hopefully) fill it well.

            I’m using the term B-Movie here to talk about movies that were intentionally made to fulfill a niche genre or entertain a particular audience outside of mainstream standards of quality. Mystery Science Theater 3000, the television series/stalwart institution that popularized the practice of riffing bad movies, took the backbone of its content from B-Movies. The most familiar B-Movies are cheaply made monster, sci-fi, and horror pictures (not Dracula  and King-Kong but their knock-offs), but they also include beach movies, juvenile delinquency movies, Elvis musicals, Japanese kaiju movies dubbed and edited for an American release, and peplum movies about Hercules-type heroes made in Italy and starring American body-builders. The list could go on. These movies had their own sets of conventions to conform to. Usually cheaply made and poorly acted, they are obviously bad to us but were popular to audiences who knew what they were getting into, and were enjoyed – as long as they met the criteria of their subgenre.

            These movies proliferated and could be quite profitable because of their cheapness, so whole production and distribution companies sprung up to churn them out and many directors made successful careers out of B-Movies. They were usually made by prolific workaday directors, not auteurs. If they did have an individual vision (and some of them did), it was secondary to commercial concerns.

            I’m talking about these movies in the past tense because these subgenres of B-movies don’t really exist anymore, though their iconography lives on over in category 3. The new B-Movie is direct-to-video or direct-to-streaming. The absurd triteness of Lifetime and Hallmark movies fit these categories; so do Sharknadoan SyFy channel movies and the cheap-and-cheesy horror movies of Asylum and Full Moon that draw in audience with outrageous (Evil Bong) or deceptive titles (Atlantic Rim, recently and controversially lampooned on MST3K). These films are not bad by accident but because the niche they fill does not require them to be good; badness is in fact preferred. Audiences may watch them sincerely as guilty pleasures (think your mom watching Hallmark) or ironically (think my postmodern girlfriend and her family watching Hallmark, or stoners watching Sharknado), simply out of boredom (the Saturday afternoon crowd watching Horror at Party Beach) or to socialize and make-out with a sweetie (the Saturday evening crowd watching Horror at Party Beach). For whatever reason the audience tunes in, as long as these movies have an audience, they will exist.

When we watch them today, B-Movies can be delightfully absurd but they can also be grating or boring as the criteria lead to their own kind of conformity or the shortcoming of their origins produce something slow and dull instead of something ludicrous. Thus, not all B-movies are equal and they are best enjoyed with commentary, provided either by the professional riffers of MST3K and their ilk, or by friends. Some of my personal favorite B-movies include Horror of Party Beach, Pod People, Starcrash, and Space Mutiny.

            While a lot of these movies are objectively bad (and in the Sharknado and Asylum boat, aggressively + intentionally so), there’s room for ambiguity. A lot of people write off entire genres (sci-fi, horror, fantasy) as bad and will only watch them for a giggle. Or certain subgenres are beloved by some fans and derided by others. Take giallo, the hyperstylized Italian variant of the slasher movie. I sincerely love gialli for the mythic, stylized violence, the eye-popping visuals, the sheer weirdness, and the ultra-‘70s rock soundtracks. But you could also ironically watch gialli for the shitty dubbing, paper-thin storylines, and the ultra-‘70s rock soundtracks. Even I, a fan, can watch these movies sincerely one minute and ironically the next, or some combination of the two at once. In any taxonomy, there are edge cases.

            The thing to remember is that these are purposefully made movies that fulfill a different set of criteria for a commercial (not artistic) purpose. The criteria of these subgenres are alternate aesthetic frameworks, and it’s the iconography and tropes of those criteria (the kitschiness) that endures, more so than any of the individual films, as raw materials to blur the high-brow/low-brow lines.

1b. The Flop

            These are movies that failed. Movies that aspired to, if not excellence, than at least quality within respective popular genres (commonly action, science-fiction, superhero) made for a decent (sometimes exorbitant) chunk of change by competent, even talented, directors and filled with successful, even award-winning actors, with a crew of professionals, and released into the world by major studios as potentially good (or at least high-grossing) movies. And, held to these mainstream criteria, they are found wanting and subject to delighted ridicule. What happened?

            The popular podcast How Did This Get Made? has built its backbone on these sorry films, which makes sense. We know how B-movies got made: to meet audience demands. In the Flop, mistakes were made. The podcast is less interested in dissecting what mistakes were made, where, and by whom, but each and every way the Flop has violated our normal standards in interesting and absurd ways. The Flop isn’t just a failure, it’s a failure that failed interestingly. It is also not necessarily a commercial or critical failure at the time of its release – a Flop can also gain a reputation for outrageousness after its’ been released and turned a profit. Some Flops are born Flops, and some are critically reevaluated.

            Most of the bad movies in my personal tape collection are Flops, because Flops get a wide home video release (sometimes to recoup commercial losses) and a few decades later wash up in Salvation Armies and Goodwills where I can buy them for a buck. Let’s take a closer look at some of these examples.

            Batman and Robin is a born flop, the quintessential. Its sins are in questionable directorial choices (Joel Schumacher’s insistence on making a live action cartoon) and insane acting decisions both campy (the villains) and bland (the heroes). There are some external reasons for its commercial failure and intense derision: consumer expectation – fanboys wanted a more serious take on their idol – and homophobia towards the director and to the movie’s blatant homoeroticism (yes, yes, the nipples). I’ve already written a whole blog post about B+R and how it’s more fun that Burton’s Batman, but even though I’ll go to bat for B+R’s hyper-watchable absurdity, it’s a bad movie for other reasons. Clumsy action sequences, bad gender takes, and a weird racist rainforest dance sequence make my love for this movie purely ironic, but love it I do, which is really the point of this whole exercise. B+R failed for the same reason it’s so fun – it injected camp that exploded the seriousness of an inherently silly subgenre. Regardless, it was a failure by any measure. It did turn a profit, but that profit was $100 million less than its predecessor, and it tanked its franchise.

            Some movies become Flops post-release thanks to the overwhelming reputation of certain iconic people involved in the movie’s creation. Take two movies I’ve recently screened: Face-Off and Signs. Both were, though not stratospheric successes, profitable and well-reviewed in their time, but both prominently involve people who would become memes. The internet fucking loves Nicolas Cage because of his Shatnerian tendency to overact. He gained infamy screaming “NOT THE BEES” at the end of the dismal 2006 Wicker Man remake, almost a decade after Face/Off, but moments of Cagesque overacting can be found in his earlier work, and find them the internet did. Thus, in the year of our lord 2019 you’re less likely to watch Face/Off as an example of John Woo’s action-director chops but because it features a bonkers face-switching premise and because, in the opening 10 minutes, Nicolas Cage, dressed like a priest, gropes a female choir singer and screams for some reason. The memeification of Cage has been harnessed by recent over-the-top horror flicks like Mom and Dad and Mandy and has probably saved Face/Off from the kind of obscurity Cage’s not-quite-as-ridiculous costar John Travolta’s action movies from the same era seem headed towards. An infamous person leads to reevaluation as a lovable flop.

            Likewise Signs has the fortune and misfortune of being directed by M Night Shyamalan. Signs was Shyamalan’s second picture after smash hit The Sixth Sense and it followed the well-liked Unbreakable. At the time of its release, Shyamalan was still the new Spielberg and reviewers had stars in their eyes. If Signs didn’t match his breakthrough (which was overrated anyway imo) it still had a kind of forgivable potential. But as film after film with silly premises followed and flopped, the Shyamalan brand no longer promised supernatural family thrills but B-movie adjacent cheese. Without the gloss, Signs is a movie in not great – check out Lily's take on why for details. It doesn’t help that woke moviegoers don’t really love Mel Gibson at the moment. We look for the Flop, and the Flop is what we see (and enjoy).

            Of course, this is subjective. And while I’m watching Face/Off in pretty much the same way as someone who watches it as an over-the-top action movie but calls it good, I’m watching Signs very differently from someone who affirms its vision of spirituality. HDTGM devotes a not terribly sympathetic segment to reading opposing reviews of the movies they’ve just lampooned, acknowledging that rarely is the Flop universally hated. It’s all a matter of degree and perspective.

            There’s another major reason a movie may become a Flop; it, like your least favorite grandparent, ages badly. Take a little movie called Hackers released in 1995 starring an unfathomably young Angelina Jolie and the somehow-already-old Sherlock from Elementary. I screened it recently for some friends, seasoned bad-movie vets all who managed to pepper Signs with lively commentary until the credits rolled. For the last twenty minutes we stared at Hackers in numb silence, and upon conclusion those who hadn’t walked out declared it the worst movie they’d ever seen. What does that mean?

            Hackers was one of two competing ‘cyberthrillers’ released that year, the other being the vastly more successful but now-forgotten Sandra Bullock vehicle The Net. Hackers capitalized on the novelty of the internet and its audience’s relative unfamiliarity to present hacking as a kind of whizz-bang sorcery and featured several scenes set within a computer (but not, for some reason, rendered in CGI). And while the fun visuals and gimmicky premise was enough to make some reviewers forgive the cinema sins of shit screenplay, bland acting, and nonexistent characterization, the patina of age has stripped away the sheen. To the young millennials and gen-Z-ers at the screening, myself included, Hackers is a relic of halcyon days when techies were hip cyberpunk anarchists instead of white boy capitalists mistreating their workers and selling your metadata. So on the one hand you have a take on tech that plays like bad pulp sci-fi, and on the other you have all the shortcomings that made it a bad movie to begin with, and it all comes together in a big bitter slurry of suck. It’s worth watching, but you’re only going to want to watch it once.

            So, quick wrap-up. The Flop is a movie that aimed for mainstream success and legitimacy which, at some point, for some reason, by some segment of the audience, came to be regarded as worth watching on the merit of its failings.

             

1c. The Auteur

            Ah, the rarest and most treasured of bad movies. The Auteur Bad Movie is the movie that should not exist, made by someone outside of the studio system who through sheer force of will accumulated the capital to make a movie. Because of how improbably they are, they don’t happen very often, and rare is the Auteur with more than one Bad Movie to his name, and yes it’s usually a he. To be an Auteur of Bad Movies takes a rare combination of determination and derangement – Auteur Bad Movies may be the only good thing to ever come out of male entitlement. Tommy Wiseau’s self-financed The Room is doubtlessly the most famous, but this exalted category includes many treasures: Hal Warren’s Manos: The Hands of Fate, Claudio Fragasso’s Troll 2, James Nguyen’s Birdemic, and the oeuvre of Ed Wood.

             Auteurs of Bad Movies are usually not professionals; they are industry outsiders, fertilizer salesmen, and mysterious moguls, but they all share an obsessive love of movies. They often emulate idols – Nguyen’s Hitchcock, Wiseau’s James Dean, Ed Wood’s Bela Lugosi – and strive to make masterpieces. Sometimes nobody filmmakers with a wad of cash and a prayer can make masterpieces (Evil Dead), but the fate of the Auteur of Bad Movies is to so fatally misunderstand every filmmaking convention, from the technical to the thematic, that they produce an anti-movie that fails on every conceivable level. This is what makes these films so unbearably entertaining. Their great egos may lead them, like Wiseau, Wood, and Warren, to star in their own bad movies, and the display of these strange individuals tends to produce a cult of personality, including some of the only good biopics ever made and the extraordinary amount of fan material to spring up around Manos, including a crowd-funded Blu-Ray restoration. It’s fair to say that these kinds of Bad Movies inspire a degree of obsession in their fans matched only by the obsession of their maker and rarely found for the other two categories of Good Bad Movies.

            Quick definition: the Auteur Bad Movie is made outside of any sort of studio system by a determined mastermind, and fails in as many ways as possible. If good bad movies are worth watching because they explode our usual storytelling conventions, Auteur Bad Movies are the best of all, or at least the most efficient.

1x. Edge Cases

            But hold on, you may be saying, Ed Wood worked within a studio system and worked within B-movie genres – social issue exploitation, monster movie, horror-themed porn. Why isn’t he up in category 1a? Let’s take a moment to parse out two edge cases, Ed Wood and David DeCoteau, to think about the role of reputation.

            I say Ed Wood is definitively in category 1c for a couple reasons. Firstly, he begged his way onto the studio lot for his B-Movies and then begged some more funding for his monster movies, even going so far as to con a Baptist church to make Plan 9. He’s wildly prolific for an Auteur of Bad Movies, sure, but it’s nothing compared to the career B-Movie maker. Secondly, his movies are failures even within their niches – and I say failure in a good way. Take Glen or Glenda, which should have been a quick and tawdry exploitation movie based on then-famous trans woman Christine Jorgenson and instead is a confession of Ed Wood’s own interest in cross-dressing that also features Bela Lugosi screaming “PULL THE STRING” over stock footage of stampeding bison. Finally, for better or worse Ed Wood, through Golden Turkey Awards and a biopic and the abiding infamy of Plan 9, has been canonized as the first saint of bad movies; the biopic in particular frames his movies not as workaday assignments but as passion projects. Since no one was giving Wood jobs, that seems pretty true. The importance of Ed Wood the historical character and the special badness of his films mark them out from other bad movies.

            On the other hand, let’s look at David DeCoteau. He starts out as a clear B-Movie case, working for that great B-Movie producer Roger Corman, and then for the makers of modern direct-to-video trash Full Moon Features. Alas, after getting the boot from Full Moon for making one homoerotic boarding school film too many (or so the story goes) he founded Rapid Heart Pictures where all he did was make homoerotic boarding school films until he also started churning out deranged children’s movies like A Talking Cat?!? Does starting your own production company make you an Auteur? Not if you keep putting out a massive volume of movies within the same general conventions as the B-Movie domain you started in. DeCoteau’s Rapid Heart movies are less about fulfilling an artistic vision than making a quick buck and filling a niche as DeCoteau freely admits in interviews, the B-Movie ethos. Which isn’t to say you shouldn’t watch A Talking Cat?!? (you absolutely should) but that it is a particular kind of bad movie. But who knows, maybe somebody will make a fabulous DeCoteau biopic that will change the way we watch his films.    

Category 2: Bad Bad Movies

2a. Boring

            Alas, here we have the most subjective of my taxonomies. But while we may disagree on when a bad movie is boring and thus not worth screening, we probably agree on the definition. These are the movies we shrug at when leaving the theater, the ones we probably forget about, the ones we neither subject to an angry tweet-storm or recommend to our friends. Most typically, they are movies that strive for mainstream greatness and hit the target of middling mediocrity, or movies that could have found life in categories 1a or 1b but simply failed in a boring way. While some people might enjoy the dull comforts of Boring Bad Movies, they are unlikely to inspire a fervent following, simply because they’re too goddamn boring.

2b. Offensive

            Offensive is a loaded word politically right now but let’s just say that here lie the movies that offend our sensibilities in unproductive ways. Here lie the gross, juvenile and (most damningly of all) unfunny comedies, the comedies that base their humor on gay panic, misogyny, transphobia, or pedophilia, the comedies that punch down or are just gross. (Comedies that are plain unfunny may be slotted in 2a). Here too lie the movies that, while they may be technically proficient and historically significant, base their entire foundation on something loathsome like racism (say, Birth of a Nation) that aren’t suitable for a fun night of riffing with the gang. Slot here too movies with graphic rape scenes like I Spit on Your Grave (on the Wikipedia bad movies list by the way) which, while they may have their defenders, still aren’t suitable for a fun night of riffing with friends. Graphic violence is in a different category because while violence and gore can be so over-the-top and ridiculous and dumb (or stylized) that it won’t ruin the vibe, even a badly-done or stylized rape scene is still gross and unfunny.

MST3K knew the difference. The gang didn’t view Sidehackers all the way through before selecting it for the show and were horrified to discover its’ latter half descends into rape and murder. They edited that out, because it isn’t funny, and learned to watch movies all the way through in the future. When asked about movies too bad for inclusion on the show, the crew named Child Bride, a movie that was not bad in the correct way. To say a Bad Bad Movie is offensive isn’t a political thing – it’s to say that the movie isn’t fun to joke about, it’s just gross.

Obviously there’s ambiguity about when a movie is too offensive to be good. My dad hates Lanthimos’ The Lobster with such verve I can only assume it offended him personally, possibly by name. Plenty of people love the #edgy movies of the New French Extremity, of Lars Von Trier or of Gaspar Noe, and plenty of people think they cross a line. But the defenders of these movies don’t think they are fun bad movies; they think they are good movies. No matter who you side with here, these movies aren’t suitable for your bad movie lineup.

I want to acknowledge that some Good Bad Movies dance on this line. The Room is undeniably misogynistic in its worldview and shows its hero laughing at a story of a domestic violence victim; Manos shows a six-year-old girl becoming the ‘bride’ of the villain. I’d argue the difference is twofold. Firstly, these potentially offensive scenes aren’t graphic. If The Room showed a woman being beaten, or if Manos showed a grown man romancing a child, we wouldn’t watch them. Instead, these moments are fleeting, and the viewer puts the laugh on the filmmaker. The Room manages to accidentally reveal the absurdity of misogyny, and while Manos is almost too inept to be taken seriously, the riffers on MST3K distance themselves from this final ickiness with cries of disgust and protest. Secondly, and most importantly, these aren’t the key moments of transgression that make the movies bad the way they are for movies that are bad because they are offensive. Instead, the key transgression is aesthetic. The ickiness just happens along the way.    

Category 3: Not Bad Movies

3a. The Campy Movie

            A pet peeve of mine is calling The Rocky Horror Picture Show a bad movie. I understand where the confusion comes from, really I do. When the only other movie with a midnight showing tradition even half as elaborate is the infamously terrible The Room, it’s easy to assume that midnight movie practices spring up exclusively around bad movies, but that’s not quite right. They spring up around cult movies, a catch-all term that includes unintentionally bad movies and movies that know exactly what they’re doing.

            RHPS isn’t bad because it’s extremely intentional. Richard O’Brien and their cast use the tradition of camp and an appropriation of B-movie imagery and story tropes to deconstruct the implicit queerness in those tropes and tell (or attempt to tell) a story of sexual and gender liberation. That’s my take anyway. You may think that RHPS has a conservative bent because Frank is punished for his transgression and isn’t a great guy anyway, or because Frank isn’t a good representation of genderqueerness. Alternatively, you may think that the cultural afterlives of RHPS as a liberating space for intergenerational queer community building and cultural memory are more important than anything O’Brien actually intended in the source text. Regardless, we couldn’t have these kinds of debates – about whether or not it’s a good or bad film, and in what ways – if RHPS wasn’t an intentional text.

RHPS is part of a whole tradition of combining queer cultural production and B-Movie raw material, on the same lines as Theater of the Ridiculous and movies like Psycho Beach Party. In its camp stylings, it’s also in the same general boat as the oeuvre of John Waters. All of these texts purposefully resist heteronormative standards of good taste and court the label of trash film, so they can be evaluated based on how well they achieve this end. Calling these movies bad denies the autonomy and the efforts of their creators, and also subtly delegitimizes camp by implying it’s a product of ineptness rather than a vital queer art form. In short, it pisses me off.

That being said, the same kind of people who love Good Bad Movies probably also love Camp because they both challenge the artistic status quo. So if you’re programming a film festival of Cult, Weird, or Trash Films, by all means, camp it up! Just don’t call them bad.  

3b. The Art Movie

Like all of the above, the Art Movie (or the Experimental Movie or Avant-Garde Movie) challenges our normal criteria for good movies, this time (and, certainly, like some Camp content) for an explicitly artistic end. Just like category 3a, the distinction here is that these movies, unlike Bad Movies, intend to violate those criteria, and mistaking the whole category as bad misses out on the fact that there are quality distinctions within Art Films. Because a lot of Art Movies play with form, they can be bizarrely paced or non-narrative, or get at their narrative through untraditional means. Sometimes they are actively aggressive towards their audience. So they might seem bad if you don’t know what you’re getting, but they’re actually just insisting on different criteria. Just because a movie is Avant-Garde doesn’t mean it’s necessarily good; it just means we’re using a different measuring stick to evaluate it. Like any other medium of Avant-Garde Art, Avant-Garde Film should shift the definition of what film can be.

Let’s take a couple quick and pretty mild examples. Vera Chytilova’s Daisies is an aggressively and joyously feminist Czech New Wave film and satire of the communist Czech regime. It kind of looks like a normal feature film –feature length, has two attractive leads, opening credits, whatever. As avant-garde films go, it’s imminently entertaining, lively, and fun. But if you go in expecting a traditional narrative film, you might come away thinking that there’s no plot and unsure how the two leads managed to cut each other up with scissors and dance around their bedroom like cartoon skeletons. It’s a movie that insists on playing its own game and, taken on its own terms, it’s a fucking masterpiece.

*Puts on film-bro hat* Let’s talk about David Lynch. Lynch’s movies definitely vary in degrees of experimentalism but my favorite of his movies, Mulholland Drive, falls pretty squarely in the Art Film camp. MD violates the biggest Screenwriting 101 Law: don’t say it’s all a dream. Its circular, reality-boggling plot, its scenes of stilted acting, and its bizarre comedic asides all serve to construct an extraordinarily gripping dream world that privileges the subjectivity of its protagonist above all else. Again, the key word here is intentionality. Betty’s gee-whiz arrival in LA plays like a badly acted cliché (at one screening I attended, this scene got a lot of laughs), because the movie chooses the most cliché LA narrative as its starting point to turn that image of LA inside out. But taken out of context, or seen by an unsympathetic audience, it does kinda seem like a stilted dialogue scene from The Room. Just as there are good Art Movies and bad ones, there are good Lynch movies like Mulholland Drive and bad Lynch movies like Lost Highway that use these artsy techniques to accomplish or fail in their narrative goals – it’s not just weirdness for weirdness’ sake.

When I argue that Bad Movies at their best are accidental avant-garde, it’s because they through sheer ineptness accomplish the same shifting of aesthetic standards and categories that good avant-garde does. If you’re looking for the weird and the unexpected, both of these worlds of film will give them to you. They destabilize categories of Good and Bad in a way that allows new kinds of art to be made. It doesn’t mean that they’re the same and they warrant different kinds of analysis, but similar kinds of audience-ship.

Category X: Why does this matter??
            Nerds love to fight over esoteric shit like this, and I am nothing if not a nerd. I hope, if you like my taxonomy, you and your nerdy friends will have endless hours of fun fighting over what category Mac and Me belongs to (category 1b is the correct answer). I know my girlfriend and I will.

            But I also think this matters, at least a little bit. Right now, the terms good and bad can be meaningless. So can quantitative measures like a Rotten Tomatoes percentage score. We already know that different kinds of movies should be held to different standards – it’s not a big deal if Hereditary didn’t make you laugh, or if The Princess Bride didn’t scare you, but swap the two and it becomes a problem. People like Bad Movies just like they like comedy and horror movies for similarly distinct reasons from why they might enjoy musicals or dramas. But looking for great Bad Movies on the internet can be frustrating as all the different kinds of Bad Movies get muddled together. And because bad and good are usually the binary terms against which all genres of movies are measured, the fact that Bad Movies might actually be an important part of the film canon demands a different kind of vocabulary. If suddenly Bad Movies can be Good (and Good movies can become Bad), than these words and these categories aren’t going to cut it.

Bad Movies are much more than just the detritus of Hollywood; they provide their own unique audience experience, and if you’ve ever riffed a bad movie with friends you know it’s actually kind of empowering to burst out of the reverent silence expected of the audience. It demands creativity and wit and a certain lack of inhibitions, and it’s a lot of fun. In front of your very eyes, the movie, frozen in time, transforms into something new. Bad Movies are special, damn it, and it’s not enough to just toss them off as bad or quote a low Rotten Tomatoes score. We lose so much of what they offer. I hope the categories I propose provide a way of useful language to recommend Bad Movies and talk about their appeal, and also understand what purpose they can serve as Art.