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 h