Theme: Bad Movies

Everyone has their opinion as to what a bad movie is. The idea of the bad movie has been thrown about by books, film festivals and tv shows on the subject. And yet it is not always clear what defines a bad movie.

From a look at what are commonly considered bad movies, a bad movie can be any of the following:-

– A work that is made with astounding degree of technical ineptitude, legendary cheapness or where production values and effects in particular have dated badly

– A work that contains absurd dialogue, purple prose or lines that have since proven unintentionally ridiculous

– A big-budgeted film that proved a massive flop and fell well below expectation

– A work such as a remake, a sequel or an adaptation that badly mangles the source material

– Films that feature early performances from subsequently well-known actors in embarrassing roles

– Films made with absurd levels of pretension or plotting incoherence

– Works that are morally offensive on some level

What constitutes any of the following is often highly subjective. Many younger modern audiences will regard anything from an era like the 1950s as bad simply for its lack of sophisticated modern production values. Morally offensive varies widely with some simply equating their personal disgust with bad filmmaking – horror films are often treated this way.

The cult of bad movies began with the publication of The Golden Turkey Awards (1980) by Harry and Michael Medved, which held a series of badly made films and flops up to critical ridicule. Contrarily, this served to create a cultish fascination around a figure like Edward D. Wood Jr, whom the Medveds called the World’s Worst Director. This was also followed by assorted festivals that screened many of these bad movies followed by video/dvd revivals. This also created a fad for Deliberately Bad Movies.

There are also tv shows like Mystery Science Theater 3000 (1988-99, 2017-8) that make a virtue of taking older films and running them over with comedy lines ridiculing them for their supposed badness, a process the author finds deplorable as it often derides films irrespective of their merits and without leaving a viewer to make up their own mind.

What one would like to see is a more varied critical language employed to differentiate bad movie-making – there is a world of difference between no-budget filmmaking and expensive flops or works that suffer from artistic pretension – they are bad in different ways and not at all comparable. Below is a list of what are commonly considered bad movies (sometimes one’s opinion differs) as well as several that one thinks are worthy of inclusion.