5 Signs You're Watching the Awesome Kind of Bad Movie

This title-comes-first, budget-and-quality-come-last method was so successful that it's still being used today by production companies like the Asylum, the guys responsible for such recent titles as Nazis at the Center of the Earth and 2-Headed Shark Attack. The Asylum gets a great deal of business from people seeing these awesome titles and saying, "Zombies vs. Squirrel Ninjas? Whoa, that must be so bad it's good."

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These viewers inevitably wind up disappointed, though, because Asylum-style B-movies almost never follow the crucial rules of good-bad movies. Like ...

What makes Jurassic Park enjoyable isn't the same thing that made No Country for Old Men a success. The Avengers and The Seventh Seal are not good for the same reasons. But bad movies? Almost always, bad movies are bad in the same way. The acting sucks. The monsters are stupid looking. The ghost shark is just phoning in his lines. It's duller than watching a plant die. And yet these dull B-movies keep making money, because every time we come across a new one (Amish Vampires vs. a Yeti! A Giant Tsunami of Velociraptors!), we convince ourselves that this one will be different.

What we're forgetting is that for a movie to be enjoyably bad, it must also be a success. Remember "Friday" by Rebecca Black? It was a terrible song, yes, but it was also a successful song, because it did what a pop song is meant to do: It got into your head and wouldn't leave.

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Similarly, a good-bad movie should succeed at its job: It should entertain us for 90 minutes. And this achievement is so rare that it's almost impossible. For every Troll 2 or The Wicker Man, there's a thousand bad movies that sank like dead two-headed sharks because they were terrible and boring.

How do some bad movies manage to avoid this and achieve greatness, then?

That's pretty entertaining ... but it's like one minute of the movie, and the film as a whole doesn't really offer much else. No joke is funny if you keep repeating it for 90 minutes. To reach "so bad it's good" territory, a movie needs to continually escalate its badness. For example, let's take Birdemic, widely celebrated as one of the greatest "so bad it's good" movies of all time. The badness of this movie is like the subject of a long Internet argument: Just when you think you've grasped it, it morphs into something else.

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Birdemic starts with some terrible acting: Sure, that's amusing for about five minutes. But then comes the scene where the protagonist invents a solar panel that would single-handedly solve the world's energy problems, and everyone around him reacts like this is no big deal. Soon afterward, mutant birds appear that are made from those animated gifs they had on websites back in 1995, and then the birds start exploding and making cute little dive bombing noises while they do it. And it just keeps going. Amazingly, Birdemic pulls off this badness roller coaster for its entire runtime.

Of course, the boundaries of this rule are blurry, because not everyone is entertained by the same thing. Some people think Batman & Robin and Die Hard 4.0 successfully climb the "so bad it's good" mountain; for others, they're just bad. I enjoyed the Twilight movies on this level; a lot of people enjoyed them about as much as sticky floor popcorn that a hobo's been sleeping on. But it's important to realize that good-bad movies are like those trips to the dentist where they offer you a bunch of different of flavors of fluoride gel that all taste like butt: They should be varied in their terribleness. Another important rule is ...

No matter what good-bad movie you're talking about, there was at least one person on set who thought that the movie is going to be great. In Troll 2, it was the Italian husband-and-wife director-writer team, who wrote their script in English despite hardly speaking the language. In The Wicker Man, it was Nicolas Cage, who poured everything he had into that scene with the bees. In The Room, it was director Tommy Wiseau, who seemed to think the story he was telling was a life-changing masterpiece.

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No one involved in 2-Headed Shark Attack thought their movie was going to be great. Good-bad movies, on the other hand, have an innocence behind them that is almost endearing. We all like to watch movies that give us a peek into the minds of people completely unlike ourselves. Through the magic of cinema, we can experience life as a serial killer or a narcissist or a madman or someone from Canada. But most of these movie experiences are filtered through the viewpoint of a completely sane director and cast. Good-bad movies cut out this middleman and plug us directly into the brain noise of someone who thought that this was how Americans play football.

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Which is why, when Birdemic 2 was released in 2013, it just wasn't as enjoyable as the original. Director James Nguyen made the sequel years after his movie had been proclaimed one of the worst ever made, long after even the densest ego could possibly believe that they were making another daring pro-environment masterpiece. The weird innocence of the original was replaced by a director adding zombies and shit in an actual attempt to be bad, and that's just not as fun.

This attitude is particularly common when it comes to creative stuff. A friend dismisses your life-size mural of a kitten riding a dragon; they could do it better, you know, if they wanted to. Relatives claim that playing the harmonica must be easy because you do it so well, ignoring all your long nights slaving away at harmonica school. Movie making is no different: A lot of people have the attitude that a director just points cameras at stuff, and everything else works itself out.

This is where bad movies come in. Most good-bad movies were made by the film industry version of the waffle-eating guy picking on your Frisbee game. For example, rumor has it that the famed 1966 good-bad movie Manos: The Hands of Fate was actually the result of a bet somebody made with the director after he boasted that movie making was no big deal, anyone could do it. The result was this:

Watching Manos is like attending a reverse filmmaking school. It's a level of bad that most of us non-filmmakers never imagined could exist, because we've never seen that far behind the scenes of that particular creative process. Moths fly at the screen because of the lights the crew was using at night. Entire scenes are out of focus. Whole shots are blocked by the back of an actor's head. Manos is an extreme example, but most good-bad movies tend to have been vomited out by people who both overestimated their own skills and underestimated the difficulty of making a good film. Watching these movies is like vicariously dragging Waffle Taco Guy up and forcing him to throw a Frisbee at a professional level, and then watching him cry as his Frisbee goes off course and knocks over a fruit stand.

Furthermore, good-bad movies teach us to appreciate qualities in movies that were formerly invisible. Sure, they have a whole Oscar category for sound mixing, but if you really want to appreciate what good sound mixing does for a movie, watch this scene in Birdemic fail at it. We might laugh at a wooden performance or two in a blockbuster, but we don't realize just how good most actors in movies are until we watch The Room. Sure, the last Hobbit movie kind of sucked, but at least no one got hit in the face with a boom mic.

C. Coville has a Twitter here and a Tumblr here.