When Does a Bad Movie Become Good?

I recently watched the documentary, Best Worst Movie and frankly, it’s bizarre when you think about it.

The documentary centres around the 1992 film Troll 2, widely regarded as one of the worst films ever made. Twenty years on, the film has gained a massive cult following and is playing in packed out cinemas across America. And it’s spreading, Troll 2 is gaining a following across Europe as well.

The story is ridiculous, the actors are terrible, the dialogue is worse, direction is non-existent and there are no trolls to be seen. Yet people love it? Why? Why are people lapping up this rubbish?

It makes no sense. If you were asked to choose between watching a good movie and a bad movie, you’d choose the good movie wouldn’t you? Yet no, these people are choosing to watch Troll 2 instead. In the time it takes to watch Troll 2 you could have watched Citizen Kane, widely regarded as one of the best films ever made.*

The charm of Troll 2 seems to stem from the fact those involved didn’t seem aware they were making a bad film. It falls into that old cliché of being ‘so bad it’s good.’ But when does that occur exactly in the film making process? The Twilight films for example, will never have to worry about falling into this category.

To become ‘so bad its good’ a movie has to fail on every level. The run-of-the-mill bad movie will usually get at least some elements of the film right. The success of a film is built on lots of different facets such as the acting, casting, dialogue, direction, editing, sound, music, etc.  The SBIG movie will mess up on almost if not all of them.

But again for it to really succeed (or indeed, fail) it needs to appear that those involved don’t know the film is terrible. Ed Wood, director of Plan 9 from Outer Space, was said by those around him to be unaware how bad a director he was, so consumed was he in his ‘art’.

It’s tempting to think this comes down to an issue of budget as many films proclaimed as being SBIG are typically low budget. There may be some truth to this but on the flip side this argument ignores the many good films made on small budgets throughout cinema’s history. Kevin Smith’s first (and best) film Clerks was made for $30,000 (largely self-funded) with a cast of unknown local actors. This only equates to about an eighth of the budget given to Troll 2. It’s perhaps ironic that it was when Kevin Smith was given a budget to work with and able to cast well-known actors in his films it all started to go a bit pear-shaped (I’m looking at you Affleck).

There is a growing market for bad movies. When making Mystery Science Theatre 3000 in the 90’s, a TV programme based around the idea of making fun of bad movies, the producers would be inundated with requests from directors to show their films as they knew an appearance would increase their sales.

In modern times, Asylum pictures lead the way in bad movie releases with titles such as Megashark vs Giant Octopus and Sharknado. This trend is even shifting over to mainstream Hollywood with films built around ludicrous premises (Snakes on a Plane anyone?).

But where these films fall down for me is in that we’re supposed to think these films are bad, everything is played with a knowing wink and a smile. They are not true SBIG movies. The SBIG movie does not know how awful it is.

There is a theory that some film makers have deliberately tried to make their films as bad as possible to achieve SBIG status. A good analogy for this would be The Producer’s, where they deliberately try to make the worst musical ever but inadvertently become the biggest hit on Broadway.

Birdemic is a film often cited as an example of this. I don’t buy it. If you were to ever watch Birdemic (there are clips on youtube), you would realise that to have deliberately made a film as bad as this would have taken a lot of effort. And if you are going to put that much effort in then you might as well try and make a good movie.

I don’t believe anyone sets out to make a bad movie but through factors such as bad stories, bad actors and just sheer bloody incompetence they do it. And I, and many others, love them for it.

*you may have worked out, I spend a lot of time watching bad movies when I could be watching Citizen Kane. Yet I’ve never seen Troll 2.