Tuesday, September 30, 2008

On Bad-good and just plain bad

Alternative title: From Boll to Wood, when bad is good and when it's not.

Occasionally while watching a movie, you might find yourself thinking something along the lines of: "this is bad, this is really bad, this is really really...good." This sudden change of mind isn't as much because the quality of the movie increasing suddenly, quite frankly the direct oposite. The movie has reached that notorious bottom of the barrel, and is now vigorously drilling its way through said bottom, through some truly mind-blowing space/time thingmajig emerging near the top, it's so bad it's good. It can be compared to wearing clothes so soaked they can't possibly get wetter.

It's actually kind of a fine line, and I suspect it depends on the watcher, but speaking from my own experience, there's some movies that just ooze pure bad-yet-goodness. Plan 9 from outter space is my personal favorite example. That film has so much insanely bad craftmanship, I swear to the gods of celluloid and dark cinemas it has to be intentional to a degree very few others have followed, before or after. The director, Ed Wood, can be described as a director completely and utterly robbed of the concept of compromising. The actors of Plan 9 several times tried to make Wood go for another take by acting completely back-breakingly awful, mais non. You can say what you want about the crossdressing director antigenius, but when he said "one take will do," he really meant it.

The second category of bad movies is the less plesant one. Movies that are so bad they are just bad. Examples of these are to numerous to name, and quite frankly it's hard to find a king of the failflicks. Still, pretty much anything I've seen by Uwe Boll comes pretty high (low?) on the list by default. I don't know quite what irks me so much about Boll. Yes, his movies makes me, as an aspiring maker of movies, angry and sad to my very core, but it should be no problem to just ignore him, right? Yes, but at the same time no. It's amazing how many movies the guy have made, and equally amazing how he manages to fund it all, seeing as the rest of the world likes Bolls movies just as much (little) as I do.

I seem to have derailed from my original topic, movies that are just bad. I think it's something about the attitude one assumes while making the movie. If what drives the movie forwards is the love for the medium, genre and/or audience, the flicks tend to dip towards the bad-good side of the scale, but when the movie is made with condescending arrogance or halfheartedness, it tips the other way. I won't be so bold to assume that people who make horribly bad movies hate the audience, but it might seem like that some times.

Anyway, to wrap this up, here's a 'lill list of my 7 favorite bad-good movies, in no particular order

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