What’s So Good About Being Bad?

Cult fandoms thrive off the so-bad-it’s-good factor of shoddy entertainment. So, what’s the appeal?

2017 was the year I joined a cult. 

At night, my fellow cult members and I would gather in a dimly lit auditorium in Leicester Square. We’d sit, packed shoulder-to-shoulder, enraptured by a series of otherworldly pictures playing before us. Together we sang songs; we threw spoons; we chanted rehearsed phrases like rabid religious acolytes. 

Except our idol wasn’t a god, and we had no sacred text. At the heart of our congregation was a film, one so outstandingly bad that many have compared its creator to an alien from outer space. 

That was my cult, the cult of bad movie fanaticism, and to this day I’m struggling to unpick the twisted knot of irony and sincerity that bound me to it.

A Film Too Bad To Hate

The Room was unleashed upon the world in 2003 by Tommy Wiseau, a man of unknown origin and mysteriously large reserves of cash. With a nonsensical plot, surreal dialogue and awkward sex scenes that hogged over 10 minutes of runtime, it was the kind of film destined for cult greatness—and cult greatness it received.

In the years since its release, The Room went from a flop that failed to earn $2,000 at the box office to a worldwide phenomenon that has raked in millions and continues to attract eager crowds. Its fans are so devoted that near-liturgical rituals have developed to accompany screenings

When pushed for a reason to justify their irrational cult fandom, moviegoers typically fall back on the adage ‘so bad it’s good’. Like any number of tone-deaf X-Factor auditions, the phrase describes a piece of work or performance that falls so short of typical standards of quality that the spectacle of the thing itself becomes a form of ironic entertainment.

But such an all-purpose phrase doesn’t provide much of an answer as to why a film like The Room is so beloved. In fact, at face-value it’s an outright contradiction, like calling something ‘so sharp it’s blunt’. There’s got to be more going on behind the ludicrous rituals and running jokes, and getting to the heart of it might just help us understand ourselves a little better. 

All Fun And Games

Robin Bailes runs the YouTube film review channel Dark Corners along with friend Graham Trelfer. For him, bad movies exist as joke fodder. The more a film teems with wooden dialogue, shoddy special effects and nonsensical plot points, the more there is to point and laugh at. 

Robin’s review persona toes the line between mocking and sympathetic—highlighting a film’s shortcomings whilst ensuring that any redeeming concepts get their fair dues. 

“It doesn’t seem like I’m so much angry at them as I am disappointed by them. I just feel like they could have done better,” he says. 

But he’s not the first to use bad films as a platform for comedy. The practice was popularised by comedian Roy Hodgeson with the show Mystery Science Theatre 3,000 (also known as MST3K). Despite each episode being little more than a feature film with a deeply cynical running commentary, it was a smash hit, introducing many to the joy of junk cinema.

The MST3K running commentary style of comedy quickly became known as ‘riffing’, and it has been credited for spawning countless staples of the entertainment industry today, from DVD commentaries to YouTube lets-plays. More importantly, the spirit of snarky, self-aware humour that characterised Hodgeson’s work is central to the current culture of bad movie fandom.

It’s exclusively this mocking aspect of cult fandom that makes sense to Bailes, as well as large swathes of the community. In fact, outside of research for his show, the YouTuber avoids so-bad-it’s-good movies at all costs. “They’re movies you can talk over because god knows there’s nothing worth hearing,” he says. “I also think that if you watch these films with other people, then I get it because it’s like a shared experience, and that can be a lot of fun”.

But what if humour is just the initial hook that pulls one into the cult fandom community? Shared laughter is great for bringing people together, but what’s even better is a shared cause. 

Sticking It To The Man

Somewhere down exploring the so-bad-it’s-good media rabbit hole, a curious question presents itself: what exactly is bad? If taste is so unique to the individual, who gets to decide the qualities that make one thing worthy of praise and another deserving of scorn?

For the average cinemagoer, the answer lies with critics, those stalwarts of the culture pages and academies with the five precious stars needed to make or break a film. It was artist and writer Jonathan Richardson who, in the early 1700s, first devised a quantifiable method of determining the value of art. His 18-point system stood as a precursor to today’s five-star standard, and it cemented the idea that art had certain characteristics that one could label ‘good’ or ‘bad’.

In the 80s and 90s, a curious counterpoint emerged to this artistic hegemony within the filmmaking space, the ‘badfilm’ movement. Disillusioned by the standards of taste-making elites, whose influence had a sanitising effect on the industry, these fans ventured deep into the cinematic wilderness to make contact with the dishevelled, unloved films previous generations had exiled. The fans took these films into the warm, feeding them the adoration critics had long starved them of. 

For these audiences, to relish in the pulpy violence of films like The Toxic Avenger or the shoestring special effects Plan 9 From Outer Space is to hold a middle finger up to the establishment. In a landscape of well-established conventions and high-minded ideals of taste, these fans take comfort in the unpretentious sincerity of schlock.

Pieces like President Obama and Two Trees In Love are all displayed in the museum’s collection with a good-humoured joviality. Importantly, however, there’s no outright mockery in any of the museum’s material. Instead, the target of the MOBA is the art establishment itself. Like with the ‘badfilm’ movement, the museum takes aim at the pretentiousness that pervades the art world. And in doing so, it seeks to make art more accessible.

“The word ‘art’ in our name is more important than the word ‘bad’. We want things that are sincere art, that are art, and to us that means it needs to be sincere and original,” says Louise Reilly Sacco, MOBA’s Executive Director.

“I think art is intimidating to people. Part of our appeal is that we are giving people a chance to come in and laugh with their friends and disagree with us,” she says.

Seen from that perspective, the sight of a riotous, spoon-throwing cinema auditorium becomes something altogether more meaningful. Hidden beneath the ironic humour and absurd rituals is a spirit not dissimilar to the one that fuelled the punk movement of yesteryear, an unspoken chant of ‘I won’t like what you tell me’. 

Not So Harmless?

It doesn’t take too sharp of a mind to look at the credits for cinematic disasterpieces like The Room, Birdemic or Troll 2 and spot that the creative forces behind many of the most popular come from outside America. Whether it’s Vietnam (Birdemic’s James Nguyen), Italy (Troll 2’s Claudio Fragasso) or…um, perhaps somewhere around Eastern Europe (The Room’s Tommy Wiseau), these creators all come from cultures wildly different from the Hollywood norm. Yet, they all share a similar affection for that norm, and they all strive to capture it. Similarly, they all fail, with results equal parts clunky, naive and hilarious.

What’s overlooked is that the humour with so-bad-it’s-good films so often derives from this sense of foreignness. A figure like Tommy Wiseau can’t help but appear as an outsider, despite his best efforts. By laughing at his failure to grasp the American culture he so desperately longs to be part of, audience’s automatically assume a place above him. Cult fandoms may scoff at the elites of art criticism, but in mocking the efforts of cultural outsiders, they’re complicit in an elitism of their own.

In his research paper The Cultural Politics of Accented Cinema, Iain Smith, senior film lecturer at King’s College London, explores this tension, concluding that so-bad-it’s-good cinema is inescapably tied to the power structures that shape Western society.  

“For me, there is something unacknowledged about what’s going on at laughing at the broken english within these films, the heavily accented english, and even just the production elements of the film…that perception of foreignness, even if it’s not conscious, I think is still playing a role [in making audiences laugh],” Smith tells me.

“I wanted in that piece to try to get to grips with what precisely we’re laughing at. Is there a xenophobic dimension to it? Or is it something about cultural distance?”

Smith isn’t looking to utterly condemn cult film fans with his ideas: he’s got too many old movie posters and books about B-movies to justify that. Rather, he’s calling for some simple contemplation. When we laugh at Tommy Wiseau, or when we line up to ask him questions at midnight screenings, where is the enjoyment coming from? Whose dignity are we undermining? And what does that say about us?