BAD MOVIES THAT FANS LOVE
Critics may hate them, but some films charm the audience.
A month before Suicide Squad opened last August, I left a screening in Washington with a smile on my face. Bad guys teamed up, stuff exploded — it may not have been the Citizen
Kane of supervillain movies but enjoyment was had.
When the reviews came in, I looked more like the emoji with a monocle; Variety labeled me an “outlier” and pretty much every other critic in the universe hated the film. Almost angrily so. But then came a whiplash: Audiences made Squad a hit with $325 million and ensured that Margot Robbie would don Harley Quinn’s short shorts and crazy makeup again.
But was Suicide Squad a horrible film or a comic-book masterpiece? Who was right? The answer: Well, nobody and everybody, since cinematic badness is mostly in the eye of the beholder.
“There’s always going to be a market for so-called ‘bad movies,’ probably because most people seem to love the idea of a guilty pleasure,” says Kate Erbland, film editor at the movie site IndieWire .com. “It’s fun to like something
that other people don’t, all the better to defend it and revel in your own unique tastes.”
The appetite is there, no question. Transformers: The Last
Knight, part of a series that is known for being critic-proof, was savaged by reviewers (only 15% liked it on aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes.com) but still won the box office (albeit with $44.7 million, the worst opening weekend in Michael Bay’s five-movie franchise).
Summer always has been a place where even the iffiest high- profile movies thrive. Sequels Jason Bourne and X-Men: Apocalypse both received mixed reviews a year ago, and The Legend of Tarzan was a critical dud, but all were in the top 10 for the season. Same for Minions and San Andreas in 2015, and Transformers: Age of Extinction, Maleficent, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and Teen
age Mutant Ninja Turtles in 2014. “For a lot of people, huge spectacle is something that needs to be seen, regardless of the reviews and the buzz,” says SlashFilm.com editor in chief Peter Sciretta.
As long as popcorn and Goobers have been a part of the cinema experience, there have been B-movies and fodder for endless “best worst” lists. Reefer Madness (1936), Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), Ishtar (1987), Showgirls (1995) and Gigli (2003) all have a reputation as films folks love to hate, and 1970s Roger Corman movies such as Death Race 2000 and Piranha, as well as flicks from Troma, the Z-grade producer of such titles as The Toxic Avenger and Class of Nuke ‘Em High, have found cult status. Potentially the newest chapter in that history of satisfying imperfection? The Book of Henry, a weepy drama now in theaters that one Esquire
article called “the best worst movie” of 2017.
“There is a whole subculture of people who just really enjoy watching really bad movies,” says Erik Davis, managing editor for Fandango.com and Movies.com.
And there are plenty of places to celebrate them for those so inclined. Princeton University has its Cheese and Bad Movies Club, where students pair Brie with a showing of Battlefield Earth. The Razzies annually honor the worst movies of the past year the day before the Oscars. Netflix has plenty of old episodes (and a new season) of Mystery Science Thea
ter 3000, which made the communal experience of watching tasteless movies cool in the ’90s, way before live-tweeting.
The unlikely phenom of bad cinema has spawned many options in the podcast realm. Comedians Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael and Jason Mantzoukas host How Did This Get Made? (with celebrity guest stars tackling everything from Grease 2 to
Over the Top), Washington sports-radio personality Chad Dukes created the Con Air Cast because of his love for the 1997 action film with Nicolas Cage, and Stinker Madness speaks for itself.
“We love movies (and) no matter what the quality of them are, the best part often is talking to your friends afterward,” says Scheer, who acknowledges “stacking the deck” with films bound to foster discussion for his podcast. “Sometimes the choices just add up to a crazy end product and the fun is trying to decipher how it got so far off the rails. We are like CSI for movies.”
Ask any critic or film reporter and they’ll have a favorite bad movie that plumbs the depths of Rotten Tomatoes. For this writer, there’s Sylvester Stallone taking on a cult at Christmastime in the retro shoot-’em-up Cobra (18%). For Sciretta, Kevin Costner’s Wa
terworld (42%) may have been a failure all around but also boasts “a great premise and fun swashbuckling action.” Uproxx senior entertainment writer Mike Ryan says he “had the time of my life” seeing sci-fi action film Battleship (34%) in a theater, though he refuses to watch it again “because I know I probably won’t like what I see (if I watch it) at home.”
A hierarchy of badness has become apparent. There’s the critically panned fare that finds its audience somehow. And certain cinematic bombs, including last summer’s dazzling failures Independence Day: Resurgence and Al
ice Through the Looking Glass, are so unnecessary that no one likes them. But what also exists is that rare level reached by television’s social media sensation Sharknado movies and the notoriously abhorrent The Room, which “achieve the complete opposite of Oscar glory because every aspect of them is a bit of a train wreck and people like watching that unfold,” says Davis.
Erbland acknowledges being “an early adopter” of 2003’s The
Room, writer/director/star Tommy Wiseau’s romantic drama that began as a limited release before becoming a midnight-movie phenomenon. Like “a masterpiece in reverse,” Davis calls it the very definition of a perfect bad movie: “The actors don’t have any chemistry, the acting is completely wooden, the story is totally ridiculous and the cinematography is awful.”
Johnny Depp’s movie Ed Wood paid homage to the Plan 9 director, and similarly The Disaster
Artist (in theaters Dec. 8) follows the making of The Room and stars James Franco as Wiseau. After a rapturous response at South by Southwest film festival in March,
Artist ironically has the potential of being an awards-season contender, Davis says. “We’re getting to a place where some of these historically bad movies could in some way, shape or form be awarded some of the highest honors that we have.”
Suicide Squad probably will never get a future film chronicling how Jared Leto gave all his castmates rats, porn and condoms. (Though to be fair, the movie did win an Oscar — for best makeup.) However, Squad and fellow superhero hit Batman v Superman:
Dawn of Justice are just the most obvious examples showing the deep divide that exists between critics and audiences.
Exacerbating the situation: When Suicide Squad director David Ayer, The Mummy filmmaker Alex Kurtzman and Baywatch actor Dwayne Johnson publicly proclaimed that they made their films for fans and not critics — a chestnut that Erbland finds baffling.
“Most critics, myself included, love movies so much that we’ve turned watching them and discussing them into our literal jobs,” she says. “There shouldn’t be this disconnect.”
Adds Ryan: “There are loud people who will defend something like Suicide Squad until the day they die, but the reality is a good movie (like) Wonder Wom
an will outperform a bad one of the same genre.”
Yet Erbland sees both sides wising up. Audiences are growing more discerning — the receptions for both the critically reviled
Transformers and Mummy have been underwhelming this summer, at least domestically — while critics are starting to see the appeal of films that embrace the broader strokes.
“Going to a movie is so expensive now, especially if you have a family — and there are so many other (entertainment) options — I don’t think people will willfully pay for what they know will be ‘bad’ as often anymore,” Ryan says. “The lesson here: Make good things.”
There are plenty of Oscar-ready films to watch, Scheer argues. But they probably won’t be as fun as getting your buddies together for a showing of The Room.
“In a weird way, I think watching bad movies is like re-creating a less-costumed version of The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” Scheer says. “We all want to be in there yelling at the screen, pointing stuff out to our friends and essentially taking a solitary experience and using it to connect with others.”