Like A Film That Loses Its Entire $5 Million Budget And Starts A Cultural Movement: Isn’t It Ironic?

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There’s a growing trend in comedy that says poorly made entertainments are inherently hilarious. In his latest article, Lucas Wesley Snipes looks at the success of Tim and Eric, How Did This Get Made?, James Franco’s upcoming movie about The Room, and a few other so-bad-it’s-good entertainments that he admits to being a fan of himself. He asks the question, does celebrating something for obviously being terrible somehow cheapen praise levied on something that’s actually good?

The Room and Other Bad Art We Can’t Get Enough Of

Tommy Wiseau’s 2003 film The Room is almost without any question the worst movie ever made. Films have been made more poorly and more carelessly, but when you consider the production costs in relation to the end result, it’s really hard to argue any other film, or indeed any intended entertainment in general, is more fitting of the “disasterpiece” label. Naturally, this has translated to a rapid cult following on the Internet and in midnight theaters around the country, with an ever-increasing number of celebrities championing the film as one of their favorites. Patton Oswalt created a skit about Wiseau for one of his DVD releases, Tim and Eric dedicated an episode of Awesome Show, Great Job! to what it would be like working with the actual Wiseau, and now James Franco is directing and starring in Point Grey Pictures’ upcoming The Masterpiece, based on the book The Disaster Artist written by the co-star and “line producer” of The Room and Wiseau’s closest friend, Greg Sestero. Seth Rogen, Bryan Cranston, Sharon Stone, and Zac Efron are just a few of the major names attached to star in supporting roles.

The Masterpiece and the fascination with Wiseau’s film in general are just one of many signs of a strange trend in pop culture that’s actually existed for about as long as entertainment itself. Everyone has heard the term “so bad it’s good,” but some people take it further than others in their enjoyment of such a thing, and can reach a point where their favorite entertainment in the world is their favorite because it’s absolutely terrible. These types of films even have their own well-known award ceremony held the same weekend as the Oscars, called The Golden Raspberries, better known as The Razzies. In the nature of full disclosure, I’ll point out I was an usher for the 2015 ceremony. I hope the fact I was just an usher puts this in humblebrag territory at worst, and I’ll add it was a joy to even be there and the night was a blast. The Razzies were founded in 1981, but that wasn’t the start of the trend, either.

Long before Wiseau, there was Ed Wood, who also received an autobiographical film based on his life with an all star Hollywood cast back in 1994. Shortly before that film was released, Comedy Central took a local cable TV show and turned it into a cult phenomenon when they started airing Mystery Science Theater 3000, lambasting forgotten sci-fi B-movies and becoming one of that network’s first hits. More recently, comedians and improvisers Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael, and Jason Mantzoukas have been hosting the How Did This Get Made? podcast on the Earwolf Network, which follows MST3K’s lead in discussing the worst movies ever made.

Movies aren’t the only source of this type of entertainment schadenfreude. Personally, I’ve recently become obsessed with a 50’s TV show called Sergeant Preston of the Yukon that airs on Grit TV extremely early in the morning. The show is basically The Lone Ranger in the Alaskan tundra, but instead of Tonto, the majority of Sergeant Preston’s main co-stars are untrained animals and child actors. While Lassie could practically communicate with humans, in the first episode of the show I saw, it took Yukon King about three full minutes to pick up a rope with his mouth and move it a few feet. I guess they didn’t have the budget for a reshoot when the dog clearly didn’t understand what it was supposed to do, and its trainer/director/person on set was audibly yelling “get the rope” at him off screen. It couldn’t have affected the overall run time of the show, either, since every episode contains a solid two or three minutes of the Sergeant sledding through empty fields, which must have been easy to cut.

I was hooked, and I kept laughing every time Yukon King wandered off screen when he was supposed to be doing something important, and the laughs got harder every one of the dozens of times Preston gave a rifle to one of his child companions, which is quite often. I might be the only one watching Sergeant Preston, but I’m not alone in the basic idea—this is just my version of Conan O’Brien’s Walker, Texas Ranger lever, which was one of the most popular regular gags on his Late Night series. There’s also the entire Syfy channel, which is constantly producing made-for-TV movies and Sharknados that wouldn’t be possible unless people loved watching patently ridiculous TV.

Why We Love Terrible Film

So, why do people do it? I just admitted I’m one of them, but I understand there’s something absurd about telling people I like these things I’m talking about because they’re terrible. As increasingly popular as this behavior is, the trend doesn’t make any sense on a very basic level. The idea of loving something because you think it’s awful is psychologically backwards and confusing, but the sort of people who love these films are hardly mentally disturbed. In fact, this kind of fanaticism can really only come out of a true, unabashed, unending love and appreciation of great films, TV shows, and popular culture in general.

The joy in a terrible film is trying to figure out what the hell the director was trying to do. Who, if anyone, could possibly have been the target audience for the madness they created? The answer is usually just the director him or herself, and as a result, these films end up amazingly in-depth and bizarre character studies of the human mind. What I’ve discussed so far is often cast off as “ironic appreciation,” but there’s nothing jokey about it—lovers of bad film have a genuine and powerful appreciation for weirdness, individualism, and the spirit of creative invention. Decades of silly and idiosyncratic stand-up comedians becoming famous simply by opening up their brains and sharing their thoughts on stage would imply that’s something almost every fan of comedy can get behind.

People aren’t watching so-called bad movies just because of a particularly bad acting performance, confusing writing or directing, or for the simple fact it’s a bad movie in the first place. In order for it to be enjoyable, a bad movie or a bad TV show can’t just “be bad.” Plan 9 from Outer Space was probably the first significant bad film to draw a cult audience, but it was hardly the first bad movie anyone made. Ed Wood had already made Glen Or Glenda?, which some film critics argue is significantly worse, and there were already plenty of science fiction films with extremely low budgets that look laughable in hindsight. While there’s a little bit of fun behind low budgets, the real joy is seeing a group of people who are desperately attempting to create art, but reveal along every step of the way their interpretation of art is unlike anything we’ve ever seen.

As much fun as I have watching a dog struggle with stage directions and as many laughs as Conan’s Walker lever created, they don’t compare in entertainment to full length studies in insanity like The Room, or Troll 2, or Escape From the Bronx, or R. Kelly’s Trapped In The Closet series, to name a few other personal favorites. Whether good or bad, it takes courage, passion, and unbridled creativity to make films like those, and this is why people can easily enjoy the work of a genius on the same level they enjoy the work of a disaster artist. The hosts of HDTGM affectionately call it next level insanity, or in a more severe instance, next level bonkers cuckoo-bananas…you get the idea. And in order to recognize an art form going truly off the rails, you need a pretty firm understanding of that art form in the first place, which most fans of bad movies most certainly have.

Not everyone can enjoy a disaster artist, but the people who do go all in. In 2015, after a 16 year hiatus, Joel Hodgson launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a new season of Mystery Science Theater 3000, and it quickly crowdsourced over $5 million and became one of the fastest funded TV projects in the history of the Internet. These people don’t just like talking about bad movies, they love it enough to spend millions of dollars to help fund a major piece of popular culture. The reason, in turn, is that they adore popular culture in general, and appreciating the worst of it can often make the best of it that much sweeter. How Did This Get Made? is halfway through its fifth year, with an increasing number of live shows in front of small, but vocal audiences proving the podcast could easily last as long as the hosts have the time, proving plenty of people within the industry are happy to embrace this concept, as well.

I’m not trying to argue that liking bad movies makes you a super fan or a somehow more trustworthy critic, or even that everybody who likes bad movies does so for the same reasons I’ve outlined. Some people just like garbage. My point is, it’s really not that silly an idea after all to enjoy things we love because they’re horrible, as long as we actually do love the same parts of culture that created them. So, if you ever feel like your more ironic friends are tearing you apart with their choice of films, maybe you should just try and look at things from a different perspective and appreciate the greater picture to understand what’s so great about horrible entertainment. If you’re more like me, and you already agree horrible movies are some of the best around, I’ll leave you with a non-sequitur the people who disagree with us will simply never understand.

Oh, hi Mark.

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Lucas Wesley Snipes

Lucas Wesley Snipes is a writer, improviser, and standup comedian living in Los Angeles. He is also a trained trapeze artist, which he loves telling people.
Lucas Wesley Snipes

Lucas Wesley Snipes

Lucas Wesley Snipes is a writer, improviser, and standup comedian living in Los Angeles. He is also a trained trapeze artist, which he loves telling people.