There is something deeply saddening and disheartening about a bad movie. Perhaps it is the realisation that somebody infinitely more talented and with more resources than you will ever have has managed to use all of that to create this. Or, perhaps, it is the realisation that the entertainment gods are not actually as perfect as they seem, and that not everything they touch turns golden. Or perhaps it’s just the wasted ticket fare.
Picture the scene. You walk into the cinema full of hopes and dreams and aspirations about what the film you are about to watch contains. You smile at the cashier as they hand you your ticket and a complimentary bucket of popcorn (this is a thought experiment, it doesn’t have to be realistic). You half skip towards screen five as you get ready for a whole 90 minutes of non-stop entertainment of the highest calabre. In my mind, each cinema-goer is equipped with a few fuel tanks inside their mind and body. One of these is filled with aspiration, one with apprehension, one with hope - and so on. Upon coming into contact with such a hazardous material as a bad movie, one by one, these fuel tanks will be burnt through at an accelerated rate. Some may even catch fire or leach away entirely. A good movie never forces you to burn through even your first tank full of apprehension, as everything the film was cracked up to be it delivers on. A bad movie, on the other hand, may leave you with as little as half a tank of will-to-live - just enough to get you home without jumping in front of a car.
So, let’s return to your imaginary friend in the theatre. You sit down in the comfortable theatre seat and take a preliminary taste of your popcorn. Although the trailers cause your tank of apprehension and irritation to burn down a little, you’re still ready and raring to go. As the film starts, your adrenaline tank is pumping at full blast and your entire body is corsing with emotions. Then, the actual film starts.
To begin with, your levels of anticipation and apprehension drop with every scene that goes by. Nothing too drastic - it sometimes starts out this way. Once the body has exhausted its supply of these two, it moves on to your hope. You begin to clutch at straws: “Well, perhaps the climax will be good!”, “Well, it wasn’t that bad - the story arc could come to a satisfying close”, “Come on, that side character couldn’t have just been thrown in for no reason. They wouldn’t just hire Elijah Wood just to kill off his character ten seconds later!”. Sadly, your entire supply of hope is burnt through with every unanswered question and every unaddressed plot hole. Now at a rate of litres per second, your body’s supply of anger and irritation begin to be used up. With a rate of tonnes per frame now, you continue to exhaust your supply of anger. When - and only when - your entire supply of anger has been burnt up, will the slow leakage of your will-to-live start. Unlike the previous, it starts out slowly, with the agonising process of leakage down your legs, through your shoes and finally seeping into the ground like some noxious contaminant. This is usually where the depraved laughter, head in hands or head banging starts.
By the time that your mind has regained control of the body after the nuclear meltdown in the irritation and anger tanks (and the Chernobyl cleanup efforts have concluded to scrub your body of angered sweat), you finally muster the courage to raise from your seat. Hands and legs shaking, you proceed to the back of the screen. As you do, you glare at the projectionist at the back of the theatre for putting your through the last 90 minutes. He ignores you - it happens every other week. On leaving the screen, you hear the father of the obligotary obnoxious children, who always seem to be present, exclaiming that the film was “really good” and that “we should buy it on DVD”. The rest of your will to live empties out as you throw up in a trash can.
Sound familiar?
Well, perhaps not. But, a similar feeling will, at the very least, be common to all of us. Bad movies are genuinely traumatic experiences, and yet nobody can pinpoint why. However, the specific features of a bad movie will not be so repetetive, leading to large deviations in reaction based on both the audience member in question and the movie. Let’s take a look at some of the most common abominations that Hollywood has spawned on us in its lifetime:
Has anybody seen by budget?
Whoever authorised this film probably didn’t ask their boss first, so got stuck with using their own bonus of around $200 to fund the entire film. Cheap, half-baked shots with crappy animation that looks like something from the PS2. Within this category, there are two sub-categories.
I’m trying my best!
This category is where Dreamworks animation lands firmly. Despite films like Shrek clearly having a great deal of effort and heart put into them, they just come off as looking and feeling like some bootleg Disney story. I don’t know if I am just a Disney fanatic or not, but whatever animation software they are using is just blowing the competition out of the water. This film is not intentionally bad; the creators were just working with what they had and did a great job with the tools at hand. I actually kind of like this category.
Money, money, money
Step right up to see the next revolution in money saving that the film industry has given to us, starring Illumination studios and Chris Meledandri. Illumination intentionally use filmmaking tactics which make their films incredibly cheap to produce. Re-used sets, character models, sound effects, visual effects, literally anything that can by copied and pasted, this guy will find out how to do it. Stock animations, stock models and generic animation styles make these films look and feel like they were produced by an algorithm or a focus group. Oh wait - they actually were produced by both. Well that explains something. Please see this. Stop giving these films your money, because they sure-as-hell aren’t spending it on making better movies.
Now, those two categories are rather weird, in that the effect they have is inverted to traditional expectations. A painfully obvious case of budget starving nevertheless makes me love the film more. A case of cost cutting and penny pinching by the likes of Illumination make me want to smash the projector in the cinema. In other words, just putting heart into a production makes it appear that you have a much bigger budget than you have. Speaking of which…
Check out this cool budget!
Who would have thought that throwing money at animators and telling them to work harder doesn’t produce better art. I would.
You see, there are some companies on this earth that just love to show off. Whether it is Disney showing off their CGI skills with a bunch of useless real world remakes of cartoons (Dumbo, Aladin, etc.) or Universal including huge amounts of music in their movies just to show off how much music UMG has the rights to, this production is just a massive ego-trip, but on the part of a company, not an actual person.
Sadly, despite the enormous amount of technical prowesse usually shown, the movie - in the end - winds up having little to no creative value at all. Sometimes, it can be difficult to even hate the movie because you can see the amount of effort put in, sometimes even leading to guilt about asking for better. The amount of technical work has to be balanced with the amount of creative work, or your film just becomes some kind of tech demo or proof of concept. Not intended for general audiences - because it sucks.
Loose lips sink ships
In case you weren’t aware, social justice warriors (in 2021, not renamed “woke people” or “children of the woke”) have succeeded in completing their Long March Through The Institutions and have managed to infect Hollywood with their absolute nonsense. Sadly, this means that they see these films (which will be distributed and send out to ordinary people all around the world) as some kind of brainwashing propaganda tool. I was not expecting to be lectured about the patriarchy or white priviledge by a kid’s movie about video games, but it has happened on multiple occasions. The sad thing about these movies is that they often have some merit to their story or technical side, but are completely ruined by the SJW infiltration. The humor is trash, the message is trash, the “progressive themes” are awful and don’t resonate with non-SJWs. At least they aren’t very good propagandists, or more of them might be created. In fact, these messages are often so appauling to the common man that it can cause advanced symptoms of psychosis and clinical depression. No wonder the CIA uses these films as torture weapons at Guantanamo Bay.
Now, there is another kind of these films. And that is the woke remake. All that needs to be said already has been by a man much smarter and more articulate than myself.
Wiseau films
Tommy Wiseau is a genius. Not only has he created (or kickstarted) and entire genre of film, he has managed to accidentally create probably one of the greatest advancements in professional humor of the 21st century. Tommy Wiseau’s entire collection of films (comprising of a whole one film) are so bad that they are incredibly good. Somehody, the acting would be better if you replaced the entire cast with text-to-speech engines. Everything is so bad, yet so good at the same time.
I think that the true reason these films are so good in their badness is that the internal scale our brain uses to measure our pleasure in a thing breaks when levels get too high and circles all the way around the intense pleasure in the badness. Now where have I seen that before?
If you can watch the entirety of The Room and tell me there is no value, you are a liar.
Well, in this day and age, the experience of a bad movie is almost as common to use as a bout of plague would be to our ancestors. Modern humans are just built to resist other kinds of natural tortures. Rather than sores and flu, we have psychological suffering induced by the worst kinds of entertainment on the planet. Hopefully, though, this can serve as your vaccination against bad movies. Whenever you next are forced to watch one, think of this article. Hopefully it can reinforce your imploding anger tank with a chuckle of laughter.