Gently Bad

I’m not a fan of bad movies, generally. I don’t sit and watch them for fun, except for a handful of comfort movies that I’ve come to realize as an adult aren’t good. That said, I end up watching a lot of them anyway, not just because I watch a lot of movies full stop, not just for various columns here, but because I became, at the tender age of perhaps fifteen, a fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and later a fan of RiffTrax. And if you do that, bad movies are just going to be part of your life. It’s inevitable that you start having thoughts about them.

The kind I have the most fondness for are the ones where they’re genuinely trying and there’s nothing mean-spirited about them. I know people who say Miami Connection is a good movie. These people are wrong. That said, it’s hard to hate it. Yes, all right, I burst out laughing when Jim (Maurice Smith) expresses his joy that he’s found his father. How not? Still, aren’t you happy for him in that moment? It’s such an innocent moment.

Y.K. Kim just wanted to get a movie made. It’s the same aspiration I admire in Ed Wood. However, I find little else to admire in Wood. For one thing, there is something rather grimy about his films. There’s little joy in them and no innocence. Still, Kim and Wood both made movies for the love of making a movie. Kim has made no others, and this one was nearly lost, but by Gods he made that one. It’s an ambition I admire, not least because—like our little endeavour here—making a movie is a group activity. You have to get others to share your dream.

Samurai Cop is a little darker; Amir Shervan, however, is another man who got a film made against the odds. It’s another silly movie—the racism leans more toward the Ed Wood of things than the Y.K. Kim end of things, obviously. But it’s trying so hard to be a real movie despite having a budget so low that much of the cast is wearing their own clothes and they couldn’t afford enough guns for everyone. And if we could all do with a little less banana hammock, well, at least there’s still that delightful battle between Mathew Karedas and Robert Z’Dar.

You cannot count The Room in this, or Sharknado. The Room does not have the purity and gentility. If the films of Ed Wood are grimy, The Room is besmeared with filth. Everyone in it is bitter and foul. That’s even before we get to Tommy Wiseau himself, but my Gods Tommy Wiseau is not a pleasant man. There also isn’t the determination behind it, merely the mysterious funding from whatever country Wiseau is from. (He sounds like a wild and crazy guy, or that woman from Werewolf.) Joy is too kind an emotion to be tangled up in that movie.

As for Sharknado, it’s too cynical. It was made to be a bad movie. It was made for cult status. Anthony C. Ferrante works for hire; Thunder Levin also writes rip-offs of more popular properties. It has actual stars, of a sort, and plenty of celebrity cameos in on the joke. The second one has some truly appalling ones—Matt Lauer, Jared Fogle, and Andy Dick—and you want to take Richard Kind by the hand and escort him into a better movie. He deserves better and so do we.

I still won’t watch these movies without the riffing. It’s just not my speed. I can’t do it. But I’d also rather see one of these movies riffed than a cynical movie or a grimy one. I’d rather spend my time with them. I mean, I’d rather see one of those movies that has similar origins and actually manages to be good than any of them, but still. There’s a place in this world for good-hearted but still bad, and we should have more of it than the simply bad.