So Bad They Are Bad

I seem to have watched a lot of bad films over the past week or so.  Of course, 'bad' is an adjective that can cover a lot of bases when it comes to film.  There are those that are poorly made, yet often still have some merit in terms of their ideas, characters or plot devices.  Then there are those that are 'bad' in the sense that they are offensive - they cover tasteless subject matter or controversial material in a tasteless way, (about the only films which make me feel this way nowadays are some of the 'Nazisploitation' titles). There are also the films that are so bad that they are 'good', in that their sheer ineptitude makes them endearing and entertaining.  Finally, there are those films which are, well, simply bad.  Into this latter category fall, in my opinion (and other opinions are available and might be equally valid), those films which seem to be overblown home movies made with mainly amateur casts who are friends and family of the producer/director/writer/director of photography/costume designer/teaboy.  (Such multi-tasking is less a sign of auteurism as it is ultra low budgets).  Not all micro-budgeted movies fall into this category - many are made by professionals wanting to make their own film independent of studios and financiers.  Often, these are pretty good and things like Amazon Prime and other streaming services, with their insatiable appetite for content, have provided them with a platform.  Unfortunately, they have also provided a platform for the amateur films, encouraging their makers to turn out yet more of them.

Now, the fact that they are home movies escaped into the wild isn't what makes them bad per se.  It is the fact that they are frequently knowingly bad, deliberately playing to the crowd who like to  watch such things 'ironically'.  That's what I really dislike about this type of 'bad' movie - that they are cynical attempts to create an instant 'cult' movie by people who clearly have no inkling of what it is that actually makes genuine 'cult' movies.  That, for instance, is what I disliked about Pervirella (1997), one of the 'bad' movies I watched, not that it was a largely amateurish glorified home movie, but that it was so clearly trying to be a deliberately 'so bad its good' film experience.  It had the air of something made by undergraduates who had seen every episode of 'Monty Python' and 'Rutland Weekend Television', yet had no grasp of why they succeeded, instead trying to replicate the 'zaniness'.  (To be absolutely fair, Pervirella does feature Jonathon Ross being decapitated and provides an ill-looking David Warbeck with one of last roles - he died later that year.  But none of this compensates for the feeling that you are watching someone's private joke - everyone involved clearly had a good time making it, but that doesn't transmit to the audience).  

Still, compared to Helen Keller vs Nightwolves, a film so bad I couldn't endure it to the end, Pervirella looked like a masterpiece.  Thankfully, the other 'bad' films I saw were more enjoyable - The Snake Woman (1960), Sidney J Furie's low-budget British b-movie, for instance, which feels like a provincial theatre company's dress rehearsal for Hammer's more accomplished The Reptile (1966), for example.  Or the deliriously bizarre Blood Freak (1971), in which a Vietnam vet hallucinates that he becomes a turkey-headed monster after smoking pot.  Not only is the monster wonderfully ridiculous, but the director keeps popping up in between the gore and violence to sermonise us about the evils of marijuana, finally collapsing into a coughing fit worthy of the Fast Show's Bob Fleming.  It's the best sort of 'bad' movie - one that those making it clearly didn't think was bad at the time.  So much more entertaining than the deliberately 'bad' variety.