What makes a bad movie so bad, it's good?

Did I have a momentary lapse of judgement?  Did we discuss this?  I'll delete the thread if we did.

dschult3 - Nah mate, don't worry. We had a thread about intentionally bad games that devolved into a very long discussion that took a few days, but it was more about games, not movies.

I totally agree. The Room is so bad it's good because Tommy Wiseau actually thinks it's great movie making. Sharknado tries to be bad on purpose. It's not so bad it's good because that's what they were going for.

Those movies require a level of sincerity. Sharknado, or anything the Asylum churns out doesn’t have that. It’s B movies for normies who think casting the guy who played Urkel makes the movie funny. It’s why Samurai Cop 2 is garbage while Samurai Cop rules.

Like you said, The Room is so good because even though it’s bad, Tommy tried to make a good movie and he thought it was a good movie. It works because it’s a movie about complex human relationships and emotions made by a guy who might not actually be human.

Pretty much what I think, too. It's only funny when you feel the sincerity behind the project, when you get the impression that "holy shit, this people really believe they are making the new Casablanca!" It's funny because most of comedy is based around seeing people spetacularly failing at something. My favourite ones will always be Deadly Prey, The Room and Ed Wood in general. Those Asylum movies don't get even close to this sincerity: they are a business, plain and simple; they found out that shitty premises made to be memetic/viral get attention from stupid Youtube reaction videos and the like. Tommy Wiseau, on the other hand, honestly believed (by all accounts and by the self importance felt in the movie itself) that his movie was getting all the Oscars - he wasn't just trying to make a "viral video" to sell more tickets; he was honestly trying to create art.

That's why I said on another thread that I genuinely respect these creators: they fail hard at undertanding how to write a script, act and film/edit a movie, but they sure as hell put their heart into it. To me, that's better than 99% of the standardized shit we see in cinemas nowadays.

Now, there are some movies (a few) that can parody this and be good by themselves. But in this case, they don't just try to "imitate" a "so bad it's good"; they clearly satirize it, so they are straight comedies, and intentionally so. I can think of things like Italian Spiderman:



See, this is not like what Asylum does (make a shoddy movie but base it on an absurd premise and hope it gets viral); this is a comedy movie with well written jokes - it just happens to mock and homage "so bad its good" stuff.

Round 2.