In Praise of Awful

Much like everyone else in the entire world, I enjoy movies that are good. In fact, that's probably my working definition for a good story (i.e. enjoyable). But I also love bad movies. No, that's not exactly true: bad movies are fairly common. I enjoy the terrible, the awful, the godawful, the movies that are cinematic train wrecks.

Now to be fair, these movies aren't much fun to watch by yourself, but if you can get a bunch of your equally witty friends together to mock the thing, they're hilarious. And if you're stuck on a space station, you can always cobble together some robots from scrap metal to fill the void (you might need to do the voices yourself, though, and prepare for a complete mental breakdown). This is the basic formula of Mystery Science Theater, although the commentary can vary in quality (and they're always stealing my lines :( ).

I recently watched what is commonly considered to be the worst movie ever made: Manos, the Hands of Fate. Behold!

More impressively, I've seen it twice, since one of my friends wasn't present for the initial viewing, and he would have missed out on all the new in-jokes we have about the film. I worry that a third viewing might actually kill me. I could write a week's worth of posts about why it's bad, but either take my (and everyone else's) word for it, or watch it yourself (with friends).

Interestingly, I think the time is ripe for a Manos sequel. After all, in August they showed Manos throughout theaters across the country; it's legendary badness has promoted it to cult status. And the ending certainly leaves room for a sequel. I'm trying to talk my friend's little brother Chris into directing the film. After all, he was the film genius behind all of the film projects we turned in for easy As in high school.

I've seen two other films that aren't quite as godawful as Manos, but still so terrible to be entertaining. And while neither has made it to DVD, you can find them on Netflix streaming service. The names of the movies are Unmasking the Idol and Order of the Black Eagle. Both star the same balding (yet sexy by script) secret agent, Duncan Jax: the first is a weird combination of Bond, Indiana Jones, and Enter the Ninja, the other is a slightly less weird combination of Bond and Commando. Oh, and his sidekick is a baboon, and clearly the brains of the operation.

Can I sell these movies, or what? After watching them, we gave them a 4 and 5 star review on Netflix...ratings that they still hold, at least from a few days ago. I think we were the only ones who reviewed these. The movies are also surprisingly racist for something made in the 80s.

What I love about these kinds of movies is how bad they are. Their creator didn't let fear hold him back. If he worried that he was making something awful, these films wouldn't have ever seen the light of day. There's a kind of exuberance to these works that I respect (perhaps the only thing I respect about them, from a creator's standpoint).

More, I think we've all seen stuff that we hated. Films that were uninteresting, or boring. Films where you couldn't really recount what happened walking out of the theater, or films where you just couldn't find yourself caring about what happened to the characters. These are films that were merely bad. But the truly awful films are ones that take huge swings and miss, hard. They're the ones you remember.

Books, are a little different, but I'd much rather create something truly terrible than something that was merely bad, or even mediocre. Something people could laugh about; something I could even laugh about (years down the line, probably, but still).