The Dubious Joys of Bad Movies
December 25, 2025
“Why,” I asked my husband, “would anyone want to waste time watching a bad movie?”
“Because it’s fun,” he replied, as though this should be obvious.
“No. A good movie is fun, even if it is wrenching. A bad movie is just sad. Pathetic, even. An insult to filmmaking. It should be ignored, not indulged.”
“You are such a snob.”
Okay, he did not say I was a snob. But he thought it. I know that furrowed, uncomprehending brow, that disappointed tug at the corners of his mouth. Was he right? Yeah, maybe. But I respect art, and celebrating its failures still strikes me as absurd. Mystery Science Theater 3000 (which I have been taught to call MST3K) popularized what Andrew and one of his buddies had been doing for years. He considers smartass riffing of a B movie as much an art form as film itself.
When he saw a review of an amateur movie involving hippies, sex, and Bigfoot, he of course could not resist. “This, you’ve gotta see,” he told me. “It’s hysterical.” The movie is a ridiculous attempt at soft porn. It is so entirely unarousing, “porn” seems a misnomer, but “soft” applies all too well to the guys. Not only are they too scared to defend their girlfriends from The Geek (Bigfoot)—who was probably some guy they found on the street, because you can see his frayed pant leg and bronzered-skin beneath his fake-fur costume—but they are soft in another, even more unfortunate way.
“Well geez, after all those takes,” I say, defending them. Laughing too hard to reply, Andrew finally chokes out, “You think they did more than one take for this?”
So. They spent maybe a single drunk weekend shooting this thing, and I gave them two whole hours of my life. Most of which required watching them trudge, interminably, to their campsite, with truly awful music in the background and a few uninteresting episodes of sneak-away sex, before they halfheartedly fended off the yeti.
I am too serious a person. I know this. On the old Patty Duke Show, I would have been Cathy, who preferred the minuet to rock ’n’ roll. Try finding a minuet these days. The comics and animation Andrew loves—which, to be honest, used to seem kind of childish to me—now dominate the cultural zeitgeist. And I am as churlish about animation as I am about bad movies. I see their talent and energy, just as I relish the cleverness of some of those MST3K cracks. But for reasons unclear even to me, animation (with exceptions, including The Simpsons) fails to engage me. It feels overbold, crude, funny but superficial, like the stuff the boys in the back of the classroom used to draw during math class. For years I have been reduced to grumbling, “Can’t we watch something with real people in it?”
This puzzles my husband, who spends much of our life shaking his head over my wacky imagination. Can I not imagine the real people? Do I not see the cleverness of all the Easter egg references, the interlocking story arcs, the plots you could never enact conventionally? I wondered this myself. From time to time, an article would pop up in one of my Serious magazines, with somebody smart talking about how cool it was to watch bad movies, and I would sigh and dutifully forward it to Andrew. He was winning.
The latest such article—in The Hedgehog Review: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture, a journal I adore—was titled “The Cinema of Inadvertence, or Why I Like Bad Movies.” Sighing, I began to read. Sure enough, MST3K made the second paragraph, and with a lovely bit of insight that had never occurred to me. Phil Christman describes the framing device: “a man and two robots cracking wise over the soundtrack as bad movies played onscreen,” in case you are as clueless as I once was. Then he remarks, “It was important that the man wasn’t simply alone, and that, at the same time, he was somewhat isolated: a Crusoe-like figure alone on a satellite, forced to build himself a minisociety of talking robots. Watching bad movies was a social yet marginal activity; it was a way of watching that orbited the normal enjoyment of film.”
That is, I suspect, how a lot of incredibly intelligent people too honest to adapt to society’s games and pretensions have felt for quite a long time, and why they are surging forth to impose the culture they developed at the margins. Tech made that sort of intelligence cool. Meanwhile, the sly winks and deceptions, the dangerous liaisons and endless philosophizing of the films I love…are now seen as irritating and archaic.
But they were human, I mutter to myself. They were about being human, about love and sex and death and redemption. These bright-colored moving drawings and goofily misguided, scenery-chewing movies might be about all those things, too, but I am too annoyed by their presentation to extract the ideas. Again, Christman points out what I have missed: “Anyone can commit himself body and soul to a clearly formulated project of obvious importance or quality, but to throw your last dollar, your last scrap of energy, into something ill-conceived and absurd from the beginning: That takes a human being.”
Which, I suppose, is why he “drove across town to see a revival screening of King Kong Lives, a film so bad that the distributors refused to allow Siskel and Ebert to show clips of it.” He defends his taste: he does not like trash, which is morally coarsening, but rather “the film that is childish or incompetent—what it does, it does inadvertently.” Christman writes on, skewering the elitism of the art world’s exclusions. Earnest attempts that fail are charming. Bad taste is democratic. (Or authoritarian, it would seem now.)
Still, the enjoyment of others’ failures feels, to me, like laughing when somebody slips on a banana peel. There is a touch of meanness in it, a whiff of condescension. Schadenfreude is too strong; fans elevate these attempts, pronouncing them so bad they are good. But to crack jokes as you watch, you have to take a separate stance, distance yourself from the work and analyze it, time your joke just right.
And now it clicks. I do not shun bad movies and animation and comics because I am a cultural snob. I am a cultural snob, but that is a separate subject. I shun these forms because I read and watch movies to enter their world, not stand apart from it. I want to feel myself one of the characters, or better yet, move in and out of the minds of several characters, grasping their emotions from within. And I have not learned to do that with what is drawn, or botched. Riffing a movie, while clever as hell, keeps the movie at arm’s length, critiquing and mocking. You are nowhere near the entrance, let alone inside that movie.
Which, if I am giving up precious time, is the only place I want to be.
