The Difference Between "So Bad It's Good" and "Just Bad"

In recent years, there seems to have been an increasing popularity in movies that are so bad, they're good. The most popular, and probably the most popularof these movies is The Room.

For those of you who don't know, The Room, is known as being the Citizen Kane of terrible movies. It tries so hard to evoke emotion from its audience but only ever evokes endless giggles. What is intended to be a cold, thought-provoking drama is instead getting more laughs than a Wayans brothers movie, not like that's saying much, though. Same goes for another, slightly more mainstream film called Showgirls, which was intended to be a look into the lives of strippers in Vegas, and was meant to be a serious drama, despite having dialogue tidbits like "Man, everyone got AIDS and shit". These, amongst other cult favorite movies are put into a category of movies that are so bad, that they are actually enjoyable.

Compare that, to some more mainstream movies that have just been reviled by audiences. Movies like Transformers 2, Batman and Robin, or even Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. What is the difference between these two categories? How is it that a movie with a ham sandwich budget can have more fans than a multimillion dollar movie, that also made millions in theaters?

The Intention

Remember what I said about what The Room and Showgirls were trying to be? They were trying to be commentaries on different areas of life, such as romantic relationships and the lives of vegas strippers. It's knowing that is what they set out to do, and seeing what they 'saw' about these things that makes them so hilarious. One more recent movie is the always enjoyable Birdemic, which is intended to be a horror and romantic movie, that also serves as a cautionary tale of what will happen to the planet due to global warming. And apparently, the future of our planet holds fire-breathing birds that sound like WW2 planes dive-bombing. Yeah, that's threatening. And really, that's part of the hilarity of these movies. It's that they are trying to say something deep but they are getting lost in all of the other fluff that they just had to include, such as over the top dance numbers, playing football in tuxedos, and multiple sex scenes that are really just the first one, copy and pasted over and over again at later parts of the movie. The other thing about intention is that it's hard to take a movie seriously when it's trying to make a statement about its subject matter even though it's being told by someone who clearly doesn't know what they are talking about. They haven't done their research, they don't have enough experience, or they are conveying it through hilariously bad dialogue.

Budget to Effort Ratio

The funny thing about the movies I listed under "Just bad" is that when you think about it, despite having huge budgets thrown at them, some good actors, among other things, they should, by all accounts have turned out better than they did. So what the hell happened? With big budget movies, sometimes there is a degree of laziness involved in the production. Take the dialogue in Phantom Menace for example. It isn't extraordinarily bad, it's just not good either. It's just bland. And considering that the actors in the movie, some of them oscar nominees and winners, are all giving the same performance that's more wooden than Treebeard, the blame has to be placed on the screenwriting and the director, who must have been telling them to be clunky and emotionless. How about Transformers? Sure, there was some variety in the dialogue, but the humor in all three movies either falls flat or insults the audience's intelligence. The writing in all of the Transformers movies ranges from trying too hard to just not trying at all. Hell, I think Optimus Prime's narration essentially says the same thing throughout all three movies. The fights are the same, the story is always the same, all of the robots look the same, everything looks the same throughout the whole franchise.
Compare that to The Room. For those of you who have read Greg Sestero's book, The Disaster Artist, you know that the filming of the movie was a living nightmare. But at the end of the day, the one thing that Sestero notes about everybody in the production is that they took it seriously. Yeah, most of them knew that the movie was gonna blow, but they were willing to see it through to the end. Tommy Wiseau himself was extremely passionate about the project from start to finish, the only problem is that he didn't know what the hell he was doing. 

And I suppose that there is an element of sympathy involved in some of these more indie productions including The Room and Birdemic. You know that the person making the movie is spending every penny that they have to make their dream of being in the movies a reality. Hell, Manos: The Hands of Fate was directed by a farmer using his barn as most of the sets. On a subconscious level, you are almost looking for something about the movie that's worth while so that you can come back for multiple viewings. At least in that regard, the movie won't be a complete waste of everybody's time. With the bigger budget bombs, you know that everybody got paid handsomly and for the most part, the movie made a ton of money at the box office, so if you don't bother watching it, what's the harm?

Of course, there are exceptions to the rule, that being Showgirls, which paid a ton of money ($2 million from what I have read) for its screenplay, was directed by a guy with some credibility and even starred some well known actors, and it ended up bombing at the box office and ruining everybody, as well as the NC-17 rating. Though I guess that last part isn't so bad.

Dialogue 

Okay, technically I already addressed this, but here's a final thought: the most enjoyable aspect of horrible movies is the laughable dialogue. As a sucker for good dialogue and someone who quotes movies endlessly, I can't help but throw some good lines from The Room into everyday conversation, especially with someone else who has seen the movie. You'll just be carrying on a conversation and you just randomly say "Anyway, how's your sex life?" Next thing you know, both you and your friend are speaking in weird french accents and speaking in run on sentences. It's great fun! Unfortunately you'll both sound drunk and deranged.