Worldwide patrons have spent millions of dollars this year to watch some very bad movies. Over 25 million people in America subscribe to services like Netflix that are full of horrible attempts at filmmaking. Cable channels run unwatchable films constantly. We dedicate so much of our time to cinema, it is only natural that we search to find humor in the bad movies whether they are scripted, executed and/or acted poorly or because their stories, themes and/or characters are overly familiar. Because of this, a whole industry has sprung up recently with entertainment at the expense of bad movies serving as its sole product.
What constitutes a bad movie seems to be subjective. Nevertheless, there are arbiters of cinematic taste out there willing to declare which movies they think are the worst. Since 1981, the Razzie awards have presented the worst films, filmmakers, and actors with the dis-honors they have earned. There’s Roger Ebert’s list of most hated movies, the IMDb bottom 100, the Wikipedia page “List of films considered the worst,” and numerous others. Though zine culture has lost a lot of its underground utility following the growth of the internet, there is a relatively new (and well-done) zine title I Love Bad Movies. Further, new technologies have created new ways to express disdain for such films. These include the web series Bad Movie Beatdown and the podcasts Bad Movie Fiends and How Did This Get Made?. But when did viewers begin to turn their disdain for bad movies into a marketable product.
Thanksgiving Day, 1988 marked the premiere of the cult hit Mystery Science Theater: 3000. The show had a simple premise: the central characters watch a bad movie and make fun of it. It wasn’t the first such show, but it was the first to reach a wide audience. MST: 3K was loosely structured around a plot in which a mad scientist and his sidekick launch a janitor--originally played by the series creator Joel Hodgson--into space and torture him by forcing him to watch terrible b-movies. Joel creates robotic friends out of spare parts, and two of them (Tom Servo and Crow T. Robot) watch the movies with him. Silhouetted at the bottom of the screen, Joel, Tom and Crow mock the film’s flaws, poke fun at the actors, and develop running jokes that would last throughout the series.
Over MST: 3K’s ten season run, Joel and his robot friends were forced to view some of the worst films ever made. They riffed on films such as The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, Santa Claus Conquers The Martians, and Manos, The Hands of Fate. And, although the show was cancelled in 1999, its legacy can be seen in shows that followed like The Film Crew and Cinematic Titanic (both created by former MST: 3K cast members and writers) along with many of the other platforms already named.
MST: 3K’s formula was limited to b-movies because they were available to be broadcast for free. When show alums Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett created RiffTrax in 2006, they introduced a way to get around licensing fees and studio permissions. RiffTrax provide an audio commentary to be played by viewers while watching their own copy of the movie. RiffTrax cover b-movies that would have been perfect for MST: 3K, but they also provide commentaries for some of the most popular films of today. For example, recently they have made commentaries for films such as Twilight: Breaking Dawn, Part One, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Captain America, and Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon.
At first, the appeal of MST: 3K interactions with bad movies may have been the result of boredom and/or displeasure with being sold subpar films and being treated like a moron by Hollywood. But the rise of the internet culture and the pervasive DIY attitude of the moment explain why the last eight years have seen a sharp increase in movie-goers interfacing with and critiquing films through sampling, parody and pastiche. On YouTube, recut movie trailers place films into entirely different genres and series like How It Should Have Ended point out simple solutions to convoluted movie plots. One of the greatest examples of a viewer mocking a film in a way that is both funny and artistically challenging is comic book and cartoon artist Brad Neely’s 2004 replacement audio for the film Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone title Wizard People, Dear Reader. Neely’s audio track creates a new narrative, recreates the characters, and changes the significance of the events on screen.
At one time, short of yelling at the screen or publishing a scathing review, customers burned by a bad movie had little recourse. Today, we can find humor in the mediocrity as we commiserate with one another over another terrible film.
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