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October 22, 2003

There's bad, and then there's BAD

So I've done a lot of thiniking lately. Some of this thinking has had
to do with bad movies and I've concluded that there are 4 levels of bad
movies.

LEVEL 1: SO BAD IT'S GOOD
These movies are so bad that they've gone full circle and are now good
again, or at least entertaining. A lot of cult classics fall into this
category. Since these movies are still entertaining they're the least
bad of teh bad movies.
Example -> Death Race 2000

LEVEL 2: SO BAD IT'S STILL BAD
These movies are so bad that they've come full circle to being good, but
then continued to circle till they got back to bad once again. These
are the types of movies that everyone knows to avoid at all costs,
appart from the completely uninformed few, or the die-hard LEVEL1 people
who are just hoping that the movie hasn't gone that extra mile to be
terrible.
Example -> Glitter

LEVEL 3: JUST PLAIN BAD
These movies haven't gotta to the level of badness to be good, they just
plain suck to start with. They have numourous flaws and stories that
are terriblly full of holes and problems. They also generally have bad
scripts/acting to go with the fundemental problems in the plot. These
movies tend to be big Hollywood blockbuster types. Because of this fact
many of these movies get decent reviews from at least a couple sources,
giving them the illusion of credibility. These movies end up a notch
below LEVEL2 movies because they pretend to be good and thus fool people
into seeing them, and wasting their time and money.
Example -> Minority Report

LEVEL 4: SO CLOSE, YET SO FAR
These movies are bad, but have such promise. They may have a flawed
story, flawed acting, flawed writing, flawed special effects, or a combo
of a few of these things. What makes these movies so terrible though is
that while you are watching them, and finding all these faults, the
movie still has something good there somewhere, it just got preverted
into shit. Why, you may ask, does this fall as the worst kind of bad
movie? Simple, you can't help be feel frustration at the fact that the
movie has such promise, but the people in charge just managed to fuck it
all up. LEVEL1 movies are entertaining, LEVEL2 movies we know to avoid,
and LEVEL3 movies have nothing redeeming about them. But, LEVEL4 movies
have something there that could be saved, or could have been made into
something so much greater. The fact that we can all see that there was
something good there before the higher-ups defaced it makes this type of
movie even worse.
Example -> Martix Reloaded, Star Wars Episode 1/2, Almost anything by
Steven Spielberg

Comments

Where do you think the movie "Very Bad Things" would go? This is a
serious question because it was a horrible movie, but I just don't know
what kind of horrible movie.

'Very Bad Things' would have to fall under Just Plain Bad I think. It
isn't bad enough to be good, and it just doesn't have any saving points
that could be exploited to fix it.

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