Awesomely-Bad: An Introduction to Movies That Are So Bad That They're Actually Good

The monster that the movie has been waiting to unveil finally jumps onto the frame in an attempt to startle – and rend the flesh of off – the helpless teenage protagonists. The only problem is that you, the viewer, saw it coming from a mile away…along with the Party City price tag on the monster’s neck.

Actors deliver their cheesy dialogue with all the grace and subtlety of a caffeinated gerbil. The plot is a hodge-podge of pseudo-mythological nonsense, tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory, and/or Star Wars plagiarism, derived from a screenplay most likely penned by the producer’s eight-year-old son…and the budget seems to have been procured from that very same boy’s piggy bank savings. Yep, there’s no mistaking it at this point: you are watching an incontrovertibly bad movie.

So why the hell are you having so much fun?

It’s certainly not a point of shame; besides, even if it were, I would be the last to admit it. This may surprise many, but I absolutely adore certain bad movies. That’s right: for all the time I spend ragging on certain instances of art that fail to actually be art, I’m much further charmed by the pleasantries of 1980s B-movie fodder than I am by the majority of today’s modern theatrical releases. Hell, if you were to break into my room when you knew I was about to watch a movie, it’s probably just as likely that I’d be popping in the DVD for either The Godfather or Street Fighter The Movie.


Well...of course.

You might be questioning why this is so, and if that happens to be true, then welcome aboard the S.S. Who the Hell Knows, because we’re on the same boat.


I apologize profusely for the above sentence. It was late and I was tired.

I’ve pondered long and hard about why people can enjoy themselves watching a film that they know, deep down, is an unquestionable piece of shit. How is it that one bad film causes deep displeasure and the other does not? Are they not both equally damaging to the infrastructure of film? And if the “bad” movie makes for good entertainment, does it then cease to register among the damned and rise to the sacred level of…good?

Ultimately, though, I came to a realization, one born of distinction. You see, there are truly two breeds of bad movie in existence: bad-bad movies and awesomely-bad movies.

Alas, we will spend the majority of time in the theaters experiencing the former category, and they truly are a detestable breed. The common bad-bad movie fails to entertain for many reasons, and I could spend the rest of this article listing them in full: bad acting, stupid story, half-baked morals, poor special effects, appearances by Paulie Shore, involvement from Michael Bay, etc. These movies emotionally drain us and leave the empty husks in the theater to rot, usually for the sake of a quick buck.


...not like I'm pointing fingers or anything...

The line separating these monstrosities from the awesomely-bad movie is a thin and blurry one. An awesomely-bad movie can possess any of the above traits (with the exception of Michael Bay, for obvious reasons) and still manage to entertain. There is no exact science to the distinction; rather, one simply feels the unique aura of good-heartedness about the film that renders it fun to watch in spite of its flaws. This aura can arise from excess silliness, in both premise or event; the charms of a low-budget production; or perhaps even a single moment that makes you sit up and laugh out loud. The unfortunate truth, however, is that these films grow rarer every day, consumed by Hollywood’s endless march into genericism and blandness over true enjoyment.

…which is why I’ve compiled a little primer of movies that I personally to be “so bad that they’re good”, so that their kind does not fade into obscurity outside the reaches of the Internet. So the next time you have a free moment and want to watch a movie, but don't feel up to being depressed by a good movie like Fargo again, then you can always turn to…

The Official Supernova Asylum Introductory Guide to Awesomely-Bad Cinema

Troll 2
Often considered the holy grail of hilariously awful films, Troll 2 is a film so universally incompetent that it even manages to get its own name wrong (not only is the film completely unrelated to the original Troll, but it doesn’t even use the word “troll” once). Between the burlap-sack-masked villains, the bizarre morals (vegetarianism is evil?), and the worst line-reading in the history of cinema, Troll 2 has been elevated from its humble, low-budget origins to cult status. There’s even a documentary detailing the fervor surrounding this movie, entitled Best Worst Movie. Consider this required viewing for anyone entering the realm of “so-bad-it’s-good” cinema.

Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000
Battlefield Earth heralds the arrival of subpar filmmaking into the 21st century…and it is glorious. Striving to be a colossal sci-fi epic, its ambition collapses in on itself in every conceivable way over the course of the film. From the bafflingly off-kilter camera angles to John Travolta’s worst over-acting ever, every last frame of Battlefield Earth is a prime example of unintentional comedy. It’s been universally panned across the board, but don’t let that inhibit you from seeing it; I guarantee it makes for a much more entertaining science-fiction flick than…oh, say, Avatar.

Manos: The Hands of Fate
When a film is created based on a bet and the screenplay is drafted upon a napkin in a Texan coffee shop, the results are almost immediately bound for the dust bin. But thanks to Mystery Science Theatre 3000, the archaeologists of obscure movies, you, too, can now enjoy this once-lost piece of theatrical blasphemy. There are so many things wrong with this movie that it’s hard to know where to start. Perhaps the shoddy editing that occasionally keeps shots of the clapboard in the film? The completely irrelevant sideplot that mostly consists of a random couple making out inside of a car, several miles away from where the “action” is taking place? The fact that the title literally translates out from Spanish into Hands: The Hands of Fate? Overall, it’s best if you simply accept and embrace these facts as you laugh out loud to the sight of a misplaced bet shriveling and dying onscreen.

Dragonball: The Magic Begins
Before there was the big-budget 20th Century Fox adaption of the famous anime series, there was the bootleg Taiwanese knock-off. Try in vain to cling on to your treasured sanity as a monkey child, an obese shape-shifter, a wise-cracking cockatoo and a pedophilic turtle-man set out to save the world from a Power Rangers villain castaway and make veiled references to rape. And you know what the crazier part is? I’ve told that this is actually the MORE accurate adaption of the series!

Hobgoblins
Yet another fossilized turd returned to the public conscious by the MST3K team, Hobgoblins is most famous for being a dark, twisted mirror into which all your deepest fears manifest themselves as agents of chaos that converge into the blackened void of a new age. By which I mean the film makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. I could attempt to detail the plot of this movie to you in full, but such an attempt may prove dangerous without a strait jacket and a cache of drugs on hand to soothe the senses.

Night of the Lepus
The horror movie genre was created with the noble goal of making humans fear that anything and everything in the world has the potential to murder you. And so it is that we have Night of the Lepus, which, for those of you not familiar with animal taxonomy, concerns giant killer rabbits. Yes, rabbits, almost as if that one scene from Monty Python and Holy Grail became self-aware and mutated into its own film. Maybe it’s just me, but it’s difficult to conjure up the slightest bit of terror when the face of death looking down upon me possesses floppy ears and adorable beady eyes. But it’s hardly the most insane and ludicrous of premises, not when there exists a film like…

Death Bed: The Bed That Eats
I swear to you I am not making any of this up. There really is a movie out there about a sentient bed that digests its victims, proving that, in Hollywood, the sky really is the limit. By all accounts, this is pretty weird as it is. Weirder still is the fact that the film took about 26 years to release after its completion. Even weirder is that the movie actually takes the form of, not a cheesy horror film, but a grungy art house epic, complete with inner monologues, stone-cold acting and trippy dream sequences. But to really, truly get a grip on how batshit-bizarre Death Bed really is, allow me to describe the most intricate, overcomplicated way to defeat a monster in a movie ever: to destroy the demon bed, one of the protagonists has to draw a circle of blood around the bed, create matching circles in the outside yard, gather the bones of the bed’s victims and carry them into the outside circles nude, which teleports the bed outside and destroys it…somehow. Why not just throw a match in the room and set the damn thing on fire?!

Yor: Hunter From the Future
Paper-mache dinosaurs. Purple cavemen. Laser-shooting cyborgs. Fire mummies. The single manliest thing to ever happen on film. Yor: Hunter From the Future is an amazing movie for all of these reasons and more, and if you disagree, I may have to hunt you down and destroy you, for it is clear that you have no soul.

Pretty Much Anything By Bruno Mattei
The surprisingly robust filmography of Italian director Bruno Mattei is like an endless library of laughably awful creations. The movies range across many different exploitation genres, from zombie films to Nazi porn (no, seriously), but I refer mainly to his blatant plagiarism of many classic American films, including Predator (Robowar), Jaws (Jaws 5: Cruel Jaws), and Rambo (Strike Commando). Of course, my favorite is the movie which plays out like a shot-for-shot recreation of Aliens, and goes by the name…Terminator 2. Again, I’m dead serious. He even beat James Cameron to the punch by two years!

Pretty Much Anything By Uwe Boll
If you know anything about Uwe Boll, you know why I’m bringing him up here. Needless to say, he’s become legendary for his ability to take popular (or sometimes, not) video game franchises and castrate everything that was ever holy and sacred about them for their film adaptations…and yet we all still come crawling back to see them, possibly because we know we’re getting a good (read: bad) product. It’s a sad indicator when your career highlight is having a cameo in your own film wherein you get shot to death by police officers…along with all the innocent children the room. I swear I’m not lying!

Pretty Much Any SyFy Original Movie
Though the 1980s golden age of B-movies may be long gone, its tradition lives on through the glorious vessel that is the SyFy channel. Flip it on late at night and you’ll likely be greeted with the sight of horribly CGI-rendered beasties being shot at by clueless actors in their late 40s with grenade launchers. I guarantee that almost any one of them is bound to be a laugh-out-loud masterpiece…it’s just a shame you have to wallow through hours of Wrestlemania to see them.

Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter
OK, I’m not going to lie: Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter is the single greatest movie ever made. Yes, yes it is. How could it not be? Think about it: Jesus Christ teams up with a Mexican wrestler and a spandex-wearing secret agent nun to defend the lesbians of Ottawa, Canada from surgeons, atheists, and skin-harvesting vampires. What, exactly, in that sentence does NOT sound like the greatest thing ever?! Watch this movie. Like seriously, right now. It’s the best.

Now go forth, my friends. Go forth, and embrace the awfulness!

A Rant Concerning the Horrifying Implications of the Mario Party Series

I am certainly not a stranger to being the odd-one-out in a debate. Though not by choice, I often end up as the black sheep when discussing the many facets of popular culture. In a conversation with me, exclamations of, “How can you not like X?” or “What’s wrong with Y?” are fairly commonplace. By no means is this intentional, but I’ll defend my opinions to the death anyway, with a fervor that one might not expect from such conceptually unimportant topics.

And never was this more apparent than when I declared my hatred of Mario Party.


A thousand curses upon thee, foul box art!

Upon the release of this crucial information, a feverish frenzy of words soon followed. And since I always explain myself much better in written form than in the hot seat of such an active conversation, I figured I’d take the time to fully exposit what Mario Party, and Nintendo as a whole, has come to represent.

Now, unless you were born at any time before the collapse of the Soviet Union, you know these games well. A string of eight titles (currently, and not including handheld titles) ranging all the way back to the humble Nintendo 64, Mario Party was just one of many new spinoff genres through which Mario could snake out of actually being in a platformer again. At heart, it was an electronic manifestation of the classic Milton-Bradley board game setup; players rolled the die, moved their bulbous-headed, big-eyed mascot of choice an according number of spaces, and watched the consequences play out. At the end of each round, a minigame would occur that players could win for an added bonus. The goal was to gather as many stars as possible (because, as an influential critical hero of mine has stated, it is always stars); whoever has the most when the last round has finished wins. This simple concept has remained popular and lucrative to this very day.

But let not the simplicity of the concept nor the colorful cuteness of the graphics blind you from the fact that, at heart, the Mario Party franchise is a dark, unfeeling entity. After all, there’s much to be said about such a basic idea having spawned seven rather unnecessary sequels over the course of three console generations, serving little more purpose than to add minor revisions to the already well-rounded formula at the expense of a $50-$60 tax per victim to throw onto the Official Nintendo Money Pile™. But that’s not even the true source of my distaste. No, the Mario Party games, in my mind, represent something far grander and more sinister than that.


Although I'd also like to point out that these games are also partially responsible for creating this abomination.

To understand why, you have to mentally wind the dial of time back into the late 80s and early 90s. Nintendo was a very different entity back then, as was the home console market. The former, having finally secured a safe future for the latter with the good ol’ NES, was thriving profitably in the limelight. Of course, the market was also young, and it largely maintained the sensibilities of its arcade predecessor, i.e. the desire to siphon every quarter from every pocket of every dumbstruck grade school reject. And of course, the best way to ensure that kids would keep on pouring coins into the slots of arcade machines worldwide was to make the games damn near impossible to beat in one try. Unfortunately, even with the dawn of gaming machines that had no need for such a thing, this tradition lived on. These days, my friends, were the days of “Nintendo Hard”.


Also known as the "Ninja Gaiden Effect".

One-hit deaths. Limited respawns. Bosses that took up half the screen and had a health bar eight times the size of yours. Such were the hidden trademarks of this time in history, casually hidden behind the inviting 8-bit graphics and memorable MIDI sound effects. But while these types of games could be frustrating, they were, paradoxically, entertaining at the same time. Every time you heard that ominous “game over” tune in Super Mario Bros., you weren’t sad that you died; you were excited to see how much further you could get next time. It was all about mastery through repetition, gradually taking hold of the game’s inner mechanics and bending them to your whim, just so you could have the satisfying reward of eventually overcoming the challenge, or at least finding out if the princess really was another castle. “Nintendo Hard”, in many ways, was a blessing for the culture and art of video games as much as it was a curse for the average, weak-thumbed consumer.

And nothing is a further testament to the long, strange history of Nintendo than just how ironic this phrase has become. Because while the age of “Nintendo Hard” has long since passed, the demand for the gradually mastery of games lives on in many (if far-less unfairly difficult) modern titles…except most Nintendo games. And while this current situation has had a number of factors behind it, if there’s any one scapegoat I can blame for this transition, it would be Mario Party.

In essence, Mario Party is the exact opposite of “Nintendo Hard”. There is little to no room for improvement; ultimately, your fate is controlled not by you, but by the almighty die. In general, the minigames are the one area of game in which actual skill comes into play, and surely enough there is a fairly noticeable advantage to anyone who can actually play these games the best (however simple-minded they may usually be). But in the end, all of your well-earned coins and stars (the currency by which you are intended to win the game) can be stripped away from you in an instant, most times not by a mistake on your own part but by a simple twist of fate.

Worse yet, the game delivers rewards to those who don’t deserve them. Simply landing on the most of certain colored spaces – a factor, once again, controlled by that big ol’ die in the sky – can earn you a precious star in the end, which in itself may be enough to secure victory. You can even win a star for having the most coins at the end of the game…when you stole almost all of them in the last round by playing a battle game and winning by sure luck. What are you trying to say Nintendo? Are we rewarding last-second burglary now? And let’s not forget the infamous Fortune Spaces, which randomly (I can’t help but use this word as much as possible for emphasis) assigns one player to cough up their goods to another. It may just be a game, but when I see all of my hard-earned stars handed over to some schmuck who couldn’t even figure out how to make a single combo in the Mario’s Puzzle Party minigame, well…


Yeah, pretty much this.

All of this, in my mind, vehemently assaults a key tenet of good gaming: when you fail, you should feel like it is your own fault. Random factors come into play in almost every game, that much is certain; however, a well-designed game will not make you feel as though you were doomed to your ultimate end for any other reason other than your own ineptitude. This is the very same drive that invites players to try again with a new approach, actually improve their capabilities and, when done properly, render random chance a non-factor. Mario Party, on the other hand, revels in its chaos. It considers the arbitrary nature of the game as a vital element of its fun. Ultimately though, part of the fun in competitive games is a sense of order and understanding of the rules, and to be a given a chance to utilize whatever skills they may have that pertain to the game. In so many different ways, Mario Party desecrates this ideal.

You may claim that game remains fun regardless of its chaos, but just think about the philosophy in-and-of-itself. Who would play football if the success of every play rested on a dice roll? Or if the pins of bowling randomly re-aligned themselves before every round? Or if in baseball, occasionally, just occasionally, a bomb would fall on first base and kill the runner if he happened to be there? Do these games remain fun? Or does the soul-siphoning realization that every action can be thwarted by dumb luck drain every bit of dignity from them?

And it’s not just Mario Party, not by a long shot. As a whole, Nintendo has chosen to move all of gaming in this direction in order to appeal to the “casual gaming” crowd. Super Smash Bros. Brawl and Mario Kart Wii have both received lukewarm or even downright hostile reactions from many fans of the original games, and from my experience this rests solely on the house that Mario Party built. Hell, the Wii itself thrives on the concept of accessibility over depth and mastery. I can’t help but emphasis once more the irony of the whole situation.

They have certainly proved, of course, that this is a lucrative path. And, hey, despite my twisted ramblings, most people will still claim that they love these games. And power to them! I can understand why; the emphasis on multiplayer shenanigans and sheer wackiness of it all makes a direct callback to that aforementioned era of board game dominance, just without all the choking hazards. But at the same time I can’t help but feel like they serve as a detrimental antithesis to many of the aspects that make video games interesting and more evolved than their tabletop cousins: constant discovery, evolving gameplay, and the satisfaction of overcoming obstacles. These are elements that connect the art of gaming to that of the film medium, allowing us to personally reach highs and lows in the same way a character might in a movie.

I guess if Mario Party were a film, it would be kinda like Meet the Spartans.

EDIT: It just occurred that this comic strip essentially sums up everything I just wrote in about three panels.