The Hierarchy of Badness

 As someone who watches way too many Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Rifftrax movies, I've seen lots and lots of bad movies.  But the thing is, there are bad movies and there are really bad movies.  There is a hierarchy of bad.

Apocalyptically Bad:  Movies like Plan 9 From Outer Space, Birdemic, Star Games, Suburban Sasquatch, Fungicide, Lycan Colony, Feeders, Manos the Hands of Fate, Eegah, and The Creeping Terror are just bad on every possible level.  The stories are pretty much nonsensical.  The acting is sub-elementary school holiday pageant level.  The effects are completely lame and unconvincing.  That is also what makes them so hilarious; they're mostly "so bad they're good."

Patchwork Bad:  This is kind of a special category for a particular sort of bad movie mostly from the 50s and 60s.  Movies like Monster-A-Go-Go, Rocket Attack USA, The Starfighters, Invasion of the Animal People, or Santa Claus & the Ice Cream Bunny can barely even be labeled movies because they're mostly a lot of stock footage or a different movie with a few poorly-acted scenes patched in between to give the vaguest hint of a story.  In the case of  Invasion of the Animal People it's mostly a Norwegian movie redubbed and with a lot of narration thrown in to explain what's going on.  In Santa Claus & the Ice Cream Bunny 60% of the movie is an entirely different movie! (Thumbelina or Jack & the Beanstalk depending on which version you watch.)  These patchwork efforts are more movie loafs than real movies.

Famously Bad:  The apocalyptically bad movies are usually made by amateurs who really don't know what they're doing.  Then you get other movies that are made by professionals and star big names and maybe even are written by people who have previously done something pretty good.  And yet somehow all of these elements come together to make something really, really bad.  Like Batman & Robin, The Spirit, Super Mario Bros, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Gigli, or The Last Jedi.  The problem with these movies is for the most part they're not even "so bad they're good" so much as just plain old bad.

Vanity Bad:  Some movies are bad because they're designed basically as over-long commercials for someone or something.  Movies like Viva Knievel or Cool as Ice feature some decent talent but the star is a flash-in-the-pan who has no acting chops and the scripts are ham-fisted attempts to make the main character look good.  You could put a lot of the Elvis movies in this category too as well as From Justin to Kelly and garbage like that.  The Wizard is an example of a movie made to advertise a product (Nintendo) rather than a person but still it's basically a poorly-written 90-minute commercial wasting moderately-talented actors like Beau Bridges and Christian Slater--and a very young Tobey Maguire in an uncredited background role.

Knockoff Bad:  When I did my A to Z last year on MST3K/Rifftrax movies, I noted a few times how a success will breed imitators.  Like an imitation "Gucci" or "Rolex" you might get from guy on the street, the quality is usually going to be lacking because these things are generally thrown together in a hurry to capitalize on whatever just made a ton of money at the box office.  Movies like The Last Shark, Grizzly, and Day of the Animals tried to capitalize on Jaws.  Movies like The Pumaman and Supersonic Man tried to capitalize on Superman.  And movies like Secret Agent Superdragon, Danger Death Ray, Girl From Rio, and Operation Kid Brother tried to capitalize on James Bond--the latter even using Sean Connery's brother!  There are movies like Death Promise and Kill or Be Killed trying to capitalize on Bruce Lee and other kung-fu movies but are really lame.  Movies like Guy From Harlem and Velvet Smooth try to capitalize on Blaxploitation but do it really, really badly.

Dated Bad:  A lot of the MST3K movies especially fall into this category because they come from the 50s or 60s.  Movies like Beginning of the End with its lame "giant" grasshoppers or Gamera with a guy dressed like a giant flying turtle monster are largely bad because they're old and thus the effects are not nearly as good as something from more modern times.  It doesn't mean they're "classics" like a rusty old car on blocks in someone's front yard isn't a "classic," but they are probably not as bad as some people would think.

Almost Competent Bad:  A lot of the newer MST3K and Rifftrax movies fall into this category where they generally have professional-ish production values and the actors are at least off-off-Broadway level (with the occasional person you might have heard of, or in the case of say Chad McQueen or Chris Lemmon they're at least related to someone you might have heard of) but they're just not quite up to snuff like in Sisters of Death where you can clearly see the boom mike several times or in A Talking Cat!? where you can clearly see a laser pointer guiding the cat or where a woman reaches into a hot oven with her bare hands and suffers no ill-effects.  If you want to be condescending you could say, "Bless their hearts.  They try so hard."  (But they still suck.)

Mostly Competent But Still Bad:  There are plenty of Rifftrax movies from small studios like Full Moon (Oblivion & Oblivion 2), Edgewood (Icebreaker, Radical Jack, Pressure Point), and Peaksviewing (Fairy King of Ar, The Little Unicorn, Merlin: The Return, The Sorcerer's Apprentice) that have good production values, not-laughably-bad special effects, and some actors who have done better work like Stacy Keach, Malcolm MacDowell, Sean Astin, Bruce Campbell, David Warner, Tia Carrere, Corbin Bersen, George Takei, Julie Newmar, Larry Linville, and probably some others.  But they still don't have quite the quality of big studio movies.  A lot of these movies could almost be good if they had a little more money and talent behind the cameras.  Some like Oblivion, Oblivion 2, and Icebreaker are good enough that I'd watch them without riffing.

Over-Underrated Bad:  Some big movies like Joss Whedon's Justice League or Josh Trank's Fantastic 4 or Ron Howard's Solo get so much hate even before people have seen them that it's hard to shake the perception that they're bad.  In reality none of them is a great movie but they're not Apocalyptically Bad or Famously Bad.  They're just misunderstood.

The parallels to the writing world should be obvious.  There is a hierarchy of badness for books as well.  Some books it's obvious the "author" has taken no time to edit because there are tons of typos or formatting errors.  Or there just might be plot holes or things that just don't make sense.  Or it might just be a knockoff of a more popular book.  Or like me it might be mostly competent but probably not quite good enough to actually be good. [sob]

If you're a writer, where do you put yourself on the Hierarchy of Badness?