When someone says they enjoy watching bad movies, that could mean anything. Our ability to determine whether a movie is bad says something about our recognition of good movies, which is anything but objective. Classifying successful movies as "bad" requires that a viewer step out of the moment and become a critic of filmmaking, while deconstructing movies that have no aspiration to art (Sharknado and Hallmark films come to mind) is unsatisfying and rather pointless -you may as well just enjoy them for what they are. My favorite flavor of bad movies are those in which the creator had obvious passion for the project, but no expertise or budget to pull it off, like The Room or Plan 9 From Outer Space. Those are only one kind of bad movie, and there are many others, as Phil Christman describes in a rather highbrow essay.
...I kept watching bad movies, wondering how the satellite and the planet interacted. I drove across town to see a revival screening of King Kong Lives (1986), a film so bad that the distributors refused to allow Siskel and Ebert to show clips of it on their television program. I stayed up late finding and downloading the bits and pieces of a torrent file of the 1982 Turkish fantasy film Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam (The Man Who Saved the World), known in Anglophone countries as “Turkish Star Wars” because of its unauthorized and awkward splicing-in of actual Star Wars footage. I lost my wallet, not inappropriately, at a showing of The Dragon Lives Again (1979), a surreal festival of copyright infringement in which an actor playing (though hardly resembling) a resurrected Bruce Lee fights characters named The Godfather, The Exorcist, Popeye, James Bond, and Dracula, among others. I came to love Twilight (2008), with its wholly original, indeed hermetic vision of human psychology and conversation, its endearingly transparent wish-fulfillment aspects, its inexplicable baseball game. After it left theaters, I marveled at Batman vs. Superman (2016), that filmic analogue of a moody teenager hilariously incapable of remembering or articulating why he’s moody.
Christman goes deeper into what makes a movie bad, by highlighting a few films such as A Wrinkle in Time and Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation. A critique of the latter leads into a critique of Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark and the joy of separating the good from the bad according to one's own criteria. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Ed Wood)