Show offs: why do films flaunt their flaws?
I blame Showgirls. Back in the mid-90s, one of the various executives faced with marketing Paul Verhoeven's insane Vegas melodrama realised the film was so absurd that it would, in all likelihood, fail to attract even those for whom faux-lesbianism and Kyle MacLachlan would usually be a no-brainer. In response, the buzz they set in motion made a selling point of the movie's foibles - all those hard-body hysterics and reminiscences about eating dog food didn't mean you shouldn't see Showgirls, went the pitch. They were exactly why you should.
The gambit failed - I remember watching the film in a Leicester Square enormodrome the week after it opened with the audience consisting of me, the woman I would later marry, and, several rows ahead of us, a lone figure who appeared to twice engage in self-abuse during the first half-hour. But the precedent was set - from here on, every bad film would now have a shot at becoming a so-bad-it's-good film.
Now, more than a decade letter, that sub-genre is the lifeblood of the Bad Film Club - a touring cavalcade of crud, offering audiences the chance to enjoy such clunkers as Jaws 4, Body Melt and all five instalments of under-the-radar horror franchise Leprechaun. The busy nature of its schedule is testament to the idea's appeal.
Personally, I'm ambivalent. In part, that's because I have no sense of humour. But there's also something out-of-focus about Bad Film Club's poor taste, and not only because its myspace lists Tod Browning's classic Freaks among the turkeys. The problem is, it's like laughing at someone deliberately hurling themselves at a banana skin, while twirling an outsize bow tie for emphasis - while I'm sure the movies on offer boast all manner of shoddy effects and creaking dialogue, you can't help feeling that with many of them, that's sort of the point. Were the makers of Frankenfish really aiming for Oscar recognition?
A true Bad Film surely needs to have been made with an earnest belief in its own excellence. Bad Film Club might argue that Shark Attack 3 features "one of the best lines ever spoken" - but I don't know if it could make me howl in the same way as anything from the mouth of Michael Douglas in 1998's po-faced Hitchcock re-tread A Perfect Murder. (Trust me when I say it would lose its appeal transcribed, but if you ever spend an evening with this entrancing movie, look out for the scene in which Douglas' purse-lipped cuckold arrives at tousled Viggo Mortensen's downtown pad.)
Don't get me wrong, there are clearly times when it's the flaws that make a movie. Such films are often found in the genre of quick-turnaround TV biopics, where a combination of seemingly random casting and the recent memory of the events portrayed can produce a strangely compelling effect - I refer interested parties to the near-hallucinogenic The Versace Murder.
But it's a rare farrago that can pull off the trick of appalling you while still keeping you watching. Despite the hilarity surrounding it, for instance, when it came to John Travolta's Scientology recruitment ad Battlefield Earth, I could only take 20 minutes before leaving the cinema - and this time there wasn't even a lone enthusiast in the front row.
Or maybe I've just not seen the right movies? If anyone can help, I'd be glad of guidance as to great disasters I might have missed - those movies so painful they come out through the other side as art...
