I was scrolling through some old watchlists yesterday and I realized that I have spent an embarrassing amount of my life watching movies that most people would consider complete garbage. But the thing is, I do not regret a single second of it. I actually spent last night rewatching a bit of that three hundred million dollar disaster from last year, The Electric State, and it got me thinking about the sheer scale of human effort required to make something that just does not work.
I know that feeling exactly. There is a specific kind of magic in a movie that fails so spectacularly that it circles all the way back around to being essential viewing. It is that uncanny valley of cinema, where our brains find a sincere, hardworking failure infinitely more compelling than a polished, mediocre corporate product. Today's prompt from Daniel is about that very phenomenon, the so-bad-it-is-good movie. He wants us to look at the communities that celebrate these disasters and try to figure out what separates a legendary failure from just a boring, bad film. By the way, I am Herman Poppleberry, but most of you know me as Corn.
It is a great topic because it feels like we are in a bit of a transition period for this kind of media. We are living in March of two thousand twenty-six, and with generative artificial intelligence flooding the internet with perfectly average, mid-tier content, the human element of a truly sincere failure is starting to feel like a premium commodity. There is something about the uncanny valley of a human being trying their absolute hardest and missing the mark by a mile that an algorithm just cannot replicate. An AI can make something nonsensical, but it cannot feel the shame or the misplaced pride that makes a human disaster so fascinating.
You are hitting on the most important rule of the genre right out of the gate. For a movie to be so-bad-it-is-good, the failure has to be unintentional. We call this the Sincerity Threshold. There has to be a genuine, often ego-driven attempt to create something profound or entertaining. If the filmmakers are in on the joke, if they are winking at the camera and trying to make a cult classic, the whole thing usually falls apart. It becomes a performance of badness rather than a genuine artifact of failure.
That is why movies like the later Sharknado sequels or those deliberate grindhouse pastiches often feel so hollow. They are manufacturing "trash" cinema, but you cannot manufacture a genuine mistake. It is like trying to fake a blooper reel. You can tell when the laughter is scripted. When you watch something like The Room, you are watching Tommy Wiseau’s unfiltered soul on the screen. He genuinely believed he was making a Tennessee Williams-level drama about the human condition. The gap between his ambition and the reality of a guy playing football in a tuxedo three feet away from his friends is where the joy lives. It is the alchemy of misplaced confidence.
The "so-bad-it-is-good" experience is witnessing a person with a vision, often an ego-driven one, who simply lacks the technical skill or the self-awareness to realize they are failing. That leads us perfectly into the "why"—if it is not intentional, what exactly are we looking at? We are looking at the breakdown of the cinematic language. We are looking at a director who thinks they are speaking French but is actually just making noises that sound like French to them.
It is a form of cognitive dissonance for the viewer. Your brain expects a certain level of professional competence because the medium of film usually requires a lot of people and a lot of money to work. When those basic building blocks are missing, it creates this weird, hypnotic space where you are constantly asking yourself, how did this happen? How did no one on set say, hey, this makes no sense? Or, why is the camera out of focus during the most important emotional beat of the movie?
That brings us to one of the most fascinating examples of this, a movie that really tests the limits of "respectable talent." I am talking about Superbabies: Baby Geniuses two, from two thousand four. This movie is a staple of the internet movie database bottom one hundred. It holds a zero percent on Rotten Tomatoes. And the wild part is who made it. This was not some amateur in a garage.
Bob Clark directed it. This is the man who gave us A Christmas Story and Porky's. He was a legitimate, successful director who understood the craft of filmmaking. He basically invented the modern teen comedy and the modern slasher with Black Christmas. And yet, he directed a movie where babies are superheroes fighting a media mogul played by Jon Voight. It is the "Respectable Talent Paradox." How does someone with that much experience produce something that feels like it was edited by a blender?
Jon Voight is an Academy Award winner. He is a legend. And in this movie, he is doing this bizarre German accent and interacting with digital babies that look like something out of a fever dream. The technical anatomy of the failure here is breathtaking. The computer-generated imagery used to make the babies' mouths move is firmly in the uncanny valley. It is creepy. It is unsettling. It feels like the babies are being possessed by middle-aged ventriloquists.
But beyond the visuals, it is the tone-deaf directing that makes it rewatchable for the wrong reasons. There are these long sequences of physical comedy that just do not land, and because the timing is so off, it becomes surreal. It feels like you are watching a transmission from another planet where they have heard of the concept of "humor" but do not quite understand how humans react to it. There is a scene where a baby does a slow-motion martial arts kick, and the physics are so wrong that it breaks your brain's ability to process the scene as reality.
Why do you think we derive so much pleasure from that kind of professional-grade failure? Because it is not just a low-budget indie; this had a budget of twenty million dollars in two thousand four money. That is a lot of resources to produce something that is universally loathed.
There is a certain satisfaction in spotting the seams in the production. When you see a mismatch in the automated dialogue replacement, or A-D-R, where a character's voice clearly does not match their lip movements, it breaks the Fourth Wall in a way that is actually more engaging than a mediocre, competent movie. It invites the audience to become an active participant. You are not just consuming the story; you are performing an autopsy on it. You are looking at the mismatched lighting and the continuity errors—like a character holding a glass of water in one shot and a sandwich in the next—and you are piecing together the chaotic history of the production.
It turns the viewing experience into a game. We talked about this a bit back in episode five hundred ninety-three when we discussed the digital landfill and the evolution of digital deception. There is a weird comfort in seeing something that is obviously "broken." It feels more honest than a polished corporate product that was focus-tested into oblivion. It is the difference between a mass-produced plastic chair and a hand-carved wooden chair where the legs are different lengths. The wooden chair is a "failure," but it tells you more about the person who made it.
I want to pivot to a movie that has a very different kind of energy, one that Daniel might be familiar with since it has a massive following in Israel. It is called Ha-Trempist, which is spelled H-A-T-R-E-M-P-I-S-T, or An American Hippie in Israel. This one was made in nineteen seventy-two and it has one of the best redemption arcs in cult cinema history. For decades, it was considered "lost cinema."
This film was basically a legend of the underground. It was a low-budget production about an American Vietnam vet who travels to Israel, meets some hippies, and they all go to an island to start a new society. But they forget to bring food or water, and they are eventually besieged by these weird mimes in business suits who represent "the establishment." It is as bizarre as it sounds.
It sounds like a student film on acid, but with the production value of a home movie. The director, Amos Sefer, was clearly trying to make a profound counter-culture statement about the failure of the peace movement. But the execution is just incredible. The English dubbing is completely disconnected from the actors' mouths. There is a character named Momo who just stands around looking confused for most of the runtime. The pacing is agonizingly slow until it suddenly becomes a frantic action movie with no stakes.
For years, people thought the prints were destroyed. But then Grindhouse Releasing found the materials and did a full digital restoration. Now, it screens monthly at the Lev Cinema in Tel Aviv. It has become the Israeli version of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. People show up with props, they shout at the screen, they have specific rituals for the "mime" scenes, and they celebrate the sheer incompetence of it. It is a beautiful example of a community taking a failure and turning it into a communal celebration.
That is the "sincere failure" we were talking about. Amos Sefer really thought he was the next Federico Fellini. He was not trying to make a joke. He was trying to change the world with a movie about hippies being eaten by mimes. That sincerity is what makes it a classic. If he had known it was bad, it would just be a boring, pretentious mess. This leads us to the "Boring Bad" versus "Entertaining Bad" spectrum.
The spectrum is the most important distinction for a cult movie fan. A movie can be technically incompetent but still have a pulse. It can have a weird energy or a strange performance—like the "Oh my god" kid in Troll two—that keeps you leaning in. Boring bad is just static. It is a movie where nothing happens, the lighting is flat, the actors are bored, and no one seems to care. A movie like Superbabies is entertaining because it is so aggressively weird. A movie that is just a generic, poorly made police procedural is just a waste of time.
Moving from the history to the metrics, how do we actually track these disasters? We have more data than ever on what people consider "bad." The I-M-D-B Bottom one hundred is the gold standard for this, but their methodology is actually pretty smart. They do not just take every one-star review at face value. They use a weighted average that focuses on "regular voters."
That is an important distinction. It helps filter out "casual noise" or review bombing, where a bunch of people might attack a movie for political reasons or because a YouTuber told them to. By focusing on people who vote frequently across all genres, the I-M-D-B list identifies the films that have a sustained reputation for being disasters. It is how movies like Gigli or Battlefield Earth stay on the list for decades. They have earned their spot through consistent, long-term consensus.
It is also interesting to look at the gap between the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer, which is the critics' score, and what they call the Popcornmeter, the audience score. Usually, we think of a high audience score and a low critic score as a sign of a "fun" blockbuster. But when you see a very low score on both, but a massive number of reviews and a high "want to see" metric, that is often a sign of a "hate-watch" or a burgeoning cult following.
We are seeing this play out in real-time with some of the big releases in twenty-five and twenty-six. Look at the discourse around Disney’s Snow White remake or the high-budget flop The Electric State. There is this immediate social media consensus that forms. People start memeing the trailers before the movie is even out. The "hate-watch" has become a significant part of the modern economy.
The Electric State is a great case study because it had a massive budget, around three hundred million dollars, and it comes from the Russo Brothers, who made some of the biggest movies in history. But the reaction in twenty-five was so visceral. People were pointing out the "gray mush" of the digital environments and the total lack of chemistry between the leads. It felt like a movie made by an algorithm that had been fed too many concept art books but forgot to include a human heart.
Does that count as "so-bad-it-is-good" though? Or is that just "expensive bad"?
That is the debate. I think for it to become a cult classic, it needs time to shed the corporate baggage. Right now, it just feels like a waste of money and a symptom of "streaming bloat." But in ten years, we might look back at the weird design choices and the bizarre pacing as a fascinating artifact of this specific era of digital deception. It is the ambition that matters. Even if the ambition is just "make a giant franchise," the failure to do so can be spectacular.
I also wanted to mention The Weeknd’s movie, Hurry Up Tomorrow. That was another one from last year where the hype was massive, and then the actual product was so self-serious and stylistically over-the-top that it became a lightning rod for "unintentional comedy." When a pop star tries to pivot into "serious auteur filmmaking" and it does not land, it is almost always a goldmine for this genre. It reminds me of Neil Breen’s work, but with a hundred-million-dollar budget.
It is the ego. You need a big ego to make a legendary bad movie. You have to believe that your ideas are so important that the rules of logic, physics, or basic storytelling do not apply to you. Whether it is Tommy Wiseau or a pop star with a massive production budget, that "unfiltered soul" is what the audience is looking for.
Let us talk about the communities that actually curate this stuff. Because it is not just people randomly stumbling onto bad movies anymore. It is a structured, data-driven hobby now. You have subreddits like r slash bad movies where people trade recommendations like they are rare vinyl records. They have their own tiered systems for what constitutes a "must-watch" disaster.
And you cannot talk about this without mentioning Red Letter Media. Their Best of the Worst series has basically defined the modern "bad movie" canon. They take these obscure V-H-S tapes, things like suburban martial arts movies or bizarre instructional videos from the eighties, and they analyze them with the same level of detail that a film scholar would use for Citizen Kane. They have turned the "autopsy" of a bad movie into a high art form.
They have done so much to popularize the idea that you can find value in failure. They look for the "whoops" moments, the strange editorial choices, the actors who are clearly being paid in sandwiches. It is a celebration of the fringe of the industry. It makes the world of filmmaking feel more human and accessible. When you see a movie where you can see the boom mic in every shot, it reminds you that movies are made by people, not just machines.
Then you have the RiffTrax team, the guys from Mystery Science Theater three thousand. They have moved over to platforms like Nebula now, and they are still doing what they do best, which is providing a comedic commentary track over these films. It creates a communal experience. You are not just sitting alone in the dark watching a disaster; you are part of a group that is all noticing the same weird details at once. It is a way of "taming" the disaster.
It turns the film into a skeleton that the community builds a new layer of comedy on top of. I think that is why Letterboxd has become such a hub for this too. You can find these curated lists with titles like "Movies that exist in a different dimension" or "Sincere disasters." It allows new fans to find the "essential" bad movies without having to suffer through the boring ones. It is curation as a form of public service.
I have to ask, do you have a personal favorite? One that you would put on your "Mount Rushmore" of bad cinema?
Oh, that is tough. I think I have to go with Miami Connection from nineteen eighty-seven. It has everything. It was made by a martial arts grandmaster named Y.K. Kim who had no idea how to make a movie but had a lot of passion. It is about a taekwondo synth-rock band that fights motorcycle ninjas who are smuggling cocaine in Orlando. It is pure, unadulterated sincerity.
It is better than it sounds. The songs are actually catchy in a very eighties way, but the dialogue is pure gold. There is a scene where one of the band members finds out his father is alive, and he gives this incredibly long, screaming monologue about how he has been "searching for his father" even though it was never mentioned before in the movie. It is so sincere and so weird. It was a lost film for years until a programmer at the Alamo Drafthouse bought a print on eBay for fifty dollars.
See, that is the magic. A fifty-dollar eBay purchase turns into a cult phenomenon. My pick is usually Troll two. The fact that there are no trolls in the movie, only goblins, because they tried to market it as a sequel to a completely unrelated movie called Troll, is just the beginning. The acting is so wooden it could be used for furniture. The "Oh my god" scene is legendary for a reason. The kid's face, the slow zoom, the fly crawling on his forehead. You cannot write that. You cannot direct that. It just happens.
You really can't. And that brings up a bit of a philosophical question. As we move further into the age of AI-generated content, are we losing the ability to make these kinds of movies? If an AI can generate a "perfectly okay" script and "perfectly okay" visuals, will we ever see another Troll two?
I think the opposite might happen. I think we might see a surge in "AI-bad" movies, but they will be bad in a different, more frustrating way. They will be nonsensical because the AI does not understand cause and effect. But they will lack that human sincerity we keep talking about. They will be "boring bad" by default because there is no ego behind them. There is no "soul" to fail.
That makes the human-made disasters even more precious. It is like the difference between a glitch in a video game and a mistake in a painting. The mistake in the painting tells you something about the artist's hand. The glitch is just code breaking. We are looking for the artist's hand, even if that hand is accidentally knocking over the vase and then trying to glue it back together with toothpaste.
That is a great analogy. So, if someone wants to start their own journey into the world of "so-bad-it-is-good," where should they start? What is the roadmap?
I would say start with the classics. Watch The Room or Troll two just to get a feel for the "sincerity" we are talking about. Then, go to Letterboxd and look for the "So Bad It Is Good" lists. But my real advice is to find a group of friends. These movies are meant to be shared. They are social experiences. They are meant to be talked over, laughed at, and analyzed in real-time.
And keep an eye on the high-budget flops. Sometimes the most interesting failures are the ones where a studio spent two hundred million dollars trying to tell you what is "cool" and completely missed the mark. Those are the ones that tell you the most about where our culture is at any given moment. They are like time capsules of corporate misunderstanding.
We should also mention the value of these films for anyone interested in the creative process. If you want to understand how a movie is put together, there is no better way than to watch one where the pieces do not fit. You learn about lighting by seeing it done poorly. You learn about pacing by seeing a scene go on for three minutes too long. It is a masterclass in what not to do. It demystifies the magic of cinema.
It is the "Entropy Budget" we talked about in episode eleven hundred six. Sometimes you need a little bit of chaos and "weirdness" to understand the structure of the system. These movies are the ultimate entropy. They show you the skeleton of the medium by stripping away the muscle and skin of competence.
I think we have covered a lot of ground here. From the uncanny babies of the early two thousands to the mimes of nineteen seventies Israel, and the high-budget "gray mush" of twenty-five. It is a wide, weird world.
It really is. And I think the final takeaway is just to be kind to these movies. They are failures, yes, but they are brave failures. It takes a lot of guts to put something out into the world, even if it ends up being a disaster. At least they tried to make something unique. That is more than most people can say. Even a zero percent movie is a testament to someone's effort and ambition.
That is a nice way to look at it. A zero percent on Rotten Tomatoes is still a hundred percent effort. Before we wrap up, I want to say thanks to our producer, Hilbert Flumingtop, for keeping the gears turning behind the scenes.
And a big thanks to Modal for providing the G-P-U credits that power the generation of this show. We could not do this without that technical backbone.
This has been My Weird Prompts. If you are enjoying our deep dives into the strange corners of culture and technology, a quick review on your podcast app really helps us reach new listeners who might be looking for something a little different.
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We will be back soon with another prompt. Stay curious, and maybe go watch a movie that you know is going to be terrible. You might just find your new favorite thing.
See you next time.
Goodbye.
