Good movies are good. Bad movies are bad. We all know this. However, some bad movies are so bad that their sheer badness horseshoes back around to somehow being good. Yes, we’re talking so-bad-they’re-good movies, a subgenre we particularly enjoy celebrating and one that doesn’t seem to be running out of steam anytime soon. For every generation-defining masterpiece, there’s at least one total dud that nonetheless gets popular because of how dumb it is. Bad-good movies are special experiences whose appeal is difficult to describe, but always appreciated.
Most so-bad-they’re-good movies don’t set out to be bad, and are often made with an earnestness that can only come from a group of artists who genuinely believe they’re making something profound. And then there are the bad movies that are bad on purpose, whose creators definitely did not set out to make the next Citizen Kane. A lot of these movies are just annoyingly terrible low-budget slop designed to parody whatever’s popular at the time, but some of them are so charmingly stupid we can’t help but love them.
Some of these bad-on-purpose movies are so much fun they’re genuinely popular, and distributors like the Asylum and Troma Entertainment have become household names simply through releasing terrible films. Whatever the genre and no matter how small the budget, these movies have a few key things in common: The acting is terrible, the effects are terrible, and the plot is so dumb you wonder how a human being could have thought it up.
The 10 Most Hilarious Bad-on-Purpose Movies
Bad by design, good by accident.
Gallery Credit: Emma Stefansky
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We loved them as kids. We might still love them now. But deep down, we know. They ain’t great.