here is nothing quite like a good-bad movie. Sometimes the title alone is enough to let us know what we’re in for: think Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958). Sometimes the good-badness might be about knowing we are guaranteed an over-ripe performance from a particular star: think Nicolas Cage from around 2010 onwards. Sometimes a lurid or ridiculous premise promises a good time all by itself (see: Night of the Lepus, AKA the killer rabbit movie). But whether or not the creative minds behind these kinds of cultural landmarks were in on the joke is sometimes less self-evident. If you have seen the romantic drama The Room (2003), you’ve seen the most advanced 21st-century contribution to the good-bad canon, the most lavishly entertaining example of the form. If you haven’t seen The Room, save this article for later, and go forth and enjoy its charms. What’s wrong with The Room? It is so much quicker to list what’s right with it, because the answer is nothing. It is fully unhinged. People wear tuxedos for no reason, then play football. Shots are filmed out of focus. Characters regularly succumb to telenovela-style outbursts. It is, as they say, so bad, it’s good. Movies that are so bad they’re good becoming legendary for that very reason is not, of course, a recent phenomenon. Happy 30th birthday to cult favourite Troll 2, a film that famously features no trolls. Speaking of birthdays, 2020 also saw Showgirls turn 25. Once deemed so-bad-it’s-good, it has now been enthusiastically reclaimed as a work of misunderstood genius. Xanadu, the calamitous roller-disco extravaganza that paired Olivia Newton-John on skates with the Electric Light Orchestra, turns 40 this year, and has not yet been reclaimed as anything other than a nightmare. But there’s still time. The godfather of wonderfully terrible films is Plan 9 from Outer Space, Ed Wood’s 1959 effort about aliens attacking the Earth. Hubcaps on strings are pressed into service as interstellar spacecraft, wobbling their way to our planet. When we get our first glimpse of the alien beings within, the hubcaps start to look pretty cosmic by contrast; the aliens bear a resemblance to inexpensive actors sporting off-the-rack medieval fayre costumes. Horror veteran Bela Lugosi, appearing as the villain, passed away before filming; his character’s scenes are constructed from screen-test footage he’d shot with Wood, plus additional material featuring another, far taller guy with a cape draped over his face. Throughout the film, scenery has a habit of wobbling alarmingly, particularly the gravestones. But would we still be watching Plan 9 or any of the rest of them today if the film-makers had dodged these pitfalls and premiered run-of-the-mill movies? Cinema history is littered with the unmarked graves of bad films, but they don’t all wobble. It’s the flaws that make them memorable, that help them attain legend status. Perhaps the likes of The Room star-director-writer-producer Tommy Wiseau have the last laugh. Thousands of people show up every year to screenings of his masterpiece to interact with it, throwing plastic spoons in the air, as is now traditional during any of the many shots in the film where you can glimpse a picture frame in the background containing a stock image depicting a spoon. The film’s mythos is so great that James Franco made a biopic, The Disaster Artist, about its creation. Fans adore The Room for its unique flaws; it has a legacy that few legitimate comedies achieve. One of the last screenings I attended before Covid was at a sold-out Prince Charles cinema, with Wiseau presiding over proceedings with off-kilter charisma: if you want to lead a cult, make a cult film. The Room is far from the only example of this phenomenon: from fan conventions to midnight screenings and their digital equivalents, collectively revelling in a piece of culture that is enjoyable in ways its makers may not have intended is a form of entertainment with a long history. What’s more, in a year when meeting in person has been a challenge, collective digital watchalongs have never been more important. Personally speaking, a regular WhatsApp group viewing party that a friend set up got me through lockdown; it was called Sexual Tuesdays and was dedicated exclusively to watching crap erotic thrillers (highlights included I Know Who Killed Me, Wild Things and Presumed Innocent). Still, film-makers themselves do not exist in a vacuum, far removed from how their films are received by movie fans. Most are movie fans themselves; they are fully aware of the concept of so-bad-it’s-good. Sure, the majority of them would rather make a bona fide classic, but isn’t it better to make something memorable than something forgettable, even when it is memorable for the wrong reasons? The geniuses involved in Plan 9 and The Room were not trying to create venerably dumb films, but today there are plenty of other, less innocent film-makers who want a piece of that action. Look at the self-consciously goofy Sharknado franchise, in which people are terrorised by tornadoes filled with a diverse array of aquatic predators. It’s not a series overly troubled by the demands of physics, but it does have a keen sense of what its audience might find awesome. Sharknado 3 ended with series regular Tara Reid’s character apparently flattened by flying debris, and then ran a Twitter marketing campaign where fans could decide her fate. Fans could tweet #AprilLives or #AprilDies, with the results revealed in the fourth Sharknado film. As it turned out, April would indeed live to face further airborne sharks … as a resurrected cyborg. The Sharknado films are amiable enough, but they lack the magic associated with films that are not trying so hard for cult status. And it’s not just monster movies. Nobody behind Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever (2014) was casting a cat that’s famous from a meme because they believed the film would be straightforwardly good. They were hoping to create a cult film. Towards the end of 2013, the company that managed Grumpy Cat’s image was valued at around $1m; their film aired on Lifetime, and #WorstChristmasEver trended during the first half of the movie. Everybody knew going into it what its flaws were; it was all baked into the marketing proposition. Maybe it is something about the season: there is a thriving cottage industry dedicated to producing cheesy festive films, with Hallmark, Lifetime, Netflix and many more all proud to produce variations on a theme (see: Crown for Christmas, The Mistletoe Promise, The Christmas Train, Debbie Macomber’s Mrs Miracle). They are mostly about a struggling pastry chef falling in love against the odds at Christmas with a member of European royalty disguised for complex reasons as a humble greetings card designer; and they’re enough to temporarily thaw the heart of even this staunch anti-monarchist Grinch. It has never mattered less to the success of a film or TV show whether it is legitimately good or good-bad. It is now possible to attract millions of views from people laughing at something bad-good, and that is a game-changer. A midnight screening of Troll 2 at an independent cinema is not going to knock Captain America off the top of the box-office charts, but on a streaming service it is a whole different ball game: you, the viewer, have unlimited choice for no extra money, so it costs nothing to sample something you’ve heard is outrageous. You gasp, you tell others, who then check it out to see if it can possibly be true. But deciding that you love a cultural phenomenon despite its imperfections can feel hollow when those imperfections seem overtly engineered according to commercial imperatives. Appreciating genuine artistic failure requires an appreciation of human effort and human fallibility. That disappears when you watch people intentionally trying for so-bad-it’s-good status; it’s like watching a staged blooper on You’ve Been Framed, or Jimmy Fallon corpsing deliberately on Saturday Night Live. You don’t have to be a Sharknado movie to jump the shark. This is why Tom Hooper’s recent Cats is such a pleasurable film. No, really! There are many reasons Cats turned out the way that it did – most of them not wildly flattering to anyone involved – but you cannot accuse it of attempting to secure a kind of hollow cult status through a deliberate bid for badness. Cats is a prestige adaptation of one of the most successful musicals ever staged, with a cast of A-list stars and world-leading dancers and choreographers. This is a film that was attempting to secure Academy Awards; a film that was hoping Jennifer Hudson’s tremulous, ugly-crying version of Memory would potentially hit the same spot with Oscar voters as Anne Hathaway’s rendition of I Dreamed a Dream in Les Misérables. Instead, from the moment that the first trailer dropped, audiences responded with shock. The whole thing shimmered with uncanny energy. The cats had fur, but were shaped like humans, with human hands, but cat ears and tails. There was a sense of dancers gliding past the floor rather than being located in an actual physical space, like the whole thing was taking place in a kind of DayGlo limbo, and quite clearly none of its extraordinary oddness was part of the plan. It was meant to be a festive treat for the family. The marketing insisted, with a dollop of impressive Stockholm syndrome energy: “This Christmas, you will believe.” Had a global pandemic not got in the way, its status as a yowling fixture on the midnight-movie circuit would already have been confirmed. These kinds of films – where the gap between intention and effect is so stark, so dramatic – are rare, and in a post-irony era where everyone is desperate to be perceived as “in on the joke”, they are getting rarer. These precious gems are what Susan Sontag referred to in her classic essay Notes on Camp as “failed seriousness”: cultural artefacts made sincerely, really going for it, pulling out all the stops, and absolutely stacking it. Think Madonna in Swept Away, Naomi Watts as Princess Diana, Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest. Delightful, unintentional, camp. That’s what we lose when a Sharknado blows into town: camp in its purest form.