Nobody sets out to make a so-bad-it’s-good movie. No director hopes that their passion project will become something that people laugh at in midnight screenings while throwing related objects at the screen. Tommy Wiseau thought he was making a Tennessee Williams-esque masterpiece with The Room. Canon Films believed The Apple would be the musical smash of the ‘80s. The truth is that earnestness gone wrong is simply funnier than someone who thinks they’re in on the joke. The laughs are even more satisfying when the so-bad-it’s-good movie was intended to scare its audience through a display of moralizing propaganda.
First released in 1936, Reefer Madness was meant to be a P.S.A. to concerned parents of good teenage boys and girls about the primal menace of marijuana. It was financed by a church group and given the title Tell Your Children, and the aim was clear: to keep kids off of that most dangerous of drugs. It did that by portraying the mere act of puffing on a cigarette one time as a direct pipeline to a life of rape, murder, and insane asylums.
