Why exactly are we so fascinated with bad movies? Perhaps it is simple schadenfreude, the delicious mental backwards engineering required to work out just exactly how somebody somewhere decided that the John Travolta-led, Scientology-infused Battlefield Earth, or Ed Wood’s frightful Glen or Glenda were anything approaching a good idea. It cannot be that we actually want to watch these things, for where is the thrill in experiencing completely inept film-making unless it really is about taking pleasure in other people’s creative failure?
The situation becomes even more preposterous when we consider those movies that have always been so terrible that nobody should ever be able to witness them on the big or small screen. Jerry Lewis’s The Day the Crown Cried; the Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire-led Don’s Plum. And then of course there is the Roger Corman-produced 1994 version of The Fantastic Four, a largely unseen comic book B-movie (Z-movie?) reputedly so awful that, according to Corman, Marvel Studio founder Avi Arad bought it from the rights owners to avoid the film cheapening his brand.
