MY RATING SCALE: WHAT DOES BAD MEAN?

Anything falling to the Bad tier of my rating scale should be abandoned unless you are amused by the inferiority of it all.  Some things are so bad that they’re entertaining.  Some things are just train wrecks.  The movie and music industries have higher barriers of entry still, so the general public is safeguarded from truly amateurish rubbish.  The publishing industry is in a unique spot these days, as self-publishing has unleashed a deluge of vanity-press hot garbage on the masses.  But again, I feel like truly bad works happen very seldomly on purpose, and oftentimes the consumer has to seek it out.  If this is you, here are my guidelines for Bad tier:

A 0.75 rating is the broadest of the Bad tier.  Some content keeps you wondering until the very end if it can pull out of the death spiral, but it ultimately doesn’t.  These products are bad, irredeemable, and baffling how they even got made.  A film like Showgirls is ‘bad’- had it not starred the actress who played a squeaky-clean smart girl on Saved by the Bell, it wouldn’t have been notable in the first place.  Everything else about it alternates between being dumbfounding or boring.  Scientologists will disagree, but Battlefield Earth is ‘irredeemable’- there’s no hope for course correction because it crosses the Rubicon so hard that all that’s left is to wonder how far down the death spiral actually goes.  The monster mash-up Van Helsing is ‘baffling how it got made’- money is the only possible answer, and a cynical one at that.  Trying to turn literary characters into superhero action stars is not a winning formula, and this film proves it.

In Ratatouille, there’s a scene where the main rat character is trying to communicate instructions to the main human character by nipping at various parts of his body until he does the right action.  The human character takes the rat into a closet, shows him the marks, and lets out a series of visceral howls.  This is kind of what the experience of a 0.5 rating feels like.  It’s awful, terrible, and like a slow-motion train wreck.  The 1940s B-movie The Corpse Vanishes is ‘awful’- the setup, the antagonist’s motivations, and the implementation of plans are littered with holes.  I have picked on this franchise quite a bit already, but Friday the 13^th Part 2 is ‘terrible’- the suggestion that Jason Vorhees had been alive all this time make no sense and torpedoes this quasi-revenge flick from the start.  Another sequel, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, is ‘terrible’- no sequel was needed, and the attempted meta-awareness content just makes the film even more difficult to understand, let alone watch.

At the very bottom of the barrel is the 0.25 rating.  They are insufferable, so bad it hurts, and in contention for the worst ever.  Plan 9 From Outer Space earns its reputation as one of the worst films ever made.  It is ‘insufferable’- a plot so hackneyed and poorly constructed that its only redeeming quality is its entertainment value for being as bad as it is.  The independently-produced The Room (not Room, but The Room) is ‘so bad it hurts’- here is a misguided passion project by an inept amateur (or perhaps a savvy con artist out to achieve fame for something so rotten?) with actors whose performances seem to indicate that even they have doubts about the coherence of what they’re saying and doing.  Further down the pantheon of self-financed disasters is Manos: The Hands of Fate.  Of the eight films to earn my lowest rating, this is the one I would be most inclined to declare ‘in contention for the worst ever’- no little happens for so long, and then that which does happen makes no sense.  It was financed and created by a manure salesman.  If that’s not art imitating life, I don’t know what it.

That’s my rating scale.  If you made it through each post, thank you for taking the time to understand better where I am coming from.  I’ve been eager to start writing reviews again, and this exercise has helped me gear up for it.