10 Movies That Actually Benefited From Bad Acting

Kevin Smith's Clerks is one of the most iconic and beloved independent films of the 1990s - a testament to how an inspired vision can compensate for a lack of budget or quality actors.

Brian O'Halloran and Jeff Anderson star as slacker protagonists Dante and Randall, and given that neither of them had acted before, it wasn't terribly surprising that the amateur quality of their performances has been consistently noted by viewers ever since.

In countless scenes, O'Halloran and Anderson are sort of robotically speeding through their dialogue in a way that seems completely unnatural and unconvincing. And yet, this lends a certain charm to the end product.

That stilted quality accentuates Clerks' generally thrown-together, kitchen sink feel, and while it might seem to initially undermine the "realism," it also reminds the audience we're effectively watching "real people" rather than movie stars.

Kevin Smith's movies have rarely been about their acting prowess or technical filmmaking: he's a dialogue guy and that's never been more abundantly clear than in his career-making debut.

O'Halloran and Anderson certainly improved by the time Clerks II came around, but their lack of acting experience was actually a weird and unexpected net positive for the original.