15 Films So Bad They're Good

There’s a certain type of film that, though unlikely to be mistaken for the work or Bergman or Fellini (or even George Lucas), has a devoted following among a specific section of society. Call them B-movies if you like or guilty pleasures if you must, but most critics refer to them as “bad”, a term that Ernest Mathijs and Jamie Sexton, writing in Cult Cinema: An Introduction, define as “poor and distasteful filmmaking.”

As Woody Allen might quip, “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“Poor and distasteful” films are often more fun than Hollywood’s latest mega-product, and have a shorter running time to boot. True, the daftness of the narrative is usually off the charts and the less said about the director’s “vision” the better, but if you can get on the picture’s wavelength, then the rewards are more than ample.

In order for a film to be so bad it really is worth watching, it requires certain elements: insane (and insanely quotable) dialogue, performances so broad they qualify as camp and “special effects” that ate up half the $1.98 budget. Plus, if there are drooping mikes and extras who stare into the lens, so much the better.

If you’ve ever wanted to see Earth invaded by a space gorilla in a diving helmet, read on.

A picture guaranteed to bring out the worst puns imaginable (“His bark’s worse than his bite”, “what a sap”, “surely knot” etc.), From Hell It Came convincingly depicts the “old legend” of Tabanga, the tree monster who “walked to avenge its wrongs.”

On a “savage island” in the South Seas populated by white English-speaking extras, a Prince named Kimo is sentenced to death by ceremonial dagger for supposedly murdering a chief. But every B-movie fan knows that when a wrongly-convicted man swears vengeance on his persecutors before being buried in a hollow tree trunk, it’s only a matter of time before he returns as another actor in a silly costume.

And what a costume it is. Unlikely to scare anyone except the film’s financial backers, who likely imagined the shirts disappearing off their backs, Tabanga was designed by an uncredited Paul Blaisdell which isn’t too hard to guess as the ambulatory antagonist possesses the same fluid grace as his finest creation, the conical cucumber creature from Roger Corman’s It Conquered The World.