Is There Such A Thing As A Bad Film?
Recently this question has come up alot in conversations and lectures, is there such a thing as a bad film? I don’t mean is every film worth 5 star reviews, because to be honest i think the 5 star reviews are starting to become too frequent. What i mean is that people nowadays are getting bombarded with what other people think, and making decisions on films they have never seen. The amount of times i have mentioned a film for someone to reply with ‘I’ve heard it’s crap’ are too many to count. Let’s not forget that film’s main aim is to entertain the audience, and make an overall enjoyable experience. Let’s go back to the 1960’s where B-Movies were at there height. These films are, production wise, crap. For example The Raven (1963) was filmed in just 12 days, it’s budget was $200,000 which is peanuts compared to another big release of 1963: Cleopatra. Cleopatra had an estimated budget of $44 million. So we can instantly tell the differences between these films will be huge. What i want to argue however, is not which is the greatest visual experience, but which is the most enjoyable. The Raven runs for just 86 minutes, enough time to keep the viewer entertained and comfortable, where as Cleopatra runs for a total of 243 minutes. I must have to say that the most enjoyable of the two is ‘The Raven’, just for the now cheesey special effects and the over the top camp acting by screen legend Vincent Price. Sometimes the worst, slated by critics, movies will be the most enjoyable. For example a few months ago me and a few mates decided to watch Wild Wild West (1999), which is just an awful film in critic terms, but for us it was highly enjoyable. We laughed at the cheesy lines and discussed ways it could be made better, but i will always remember it for this reason. Going back to the primary focus of film-makers, which is to entertain the audience, i would argue that if one person enjoys a film this makes it a ‘good’ movie. We can’t argue with this because we all have different tastes and ideas about what makes a good film. Now i try to save reading reviews til after i have seen the film, and i think this is the way we should all do it, i like to see if i agree with ‘Empire’ or ‘Total Film’ in what they thought about the latest release. More often than not we hear the phrase ‘It’s so bad, it’s quite good’, which is possibly the way to look at any ‘piece of crap’ film, not by the amount of good reviews or awards it has received. Don’t even get me started on the Oscars…
