“Hilarious, and it answers a tough question: Can something be bad on purpose and still be good-bad?
The answer is a definitive: Maybe Kinda!
Let’s compare this to the Sharknado series. Both are knowingly bad versions of a thing, so the comparison works.
One of the things I don’t love about Sharknado is that the entirety of the joke is that it’s a tornado with sharks in it, and this is very improbable.
Evil Bigfoot Monster’s joke is that this is a piece written by a very bad writer, and that’s a setup that can express multiple ways, like having a character’s name change halfway through for no reason, having a character sustain the same injury twice, both times as if it’s the first time, bad descriptions, terrible attempts at chapter-end cliffhangers.
I think I’d enjoy Sharknado more if the joke was that Sharknado is the kind of bad idea someone would have, and someone who had THAT kind of bad idea would also make a movie filled with bad ideas.
Sharknado would be so amazing if they had a really-good-looking practical shark that they only used once, and then they used terrible CG for the rest. Imagine if for just one shot there was a GREAT looking shark, just plopped into the middle of the movie, and the rest looks like shit. You’d be like, “WHY!? Why wouldn’t you use that shark the whole time?!”
Or if Sharknado reused very brief clips several times to obvious effect.
I think the joke of “this is a terrible movie idea” is richer than “sharks in a tornado,” but the real shame of it is, you don’t have to pick! You can have both!
I think where both Sharknado and Evil Bigfoot Monster struggle to be “so bad they’re good” is in the execution.
I consider myself a dabbler in the so bad it’s good, and I’d consider Fateful Findings: a Neil Breen Film, to be my absolute favorite.
If I had to condense what makes it great, it would be that it feels like a movie that’s been made by a space alien whose entire film studies consisted of a quick read of the encyclopedia entry for “movie,” the manuals for his equipment, and then he was like, “Got it, I can do this.”
The movie makes almost no sense, but it also feels like it’s TRYING to make sense. Or, it feels completely bizarre, but like its oddity is the result of someone who has something to say, and in the saying, the original meaning is lost. Like there’s a perfect idea, an emotion, and it’s the attempt to express it that’s imperfect, and SO imperfect as to completely obscure the original meaning.
It’s that vague, opaque feeling that’s missing from Sharknado and Evil Bigfoot Monster, and I’m suspicious that the issue is that it’s harder for a competent person to make something incompetent than they’d think.
Sharknado, for all its wackiness, follows the basic rules of film. The shots don’t look like shit, a series of things happen, and I usually know what’s going on from moment to moment. Contrast this to the part in Fateful Findings where Neil Breen suddenly has the ability to phase through objects, something he does in exactly one scene because he needs to do it in that one scene.
Sharknado’s main character is kind of an average guy as opposed to being a megaselling author/spy/super hacker/superhero, which makes no sense and yet here we are.
Sharknado and Evil Bigfoot Monster are still totally competent, and the places where they’re not are places where that’s the intent. So it’s not quite as fun.”