Sharknado and bad movie culture

I am not the most well-versed bad movie watcher: I haven’t seen Troll 2, Birdemic, or A Talking Cat!?, and my friends and I don’t gather to watch bad movies and joke out a running commentary a la Mystery Science Theatre 3000. But I have seen a number of MST3K episodes, and, more importantly, I do listen to a ton of bad movie podcasts. These podcasts, and the communities that have sprung up around them, show how bad movie watching has become a cultural phenomenon. It’s small, but, given the schedule of SyFy, it’s proven to be powerful.

But Syfy is doing its best to ruin this phenomenon.

Bad movie podcasts are a dime a dozen these days – The Flop House, How Did This Get Made?, and We Hate Movies are some of the more notable examples, but just look through iTunes and you’ll have a plethora of commentary on garbage cinema. What all these podcasts try and do is find the gold within this garbage, movies that are not terrible to sit through because they are enjoyable in their awfulness. A movie like The Room is one such example of gold: a straight-faced attempt to make a film that fails on every level, and whose failures are fun to watch and laugh at.

The Room’s creator, Tommy Wiseau, thinks he’s a great filmmaker; every convention appearance and statement he's made only reinforces his self-delusion. Though it sounds mean-spirited, this is what makes for a great bad movie – a sincere attempt at hitting all the bases of a successful movie, and tripping over every base even when the ump has called the hitter out. The Room is described as a “romantic drama”, but from the way people talk about it, it’s one of the great comedies of the 21^st century.

Syfy’s Sharknado series is the anti-Room. It is a bald-faced attempt to cash in on what makes The Room and its ilk likeable, to try and manufacture its own cult status. It knows what it’s doing and that what it's doing is stupid, and this is a cardinal sin of bad movie watching. For a film to be self-aware sucks the fun out of trying to find something to laugh at, like it’s elbowing the audience in the ribs the entire time, until the viewers’ ribs are thoroughly bruised.

But what’s worse is that it’s a manufactured part of a genuine, grassroots cultural phenomenon. Sharknado is making bad movies for the uninitiated, not for those who’ve waded through the piles and piles of garbage to find a laugh. When you listen to a podcast like The Flop House, which rates movies as Good-Bad, Bad-Bad, or A Movie You Kind Of Liked, more often than not you will get a bad-bad rating. It takes time and energy to find something that will end up being entertaining. Sy-Fy takes all the guesswork out by telling you their intentions through a stupid premise, D-list cameos, and tongue-in-cheek voice-overs. The only intent is to make something “bad”, and in this way they fail.

They made something that is just bad.