So Bad It's Good/Quotes
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"Its delicious unconscious ridiculousness, and its enchanting naiveté, as are supreme and unapproachable, in their way, as are Shakespeare's sublimities."
—Mark Twain, in the introduction to English As She Is Spoke
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"This is *so* stupid that it swings all the way around the meter and ends up right back in "Unbelievably awesome" territory..."
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"I would just like to point out that you just read about a ghost and a gorilla vampire trying to have sex when they suddenly are interrupted by a robot out to get a drug lord. You will never read that again in any other context, so cherish this moment before it's gone."
—Review of the movie Robo Vampire at Encyclopedia Obscura
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Leo: This Chun-Li movie is going to be baaaaad. |
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"I like how World of Synnibarr is uniquely deranged. The first time I read through it, I knew I would never see anything else quite like it, like only McCracken could have made a game that's fucked up the way Synnibarr is fucked up. It's the Plan 9 From Outer Space of RPGs...its execution was horrible, but its wrongness has this charming quality to it, and I can't help liking it nowadays. I've actually got more entertainment out of it than most of the "good" games I own, and I don't regret buying it, so in a bizarre way, McCracken actually succeeded."
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"It isn't enough that a movie be campy and mediocre. It must show incomparably flawed craftsmanship in every detail. It must be so stupefyingly artless that it IS ART, albeit of the most accidental kind."
—Jeff Sconce on the Cult of Bad cinema, quoted in Henry Jenkins' Textual Poachers
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Natasha Fatale: You are so bad, you're good! —Boris And Natasha, a film which epitomizes this trope.
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Paige: I can't believe how trashy this talk show is. It's nothing but sex, vulgarity, deviancy and fighting. It has not one redeeming value. No thoughtful discussions... No good examples... Nothing but pure, 100 percent trash. —FoxTrot, January 9, 1996
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The movie is unconscionably long, and I can’t imagine ever wanting to watch it again, but I am glad I got to see vampires playing baseball. It’s the sort of thing that’s so stupid that it goes out of stupidity to become kind of neat, but then goes right back to being stupid again. |
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If you invite a few friends over and drink steadily, you'll have a blast laughing and throwing popcorn at the screen.
—Smart Popcorn, in perhaps the best review ever given to the film of House of the Dead
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This is so bad it makes my brain hurt. What a great movie!
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I rise to pay my small tribute to Dr. Harding. Setting aside a college professor or two and a half dozen dipsomaniacal newspaper reporters, he takes the first place in my Valhalla of literati. That is to say, he writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up to the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.
—H. L. Mencken's full thoughts on Warren G. Harding's English composition
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Is it bad? Sure. But it's a very enjoyable kind of bad.
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"This band sucks, but it's like, they suck in a new way, like in ways we haven't seen stuff suck before, so it's like, pretty cool."
—Beavis and Butthead, on a bad music video
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"You were so bad you were good."
—Cosmo, Fairly Oddparents
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You see, movies don't necessarily have to be good to be awesome: When you hear that George Romero or Bruce Campbell's made a movie, you're pretty much obligated to go see it, not because you know it's gonna be a good movie, and certainly not because it's going to be any kind of artistic achievement, but because it's gonna be fucking awesome!
—Noah 'Spoony' Antwiler, on why he likes to watch bad movies.
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When we judge a game like this, how do we do it? Do we judge simply on gameplay? If so, the repetitive combat and long drives around town may very well mark it as a mediocre title. Do we judge it on story quality? If so, then we have a game that makes no sense and frequently makes light of murder and sexual deviancy. I say a game needs to be judged by how often it made you happy, how much you laughed or became excited, and how long you spend thinking about it after it was finished. If we judge it by those standards, then Deadly Premonition, my friends, is simply stunning. No other game has made me laugh so hard, laugh almost to the point of tears, laugh just by thinking about it. Deadly Premonition may well be the first game reviewed almost purely for its comedic value, but for a game so funny, it has to be done.
—Jim Sterling of Destructoid
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"Pretty awful? Pretty awful? It was a masterpiece of awful! It's genius, how bad it is, I kinda wish you guys could see it."
—Barney Stinson, How I Met Your Mother episode "Stuff", describing Act 2 of his one-man show.
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It's a perfect storm of shit!
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The movie is pretty bad, all right. But it has a certain charm. It's so completely wrong-headed from beginning to end that it develops a doomed fascination.
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If it were better, it wouldn't be as good.
—Brendan Gill, on Butterflies Are Free
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Few Christmas albums are as truly terrible as Star Wars: Christmas in the Stars, George Lucas' ill fated cash in on the Christmas season. But between the secret celebrity hiding in the credits to the seven songs sung by "robots," few Christmas albums are as enjoyably terrible as this one.
—Allmusic guide review for Star Wars: Christmas In the Stars
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"The Sega CD had its place in history. [...] It's a piece of shit, but it has a certain appeal."
—The Angry Video Game Nerd, Sega 32X review
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"These are beautifully bad films. I love them!"
—Doug Walker, talking about the Twilight films except Breaking Dawn
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"I am not trying to sell anyone of you to think that Catwoman is a good movie; because it is not. It is, in my humble opinion, Something better: When a bad movie comes along, like Whos Your Caddy? it is watched, disliked and promptly forgotten. But it takes a certain kind of magic to make a unforgettably bad film. The kind of movie that is so bad that you feel compelled to watch it over and over. Troll 2, Birdemic and the recent remake of The Wicker Man just to name a few; Catwoman is probably the most expensive movie to sit on that list. For The Warner Brothers it was an enormous bomb, but for me it will always be an epic win."
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"It has the same appeal as a Vincent Price or Bruce Campbell movie, you know it isn't technically good, but you just can't help but watch it anyway."
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"That sounds terrible. I wanna watch it twice."
—Troy, summing up this trope, Community
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"That was... just bad. Not "So Bad It's Good". Just plain terrible."
—The Sims 3: Late Night had this as a tooltip for the moodlet "Saw Awful Film"
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In The Name Of The King was hilarious. Easily the best Boll movie ever (in the same sense that the Titanic was the best ship ever). |
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