This book examines badfilms, a subcategory of ‘bad cinema’ marked by incompetence and typically exacerbated by material poverty and restrictive production conditions. It establishes a framework through which the formal characteristics of failure can be established and analysed, and identifies intentionality as central to how badfilms are recognised and valued as cult texts. Drawing on debates about cult cinema, film form, cultural value and taste, and interrogating critical concepts such as ‘so bad it’s good’, the book investigates the impact of failure, incompetence, and ineptitude in post-pr ... More

This book examines badfilms, a subcategory of ‘bad cinema’ marked by incompetence and typically exacerbated by material poverty and restrictive production conditions. It establishes a framework through which the formal characteristics of failure can be established and analysed, and identifies intentionality as central to how badfilms are recognised and valued as cult texts. Drawing on debates about cult cinema, film form, cultural value and taste, and interrogating critical concepts such as ‘so bad it’s good’, the book investigates the impact of failure, incompetence, and ineptitude in post-production sound, uses of recycled footage, performance and editing through a series of case studies. Focusing primarily on ‘classic’ American badfilms from the 1950s and 1960s, such as Plan 9 from Outer Space, Robot Monster, The Beast of Yucca Flats, and Manos: The Hands of Fate, this book proposes a means of ‘taking the badness of badfilms seriously’. With the films discussed within this book characterised by incompetence and failed intentions, they provide unique opportunities to consider not only how we identify, respond to, and potentially value failure, but how failure itself works within the films.