'So Bad It's Great': Cinematek celebrates bad taste and dazzling rubbish

One of the more enjoyable, substantiated programmes with which Cinematek reopens is called “So Bad It's Great”. A title could not be more appropriate.

Of all the smoking, beer-drinking and beautiful women-appreciating ducks in the world, Canardo by the recently deceased Brussels cartoonist Sokal is the funniest and least conformist. The silver goes to Howard the Duck from the intergalactically flopped live action SF comedy of the same name by Willard Huyck, which just missed bankrupting producer George Lucas in 1986.

The oddity of the duck is one reason why Howard the Duck still has a large fan base a quarter of a century later. The other is that the film gained the exaggerated but not illogical reputation of being fabulously bad. The word to remember is not “bad” but “fabulous”.

Some films are so ridiculously bad that they still become fun or interesting to a large audience. The cult of the bad film began with the Surrealists. In that church, it is not Orson Welles who is the pope but Ed Wood and so his Plan 9 from Outer Space, just like Howard the Duck, is not missing from Cinema­tek's programme with the crystal-clear title “So Bad It's Great”. It is all about embarrassing failures, dazzling rubbish, unintentional parodies of mediocrity and good taste that will at least last longer than a year. Cinematek grouped together the main examples (there are enough for a franchise).

There is even more Italian copycat work in uber-cult film Zombi 2, in which gore maestro Lucio Fulci unapologetically puts George A. Romero's classic Dawn of the Dead through the meat grinder. In the hysterical Mommie Dearest, Faye Dunaway portrays Hollywood diva Joan Crawford as one of the worst mothers on earth. That Nicolas Cage overacts in a remake of the folk horror classic The Wicker Man is common knowledge for anyone who knows what memes are.

In Aldo Lado's shameless Star Wars rip-off of L'umanoide, an evil scientist wants to subjugate the galaxy by creating a humanoid but is opposed by a pretty girl and a clever Tibetan. Cinematek does not have the budget for a policy of “satisfactory, money back”.

SO BAD IT’S GREAT
> 23/7, Cinematek