The other day, for no good reason, I started to watch John Carpenter's bizarre 1986 film Big Trouble in Little China. This in itself was unusual, because I have always found Kurt Russell's career to be a phenomenon as baffling as string theory: he can't act, he walks and runs in an odd, lumbering way and he always sports the worst hair of the era that he happens to be living through. Even with that designer eyepatch in Escape from New York and Escape from LA (also by John Carpenter), he does not look intimidating in the way that Clint Eastwood or Samuel L Jackson or even John Travolta look scary; he looks like a little boy who broke into Long John Silver's bedroom and stole one of his props.

Even Russell's biggest fans concede that his best performance was in a decades-old TV movie about Elvis Presley (also by John Carpenter). Much like Ronnie Wood, Russell is the kind of person who made valuable industry connections at an early age and then milked them. He is Hollywood royalty, yes, but he is royalty in the same way that the other guys in the Smiths and U2 are royalty: he knows people on the throne. He is even married to one of them. But he has never occupied the throne himself.

Battle Royale: 'Released in the wrong time in the wrong country.'

In any case, I watched most of Big Trouble in Little China, which was terrible, and then checked on Wikipedia to see how well the film did at the box office. And here I made a curious discovery. Although the film crashed and burned upon its release, over the course of time, thanks to massive video sales, it became a cult classic. That's what it said, right there on Wikipedia. It was a cult classic. So I checked out a few other websites to see if this was true, then ran it past a couple of close friends who, despite their otherwise unblemished pop cultural escutcheons, actually like Kurt Russell movies. And all of them said the same thing. Yes. We love Big Trouble in Little China. It's a cult classic.

"But it sucks," I told one of my friends, who I would have never suspected of being a Russell aficionado. Never, ever, ever.

"That's got nothing to do with it," he replied. "It's like being a Deadhead. Either you're on the bus or you're not on the bus."

This conversation got me to thinking about the very meaning of the term "cult classic" or "cult film". A cult film is usually, though not always, a film that was savaged by critics and ignored by the general public upon its release, or a film that was admired by critics but savaged by the public when it first appeared. But over the years, as the tribal drums implacably thump away, the cult film gathers a significant following among a small but vocal segment of the population. Cult film buffs are true believers, zealots who refuse to accept the verdict of history. No, Dune did not suck. No, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension was not the worst movie ever made. No, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is not breathtakingly self-indulgent and just plain awful; it is actually jaw-droppingly great. Those of you who do not share this opinion are idiots.

There are high-quality cult films (Aguirre: The Wrath of God, The Brother from Another Planet, The Big Lebowski), low-quality cult films (Reefer Madness, The Toxic Avenger), prefab cult films (The Blair Witch Project, Surf Nazis Must Die!) and lots of movies that fall somewhere in between (The Evil Dead II, Showgirls). For the most part, cult films are neither as bad as the general public and critics said they were upon their initial release, nor as good as their fans maintain. Except in the case of Big Trouble in Little China, which flat-out sucks.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show: 'When cult films become more widely known, their fans feel betrayed, preferring that they remained relatively esoteric' Photograph: www.ronaldgrantarchive.com

Some cult films – Get Carter, Hard Boiled, Office Space, Infernal Affairs, Blue Velvet, Reservoir Dogs, True Romance – are absolutely great. They deserved a warmer reception when they were released, yes; they have a right to be much better known than they are, yes; but it is not as if no one has ever heard of them. Other cult films suffer from being released in the wrong time in the wrong country; this is certainly the case with Old Boy, Battle Royale, Sonatine, Adam's Apple, Outrage and any number of Korean gangster films. These are films that are cult classics outside the country in which they were released; but inside that country they are by no means unknown quantities. They are the pop-cultural equivalent of the tallest building in Wichita, Kansas. The whole wide world may not know that Wichita has a remarkably tall building. But residents of Wichita do.

Devotees of cult films have a curious mindset. They want the movies they worship to be better known, but they secretly fear that wider acceptance would spoil all the fun. They would have much preferred that Jet Li remain obscure, that films such as Ong-Bak never achieved anything more than borderline success. They do not really want suits in the suburbs to discover Eraserhead, or Leningrad Cowboys: Total Balalaika Show, arguably the greatest music film ever made. Devotees of cult films are like billiard or backgammon fans; they insist that the games are far superior to pool or chess, but they realise that if everyone started playing them, it would ruin everything. Cult films are like Brooklyn: things were great until the investment bankers found out.

Cultists do not really want to share. They want to make noise without actually being heard. There is a rehearsed eccentricity at work here, and bottomless reserves of irony. Deep down inside, cultists fear that the verdict of history may be correct. Maybe Event Horizon and Manhunter and Super Troopers are just OK, but nothing more. Maybe, despite Mickey Rourke's fabulous three-minute cameo, Buffalo 66 isn't quite as brilliant as cultists think. Maybe V for Vendetta really is stupid and juvenile. One could not continue to insist that Spaceballs was an overlooked classic if millions of people actually saw it – and accurately reported that it was anything but a classic. Ditto Welcome to the Dollhouse and Earth Girls are Easy. When cult films become more widely known, their fans feel betrayed, preferring that they remained weird and relatively esoteric, like Ichi the Killer or Grabbers. There was a time, though it is hard to believe, when Jackie Chan movies had a cult-like status, and only hipsters recognised his true genius. Then, in the late 1990s, Chan broke out in a huge way and made loads of popular mainstream American films, few of which would ever achieve cult film status. Chan was like the youthful Prince; it was more fun when only the elect knew about him.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: Breathtakingly self-indulgent or jaw-droppingly great? Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/MCA/UNIVERSAL

The internet has made it harder for films to achieve true cult status. This is because the internet has destroyed the concept of lag time. Early cult films such as Reefer Madness and Faster, Pussycat, Kill! Kill! were released, tanked at the box office, and then went away for a while, to be excavated from the crypt at some later point. The same was true of Mad Max, which took a while to build an international fan base because no one outside Australia could understand anything Mel Gibson was saying. Films like this, unlike The Three Faces of Eve or The Rocky Horror Picture Show, were shrouded in mystery. This allowed cultists to feel special because they had seen a film that others had not, and in many cases, could not see. They liked it that way.

Anyone who truly loves movies has a personal list of cult films. These are films that suck, but that suck in a special way. Because we saw those films with our children (The Three Amigos, Multiplicity), or with the first girl that we loved (Futz), we impute virtues to them that may not exist. I saw a John Huston film in Paris in 1973 called A Walk with Love and Death. I was with a girl I really liked, so I may not have been paying as much attention to the film as I should. It starred a very young Anjelica Huston and the son of the Israeli warlord Moshe Dayan as two gullible youngsters promenading across Europe during the religious wars in the late 14th century. I have ceaselessly recommended that film to friends, not because it is any good – it is actually quite horrible – but because in my mind it is a film that has achieved legendary cult status. Even though the cult may not extend very far beyond my living room. And even though it is an absolutely horrible motion picture that almost destroyed Anjelica Huston's career, it's still a lot less stupid than Big Trouble in Little China. A lot. My own experience with the Huston family's epic 1969 dud underscores a very important point about cult classics: just because everyone in their right mind says that a movie is atrocious doesn't necessarily mean that it isn't.