A murder of academics have nearly defined camp out of existence. But schlock, Mr. Steinman’s specialty, has less nuance. Camp’s shuffle-footed, irony-free cousins, objets d’schlock are in such poor taste that they repel even regular viewers of the television network CBS. Even for those who love them (me), Mr. Steinman’s miniature operas of heartbreak and desperation are critically irredeemable — too solemn and silly to even pretend to sophistication. But when “so bad it’s good” is a commonplace, maybe the irredeemable is the only refuge left. JONAH ENGEL BROMWICH

‘Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?’

Is it camp? Decidedly.

Nothing says camp like getting to watch two aging divas go to war with one another. That’s what happened in “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?,” wherein Bette Davis plays a drunk, deranged and delusional former child star who seems to have caused the car crash that cripples her prettier, kinder, and more successful sister (Joan Crawford), whom she holds captive in the once-glamorous house they share. For more than two hours, Davis wears jealousy on her frayed chiffon sleeves, turning away her sister’s visitors, plotting against nosy neighbors, even murdering her sister’s pet bird. “I’ll clean the cage,” she says before literally cooking it up as a meal that she serves to her sister. JACOB BERNSTEIN

Ed Wood

Is it camp? Maybe too campy to be camp.

He used hubcaps for flying saucers, cardboard for sets, and had a bad habit of leaving the boom microphone in the shot. He’s been called the worst director of all time. Ed Wood’s Z-movie science-fiction project from 1959, “Plan 9 from Outer Space,” is often called the worst movie of all time, although his 1953 ode to cross-dressing, “Glen or Glenda,” starring Mr. Wood himself in resplendent angora, gets votes too. But maybe he was better than we think.

Since Tim Burton’s affectionate 1994 biopic, “Ed Wood,” starring Johnny Depp, Mr. Wood has been the subject of a critical reappraisal of sorts, with defenders casting the director’s crude productions as a kind of outsider art. “What comes over isn’t directorial competence,” the writer Johnny Mains told The Independent in 2017, “but exuberance in abundance, enthusiasm and I would take that any day over a film that’s technically brilliant but lacks any soul.” “Plan 9” manages a not-terrible 67 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, where it’s described as the “epitome of so-bad-it’s-good cinema.” And some have lauded the sympathetic portrayal of gender nonconformity in “Glen or Glenda” as decades ahead of its time. At the end of the day, the film is 60 years old and we’re still talking about it. Maybe sometimes bad is actually not bad enough. ALEX WILLIAMS