Terrible films are 10 a penny, but making something as magnificently, joyously awful as Showgirls or The Snowman? That takes real skill. Here are the rules of the Truly Bad Movie

Few things in life can rival the joy of watching a truly bad movie. Those of us who savour inept, high-profile, well-funded bombs can only look with pity on our forebears who had the misfortune to be born before motion pictures were invented. Unlike modern film buffs, who can conjure up literally thousands of bad films with just a few keystrokes (thanks to the cultural abyss that is Netflix), our luckless ancestors were forced to make do with bad plays, bad operas, bad circuses, bad auto-da-fés. How they got through their culturally barren lives without bad motion pictures is one of the great mysteries in human history. I know I couldn’t do it. Luckily we have had two films in recent weeks that deserve to enter the pantheon of bad movies.

The Snowman falls into the classic category of the Big-Budget Bad Film That Wrecks a Good Novel. Like The Lovely Bones, The Shipping News, The Da Vinci Code and a host of others, The Snowman sets its sights on a book that the public absolutely loved and takes a wrecking ball to it. Armed with a dazzling international cast, including the deceptively inanimate Teuton Michael Fassbender, the sultry Swede Rebecca Ferguson, the adroit Parisian Charlotte Gainsbourg, the freshly excavated yank Val Kilmer and his redoubtable compatriot JK Simmons, The Snowman has a bad script, bad direction, bad accents and bad, bad, bad snowmen with coffee beans for eyes. It also has a vengeful lake that seems to hold grudges for an awfully long time, in defiance of all known environmental trends. It may well be the finest Bad Norwegian Film ever made. Even though it’s not actually Norwegian.

Like all top-flight Bad Movies, The Snowman has an incoherent plot, an unedifying assortment of subplots and red herrings, masses of hi-tech gobbledegook and a complete indifference to the question of whether anyone watching can possibly understand what is going on. Today, more than a week after seeing it, I’m still not sure whether Ferguson is dead at the end of the film or is only missing a pinkie.

Though it is not a Bad Movie on a par with Really, Truly Bad Movies such as Ishtar or The Postman or At Long Last, Love, The Snowman will do. If you are a bona fide aficionado of movies that seem to have been scripted by dipsomaniacal Arctic Circle nitwits, then hunkering down with The Snowman for a couple of hours is a wonderful way to pass the time.

Geostorm is a bad movie to be loved, honoured, feted, treasured. It is truly a gift from the gods

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Click here to watch a trailer for Geostorm.

Yet, much as I enjoyed the festively inane Snowman, I was far more impressed by Geostorm, a film on a much higher level of atrociousness than Der Flop from Dee Fjords. With Gerard Butler inexplicably cast as a brilliant astrophysicist who’s surprisingly handy with his fists, Geostorm fuses a strange extraterrestrial bromance with a cautionary tale about the environment and a villainous White House conspiracy. Think of it as I Love You The Day After the President’s Plane Is Missing on the Pacific Rim, Man.

Boasting an incomprehensible plot, several preposterous subplots, an anti-Trump message that is as subtle as spinal meningitis, a precocious tot, a seemingly doomed third world puppy and a score that sounds like Aaron Copland’s high-school entrance exam, Geostorm starts off bad and keeps getting worse.

Featuring that kind of massively annoying external spaceship maintenance we all just saw in Life and Gravity, that gallant camaraderie we just saw in Aliens, the touching father-daughter subplot we just saw in Interstellar, and – did I already mention this? – Gerard Butler as a brilliant astrophysicist, Geostorm also serves up the same municipal hysteria we saw in Olympus Has Fallen – or Was It London?, the same interminable CGI electrical storms we saw in Doctor Strange and Wonder Woman, the same global mayhem we have seen in everything from World War Z to Suicide Squad. It is the very essence of the Bad Movie We Love, in part because it reminds us of so many other Bad Movies We Love, except that it stars Gerard Butler as a brilliant astrophysicist. It is a Bad Movie to be loved, honored, feted, treasured. It is truly a gift from the gods.

Then there is the impending release of The Disaster Artist, a film about the making of the 2003 bomb The Room, now regarded as one of the finest genuinely awful movies ever made. Here, let us admit that neither The Snowman nor Geostorm can rival The Room for its jaw-dropping hideousness. This does not detract from their achievement as authentically Bad, Bad, Bad Movies. It simply means that they cannot fairly be compared to Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad Movies. Movies like The Room are in a class of their own.

Let’s backtrack a little and discuss the concept of Bad Movies We Love. First off, people who love Really Bad Movies never complain about having wasted their time watching them, nor do they ever attempt to warn other people to avoid them. People who post nasty, faux-intelligent reviews online regularly report that the film they just saw was the “worst movie ever”. These drooling ding-dongs don’t know what they’re talking about. The duds and dreck that float to the surface every single day on the internet are only the Worst Movies Ever Made Since This Time Yesterday. This instantly disqualifies them as Truly Bad Movies. Truly Bad Movies never go directly to video, directly to DVD, directly to the internet. It takes years and years and lots of money to make a Truly Bad Movie. You can’t just knock them out in a week.

To qualify as a Truly Bad Movie, a film must have a real budget, be made by a real studio, feature real movie stars, and have a real commercial release. A Truly Bad Movie swings for the fences and goes for broke. This is why the 37 low-budget films that Steven Seagal made in the past two years cannot be considered Bad Movies in the classic sense of the term. A Truly Bad Movie is a movie that started out with the intention of being good, but somehow lost its way. This never happens with Steven Seagal movies.

A bad movie must star people who frequently appear in good movies, giving it the patina of class and intelligence

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Click here to watch a trailer for The Snowman.

Here we come to the crux of the enigma of the conundrum of what constitutes a Truly Bad Movie. It cannot be a low-budget piece of trash or a film-school gag or a stupid action film made as part of some weird tax write-off in Germany. To be considered a Truly Bad Movie, a movie must have started out in somebody’s head as a good movie. It must have been green-lit by people who seemed sane at at the time. And it must star people who have frequently appeared in good movies, giving the Truly Bad Movie the patina of class and intelligence all Truly Bad Movies require.

Ageing purists sneer at young people when they attempt to break into the rarefied ranks of Bad Movie aficionados. Just as they will insist that no band, no matter how awful, could ever be as annoying as the Grateful Dead, Jethro Tull or Wings, people now in their dotage scoff at the notion that any newly released film could rival Showgirls, Xanadu and the almost universally execrated Heaven’s Gate. They maintain that unless a movie lost enormous amounts of money, ruined reputations, blowtorched careers and virtually bankrupted a major studio, it cannot qualify.

This is simply not fair. Every generation wants to have a few movies it can point to proudly and say: “Surely this is the worst film ever made.” Just as every generation wants to lay claim to its unapproachable titan, its Frank Sinatra, its Beatles, its Michael Jackson, its Ed Sheeran, every generation wants to point with pride to its 47 Ronin. Just as every generation wants its Kylie, every generation wants its Miley. It’s a basic human drive, as natural as breathing.

But here it is vital to distinguish between the mega-iconic, archetypally bad movie – say, John Carter, whose name shall ring in infamy long after we have all passed from the scene – and the kind of Genuinely Bad Movie that, without ever attaining such dizzying heights of hideousness, nevertheless qualifies as a Bad, Bad, Bad movie. Such movies fill our hearts with joy and our loins with pleasure. For, as the American wit Garrison Keillor once put it, a good newspaper can only ever be so good. But a bad newspaper is a joy for ever. Same thing for movies.

One of my great regrets in life is that I will probably not live long enough to see the Bad, Bad, Bad Movies that Vin Diesel and Jennifer Aniston still have in them. It is the tragedy that defines us as a species: man is the only creature on the face of the Earth that knows he will die before Mark Wahlberg has made his last crummy film. But at least he got to see Gerard Butler as a brilliant astrophysicist.