Tonight I got to see the movie Exorcist II: The Heretic again, and it reminded me of something I used to think about movie ratings. (I mean the star ratings in TV guides, not MPAA ratings.) You see, Exorcist II: The Heretic is an awful movie, fully deserving of the one star it got from my TV guide; but it’s also a wonderfully entertaining bad movie, so I think there should be some sort of way to let viewers know about this. So when a bad movie is really bad, it should get the one star, or maybe no stars; but if it’s bad in a fun way, or “so bad it’s good”, then it should get a different set of stars, let’s say in red.
So as an example, let’s use Plan 9 from Outer Space. That’s an awful movie, but it’s also really entertaining. So for that movie, I’d say, give it one regular star, and four red stars (for a bad movie that’s fun to watch, a.k.a.: “so bad it’s good”), or just four red stars. And that’s the rating Exorcist II: The Heretic ought to get as well, for it’s truly a God-awful movie, but it’s also really fun to watch, especially if you’re watching it to make fun of it. But there are lots of bad movies that really just suck, and are no fun to watch at all. And they could get one regular star and/or one red star, so that we’d all know not to bother watching it.
