With Basket Case, I got the impression that I was watching a movie made by people who wished that they could convince people to let them make movies, weren't successful, and made a movie anyway. The low budget and primitive technique are not by themselves the problem. The really bad acting is not the problem. One can make a decent movie without them.
Low budget and primitive technique can work to make a very good movie. Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol's movies are good examples. I doubt that any of those movies before Heat had a budget higher than Basket Case. One difference is that they used found locations rather than what amounts to high school stage sets, and they called attention to just how primitive the technique was. A lot of the editing for Flesh, for example, seems to have been done in camera. Part of Flesh is even silent--no soundtrack at all.
Another difference was that they had decent acting--even when the dialogue was improvised. I would point to the films after Vinyl to illustrate this. Even Vinyl accomplished what it set out to do by actually preventing the actors from properly preparing.
Okay, none of the Warhol/Morrissey movies I've cited were horror movies or fantasies--even though some of them like My Hustler played Forty-Second Street. I a Man was intended to be part of a sexploitation genre, and it pretty much succeeds as that genre existed in 1967. Lonesome Cowboys, another Warhol/Morrissey sexploitation, played at midnight at the San Francisco Film Festive in Nov. 1968.
As for films that appear to have had no pretense of artistic merit, take John Waters's early films, that is the ones before Polyester. All of these were done with found locations, and even though they were carefully scripted with absolutely no improvisation allowed, no one seems to have dreamed of their finding a broad audience. Pink Flamingos was sort of a fluke that got Waters his breakthrough in the midnight movie genre. It displaced El Topo as THE midnight movie. Waters got his friends together and basically said, "Let's make a movie."
Low budget sex films like Deep Throat also are candidates for the label "bad movies," but their goal is to suck you into their story beyond their value as pornography. Some of them succeed in doing that. Movies with greater goals and lower production values lack that charm.
For those movies that lack these kinds of goals (or lack thereof) simply fail to meet their goals. That to me is the definition of a bad movie--movies that fail to meet their goals. In my opinion, they don't merit the kind of following that a film like Basket Case seems to have acquired. That is why a film like The Genesis Children, despite higher production values than Basket Case, are just bad movies.
I'd be eager to be convinced to change my mind, but I haven't heard anything yet that has convinced me. Take the challenge. Convince me.
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