Recently, there’s been an interesting development in film and other media: the culture of “bad”. What I mean by this is works that would generally be considered awful are looked at as brilliant in an ironic sense. Such works are regarded by the paradoxical title “so bad its good.” The best example of this is “The Room,” a 2003 movie regarded as one of the worst ever made. It now has a cult following as a comedy due to its hilariously bad writing, direction, and acting, instead of the melodramatic romance its supposed to be.

“The Room,” “Birdemic: Shock and Terror, “ “Troll 2, and many more are being hoisted up as enjoyably bad, safe to laugh at how horrible they are. This sort of ironic enjoyment is something relatively new in our culture. I’d pin the start of this to whenever the TV show “Mystery Science Theater 3000” began airing, since this is what the show did to terrible B-movies from years ago. “MST3K” never had more than a cult following, but its brand of ironic “riffing” on bad media has now become one of our default responses.

But this is a dangerous game in my eye. For every “Troll” 2 you get movies like “Movie 43,” which is a genuinely atrocious, thoroughly unfunny comedy. “Movie 43” currently has a 4% rating on Rottentomatoes.com, meaning 4% of critics gave it a positive review, and Metacritic.com gives it an average score of 18/100. It isn’t laughably bad, its just bad. But when our culture is starting to accept bad, movies of this ilk are more likely to be made, distributed, and viewed. Its the ultimate proof of the maxim that “any publicity is good publicity”.

I’m not vilifying people who do enjoy these works. If you like something, like something and support it. But the danger is complacency. If something that’s simply bad gets passed off as enjoyably bad, the system begins to think it can toss out anything. That’s the calculus behind “Movie 43” or last year’s “Ouija.” If no one calls out these turds for being turds, then eventually you get an avalanche of bad movies that we’re just supposed to enjoy because of how bad they are. That’s not what I go to the movies for!

What’s most interesting about this phenomenon is that it seems to be unique to film. There aren’t many “so bad its good” songs or video games. There are some examples of songs that are so bad people enjoy them ironically. For me, Ylvis’ completely inexplicable “What Does the Fox Say?” falls under this category. But video games tend to be different in how bad they can get. The game Ride to Hell: Retribution made waves in 2013 for being a terrible game, some claiming you could enjoy it ironically. “Ride to Hell” is a motorbiking game where your bike floats around, melee combat is boring and repetitive, gunplay is unsatisfying, the plot and voice acting are beyond amateur, and worst of all, disgustingly toxic sexism runs rampant. It looks how it plays, and it plays terribly.

It isn’t fun. That’s what this whole culture is about. I attribute this failure to the fact that video games juggle a lot more than movies. When making a game, you need to factor in what the player will do, as well as how a game looks, how its story goes, and what we’re supposed to get out of it. With more balls in the air, there’s a lot more room to miss the sweet spot of enjoyably bad.

So is it that bad to laugh at movies like “The Room?” No, as long as we recognize just how lucky it is. In almost any other universe, movies like “The Room” wouldn’t see the light of day. But it’s here, it’s hilarious, and we should enjoy it as such. Just be critical of the media you consume. You’ll find plenty of good work out there, and you won’t see as many bad works. Oh hi, Mark!