Snakes on a Plane, the deliberately dreadful catastrophe movie out next week, begs the question: can a film that's knowingly bad be any funnier than one that's bad by accident? We're faced with turkeys each week, but movies so transcendentally awful they become perversely entertaining are rarer birds. The best sort of badness stems from a blend of pretentiousness, vulgarity and clunky dialogue to which the only sane response is incredulous laughter.
My favourite bad movie is Showgirls - a topless Las Vegas version of All About Eve so compelling (sample dialogue: "I like nice tits") it seems unfair to call it bad - it needs a new word, like badtastic. Connoisseurs of the excruciatingly awful are also fond of Shining Through, in which Melanie Griffith runs all the way from Potsdam to Berlin in a white ballgown and is told, "Mein Gott,
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A really bad movie
is a lot harder to make
than it looks, says
anne billson
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you've got guts!" Or The Holcroft Covenant, in which The Guardian’s financial correspondent turns out to be the leader of a neo-Nazi conspiracy and orders everyone to drive to Geneva, "taking the back roads as much as possible".
The Specialist is another gem; bomb expert Sylvester Stallone blasts an entire hotel suite into the sea so that it lands on top of the Cuban mobster treading water below, while James Woods threatens to blow up an office with his Biro.
Latest addition to this pantheon of preposterousness is Woody Allen's Match Point, unaccountably hailed by some as a masterpiece. Were the hailers deaf and blind? Cack-handed nods to Strindberg and Dostoevsky, in-your-face London landmarks, an unwitting gay subtext, English toffs straight out of a TV sitcom? I'm sorry, but Snakes on a Plane is going to have to work hard to top that. 
FIRST POSTED AUGUST 10, 2006
 Film: The Lady in the Water
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