So Bad It Just Might Be Good

Our ode to the bad scripts for movies we wholeheartedly love.

Taste is a funny thing. There are some movies we love because they are brilliant, funny, inspiring, perfect. And then there are other movies we love for precisely none of these reasons. They are wackadoodle. They are one-of-a-kind. They are flawed. One might even say they are bad, but they are bad in a very precise way that feels joyous. We can learn a lot from the ways in which they sidestep questions of taste and, perhaps, inspire us with all the different ways a movie can win us over.

Working in collaboration with our favorite screenwriting Substack,

jen harrington

’s INSPIRED, we have come up with some suggestions for our favorite so-bad-it’s-good scripts. Stop by the comments and submit your first draft of your favorite bad scripts!

Roadhouse

The original tagline for 1989’s Roadhouse referenced Patrick Swayze's success in Dirty Dancing (1987), "The dancing's over. Now it gets dirty.” He was so famous at the time of filming that they had to stop shooting when “a raft of Swayze fans sailed by during the big fight scene by the river.” Roadhouse had one of the biggest heartthrobs of the moment starring in the kind of movie that the ‘80s did best: the R-rated action movie, how could it go wrong?

Well, despite it not doing well at the box office and being critically panned, I’d argue it didn’t go wrong. In fact, to me, it went so so right. Why? Because Roadhouse managed to go all-in on the ridiculous excess of the time while still maintaining a fast pace, showcasing great fighting and stunts, and following a charismatic lead. It’s the perfect combination of dated ridiculousness and skilled storytelling. But what specifically makes it so special? I decided to give it a rewatch to see if I could uncover what really made the movie tick.

Here are some of my notes:

“Boobs.”

“Butts.”

“Gets stabbed doesn’t flinch.”

“Why are all these bouncers famous?”

“I have never known the name of a bouncer in my life.”

“This is like an ‘80s bouncer version of John Wick.”

“He ripped a guy’s throat out, John Wick killed a guy with a pencil.”

“Ben Gazarra is playing a spiritual prequel to his Jackie Trehorn character in The Big Lebowski.”

“Swayze butt.”

“He does tai chi and doesn’t like junk food and studied philosophy at NYU.”

“After he turns down anesthesia in the ER, he explains: ‘Pain don’t hurt.’”

“Why is Sam Elliott’s hair so beautiful and Kelly Lynch’s is so bad?”

“With so many smooth surfaces available, why have sex against a rock wall? That looks very uncomfortable.”

“So many boobs.”

“Explosions!”

“More explosions!”

“Monster truck!”

“I wonder what the broken glass budget was in this movie.”

“Dude he just ripped a guy’s throat out.”

“Classic 80’s car exploding in mid-air shot.”

“Where have the cops been?”

“The ending of this movie is strangely similar to Murder on the Orient Express.”

"Perfect last line for a movie: ‘A polar bear fell on me.’”—Jen Harrington

Coyote Ugly

This movie came out in 2000, just before I moved to New York City, and I fell hard for its version of a small-town girl moving to Manhattan—so much so that when I got there, I visited the grimy bar it was based on and got myself a souvenir tank top.

In case you don’t know, Coyote Ugly stars Piper Perabo as Violet, an aspiring singer-songwriter who leaves suburban New Jersey to follow her dreams in the big city even though she suffers from massive stage fright, because she must have a clear obstacle to overcome so that we know when the movie has ended. Her mother is dead, and her mother wrote songs, so there are stakes. After an excellent montage of her bringing cassette tapes to record labels and getting rejected, she ends up getting a job at this very honky-tonk bar (called, obviously, Coyote Ugly) where a host of inexplicably hot young women, played by literal supermodels like Tyra Banks and Bridget Moynahan, tend bar in very 2000s low-rise pants and crop tops. They’re surly to the mostly male customers and spray the guys down if they dare to order water in between drinks like responsible adults. The ladies are led by the cutting den mother Lil, played with gusto by Maria Bello. This bar stuff is all loosely based on, of all things, a literate GQ piece by Elizabeth Gilbert.

Things take a turn from reality when the script goes Jerry Bruckheimer, which makes sense given that he’s a producer on the movie. Flashdance, Days of Thunder, Armageddon—we are not here for subtlety. In one of the most absurdly crowd-pleasing scenes ever committed to film, a fight breaks out at the bar, some guy smashes into the jukebox, it starts playing Blondie’s “One Way or Another,” Violet picks up a nearby microphone, she starts singing along with the track, and the crowd is instantly soothed. For some reason a photographer is present, snaps her picture, she becomes a sensation, and we are off to the plot races.

So many terrible/great moments follow. Her dad gets mad that his coworkers at the Jersey tollbooths are hanging her sexy newspaper photo up on their tollbooth walls (!?) and there’s a bit where she gets instantly inspired to write a perfect pop song in one go while she’s playing her keyboard on her roof and hears a kid blasting a hip-hop beat nearby. The message is simple: Singing karaoke on top of a bar in midriff-baring outfits helps you overcome stage fright and achieve your highest aspirations. No wonder I was excited to move to New York!

What makes this movie so bad/good is its adherence to perfect plot structure and wish fulfillment while filling that structure with moments we absolutely know, as humans living in reality on Earth, would never happen. Meanwhile these moments are so competently presented that we almost do believe them. Perabo lights up the screen, and she gets to borrow Leann Rimes’ voice for her songs, not to mention the fact that the legendary Diane Warren wrote them. (They are perfect little pop gems; I still play “But I Do Love You” on guitar regularly.) John Goodman plays her dad, so we buy it; same goes for Melanie Lynskey as her best friend back home. Adam Garcia, as Violet’s love interest, is perfectly cute and accessible without pulling too much focus. (Where is he now? Garcia is primarily a musical theater guy who appears to have mostly returned to the stage after this, with some occasional television appearances and dance-show judging.)

It seems all too fitting that one of the soundtrack’s many bangers is called “The Right Kind of Wrong.” Did she secretly write it about this script? —Jennifer Keishin Armstrong

Face/Off

Can I interest you in a movie in which notorious hams John Travolta and Nicolas Cage, playing an FBI agent and a baddie, exchange faces, and are doomed to spend the remainder of the film chasing each other? And what if I told you that Travolta and Cage spend the film doing imitations of each other? And what if I threw in the world’s greatest purveyor of symbolic white doves and ritualized double-fisted slow-motion gunplay, John Woo, free of charge?

This is the part in which I say that Woo’s 1997 film Face/Off is terrible, but is so terrible that it’s actually terrific, or some such thing. But the thing is that Face/Off is exactly what it is supposed to be. Of all the cinematic genres, the action film is the one that lives closest to ludicrousness. Our awe is directly adjacent to our scoffing, and a good action movie can impress us with its very willingness to skate on the edge of stupid.

Woo is the creator of two of the greatest action films ever made, Hard Boiled and The Killer, which are the movies you would show to an alien who wanted to understand why movies are awesome. Woo’s style never quite translated to Hollywood from Hong Kong, although his influence can be felt everywhere, in everything from the slam-bang set pieces of the Mission: Impossible series (of which Woo directed the underrated, face-swapping second film) to the stylized hyper-violence of John Wick. The closest he ever came to mastering Hollywood was Face/Off. And sure, Nicolas Cage prefers to go big instead of going home, but if you want a movie that efficiently conveys the prefrontal-cortex, caveman thrills of a really good action movie, Face/Off is the one for you. And haven’t you always wanted to see John Travolta doing his best imitation of what Nicolas Cage might sound like if he were doing an imitation of himself? Yes, you do. —Saul Austerlitz

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Now tell us: What’s your favorite so-bad-its-good movie script? Comment below!