Good afterevenmorn, Readers!

I’m here to do something angsty, teenage me would be horrified by – defending “bad” entertainment. You know the ones – bad movies that are just a fun time to sit through, even if the only thing they have going for them is epic fight choreography, pulpy books with lead characters whose names are alliterations, and who rock their way through the pages with naught but their wry grins and cheesy one-liners. Video games that attempt a story, but fall short and yet are still really fun to play by virtue of their mechanics or visuals. All these “bad” movies, books and games, if done right, can actually be just what the doctor ordered.

Sometimes you need RPGs that inexplicably change direction to wallop the bad guys. Sometimes you need heroes with flowing locks and bare chests. Sometimes you need the weirdly gravelly-voiced maniac with a gun fetish who saves the day. Entertainment does not need to be deep. Sometimes, the exact thing it needs to be is silly — “Bad.”

While my favourite entertainment tends towards the serious and thought-provoking (if you manage to make me cry as part of the experience, it’s very nearly always an automatic five stars. Granted, it’s not hard. I am a weepy bean), and I adore grim dark anything, sometimes it’s really nice to turn to something silly and “bad” and just let yourself have fun with it.

Pan’s Labyrinth is, I think, my all-time favourite movie. My comfort watch is Doom.

There are so many “bad” films I adore, knowing full well that they’re pretty terrible, actually. There are so afore-mentioned Doom, the Transformers movies, Mortal Kombat (the recent remakes; most especially Mortal Kombat II)… these movies are not good. They sure are mindless, and quite silly. But they are a whole lot of fun.

Part of what makes them work is the fact that they lean into just how silly they are. They are unapologetic about it. So many movies with ridiculous premises have tried very hard to be very serious art, actually, and that just does not work. That’s why so many releases have been met with eye rolls, complaints, and a really unhappy viewership.

The first of the recent Mortal Kombat movies fell into this trap, inserting a brand new character not in the game, and then some bizarre justification for how champions are selected. The whole dragon mark thing was not the way to go. Only when the second movie course-corrected (sorry, Cole. I wouldn’t have minded having you stick around), and leant hard into the hokiness of the story, and the ridiculousness of the situation did it start to work. In my opinion, at least.

Doom similarly made no apologies. It deviated from the (much more interesting) grim story of the games; it didn’t shy from being very silly sometimes. The final showdown between Karl Urban’s character and Dwayne Johnson’s character was extremely silly. What do you mean you fired your last bullet into the air just so you had no choice but to fight the rapidly transforming enormous man hand to hand?! It was so stupid.

And I ate it up. It was exactly the kind of stupidity I needed. Granted, I don’t really consider it to be a video game adaptation, since the story deviated so very much from the games, so I don’t suffer from the disappointment of a gamer hoping for a faithful adaptation. As a stand-alone, zombie-adjacent pulpy sci fi story, though, it works.

As an aside, I would still love a proper adaptation of Doom. It is a great story.

Not all movies do this well, and there is a vast well of difference between silly and idiotic. Some movies, games and books are so utterly inane that one wonders how they got made/published at all. Which pieces of entertainment those are will likely vary according to the viewer, as ought to be the case. I cannot stand stoner comedies, for example. And I know for a fact that a great many folk are now casting some bombastic side-eye at my enjoyment of Doom.

It’s a little different for books. Books have a great deal more leeway to do ridiculous things. Ridiculous things, if written well enough, with enough heart, humour, and pathos can pull of sillier situations than films, I feel.

Take the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, for example. I’m currently making my way through the series now. The premise is insane — Former coast guard and his talking cat are made to fight their way through a Dungeons and Dragons style competition that is televised throughout the galaxy. What? With that at its core, it could very well have turned out to be one of the few books I could not finish. Lord knows, it’s far outside of my usual reading fare.

And yet, it works.

It works so well. I am absolutely loving this series. I have gotten stupidly attached to Princess Donut and her dinosaur pet Mongo. I eagerly await for the next absolutely crazy scheme of Carl’s, who stubbornly refuses to let this horrific competition break him.

I think it works not just because Matt Dinniman is a very competent writer, but precisely because the characters recognise the absolute insanity of their situation, and because the peril is note reduced at all because of that recognition. It is the earnestness of the characters that makes this insane premise work.

Good writing can make even the craziest ideas work in a way that other media cannot.

And, it’s great fun to write, too. The serial story that was an exclusive for a while for my subscribers was one of those. On the outside, it’s so ridiculous. Basically, it’s zombies… but make them fairies. Please know, that there is a great deal of affection behind my words when I say that it is so damned dumb. Honestly, I was giggling like a maniacal gremlin writing so much of this. I hope it works. I hope I managed to achieve that delicate balance of a very silly story that’s still really fun, instead of painful.

I am very fond of this story for the same reason I’m fond of the Transformers movies. It’s not because it’s good, but because it was really fun (to write, rather than view in this case). I enjoyed it, at least. Whether other folks will is entirely out of my hands.

So, if you’re a writer who has a work out in the world, and feel paralysed about creating the next one, please know that it doesn’t have to be that deep. It doesn’t have to be worthy of scholarly dissection to be of value. There is plenty of value in just being fun. Silly premises, even the really dumb ones, if done well, can make for some of the best reading. Bad stories can, in fact and quite paradoxically, be very good.

Go out there and write your bad stories. Someone will love them, and even if you’re the only one who does, there’s value in that, too.

So, what are some of your favourite stupid stories; film, games or books? Give me all the terrible stories you love.

Oh, I suppose I should let you know that my very dumb story The Timbercreek Incident is available as an eBook (for free if you get it from my Ko-Fi or from Itch.io), and the paperback is available for pre-order from Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org. All the links are here if you want. Look at me. Marketing like a grown up author. Ugh. I have to go shower.

---

When S.M. Carrière isn’t brutally killing your favorite characters, she spends her time teaching martial arts, live streaming video games, and sometimes painting. In other words, she spends her time teaching others to kill, streaming her digital kills, and sometimes relaxing. Her most recent titles include Skylark, Human and The Timbercreek Incident.