So Bad It's Horrible Cleanup

yeah, there is.

I've noticed that the YMMV for Can't Stop the Music says it's So Bad, It's Good. Does this mean the film has enough of a ironic fanbase for it to no longer qualify as Horrible, or is the claim that there's a significant So Bad, It's Good-based fanbase unfounded?

I think it can be safely removed from Horrible, since the film doesn't have anything objectionable (I don't remember anything anyway), and a big part of it being so hated when it came out (sparking the Razzies for example) was the backlash against disco at the time. Now, it's just a really goofy movie where the Village People act badly and pretend to be straight, with funny musical numbers.

There's another film listed on horrible that also does seem to have a So Bad, Its Good fanbase, that being Howling: New Moon Rising. Its wiki page mentions how several critics said that the film can be hilarious due to how trashy it is. It also mentioned how there have been (failed, but more so due to the fact that the 35mm reels are not edited) attempts to rerelease the movie on Blu Ray, showing that there is a demand for this movie.

after looking the film up, it seems like most people generally find it an entertaining movie. i'd say cut it and give it an entry on So Bad, It's Good.

Seems like a lot of examples have been getting cut lately for being So Bad They're Good. Wonder if it's worth a deeper look into things?

So Bad, It's Horrible seems like a place where people can have their Single-Issue Wonk and complaining run free away from editors or mods. More often than not, the movies/works are either going to be exceptionally bad, or have defenders.

I get the feeling that SBIH isn't supposed to come off like that (that's a description that better fits Dethroning Moment of Suck, and I avoid that part of the website like the plague nowadays because it legitimately does feel unruly to me). Examples don't just get added willy-nilly with abandon, any potential example is scrutinized to be sure it's actually allowed to be listed on the page (and if it's not, it's not listed or it's removed).

SBIH feels more to me like it's essentially TVT's answer to Wikipedia's "List of [works] considered the worst/notable for negative reception" i.e. "List of films considered the worst", at least in theory, anyway. This isn't a place for people to just vent about works they don't like. There's supposed to be a structure here.

Like all audience reactions, SBIH isn't strictly cataloging an opinion but rather a consensus. The suckiness of a work is not an objective truth, but the way audiences felt about it is. That's the purpose of YMMV; recording subjective things that objectively happened.

SBIH used to have much lower restrictions so a lot of these examples (especially on less popular/verifiable pages like Advertising) are just sort of grandfathered in as nobody bothered to double-check, unless they had a recent resurgence in popularity making it harder to ignore.

Though I don't think it's an "audience reaction" in the traditional sense, since it's on Darth, but we use consensus anyway to keep things neat.

Edited by mightymewtron on Mar 20th 2024 at 3:51:57 PM

From the Mobile Devices folder of Horrible.Other:

• The Umidigi A9 Pro, an entry level Android smartphone for the Chinese market (two factors that generally mean poor performance) wouldn't normally be notable enough for this page — that is, until self-described "world's youngest Bitcoin millionaire" Erik Finman decided to capitalise on conservative grievances as The Moral Substitute against Silicon Valley, bought them in bulk, and resold them at an over 300% markup. The result, the Freedom Phone, was marketed heavily on being "free speech and privacy first", with a custom app store that would never be censored. The reality wasn't so simple. First of all, the custom Android distribution that the Freedom Phone ran used content lifted wholesale from other distributions (including "Trust", the much-vaunted major privacy feature, being copied from a feature that debuted on LineageOS three years prior). The so-called custom app store, PatriApp, is just a reskin of the Aurora Store - an open source frontend for the actual Play Store - and all of the "censored apps" offered are just pre-installed (and permanently locked to old versions, because no online support meant there were no updates). Oh yeah, and it's worth reiterating that it's a $120 phone, with all the underperformance that implies, selling for five hundred US dollars. Tellingly, the official website says nothing about the (awful) specs of the phone, instead finding room only for 10 different "buy it now" buttons. Mrwhosetheboss goes into the scam here.

Despite it being a scam Moral Substitute, there are plenty of conservatives who like the phone.

Edited by Nen_desharu on Mar 20th 2024 at 8:44:27 AM

Not to mention that there was once a thing called "Wall Bangers" (now a part of the Permanent Red Link Club), which pretty much was just an excuse for people to complain about moments in works they hated.

I joined long after Wall Bangers was cut, but from what I heard, it had far fewer restrictions for adding content than other Darth Wiki pages.

Edited by punkcrow on Mar 20th 2024 at 9:17:15 AM

Granted did they actually like the phone or were they just paid promoters? For example Candence Owens posted a video using the phone but it was just an advertisement, not genuine usage.

I think it was popular among conservatives purely because it was a chance to "own the libs", even though they were just buying into a scam.

If the apps weren't actually fully functioning versions of the official apps (i.e. no online support or updates), it didn't fulfill its proper purpose to the conservatives, did it?

It seems to be one of those cases where its promises ("Big Tech can't spy on you", "All-American") are things that the unsavvy can't know about, which makes it such an effective scam. I could see it added on the grounds that it doesn't deliver on its promises, but at the same time it has a fanbase of sorts.

It's a scam. I doubt it has any legit supporters who don't just champion it for ideological reasons.

Does the Freedom Phone actually have defenders beyond a couple of Technologically Blind Elders on Facebook? It's impossible for something to be hated by literally every single person ever, so a tiny enough amount of defenders won't necessarily disqualify an example, but something that has supporters only due to Confirmation Bias still has supporters, and deciding that they "don't count" because they are wrong should be beyond the scope of this page.

It's sort of in a weird spot with the "fails to gain an audience" requirement, if I'm reading the entry for it right. Something being a scam often means there's a pretty good chance it qualifies as Horrible, considering that the audience for it doesn't know that the product doesn't actually work as well as it's championed to (not to mention that deceptive advertising is just another bad quality of its own).

It's reminding me of the entries on Horrible.Apps for N8 STATE and Virus Shield; they were apps that allegedly protected users from electromagnetic radiation and computer viruses, respectively, but were actually scams that didn't do anything except for claiming to protect you. However, they were apparently fairly popular with people who thought that the apps worked.

I agree that we shouldn't just say that supporters who are in the wrong automatically "don't count", which goes along with the "there is a market for all kinds of deviancy" point, but if the product is in such poor quality to the point of being basically useless (since, as pointed out, the phone has no online capabilities), it still might be worth considering as SBIH.

(While this is unrelated, I thought I might add that as of tomorrow, Willy's Chocolate Experience will have happened a month ago; I believe there was consensus that it counts, it was just too early to add it.)

Um... If they are objectively wrong then it IS HORRIBLE. Horrible fiction/art/media is SUPPOSED to be subjective so the "If it has a legit good faith fanbase, however niche/bigoted/creepy then it doesnt count" is legit and thus not horrible.

A phone is not Fiction/art/media and thus CAN be objectively awful. Therefore the rules dont apply.

Edited by AegisP on Mar 23rd 2024 at 5:23:41 AM

But for that reason I wonder if it belongs on our page at all, since we're assessing it differently than everything else that's there ("failed to please any audience" versus "fooled its audience into thinking it's good").

Honestly though I've even seen conservatives hate the freedom phone, even though the conservatives may have bought it they eventually got mad when they never even got their phones, and many of the phones that did arrive were broken. So even if they were initially fooled when they realized the truth they got mad. Many of the conservative figures who did claim to use it (Cadence Owens) made false claims as you could see they continued to use normal iPhones or Androids even after their promotions. Also the phone hasn't even had its website updated as they still advertise you can use Parler even though that site got shut down.

The difference between this and the fictional stuff is that this is something that can be objectively proven. A movie that succeeds to be a movie can still fail to be a good movie, but quality is subjective. But a phone that fails to be a useful phone is an objective failure, even if not everyone's aware of the scam.

Speaking of conservative products and movies that fail to be movies, I'm curious if Absolute Proof by Mike Lindell would qualify. For one, it has the ratings needed to qualify. (2.8 on IMDB, which is notable since even other election/conservative conspiracy films on that website like 2000 Mules, Rigged, and The Plot Against the President have defenders) It also received 2 Razzies including Worst Picture. Lastly, the movie's content itself led to many lawsuits against Lindell, so even if the movie was recieved amazingly it would be horrible on the count of it got the creator into trouble. However, I'm not sure if it can qualify as a movie. For one, the format and setup is less like that of a movie and more like that of a webshow where he is just rambling (think like Alex Jones). It also is mainly distributed on online video sites like Youtube, Vimeo (at least before it was taken down), and Rumble, which might make it a noncommercial product. There was a DVD offered but it was technically free (you had to pay shipping). However, Mike Lindell did specifically pay money for the film to play on OAN (which is a commerical news network), meaning that this specific release could fit under the "commerical" banner.

The "this isn't actually a movie" thing is one of the biggest criticisms I've seen about Absolute Proof (and at least one online critic said it shouldn't have qualified for the Razzies because of it).