By a strange quirk of fate, in September 1995, I found myself waiting to meet a friend in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel, Hollywood, California, as the cast and creative team of Paul Verhoeven’s subsequently much-derided Showgirls arrived from the film’s first screening. Advance word on the softcore Las Vegas fable had reached the hotel, a nexus of Hollywood gossip, ahead of the limousines. And advance word was not good. The film’s young lead Elizabeth Berkley, who would within hours receive spectacularly appalling notices, walked in through the doors and nobody met her eyes. Even the hotel staff, who are normally ready to assist anyone with anything for the appropriate tip, sensitively looked at the floor. Minutes later, in the bar, where legally required notices warn of the dangers of the alcohol that is on sale, the film’s writer Joe Esterhaz turned to me in a panic as I waited alone for my acquaintance, and shook me vigorously by the hand. “I’m Joe Esterhaz,” he said, visibly disturbed, “thank-you for coming.” Showgirls, it seems, was a very Bad Movie. This, as it turned out, had ensured its immortality.

Some bad movies are so bad, they are able to enjoy a radioactive half-life because of their sheer badness. Critics at the time predicted that Showgirls would go on to be enjoyed enthusiastically, but ironically, as if it had been written, shot, and edited within enormous inverted commas. For generations of students, twenty-something pseuds and homosexuals, it is now a staple of late night, alcohol fuelled screenings. Bad Film Club, the brain-child of the South Wales comedy double act Nicko and Joe, is currently staging special evenings of similarly poor cinema at various venues nationwide. But what makes a bad film? Most of the movies screened so far under the auspices of Bad Film Club seem to fulfil generally understood criteria of badness. At first glance it would appear they are fish, in a barrel, waiting to be shot, unceremoniously, in the head.

But 1971’s Godzilla Vs The Smog Monster, far from being a truly bad film, is an admittedly cumbersome metaphor for environmental catastrophe, and one that the world has ignored at its peril. And its man in a rubber suit Godzilla is more charming and convincing than the CGI lizard avenger that battled Matthew Broderick in Roland Emmerich’s far more expensive 1998 Hollywood version. Ed Wood’s 1959 Plan 9 From Outer Space regularly features in Bad Movie polls, but it displays degrees of imagination and energy absent from most Richard Curtis films. Viva Knieval, which was chosen for Cardiff’s Bad Film Club at the Chapter Arts Centre last month by Canadian comic Glenn Wool, at least has genuine motorcycle stunts and Breakdance The Movie, at the same venue this Sunday, features exciting old skool hip hop moves. All these films have something to commend them, and it is possible to imagine that somewhere along the line those responsible believed in what they were doing, otherwise we would not be able to contemplate sitting down to view them. Thus, when Bad Film Club asked me to host an evening, I tried to broaden the brief, away from films that were just aesthetically bad, but also morally wrong.

Who Dares Wins, my most hated film, was released in 1982. Former TV hardman Lewis Collins plays Peter Skellen, who is an SAS man rather than a chart-topping1970’s MOR singer, attempting to inflitrate a thinly disguised offshoot of the Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament and prevent a terrorist outrage. It has bad acting, bad dialogue, terrible music and a crass title sequence. But it also sets out to demonise the 80’s soft-left using impossible stereotypes and barely concealed right-wing polemic. It is like a Daily Mail version of an action movie. Not only is Who Dares Wins rubbish, it is also evil, and an example of that cinematic rarity, the commercially released facist film. Nearly a quarter of a century after its completion, it now serves as an elegy for the death of the soft British left of the 70’s and 80’s, that will move anyone who came of age politically in the Red Wedge era to tears of regret. Like Tony Blair, Lewis Collins’ SAS man pretends to be one of the revolutionaries, and even manages to convince one of them to sleep with him, but eventually leads them to their doom, having been a puppet of American-British military interests all along. Oddly the only sympathetic character in the film is the leader of the anti-nuclear terrorists, played by a young Judy Davis, whose closing speech sounds impossibly idealistic when delivered to the generals soon to delight in her death. As Blake wrote of Milton’s Paradise Lost, it would appear that the screenwriters were of the devil’s party without knowing it.

The fact is that truly bad films, like undercover SAS men, hide in plain sight. In the 50’s and 60’s we knew them by their bad plotting, bad dialogue, bad acting and low production values. But now those same faults are concealed by big budgets, professional production values, star names and skillfully managed marketing campaigns. Peter Biskind, in his book Easy Riders Raging Bulls, cites Jaws as the moment where B-movie aesthetics went overground on major motion picture budgets. Now it’s harder to identify the genuinely bad film. Does Peter Jackson’s King Kong, which acheived less with its ham-fisted direction, clanking script, emotionally maniuplative score and multi-million dollar effects than the 1933 original did with string and clay, qualify? What about Baz Luhrmann’s cloyingly insincere Oscar-winner Moulin Rougue? Is the acclaimed Brit-com Festival a bad film by virtue of its loveless, embittered cynicism? And what about the wasted franchises of Daredevil, Fantastic Four, The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen or Batman and Robin? I’ll take Godzilla Vs The Smog Monster over Pretty Woman any day. The Bad Films are out there, but often they’re right under our noses.

Godzilla versus the Smog Monster (1971)
Hedorah (the smog monster) rises from the gutters of Japan, a mixture of air, sea and earth pollution but is challenged by dinosaur Godzilla. Inappropriate trombone music and a final psychedelic disco scene propelled it to number one.

Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959)
Legendary inept movie from eccentric cross dressing director Edward D Wood about aliens resurrecting dead humans as zombies and vampires to stop human kind from creating the Solaranite (a sort of sun-driven bomb).

The Barbaric Beast of Boggy Creek, Part II (1985)
Professor and students camp out to find Bigfoot-type creature. Full of bad acting, unnecessary toplessness.

They Saved Hitler’s Brain (1966)
World War II is over, and Nazi officials remove Adolf Hitler’s living head and hide it in the South American country of Mandoras, so that they can resurrect the Third Reich for the future.

Shark Attack 3 Megalodon (2002)
In a once serene African fishing village, a marine biologist goes in search of some answers when his friend becomes a victim in one of a series of brutal shark attacks.

Frankenhooker (1990)
When his pretty fiancee goes to pieces under the blades of a runaway lawnmower, aspiring mad scientist Jeffrey Franken hatches an unorthodox scheme to bring his beloved back to life.

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (1978)
Music, comedy and spoof horror are all combined in this uniquely low-budget attack on conventional horror movies.

Octopus (2000)
While on a secret mission to deliver a shadowy international terrorist to America the crew of a nuclear sub including a young female octopus expert, face terror in the Bermuda Triangle-like portal known as the Devil’s Eye.

Attack of the 50ft Woman (1958)
One of the worst 50s sci-fi flicks a woman has an alien encounter which leads to a growth spurt.

Robot Monster (1953)
An Ed Wood-style science fiction film featuring an actor dressed in a gorilla suit with a diving helmet. The director attempted suicide shortly after its release.