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This fact has even given rise recently to commercial festivals of bad movies featuring films like The Terror of Tiny Town, a 1938 western with a cast of midgets. Books like The Golden Turkey Awards (1980) and The Fifty Worst Films of All Time sell tens of thousands of copies. The Dial magazine earlier this year offered an article titled "Five Great Bad Movies." Author John Malone discussed Duel in the Sun, Elephant Walk, The Naked Jungle, The Rains of Ranchipur and Legend of the Lost, and ventured guidance on how to tell a good bad movie from a bad bad movie. Says Malone: "A great bad movie must be in color."
Actually, despite all the intricate aesthetic distinction, good bad pap appeals to some whimsical people for the same reason that simple good pap appeals to others: entirely as a source of fun. Many observers fear that the explosion of pap in the media-ridden 20th century might harm society's more serious culture.
So far, as Sociologist Herbert Gans points out in Popular Culture and High Culture, there has been no evidence to support such worries. Ultimately, pap is an annoyance and a hazard only to those who take it seriously—which, perhaps significantly, seldom includes those who enjoy it. —By Frank Trippett