Hyperbad.

Chicago.

I can't seem to find any evidence of hyperbad. This bothers me, because I'm quite sure I didn't make it up. Though there is the occasional brief segment of college life I can't remember¹, I'm pretty sure that this was real. Since then, I've retained it as the descriptor of choice for the worst films ever made.

In brief:
Hyperbad is truly, truly awful.

In less brief:
No, seriously. Hyperbad is so bad that it's irredeemable. Not even as really trashy camp, the sort that takes a three drink minimum to appreciate.

More thoroughly:
Here's how I recall it, more or less². In the AV Club's review of the straight-to-video Bats, the reviewer³ posited the existence of a pseudo-cyclical organization of movie quality. (See Figure 1.) As near as I can tell, this was the birth of the hyperbad concept.


Figure 1.

At the top, we have "Good," which, in general, is what a movie wants to be. From there, moving clockwise, movies pass through "Mediocre" on their way to just plain "Bad." Simple enough, right? I think it's safe to assume that the majority of movies fall somewhere within this range. I realize that my examples are a little sparse, but I'm finding it a lot more difficult than expected to think of mediocre films. They just have no mental staying power.

Sometimes, though, a movie is so bad it's good. They're "Camp." Not always intentional, but a long sight better than plain bad. Not all of them have enough momentum to make it all the way back up to good, but aren't entirely bad. They're just sort of "Lame Camp," the mediocrity of so-bad-it's-good, of the folks aiming for irony but trying too hard. Think teen sex comedies⁴ at the low end, Bruce Campbell at the top.

Then, of course, we continue along the circle, back to bad. It's a rare film that has this kind of exceptional awfulness, the sort of failure on so many fronts that catapults beyond the so-bad-it's-good of "Camp" to "Hyperbad." This is the sort of topsy-turvy place where normal adjectives just won't do. This is the land of Bats and Frankenhooker and other films that make you demand your money back from the clerk at the rental store. The land of Alan Smithee.

* * * * *

¹Due to either excessive alcohol consumption or, more often, sleep deprivation.

²I've fleshed it out, and the picture's mine. But this is the essence of it.

³I'm assuming Nathan Rabin, as his name's on the review as it currently stands. But since I remember a portion of the review that no longer exists, we know this assumption could be wrong, too.

⁴You know. The ones starring twenty-somethings as teens, that feature no sex, and aren't particularly funny, especially once the pop-culture buzzwords have lost their popularity.