NOV 23 — Last week, in the space of three days, I saw the advance screening of three movies set to open in cinemas this week and next week.

Of the three, one turned out to be a pleasant surprise as it was a simple case of a classic genre film done nicely right. If you’re wondering what that film is, it’s called Kisah Paling Gengster, and you should probably go see it if gangster dramas are your thing, because I think you’d be in for quite a nice surprise.

But it’s not that film that I want to talk about right now. It’s the other two films that really got me thinking; one is a Malaysian film, the other a Hong Kong one.

Both are kind of bad, but one is almost torture to sit through and the other kind of fun. The Malaysian film’s a horror flick called Penanggal, which was highly respected actress Ellie Suriaty Omar’s feature film directing debut and the Hong Kong film is a (s)exploitation comedy called Kick Ass Girls starring three very fetching girls, the most famous being current Hong Kong sex symbol and darling Chrissie Chau, which is indeed kick-ass.

Which got me thinking — what separates films that are so-bad-it’s-good and those that are just plain bad? How can it all go wrong for one film and how can the other make you forgive so much of its “wrong-ness” and you actually enjoy its badness?

First and foremost, I think it has to be the film’s (or film-maker’s) intentions. Every film and film-maker begins with a set destination — of the kind of film that it wants to be or make. We don’t really need to hear the film-maker say what his or his intentions are but we can already get from watching the film itself what sort of goals the film-makers have set to achieve.

For instance, nobody in their right minds watching any of the Adnan Sempit films (or the Twilight films for that matter) will ever mistake it for a film with ambitions for Oscar (or even Festival Filem Malaysia) glory.

But watch things like Lincoln or Life of Pi (or Bunohan for a recent local reference) and you know that they have higher intentions than just being your typical box-office fodder. So you don’t really have to be a well-read film scholar to be able to tell the difference. You just do.

So when a Lincoln or a Life of Pi end up being a bit of a disaster in terms of execution like, say, any Katherine Heigl film that’s NOT Knocked Up or 27 Dresses, then aren’t you entitled to be a bit more outraged at a failure like that?

Unfortunately that was exactly what I felt when I finished watching Penanggal, as I had quite high hopes for it, knowing the kind of serious actress that Ellie Suriaty was and how seriously she takes her art. And there was nothing in the film to even suggest that it wanted to be anything other than a well-crafted, serious horror movie.

Despite being beautifully photographed by respected cinematographer Raja Mukhriz, the film just failed to click on any narrative level, neither normal nor “experimental.” There were unresolved subplots, and a key decision involving the kind of language used by some of the major characters just resulted in unintentional hilarity. These were a few of the many problems I had when watching the film.

And yet I found myself helplessly giggling at the same kind of narrative and acting mess that was Kick Ass Girls. Yes, the highly fetching girls (hello Dada Lo!) can make any male in the audience go weak at their knees with their, ahem, “ample” charms, but I think the main reason that we fanboys are able to forgive this kind of badness (aka madness) is because it’s plainly obvious that it never intended to become anything more than its silly title.

Just like its Japanese cousins, films with inspired titles like Big Tits Zombie, Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead, RoboGeisha, Mutant Girls Squad and Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl, these are films that truly know what they are, whom they’re made for, and make no bones about it.

In fact, they absolutely revel in their “badness.” And just like how a disastrous Radiohead-wannabe band is never, ever going to be better than a competent Ramones-wannabe band, intentions play a huge part in appreciating art, even if that art skirts dangerously near to “trash.”

Daring to reach for the stars has its rewards, but one also must be wary of the pitfalls of doing so, and accept that when it happens. All we can do is try again. As the grand lesson from the Dark Knight movies has it said — “Why do we fall? So we can pick ourselves back up again.”

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.