Why do certain people love bad movies? They’re, like, bad, aren’t they? This is the question asked by Best Worst Movie , a documentary concerning the fandom of Troll 2, one of the most beloved worst films of all time. The thing about bad movies is that they’re, oftentimes, really funny. As in, enjoyable. Entertaining. So, they meet the criteria demanded of any good movie: to interest and to involve, and, to even move. Laughing at a bad movie is, as far as I’m concerned, endlessly preferable to not laughing at anything at all. Does this make bad movies, in the end, as worthwhile as good ones?

The issue here is essentially that of value. There are many kinds of value when considering movies. There are objective kinds of value such as technical prowess and artistry, and there are subjective kinds such as humor and taste. Entertainment, though, the most important value of all, is entirely subjective. Best Worst Movie isn’t so much concerned with Troll 2 itself, but rather the people whose lives it is a part of, and is thus less concerned with Troll 2’s objective kinds of value and rather its subjective ones, in particular the personal relationship each individual has with Troll 2.

“Mostly I’ve wasted my life. I always thought I had potential but I never did use it. You know, more or less I’ve frittered my life away… but then what else is there to do with a life but fritter it away?”

This quote is from one of the interviews conducted in Best Worst Movie with one of the original actors of Troll 2. He is a quiet, lonely, old man without any family or legacy and whose house is a hoarded mess of things important only to him. He is content, though, because it was his choice to lead a quiet life in a quiet town rather than pursue a hectic acting career in a metropolis such as Los Angeles or New York. This is the power of Best Worst Movie; it articulates the complex in the simple, the beauty in the ugly, and, of course, the good in the bad. There are values and lessons in everything, even in the aimless and the unskilled. Movies, whether good or bad, only have real value to the viewer, and in the eyes of a viewer, a movie is, like life, entirely what he or she makes of it.