In 1980, the Beacon Theatre in Manhattan held 'The Worst Film Festival', a Cannes of worms that showcased such lambasted turkeys as Plan 9 From Outer Space, They Saved Hitler's Brain and the all-midget musical western The Terror of Tiny Town. Attendance was robust, but then organisers must have known: no one would watch a marathon of truly bad films, because truly bad films are unwatchable.

Movies like Ed Wood's Plan 9 are so transcendentally inept, they're fun to gape at. It's the films that aspire to greatness - social forklifts awkwardly 'elevating' the human spirit - that give bad a bad name. Filmgoers can frequently tell, from the jackknifing trailers alone, when a movie like last year's Pay It Forward is going to stink like roadkill on the grille of a Greyhound. Bad films wear their ingredients the way soup labels do. To be really bad, a film should be pretentious and sententious. It should seek to change your life. (Anti-genius is 1 per cent perspiration and 99 per cent aspiration.) It should be, above all, humourless.

'Gladiator, a pastiche of epic clichés, was OK because everyone involved knew what it was and enjoyed it,' says one high-placed Warner Brothers executive who wishes for obvious reasons to remain anonymous. ' Saving Private Ryan , a pastiche of war movie clichés, was meretricious because Steven Spielberg kept saying it was the movie to end all wars. There's Something About Mary escapes because it wasn't about bimbo empowerment.'

The executive offers her list of Avoidance Rules - a sort of moviegoers' equivalent of the warnings issued by flight attendants before takeoff. Locate the exit nearest you, she says, before screening any film directed by big-name male actors or Brian De Palma, any film that features Robin Williams in a beard, any film scored by John Williams, any film starring Juliette Binoche or Kevin Costner, any film that features Robin Williams clean-shaven, any film directed by a woman and proud of it.

Bad movies are seldom universally panned. On the contrary, they sucker critics and Academy voters alike. Best-picture winners Out of Africa, The English Patient and Dances With Wolves were as mawkish and messianic and overlong as the Oscar ceremony itself. No wonder the Academy loved them. All three of those films shared the trappings of 'prestige' - period costume, exotic settings, literary sources.

Jerry Stahl, whose harrowing heroin memoir of 1995, Permanent Midnight, was turned into a hackneyed 1998 film, says: 'If a movie seems to be telling you, between every line, how great it is - if you just know, as you suffer through it, that the writers or the actors or the directors really thought they were doing something great - that's generally the tip-off for me.

'Smug is the common thread,' adds Stahl. 'Movies and stars that scream, "Love me as much as I love myself." Think Yentl .'

Smugness, of course, is the sine qua non of Hollywood. 'When you make a movie, you can't possibly know if it's going to be good and you certainly couldn't hope it would be important,' says the actor and director Christopher Guest, who has made such delightfully unimportant pictures as Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show. 'Once, two weeks into working on a film I appeared in, somebody turned to the cinematographer and said, "You better rent a tuxedo, buddy." Meaning, he was going to the Oscars. It's indicative of a very corrupt kind of thinking.'

Surely Spielberg has already rented his tux for next year's Oscars. Acclaimed as a 'mesmerising' 'masterpiece' 'that makes us ponder the very nature of love', his summer film A.I. Artificial Intelligence raises the question: is it the worst movie ever made? A tale of a perfect child robot programmed to adore his human Mommy, this collaboration between Spielberg communing with the dead Stanley Kubrick has, with its waxy sentiment, polarised film critics.

Bipolarised some of them. 'An extraordinarily accomplished movie,' wrote the New Yorker 's reviewer, 'but a failure.' The filmmaker Lloyd Kaufman was less sanguine. 'Emotional pornography,' he called A.I. in a recent conversation. A 'soulless prefab blockbuster that wasn't so much written or directed as assembled by a committee intent on creating a product impervious to criticism of any type'.

This was never the case with Kaufman's unabashedly awful oeuvre, released by Troma Studios, which includes Surf Nazis Must Die, Rabid Grannies and Teenage Catgirls in Heat. Who, then, is better qualified to serve as our Judge Dreadful than Kaufman, a low-grade Lew Grade whose unspeakable horror films tend to be unspeakably horrible?

'Pointing out the flaws in A.I. ,' says the mogul behind Nymphoid Barbarians in Dinosaur Hell, 'is like saying you hate love, or children, or teddy bears.' For Kaufman, A.I. is an embarrassment of riches. Among its richest embarrassments are John Williams's soaring, boring scoring; a Robin Williams cartoon voiceover; at least four would-be endings which force filmgoers to get halfway out of their seats and sit back down again; and young Haley Joel Osment ever looking heavenward, presumably toward Spielberg, once again serving as a preachy, faux-mystical deity.

No 'worst film' list is definitive. One man's Patch Adams is another's Pather Panchali. John Cleese says of Broadway Danny Rose : 'I sat for 45 minutes waiting for the film to begin. It seemed to me an extremely boring movie. Yet it's Steve Martin's favourite Woody Allen film.' Guest calls it his favourite film, period.

But some films are so bad they're bad. And so - though months of hypnotherapy had allowed us to repress the memory - we must revisit Pay It Forward . A tale of a perfect child who tries to change the world by committing random acts of kindness, Forward is a 'Springtime for Hitler'-ish collision of bad acting, bad direction and bad badinage.

One of those films that certain critics, for lack of two better words, invariably call 'life-affirming', it aims to uplift society with all the subtlety of a professional wrestler hoisting his opponent into an airplane spin. In an ending that would be offensive if it weren't so risible, Osment - do we sense a pattern here? - is stabbed to death and the entire citizenry of Las Vegas holds a candlelight vigil outside this good Samaritan's home while Jane Siberry sings 'Calling All Angels'. The lump that is raised is not in our throats but on our noggins - our heads sledgehammered by this 123-minute effort to change our thinking, our behaviour, our very lives.

Some films are terrible because they are so terribly self important: think Merchant-Ivory; think the mirth-free House of Mirth; think Martin Scorsese's Age of Innocence, in which finger-snapping camerawork tries to mask, like Mennen, a malodorous beast; think Yentl. Bad movies that don't try to impress us with their art or profundity exempt themselves from ridicule here. Nobody buys a ticket to Little Nicky expecting to see The Seventh Seal.

John Waters thinks the worst films are romantic comedies - with 50 Hollywood writers attached - that play everywhere for two weeks and then disappear. 'One of the few times I've actually projectile vomited was after seeing Mel Gibson dance like Fred Astaire in What Women Want ,' says Kaufman. But these aren't the greatest offenders. 'You know, fender-benders, but never fatal accidents,' says Waters, the camp auteur of Cecil B. Demented . It's the directors who have summered at Camp Auteur that you really have to watch out for - not so much their extravagant and out-of-control ambition, as their inability to fulfil it.

'One that springs to mind is P.T. Anderson,' says Katrina Renner, the head of casting at Dimension Films. 'I loved Boogie Nights,' she says, 'but in Anderson's next feature, Magnolia, he threw together a bunch of solipsistic, weepy characters connected in only the most superficial way - though the film tries to give the impression that there's some sort of metaphysical significance to their connection.

'There's some nonsense about synchronicity at the beginning of the film that's supposed to justify the three-hour, self-indulgent mess that follows,' she continues. 'He apparently had no idea how to end things, so he took a page out of the Bible and dropped frogs on the cast of characters. Aha! These people have been enslaved just like the Israelites! How deep!'

Or maybe we just don't recognise the brilliance of these things. As director, screenwriter and former adman Lawrence Kasdan once said about Grand Canyon, his 1991 meditation on privileged, angst-riddled white folks in LA (in which jaded producer of splatter films, Steve Martin, observes: 'We live in chaos - it's the central issue in everyone's life'): 'It's so hard to do one scene, you know. And all the people out there, all the civilians and all the critics don't get it. In fact, anyone who doesn't make art, it's very hard. No matter how sympathetic they are, they just don't get it. They don't get what we do.'

© 2001 The New York Times

Franz Lidz and Steve Rushin are writers on Sports Illustrated magazine

Five movies we love to hate

1 Pay it Forward (2000) Hollywood's do-gooders charter was terribly misjudged, a film about being nice that made you want to do just the opposite.

2 Dances with Wolves (1990) Touchy-feely revisionist western made us weep - with laughter. Kevin Costner was unbelievable as the good soldier who 'goes native'.

3 Snatch (2000) Despite the relentless hype, Guy Ritchie's faux-cockney caper plumbed the depths of an already maligned genre.

4 Patch Adams (1998) Robin Williams's maverick MD thought laughter was the ultimate panacea. Shame there weren't any funny jokes in this sentimental nonsense.

5 Yentl (1983) Barbra Streisand's musical vanity project about a cross-dressing religious scholar. Yes, it's as bad as it sounds.

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