With the throne vacant, bad movie aficionados needed a new champion in the "Worst Movie Ever Made" sweepstakes. They found it in Manos, The Hands of Fate (eight percent). The lone directorial effort of fertilizer salesman (how a propos!) Hal Warren, Manos would have been a quickly forgotten oddity had it not been for the critical reassessment provided by the bad movie connoisseurs from Mystery Science Theater 3000. After betting a screenwriter he could make a successful horror film, Warren scraped together some money, hired actors and models in the El Paso area, and began work on his anti-masterpiece: the story of a family that takes a wrong turn and ends up in the clutches of a demonic cult.

Manos is a stunningly bad film, filled with endless driving sequences, insipid music, awkward pauses before and after cuts, disjointed dubbing, and ludicrously wooden acting. Some scenes (like an extended, graceless catfighting sequence) seem included only to increase the film's length, while the dialogue ("There is no way out of here. It'll be dark soon. There is no way out of here," ominously declares the iconic Torgo, a satyr who helps run the house on the verge of hell) is incredibly stiff and not at all spine-chilling. What makes watching Manos a sublime experience is the same thing that made MST3K a hit: the fact that certain bad movies are tailor-made for vulgar, smart-alecky audiences, who can collectively delight at the sheer awfulness onscreen. (Naturally, Quentin Tarantino owns a copy of one of the few surviving original prints of Manos.) When it first screened in El Paso in 1966, Manos drew howls of disapproval and disbelief; now, there's really no other way to view it. As Eric D. Snider put it, "Manos is virtually unwatchable without the aid of Joel and the 'bots and their merciless mocking."

Manos, the Hands of Fate: I be Torgo.

Since we've covered movies so bad that they aren't bad at all, and movies that are bad but become good with incredulous guffaws, it's time to explore the rarified realm of a third kind of bad movie: one so off-kilter so as to be entertaining, but still pretty far from good. I'm speaking, of course, of Uwe Boll's Alone in the Dark (one percent). Mr. Boll (whose latest, In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, hits theaters this week) has become something of a critical punching bag in recent years (going so far as to turn the tables and pummel one such unlucky critic). But I'll be darned if I don't find his movies blissfully entertaining; unlike many of the big-budget mediocrities that litter the multiplex each summer, Boll is fairly upfront about his intentions. He's not making filet mignon, he's making cheeseburgers.

Unlike the schlockmeisters of old, it cannot be said that Boll is completely devoid of cinematic craft; if you caught patches of Alone in the Dark on late-night cable, you could be fooled into thinking it's better than it is. And the actors in Alone (Christian Slater, Tara Reid, Stephen Dorff), despite their tabloid misadventures, have all been involved in worthy entertainments. What makes Boll's films so perversely entertaining is their distillation of time-tested commercial elements in jarringly askew ways. For example, Alone features ludicrously world-weary dialogue ("I learned the truth a long time ago. Just because you can't see something, doesn't mean it can't kill you," Slater portentously intones), pointless stylistic tricks (do we really need a zoom into the barrel of Slater's gun before he pulls the trigger?), incomprehensible action (there are two shootouts that are so darkly lit and discordantly edited it's literally impossible to know what's going on), hilarious miscasting (Reid as an archaeologist?!), and a pretentious scrolling prologue that makes Star Wars' look like a monument to brevity. Alone also shamelessly cribs elements from such classics as Alien and the Indiana Jones movies, and features one of the most out-of-nowhere romantic interludes in recent cinema. But it is never, ever boring; as MaryAnn Johnson of Flick Philospher raved, Alone is "an instant classic of cheeseball cinema, an orgy of overblown dialogue and hammy overacting, 90-some-odd minutes of cheap-looking, jaw-dropping incoherence."

Alone in the Dark: Trailer.

Entertaining badness comes in many other shapes and sizes. From misbegotten vanity projects like the Vanilla Ice vehicle Cool as Ice (eight percent) to the un-erotic, un-thrilling erotic thriller Fascination (four percent); from the knuckleheaded geopolitics of Navy SEALS (21 percent) to the goblin-infested cheesiness of Troll 2 (zero percent), badness can be goodness. Sometimes.