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Greatness can be aspired to. Its achievement can be the driving goal behind a film. But its realization comes down so often to the kinds of intangibles that frustrate efforts to control or create. And this applies to greatness whether the work is good or not. That’s right, today, we’re musing about greatness in the negative (but therefore curiously positive sense): the films that are so bad they’re great.

I don’t think anything more clearly illustrates the difficulty in reaching this special kind of greatne...s than the case of Uwe Boll. There is no doubt that his films are staggeringly bad. The man’s dogged determination to continue pumping out product and foisting it on a unwilling world is testament to just the kind of boneheaded commitment required of the artiste maudit. He even shows a willingness to experiment (ill-advisedly) with the form, and he inspires the worst in otherwise talented casts and writers. And let us pause for a moment at the recent spectacle of his literal boxing matches with his critics. You have to admire that. There’s even a consistency to his body of work, in that it consists of the demolition of one video game after another: House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, BloodRayne, the forthcoming Dungeon Siege and Postal.

William Peter Blatty might seem a slightly odd candidate for discussion in this space. After all, he wrote and produced The Exorcist, whose enormous mainstream success makes it rather suspect as a cult film. Ditto for another of Blatty’s screenplays: A Shot in the Dark, which is arguably the best of the Pink Panther movies. But as a director, ah, there we start getting closer to cult status. He has made two films. The Exorcist III (1990) is his best-known effort, and is debatably a cult movie. Ve...y little debate is necessary regarding his other work: The Ninth Configuration (1980).

A couple of words about The Exorcist III to begin with. Of all the sequels and prequels to the landmark original, this is the only one that really stands up to scrutiny. It is, granted, a flawed work. It’s low-key, character-driven mood is broken by the sudden over-the-top pyrotechnics of the climactic exorcism, but we can’t entirely blame Blatty for that. The story, in a nutshell, goes something like this: Blatty gets the green light to film his novel Legion. He comes up with the perfect ending for his story. Studio suits tell him that the title has to be changed to The Exorcist III or no one will know it’s a sequel. Fine, he changes the title. Then he’s told there’s another problem: there’s no exorcism in the film, and how can it be called The Exorcist III if there’s no exorcism in it? You can figure out the rest.

The serial is an extinct form of movie-going experience. Right up to the fifties, your movie ticket got you not only the main feature, a B-feature, cartoons, a newsreel and other shorts, but an episode of a serial. Usually running 12 or 15 chapters, the serial would unspool in 15-20-minute units, each ending in a cliffhanger (often quite literally so, with the hero or heroine plunging off a cliff in a runaway car, for instance). George Lucas pays tribute to the serials in his Star Wars films, which begin with ...he traditional recapitulating crawl and chapter titles.

Many, many serials are available on DVD, and since most of these titles are in the public domain, you’ll find multiple editions of the same title, with print and transfer quality varying wildly. The rule of thumb here, is, as with everything else, that you get what you pay for, so don’t expect a miraculous viewing experience if you only dropped a couple of dollars on your disc. Major-label re-issues are your best bet. The Adventures of Captain Marvel, for instance, released by Republic Pictures, is a pretty solid package.