Bad (1977)

Bad (1977) is the kind of fearless midnight-movie oddity that feels like it was smuggled out of a grimy New York backroom, then played with a straight face just to see if you’ll laugh before you flinch. Jed Johnson stages the whole thing in a cool, deadpan hush—an everyday beauty-salon routine rubbing shoulders with casual criminality—so the outrageous moments land with the unsettling punch of overheard gossip that turns out to be true. Carroll Baker anchors the film with a poised, pragmatic calm that makes the surrounding sleaze and absurdity feel oddly plausible, while the movie’s sharp observational detail turns it into a time-capsule of a city and a sensibility that mainstream cinema rarely admits existed. It’s not for everyone—its taste is deliberately bad and its humor is jet-black—but if you’re curious about horror-comedy that’s more acidic than cute, Bad is a compellingly revolting little treasure.

Bad is clearly aiming for a deadpan, jet-black satire of crime-for-hire culture, wrapped in a grimy 70s underbelly vibe where the jokes are meant to land because everything is so casually awful. The problem is it often plays less like sharp comedy and more like a parade of mean-spirited, morbid incidents that can feel like shock for shock’s sake, with humor so dry it may register as “none at all.” If you’re sensitive to bleak subject matter or you want your horror-comedy to have either real laughs or a clear moral bite, this might just leave you feeling dirty and bored. The redeeming angle is the committed performances and the unapologetically sleazy atmosphere, which will work for viewers who like their cult films cold, cynical, and deliberately unpleasant.