First, my own guilty pleasure: the remake of The Avengers. I happen to believe that it's bad in precisely the same way that the original series was bad. Yet the original series is great. Uma in a catsuit! Fiennes and Thurman just don't have the same chemistry as McNee and Riggs, though (or really any chemistry at all).
Now, on to Mars Attacks!, and why it is not actually a bad film at all. Taken on its own, it's campy and cartoony and not all that great. But you have to place it within the film-history context...
It was released the same year as Independence Day, the most over-the-top, take-itself-too-seriously, beat-your-chest-and-be-proud-to-be-American, steal-from-every-film-in-the-genre, overrated hack-job in recent memory. Mars Attacks! is the antidote, the comedic yang to Independence Day's yin.
Plus, there's a corrollary to this relationship if you go a little further back, to 1964. Fail Safe, the deadly serious yet morally ineffective nuclear exchange tale, had its same-year antidote in the utterly brilliant Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
For more corrollary, consider that both Strangelove and Mars Attacks! feature a well-known actor in multiple roles; in both cases one of those roles was the President.
