Me: What's this? Jennifer Lopez in "Gigli" AND Madonna in "Swept Away"? Two movies that consistently rank among the worst movies ever made? Together on just this one shelf of videos? Should I buy them both at the severe discount being offered?Interestingly enough, I didn't see "Heaven's Gate" on the shelves anywhere. Bargain hunters must have picked the store clean of this work of art!
Devil on Left Shoulder: Buy them! They are conversation pieces!
Angel on Right Shoulder: NO! DON'T BUY THEM! These movies have no redeeming value. They aren't campy, or sad: they're just bad. They don't even have the conversational and historical value of "Plan Nine From Outer Space". People should pay YOU to watch them!
Devil on Left Shoulder: Buy them! These movies are landmarks of popular culture!
Angel on Right Shoulder: NO! DON'T BUY THEM! Paris Hilton is a better actress than either of these two dimwits! Watching these movies will plunge you into a time-sucking black hole of monstrous proportions! Highly-successful people wouldn't waste a nanosecond on either movie! And you do want to be highly-successful, don't you?
Me: Madonna was a pretty good actress in 'Evita'....
Angel on Right Shoulder: But remember, Madonna doesn't have to act to play a strident, vengeful megalomaniac. "Swept Away" shows Madonna's true range!
Devil on Left Shoulder: But how will you know unless you watch the movie?
Angel on Right Shoulder: ......
Me: I'll buy them both!
Which leads me to reprint a large portion Joe Queenan's wonderful discussion regarding bad movies (I've posted it before, but I return to it again and again, for the nice warm feeling I get when I read it):
Though it is a natural impulse to believe that the excruciating film one is watching today is on a par with the excruciating films of yesterday, this is a slight to those who have worked long and hard to make movies so moronic that the public will still be talking about them decades later. Anyone can make a bad movie; Kate Hudson and Adam Sandler make them by the fistful. Anyone can make a sickening movie; we are already up to Saw IV. Anyone can make an unwatchable movie; Jack Black and Martin Lawrence do it every week. And anyone can make a comedy that is not funny; Jack Black and Martin Lawrence do it every week. But to make a movie that destroys a studio, wrecks careers, bankrupts investors, and turns everyone connected with it into a laughing stock requires a level of moxie, self-involvement, lack of taste, obliviousness to reality and general contempt for mankind that the average director, producer and movie star can only dream of attaining.
A generically appalling film like The Hottie and the Nottie is a scab that looks revolting while it is freshly coagulated; but once it festers, hardens and falls off the skin, it leaves no scar. By contrast, a truly bad movie, a bad movie for the ages, a bad movie made on an epic, lavish scale, is the cultural equivalent of leprosy: you can't stand looking at it, but at the same time you can't take your eyes off it. You are horrified by it, repelled by it, yet you are simultaneously mesmerised by its enticing hideousness. A monstrously bad movie is like the Medusa: those who gaze on its hideous countenance are doomed, but who can resist taking a gander?
The worst film I have ever seen is a low-budget 1969 production called Futz. It was about a man who fell in love with a pig, and even by the dismal standards of the era, it was dismal. There is also a special place in my heart for La Grande Bouffe, the 1973 film about four men who eat themselves to death, and for Anjelica Huston's 1969 debut in her father's A Walk With Love and Death, which also starred Assaf Dayan, the son of the Israeli general with the flashy eyepatch. Pasolini's 120 Days of Sodom is as vile as any film I have ever seen, The Way We Were as treacly and flatulent as any movie I know of, and the lighthearted Holocaust-era comedy Life Is Beautiful as morally repugnant - precisely because of its apparent innocence - as any film I can name. But these are personal tastes; I would never be so bold as to argue that a 39-year-old film about an arrant porcophile is the worst movie ever made, not only because so few people have seen it but because there may be several other movies about men who rapturously lie down with comely sows that are actually worse than Futz. Though I kind of doubt it.
This brings me to my major point. To qualify as one of the worst films of all time, several strict requirements must be met. For starters, a truly awful movie must have started out with some expectation of not being awful. That is why making a horrific, cheapo motion picture that stars Hilton or Jessica Simpson is not really much of an accomplishment. Did anyone seriously expect a film called The Hottie and The Nottie not to suck? Two, an authentically bad movie has to be famous; it can't simply be an obscure student film about a boy who eats live rodents to impress dead girls. Three, the film cannot be a deliberate attempt to make the worst movie ever, as this is cheating. Four, the film must feature real movie stars, not jocks, bozos, has-beens or fleetingly famous media fabrications like Hilton. Five, the film must generate a negative buzz long before it reaches cinemas; like the Black Plague or the Mongol invasions, it must be an impending disaster of which there has been abundant advance warning; it cannot simply appear out of nowhere. And it must, upon release, answer the question: could it possibly be as bad as everyone says it is? This is what separates Waterworld, a financial disaster but not an uncompromisingly dreadful film, and Ishtar, which has one or two amusing moments, from The Postman, Gigli and Heaven's Gate, all of which are bona fide nightmares.
Six, to qualify as one of the worst movies ever made, a motion picture must induce a sense of dread in those who have seen it, a fear that they may one day be forced to watch the film again - and again - and again. To pass muster as one of the all-time celluloid disasters, a film must be so bad that when a person is asked, "Which will it be? Waterboarding, invasive cattle prods or Jersey Girl?", the answer needs no further reflection. This phenomenon resembles Stockholm Syndrome, where a victim ends up befriending his tormentors, so long as they promise not to make him watch any more Kevin Smith movies. The condition is sometimes referred to as Blunted Affleck.
Several years ago, I read that a movie about a blind dental technician and a paraplegic athlete who enter a white-water rafting competition was playing at a cinema near me. I immediately bought a ticket for Good Luck, enthralled at the idea of seeing what figured to be one of the worst movies ever made. To be honest, that is the reason I became a critic in the first place; criticism seemed to be a way to channel my unwholesome fascination with train wrecks and fires into a socially acceptable framework. The truth is, every time I go to the pictures, I get goose bumps all over, anticipating that this, after all these years, could be the worst movie ever made.
Sadly, it never is. Yes, Good Luck was bad. It was an inane premise, poorly executed, and the results were not pretty. But it was not so bad that I spent the rest of my life thinking about it. I didn't even spend the rest of the afternoon thinking about it. What's more, because there was no one else in the cinema at the time, and because I have never met anyone else who has seen the film, its imbecilic charms were not something I could share with others.
There is one other requirement for a movie to be considered one of the worst ever: it must keep getting worse. By this, I mean that it not only must keep getting worse while you are watching it, but it must, upon subsequent viewings, seem even worse than the last time you saw it. That is what distinguishes Ishthar from Gigli and Showgirls from Swept Away. Widely viewed as one of the worst movies ever when it was released in 1987, Ishtar actually has several comic moments. Gigli doesn't. Similarly, Showgirls has a certain campy allure that grows a bit each time I see it. Madonna's Swept Away doesn't; it seems more amateurish on each viewing, like a morass that starts out as a quagmire, then morphs into a cesspool and finally turns into a slime pit on the road to its ultimate destination in the bowels of Hell.
All that said, none of these very, very, very bad movies automatically qualify as the worst film ever made. While it may disappoint those who welcome my occasionally unconventional opinions, I am firmly in the camp that believes that Heaven's Gate is the worst movie ever made. For my money, none of these other films can hold a candle to Michael Cimino's 1980 apocalyptic disaster. This is a movie that destroyed the director's career. This is a movie that lost so much money it literally drove a major American studio out of business. This is a movie about Harvard-educated gunslingers who face off against eastern European sodbusters in an epic struggle for the soul of America. This is a movie that stars Isabelle Huppert as a shotgun-toting cowgirl. This is a movie in which Jeff Bridges pukes while mounted on roller skates. This is a movie that has five minutes of uninterrupted fiddle-playing by a fiddler who is also mounted on roller skates. This is a movie that defies belief.
A friend of mine, now deceased, was working for the public relations company handling Heaven's Gate when it was released. He told me that when the 220-minute extravaganza debuted at the Toronto film festival, the reaction was so thermonuclear that the stars and the film-maker had to immediately be flown back to Hollywood, perhaps out of fear for their lives. No one at the studio wanted to go out and greet them upon their return; no one wanted to be seen in that particular hearse. My friend eventually agreed to man the limo that would meet the children of the damned on the airport tarmac and whisk them to safety, but only provided he was given free use of the vehicle for the next three days. After he dropped off the halt and the lame at suitable safe houses and hiding places, he went to Mexico for the weekend. Nothing like this ever happened when Showgirls or Gigli or Ishtar or Xanadu or Glitter or Cleopatra were released. Nothing like this happened when The Hottie and the Nottie dropped dead the day it was released. Heaven's Gate was so bad that people literally had to be bribed to go meet the survivors. Proving that, in living memory, giants of bad taste once ruled the earth. Giants. By comparison with the titans who brought you Heaven's Gate, Paris Hilton is a rank amateur.
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