An anonymous purveyor of electronic chain letters, whom I'm guessing is Ann Bartow, has tagged me with the 'Truly bad movie meme'.
The rules of the game are to “name the worst film I've ever paid money to see”. To show I'm a good sport, I'll play along. Part way. But I don't think I'll 'tag' anyone as that might seem intrusive. Yes, I will break the chain.
As it happens, I am not a movie guy. I resist going, a source of some marital disharmony until the invention of the PC DVD player. So my universe of contenders is small, as I only go out to films if I think the probability of liking them is absurdly high. And I hardly ever watch them on DVD either…
But even in this small universe, it's absolutely no contest. A whole bunch of us in college went to a law school film society showing of a film of considerable legal importance but, it turned out, no redeeming social value whatsoever. Had I not been wedged solidly in the middle of a very long row in a large law school lecture hall I would have walked out after about 15 minutes, but as it was I stayed for the entire ugly and — worse! — boring, boring thing and kept thinking that surely at some point they'd introduce a semblance of plot. Yes, I'm talking about Deep Throat. Horrible. And very hard to see the 'redeeming social value' in it either, which may be one reason why I've never been able to work up enthusiasm for teaching the pornography line of First Amendment cases, even though I still believe that censorship is ultimately more dangerous than cultural drek.
Does this mean Ann will now disown me?
Runner up: the DePalma remake/ripoff of Phantom of the Opera, Phantom of the Paradise. Can't think what possessed me to go to that. Actually, it was the reviews. What did they know.
If you want me to disown you, you’ll have to work a lot harder than this. Sorry! :>)
I saw Deep Throat after I knew Linda Boreman had been forced to perform in it at the point of a gun. I heard her tell an audience that if you watch Deepthroat carefully, you can see huge bruises on her body from the regular beatings she was getting to coerce her into do things she didn’t want to. And indeed you can. So I’m totally with you on Deep Throat being a terrible movie, to put it mildly. You can read more here by following the internal links:
http://www.sivacracy.net/2005/02/deep_throat.html
Ugh, the relevant link has changed and is now: http://www.amptoons.com/blog/index.php?s=deepthroat
I didn’t want to link to it directly (and ask that you not make the link live) because that blog functions as either an SEO or SER for a really horrible, racist porn producer.
Funny. I saw “Phantom of the Paradise” in the theaters and loved it! Then again, I was only 8 years old. When Netflix came out, it was the first film I rented. Sadly, it did not hold up to what I remembered. But I still appreciated Paul Williams and his catchy tunes–some of which, I can’t get out of my head.
The same goes for the Coca Cola scene in “Deep Throat”–another image I wish I had never had seen.
Why do some bad movies leave such a lasting impression?
What about “Endless love” with Brooke Shields? Or “Starship Troopers”?
You could do a lot worse than Starship Troopers, which I took to be intentionally ridiculous with its overt fascism to parody the book’s fascist premise. I found it to be kind of funny actually.
I managed to avoid “Deep Throat.” For any of a number of reasons.
But I was dating a girl (in high school, so you can all work out how old I am) who deeply, sincerely wanted to see “Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte.” Afterwards, she promised never again to insist on picking the movie. It was even worse than “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” By miles and miles and miles and miles and miles.
Sadly there’s so much of ridiculous movies that I’ve seen lately, making the list would take too long. But just to give some example “Resident Evil 3” was utterly horrible.
“because that blog functions as either an SEO or SER for a really horrible, racist porn producer.” — I am curious as to why you state this. This isn’t obvious by examining page source nor has the content of this blog ever appeared to be friendly to racist pornography.
Bemused – No, it isn’t obvious by examining page source. That’s part of the problem. Try the following:
http://reviews.amptoons.com/section/Website
The link to that page is disgusised, at the very bottom of the Alas A Blog page.
For background from the relevant blogger himself go here:
http://www.amptoons.com/blog/archives/2007/10/22/update-on-the-amptoonscom-domain-sale/
See also:
http://laurelin.wordpress.com/2006/10/10/alas-a-sell-out/