Being a humorless young man, I’m driven crazy by people who actively seek out bad movies for fun; it seems like that’s a way of avoiding engaging with good art, where the correct response isn’t always obvious. So I was nervous about Best Worst Movie, whose title tells it all. Voted worst film of all time by the normally-none-too-discriminating IMDB users, Troll 2 (Scott Tobias has written about its appeal and cult for his New Cult Canon project) has a bizarre story about people being turned into plants that makes no sense literally or metaphorically, godawful acting and general freefloating incompetence. People love it very much.
I get the appeal — it’s sui generis weirdness that never lets up — but sometimes it bothers me that people indulge in the easy pleasure of celebrating something plainly risible. And yet filmmaker Michael Stephenson makes a case not just for the movie’s appeal, but also the downside of cult filmdom. Best Worst Movie is itself an obvious crowdpleaser that’ll probably find a decent-sized audience, but — fun though it is, and even though the stakes are pretty low, and no dramatic events unfold — it’s actually kind of a downbeat film overall. Stephenson isn’t just a documentarian; he was Troll 2’s child actor. By making this movie, he delves into the appeal of something he’s part of, yet was in no way responsible for the enduring afterlife of.
Are you a supporter of gay marriage?
“I know nothing about it. I don’t follow that.” Why doesn’t it interest you?
“The same reason heterosexual marriage doesn’t seem to interest me.”
Amen, sister. One of the perks of being queer is that you’re not expected to engage in unnatural acts like high school proms and monogamy. So in honor of the hedonistic right to our own guilt-free, queer Mardi Gras, here are some subversive suggestions that will get you in the mood and take you back to that more innocent, less commercial “Over The Rainbow” time. …Read more
In honor of the news that schlockmeister Roger Corman will be the subject of a new documentary feature, take a look at the above fan-made mashup of the 5 Worst Lines in Corman’s The Last Woman on Earth. For all of the cinematic garbage he unleashed on the world, Corman gave a huge number of future stars and eventually important filmmakers their first big breaks, including Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson and Martin Scorsese. Last Woman’s highly mockable was actually scripted by Robert Towne, who went on to write Chinatown, The Parallax View, Shampoo … and also Days of Thunder, Orca and Tequila Sunrise. Those salesladies at Saks will do it to you every time!
Rich at FourFour has made an amazing discovery. A little over a year ago, a Variety story announced that pop star Willa Ford had been cast in a biopic about Anna Nicole Smith. According to IMDb, Anna Nicole was completed in 2007, but as Rich points out, it apparently never even received so much as a DVD release. But Rich found the film on a torrent site, in a manner which, he says, “leads me to believe that no official release by way of DVD is even in the pipeline. I’m guessing that this thing really was just dumped online for free because no one would take it.” So he did what any upstanding member of the community would do: he edited the film down into seven minutes of pure, golden “campy crapiness.”
See the finished product above. I think it goes without saying that my favorite part is when Anna Nicole returns from the grave to ponder media coverage of her demise. “Hell,” breaths Ford, who, incidentally, is way too well-proportioned for the role. “Maybe they’ll even make a movie about me.” Wink!
Roland Emmerich (Independence Day) is probably the most bankable schlock-meister working. 10,000 B.C. is a snickerfest with some amazing woolly mammoths. On the evolutionary chain of movies, it’s a driect descendant of the campy Raquel Welch star vehicle, One Million Years B.C. (1967). Adam Forrest and I thought it would be fun to watch them both, but didn’t expect One Million to blow us away when it turned more Shakespeare than schlock.
Karina phones in to explain what makes a good musical and why Love Songs–opening tonight–and so many others from the last 30 years don’t make the cut.
News hit the web late Friday that Maila Nurmi, the actress, model and TV host best known as Vampira, died last week at the age of 86. As always, David Hudson at GreenCine has the most comprehensive round-up of obits; I thought I’d do my part by rounding up a few video clips that demonstrate the original Goth queen’s impact on pop culture. Above, you’ll find a short clip of Vampira’s memorable appearance in Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space. Click through the jump for Vampira minutia courtesy of Tim Burton, Glenn Danzig and more.
Item 1: Judy Garland, performing “Get Happy” in a scene taken from the end of the 1950 musical, Summer Stock.
Item 2: Rufus Wainwright, performing “Get Happy” in an identical outfit, with identical dance moves, from Glastonbury 2007, apropos of this Slant review of the concert album that resulted from Wainwright’s live remake of Garland’s legendary concert at Carnegie Hall.
Choice pullquote: “Sure, fans might cackle about the delicious irony of famed (and to be fair, recovered) Fire Island disaster and crack-pipe-alley diarist Rufus doing his best impression of music’s most fabulous pill-popper. But the reverence and respect he displays here is no joke, even if said reverence sometimes verges on camp, such as in the banter that follows ‘Almost Like Being in Love,’ where he admits, ‘I’m going to speak now, because on the album Judy speaks here. When I was a kid, I wanted to be Dorothy.’ While Wainwright provocatively toes the line between celebration and mockery, he never crosses it.”
Discuss.
Previously in Side by Side Simulations: Darby Crash
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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