The Disc Jockey

By Noel Murray

No such virtue rests with Passport Video's The Worst Movies Ever Made, a straight-to-DVD compilation of clips from infamous trash like Santa Claus Conquers The Martians and Plan 9 from Outer Space. An anonymous narrator counts down from the 50th worst to the worst of the worst, dispensing pat plot summaries and adding smugly delivered, critically toothless comments about the wooden acting, cheap-looking effects and poor box office performances.

No such virtue rests with Passport Video's The Worst Movies Ever Made, a straight-to-DVD compilation of clips from infamous trash like Santa Claus Conquers The Martians and Plan 9 from Outer Space. An anonymous narrator counts down from the 50th worst to the worst of the worst, dispensing pat plot summaries and adding smugly delivered, critically toothless comments about the wooden acting, cheap-looking effects and poor box office performances.

The program is all about received wisdom; there's no passionate explanation of why the aesthetic crimes of, say, The Fat Spy or Smokey & The Bandit Part 3 might be morally offensive, nor any acknowledgement that the ramshackle can sometimes be more interesting than the slick. Frankly, it's hard to take complaints about bad special effects seriously when The Worst Movies segues between each film with the same crummy line-art animation of an audience throwing food.

Still, the disc has some unintentional value as a catalog of interesting-looking B-movies like J.D.'s Revenge (a blaxploitation also-ran about a '70s soul man possessed by the spirit of a '30s gangster) and Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (starring shameless Martin & Lewis knockoffs Mitchell & Petrillo). And it's a good resource for those seeking clips of famously buried bombs like Howard the Duck, Ishtar and Leonard Part 6, not to mention the sued-out-of-existence Jaws ripoff Great White.

The problem is that the producers of The Worst Movies let their simple equation of shabby = bad lead them to dis worthy drive-in fodder like Jack Hill's Spider Baby and underground classics like Brian De Palma's Greetings; and since they haven't the wit to really tear into them, the judgments look lazy. "Even though it starred Robert De Niro and was directed by Brian De Palma, Greetings is one of the worst movies ever made," squawks the narrator. Now there's a convincing argument.

The "bad movie" as a concept tends to be confusing. The really bad movies are blandly competent studio products that audiences spend two hours with and never think about again. (Anyone planning on buying the DVD of Twisted? Well, maybe for the seal scene, but otherwise ... yawn.) The movies that get held up as "bad" by institutions like The Razzies and The Golden Turkeys eventually find a cult, if only of people looking for camp kicks.

One guy who's made a good living off of celebrating junk is Joe Bob Briggs (formerly respected journalist and Vandy man John Bloom), whose writing on exploitation cinema tends to be contradictory: at once loving and scoffing. Elite Entertainment has put together a bargain package of the first two films in the "Joe Bob Briggs Presents" series, the 1966 oddity Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter (a multicultural horror western) and the neo-trash exercise The Double-D Avenger (starring Russ Meyer discovery Kitten Natividad as a breast cancer survivor turned superhero).

The selling points are the commentaries by Briggs, who spills a breathless heap of scorn on the two features, pointing out their crumminess in a way that resembles The Worst Movies Ever Made on the surface. But listen close: Briggs has done his homework. The sheer amount of factual information that he sneaks in between his mockery is impressive, especially since the drive-in genre rarely gets this kind of historical attention. It's enough to make Z-movie fans wish that Briggs would drop the shtick and let his honest appreciation for this stuff stand alone.

The selling points are the commentaries by Briggs, who spills a breathless heap of scorn on the two features, pointing out their crumminess in a way that resembles The Worst Movies Ever Made on the surface. But listen close: Briggs has done his homework. The sheer amount of factual information that he sneaks in between his mockery is impressive, especially since the drive-in genre rarely gets this kind of historical attention. It's enough to make Z-movie fans wish that Briggs would drop the shtick and let his honest appreciation for this stuff stand alone.