DVD Retro Retch: What's the Worst Crap Sandwich You've Eaten on DVD?

Mar 28, 2008

Last week in The Guardian, Joe Queenan used the Paris Hilton vehicle The Hottie and the Nottie as a starting point for his thoughts on "the worst motion picture ever made." The thing is, there are so many bad movies to choose from, Queenan had to establish his own set of guidelines to filter out the "generically appalling" from the "movie that destroys a studio, wrecks careers, bankrupts investors, and turns everyone connected with it into a laughing stock." After all, anyone can make a bad movie, Queenan observes. "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."

After considering a number of "very, very, very bad movies," Queenan uses his criteria -- and I think they're on the money -- to turn up a final "apocalyptic disaster" that deserves all condemnation for being the worst movie ever made. Certainly very, very, very bad movies have been recognized and debated for years. Since 1980 the Golden Raspberry Awards, the "Razzies," have (dis)honored "all things that suck on the big screen." That year also saw the publication of The Golden Turkey Awards by film critic Michael Medved and his brother Harry. Unapologetically subjective and sometimes callous, but irresistible in its film-wonk snark, it's a book that started many of us on the rubbled path toward obscure, outrageous, or just plain bizarre cinema. (Since then Michael Medved now turns up on my unapologetically subjective and sometimes callous list of the Most Ignorable Critics, but that's for another column.)

Despite the Brothers Medved crowning the film with its Golden Turkey Award, Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space is no more the Worst Movie Ever Made than "Chocolate Rain" is the worst song about the weather. ("MacArthur Park," anyone?) Yes, every movie Ed Wood ever directed makes dogs howl, sunflowers wilt, and babies cry. But, as Tim Burton understood, Wood's core oeuvre, the low-rent sci-fi/horror schlockfests he's remembered for, possess a deliriously determined spirit and gimpy charm. There's nothing cruel or mean-spirited about them. They're entertaining, even lovable at times, like a cross-eyed puppy that tries to run to your lap but instead trips over its own freakily floppy ears at each step.

So who then decides what's The Worst Movie Ever Made? For our purposes here in Film.com's new "Retro Retch" feature, the answer is that we do. Meaning you do, I do, we all do, using criteria and filters we set for ourselves.

But we're starting off with the wrong question. As Queenan demonstrates, the "worst" film is not necessarily the most retch-inducing movie-going experience. Witless Protection was as enjoyable as sucking lard-dipped banana slugs, but it didn't wreck a studio. Besides, Larry the Cable Guy headlining a crappy film? I'm sure you're shocked, in the Claude Rains sense of the word, at that revelation. We understand that the terms "the best" and "my favorite" are not -- no matter what the Internet tells you -- automatically synonymous. Likewise we understand that the movies that scar our memories, that leave us huddled in the corner rocking with our arms around our knees, are not automatically the "worst" cinema has to offer. YMMV = Your Misery May Vary.

So the real question is, What crap sandwich on DVD has made you whimper like a dog in a downpour? What movie made you shrivel a little inside, or eat a gallon of Rocky Road just to cover that stomach-acid taste left in your mouth? We'd like to know, and the "DVD Retro Retch" comments box below is your forum for telling us about the films that hurt you in your own home.

I've been enjoying or loathing bad movies on DVD for years. On my Movie Room shelves Plan 9 stands tall alongside Rear Window and La Dolce Vita; however, over the years, and for various unsympathetic editors, I've kept my trembling finger off the chapter-skip button during such mind-asphyxiating movies as Good Luck Chuck ("all the engaging magnetism of an unflushed toilet," I wrote at the time), Battlefield Earth ("Watching Battlefield Earth is to a movie-watching experience what having a yeast infection is to having sex"), Star Trek V: The Final Frontier ("delivers all the pleasure of a plucked pubic hair" -- apparently I tend to take "below the belt" too literally), and David Mamet's joyless Oleanna ("a disappointment compared to his House of Games or Heist, which at least possessed the fall-back position of being intermittently entertaining").

I love a good scary movie. The 1963 The Haunting, starring Julie Harris, is a personal fave. Yet while the 1999 redo of The Haunting is a crap sandwich that's bad in all the familiar, brain-dead, yawnsome ways, it's just a waste of time and otherwise as harmless as a goldfish floating on the surface of the tank. John Carpenter's The Thing, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, The Ring -- all right there on my shelf as quality frights worth rewatching every October. Meanwhile, for me the recent wave of soulless pus-bucket slasher and tortureporn "horror" films, typically grade B to Z in quality, are open-faced crap sandwiches with extra crap sauce on the side. But because they're shoveled onto our plates by moviedom's equivalent of Arby's and Domino's (the Saw franchise being the KFC "Famous Bowls" of the subgenre), if you hold them to any standard beyond each other, you make the mistake of assuming that they aspire to be more than what they are. Crap sandwiches that succeed in being the crap sandwiches they were intended to be, okay, they possess their own warped virtues and find their own audiences -- more power to 'em -- who enjoy them. (Bless you, C. Robert Cargill.) So, sure, they're not my thing, but they still don't fit on my menu of "Retro Retch" crap sandwiches.

This week's great new DVD of Bonnie and Clyde brought all this to mind. While loving the way Warren Beatty says "We rob banks" with a gleeful Tom-Cruise-crazy smile, this Hollywood-altering classic reminded me that the A-1 worst, the dreariest, most time-stretching movie I've had to sit through on DVD was a Warren Beatty film. It was The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, a film so soul-wearying that it is our first DVD "Retro Retch" dis-honoree.

For such an excruciating bit of pulp, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone does bring quite a pedigree. It's the 1961 adaptation of Tennessee Williams' 1950 novella. Vivien Leigh plays the rich, lonely widow losing herself to dissolute "drifting" in Rome. Warren Beatty is her callow lover, a handsome Italian gigolo. Leigh was 48, her career ending; Beatty was 23 and just starting. For her role as the cynical pimp renting Italian studs to rich widows, Lotte Lenya earned an Academy Award nomination. But there's little that's bellissimo here. The prose is so purple and the tone so overripe that the film often feels like a kitschy parody of Williams' florid excesses, or a worst-parts mash-up of Williams and D.H. Lawrence. Starting with thuddingly expository voice-over narration -- Leigh's fading Broadway diva is "drifting, if not drowning, in a universe of turbulently rushing fluids and vapors" -- what wants to be mature, sensual romance-novel boilerplate becomes instead a plodding exercise in intriguingly cast camp.

When this version of The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone -- not the 2003 remake with Helen Mirren, Olivier Martinez, Anne Bancroft -- gets talked about at all, the conversation typically moves into whether we're seeing Leigh's own personal crises shaping and shading her tragically unhappy Karen Stone. Leigh's recently crumbled marriage to Laurence Olivier, and her history of debilitating depression coupled with a fear of failure, all appear to be there onscreen. Like Leigh, Karen is fiftyish yet still striking, a formerly revered actress obsessed by negative reviews in a young woman's profession, and is reacting to a marriage that has just come to a miserable stop. Karen seeks escape in Rome after her ailing husband dies en route. While seeking "light in the dark corners" of her life, she falls vulnerable to Paolo (Beatty), who belongs to a stable managed by a vulturous contessa in a crimson boudoir (Lenya, stealing her scenes by ladling up the Williams-speak like epigrammatic goulash). At first wary, and despite warnings from an old friend (Coral Browne), Karen ultimately embraces determined Paolo's appeal, and the pair become lovers. From there it's all hell and hand baskets, jealousy and neuroses, especially after a young American actress/twinkie (Jill St. John) also catches Paolo's opportunistic eye.

It's a bleary script, trite and unfilling and interminable, clotted with dialogue that might read well in the tattered, yellowed paperback but just plops leaden onscreen. It's not helped by wallowing in that charming puritanical leitmotif, sex = death. Leigh's rote performance wavers between on-the-money naturalness and a mannered archness that frequently puts quotation marks around her acting. Devoted Leigh fans tend to praise her "raw" or "brave" work here. While she is Vivien Leigh, which counts for something, that's just sentimentalizing her autopilot presence because of what she was experiencing in real life.

More interesting is Warren Beatty. Not because he's better than Leigh, or even noticeably good. (His uncertain Italian accent may be the movie's only memorable element.) It's that today we can't help but watch Paolo through the lens of where Beatty would go soon afterward with Splendor in the Grass, Bonnie and Clyde, and his own "gigolo" image. The scenes that Leigh and Beatty share are at least interesting in that regard. During her scenes with them, Jill St. John is so insubstantial she hardly registers in the frame. In this DVD's featurette about the production, we learn that Leigh never spoke to St. John at all during filming, and that Beatty was so hungry for an image-defying role that he borrowed money to visit Williams in Puerto Rico, bought a bottle of "man tan" and an Italian phrasebook, and ingratiated himself directly to the venerable author for the part, which had been putatively given to another actor. When the film opened, its overwhelmingly negative reviews were such a blow to Beatty that they nearly knocked him out of acting altogether.

Roman Spring was the first (and only) feature film directed by José Quintero, a well-regarded theater director. He appears incapable of giving the artifice and stagy prose sufficient energy or charisma, so we get a funereal lassitude almost by default. It is a well-dressed production, though, with Harry Waxman's cinematography and location shooting through Rome's bygone grandeur. Finally there's the question of the mysterious shabby Young Man who constantly waits and watches Karen from beneath her balcony. Whether Quintero (or Williams) considered him her Death personified, Quintero sets up the final scene -- broken and abandoned, she tosses her apartment keys down to him -- such that we're forgiven if we expect Rod Serling to stroll in from off-camera for the epilogue.

Now, what's your DVD crap sandwich?

Film.Com