Showgirls, Teen Wolves, and Astro Zombies

A Film Critic's Year-Long Quest to Find the Worst Movie Ever Made

Michael Adams

• Publisher: Dey Street Books
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9780061806292
• eBook ISBN:
  9780061966316
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: History of Art
• Index: Social Sciences

"Michael Adams's book is great fun! No one intends to make a truly bad movie, but when they do, Michael Adams will be there to watch it...and make it entertaining!" —John Landis, director of Trading Places and The Blues Brothers

In Showgirls, Teen Wolves, and Astro Zombies, film critic Michael Adams embarks on a year-long odyssey to discover the worst movie ever made, which Mystery Science Theater 3000 star, writer, and director Kevin Murphy calls "disturbingly comprehensive, joyously critical, and the best of its kind." From all-time cult classics such as Reefer Madness and Plan 9 from Outer Space to new entries to the pantheon such as Gigli and Baby Geniuses, no genre, star, or director is safe from Adams’s acerbic wit and hilarious observations. In the vein of A.J. Jacobs’s New York Times bestselling book The Know-It-All, and with the snarky sarcasm of television’s Mystery Science Theater 3000 and The Soup, Showgirls, Teen Wolves, and Astro Zombies leaves no stone unturned. With a foreword by cult director George A. Romero (Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead).

What happens when a film critic sacrifices a year of his life to find the absolute worst movie ever made?

• A Cinephile’s Quest: Join film critic Michael Adams on his year-long odyssey to watch one famously bad movie a day, from Z-grade schlock to big-budget bombs.
• Humorous Film Criticism: Discover hilarious and witty observations on everything from Plan 9 from Outer Space to Gigli, delivered with the snark of Mystery Science Theater 3000.
• Cult Movies & B-Movie Classics: Explore what makes a movie perversely entertaining, whether it’s Ed Wood’s legendary howlers or a Mariah Carey musical that’s entirely without luster.
• Z-Grade Movie Deep Dive: Learn the bizarre backstories of forgotten directors and failed stars, with the viewing order for this epic journey decided by a toy bingo machine.

DECEMBER

Special thanks to those who supported me and all those who did not and to all other filmmakers.

—End credits of Ax ’Em, made by Michael Mfume

JERRY, JERRY BAD

I’ve clocked up 339 flicks so far—just over target, in fact, and with The Movie Show and Empire wrapping up for the year mid-December, I reckon I’ll end up watching more than one a day. Thing is, that still won’t get me through all the movies I bought in the early-year buying frenzies. As reluctant as I am to interfere with the Bad Movie Bingo, I remove sixty-eight titles that don’t sound as though they’ll be as bad as the more essential ones that remain. Sayonara, then, 1970s soft-core romp Weekend with the Babysitter and William Shatner as a serial killer in Impulse.

Obviously, I couldn’t do without Jerry Warren, who I sampled in Teenage Zombies.

“He made a couple of movies but for the most part he bought up other people’s pictures,” said Joe Dante when we spoke midyear. “He chopped ’em up so they were incomprehensible and then added new scenes of actors standing against walls with bad lighting saying bad dialogue. And he managed to get these abortions released to theaters—and people booked them! Here’s a guy whose career had absolutely no redeeming value. He never made a picture that approached mediocre and yet he was a fairly successful rock-bottom filmmaker.”

With that endorsement ringing in my ears, I delve into Warren’s 1957 undersea unadventure The Incredible Petrified World. Six minutes of oceanic stock footage and voice-over ease me into the petrifying dullness that has a diving expedition under John Carradine’s guidance trying to set a depth record but forced to take cover in oddly dry underwater caves inhabited by lizards, a horny old man, and a skeleton. The guys and gals quite like it down there and plan a new civilization. The script makes not a lick of sense and the badness isn’t amusing, although I like the credit “Wardrobe by Kelpsuit.” If I’m not mistaken, he was also Sigmund the Sea Monster’s preferred designer.

The title of 1965’s Creature of the Walking Dead describes how I feel after watching it. This is one of Warren’s cut-and-paste jobs, utilizing 1961’s decently filmed black-and-white Mexican mad-doctor movie La marca del muerto. Warren’s additions actually subtract from our understanding, with the rambling English-language narration often seeming to come from the mouths of the Mexican cast. And the “filmmaker” piles insult on injury with his inserts of seminude cops getting a massage as they discuss the plot for seven minutes or Katherine Victor of Teenage Zombies providing further narrative “illumination.”

Victor took the lead in 1966’s The Wild World of Batwoman, a copyright-infringing cash-in that saw Warner Bros. sue Warren. She’s Batwoman, who commands an army of Batgirls from her suburban living room. Her costume and outfit is certainly as cheap as her lair—masquerade-ball mask, hair like a permed penguin, evening gloves worn with a diamond ring the size of Ohio, all set off by a bat tattoo above her cleavage.

The plot has scientist Prof. Neon kidnapping a Batgirl at the bidding of archcriminal Rat Fink. It’s a ruse to make Batwoman steal an atomic hearing aid, that Rat will use to listen to the conversations of world leaders, and that, when mixed with cobalt, will cause a nuclear explosion. But the baddies already have a secret weapon: happy pills to make people go-go dance…nonstop! Other sinister schemes include devising the world’s most potent tranquilizer and mating Batgirls with stock-footage monsters from 1956’s The Mole People. Meant to be a campy send-up of TV’s Batman—which was already a spoof—it’s completely laugh-free and reliably amateurish in every conceivable department (the set designs are by “Color Master Studios” the film’s in black and white). There’s no amount of happy pills to make this fun.

Also not fun is interviewing Blade Runner star Rutger Hauer. I do it for The Movie Show—in conjunction with the 119-disc release of the über-ultimate-special-collector’s edition of the Blu-ray. I’ve always loved the movie and admired Hauer, so it pisses me off that he’s so truculent, antagonistic, and uncooperative. You’d think the former star—who now supports himself in straight-to-video rubbish like Dracula III: Legacy and Minotaur—might be grateful that Warner Bros. is flying him around the world and that a legion of Generation X media types like myself are hanging out to hear his stories about Blade Runner.

But no. After he keeps us waiting in the hotel room’s living room for close to thirty minutes—it’s not like he’s detained in traffic, we can hear him in the next room—he sits down and gives either a) rambling, nonsensical answers or b) acts as though I’m asking personal secrets when I ask him to comment on long-discussed production problems on Blade Runner.

I come very close to stopping the interview. When we’re done, I get out of there as soon as possible, making no secret of my annoyance to either his publicist or my producer. Afterward, The Movie Show producers manage to scrape together a few minutes of usable footage from the awkward conversation.

That, and enduring Eagle vs Shark and Daddy Day Camp, two theatrical releases that make I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry and Bratz look passable, leaves me in a foul mood. I am suffering an overload of badness, finally, and, having done three atrocious Jerry Warren movies, I sulk my way into the fourth and last.

Warren clearly learned nothing in the fifteen-year gap between Batwoman and 1981’s Frankenstein Island, which stars his “name” ensemble players and is a remake of all his “best stuff.” Four dudes trying for a hot-air balloon world record crash and wash up on an island populated by hippie cave girls who smoke skull bongs and zombie hordes under the control of Katherine Victor’s mad scientess Sheila Frankenstein.

This is far weirder than Lost. There’s telepathy, animal voodoo, perfect vegetables, vampires created with a toy pitchfork, psychedelic planetary montage, wrestling and karate, fire dancing, necromancy, and the revelation that the girls are alien-human hybrids because the island was the ancient landing place of E.T.s. Oh, there’s also a disembodied brain in a jar, a back-up brain in a back-up jar, and good ol’ John Carradine as a disembodied ghost head ranting about “The power! The power!” in a performance nearly as nuts as Lugosi’s in Glen or Glenda.

Falling into the category of “must be seen to be disbelieved,” Frankenstein Island is across-the-board awful, but one of the best bad movies I’ve seen. It cheers me up enormously.

CAVE-MANIA

I love Cate Blanchett and want to see her at the premiere of her new film, I’m Not There. So does Clare. But I can’t, see, because I’ve got caveman movies to watch.

“But you’ve said you’re on track to do 365 movies easily now,” Clare says. “Especially once work wraps up for the year.”

“I know, I know, but the deal was at least one per day and…”

“And?”

“It’s only for a few more weeks.”

Clare nods, tamping her frustration down.

“You won’t be doing it on Christmas day?”

“No, of course not.”

“And I better get a nice Christmas present.”

While a few miles away Cate Blanchett glows for the premiere crowd and a few yards away in the next room Clare relaxes with some reality TV, I sprawl on the bed and watch 1962’s Eegah.

It’s an act of love, this movie. Arch Hall Sr. tried to bestow the gift of stardom on his son, Arch Hall Jr., in a series of drive-in flicks that cast him as a hunk with tonsils as golden as his pompadour. Their most infamous collaboration was this one. This has teen gal Roxy crashing into a giant caveman while out driving. Her dad (Hall Sr.) heads out to find the beast and is promptly caught by Eegah, played by professional tall person Richard Kiel. Roxy and her boyfriend Tom—our boy Arch Jr.—stage their own rescue, leading to her abduction. Dad, daughter, and Eegah bond over a meal of charred bone and she shaves the men. More intimacy follows with Eegah introducing Roxy to his mummified ancestors. She takes things further by appreciating his cave drawings, offering the film’s one knowing line: “Believe it or not, Dad, I’m going to look at his etchings.” It’s hardly surprising that once Tom reappears to rescue Roxy, Eegah has developed a healthy case of Roxy lust that’ll cause him to first tear at her clothes and then storm the country club.

Arch Sr. wrote, directed, produced, and costarred. The budget was $15,000, which dictated that credits be painted onto hessian sacks. It’s a pity they didn’t have less money because at an hour this might be a cult classic but stretched over ninety minutes it feels like time’s standing still. As Tom, Arch Jr. is a leading man only his father could love, and is positively at his worst when warbling love tunes to his girlfriend Roxy, least of all because the songs are called “Vicki” and “Valerie.”

Once I’m done, I get researching and find that, after he wisely gave up acting, Arch Jr. became a decorated pilot who helped evacuate Cambodia in 1975 and flew in the first Gulf War.

I share this with Clare and she’s goodly enough to appear interested. Her eagerness for this to be over is palpable, though, especially when she says things like, “I can’t wait for you to be finished with this.”

Next night, it’s Yor, the Hunter from the Future. This 1983 grunt-a-thon stars Reb Brown—that nonactor from Howling II—as a cave dude who’s different from his prehistoric peeps. We know this from a) his Sharon Stone–like hair, b) his mysterious metallic medallion, and c) the film’s title. The first half has Yor slaughtering papier-mâché dinosaurs, taming and riding a giant bat-thing, accidentally committing genocide against not one but two underground barbarian civilizations, allying with tribesmen and their comely daughters, and trying to figure out the clues to his origins.

Sounds fun. Isn’t. Yawn, this Hunter from the Future. Happily, its antidote is 1990’s Ultra Warrior. Despite the video cover artwork, this is not a caveman movie. And, in fact, it’s more than a movie—it’s a metamovie, the Frankensteinian mash-up of Al Adamson’s dreams. “Produced” by Roger Corman’s Concorde-New Horizons company, it plunders footage from the schlockmeister’s back catalogue, including Battle Beyond the Stars, Lords of the Deep, Battletruck, and an unknown number of other sci-fi, barbarian, and Mad Maxsploitation movies. Stunningly, even the sex scenes are shamelessly sourced from elsewhere so that our hero’s hair color changes whenever he gets busy.

What is astoundingly original is the zany “story” that tries to link all this footage. Kenner, a.k.a. the Great White Wolf, has to free an oppressed people amid stock scenes of intergalactic war, a ground battle on Mars, mutant rampages, undersea mining, slavery camps, and gladiatorial combat staged by bad-guy the Bishop. When a mutant girl asks Kenner what life is like in his world, the Outside, it’s time for yet more stock footage as he tells her it has been overrun by robots called the Enforcers: “Mock trials were held in front of robot juries. Judges, congressmen, bureaucrats were tortured with red lasers and executed on national television. It was a bloodbath of epic proportions. So, things aren’t so good.”

Best is the finale where he writes a letter to the president, asking him to remember the “soul of a man is not measured by the height of his hat or the width of his shoe. Indeed not.”

Indeed, indeed not!

STOP ME BEFORE I MILLIGAN

Like I was with Al Adamson, my only familiarity with Andy Milligan came via passing references to titles like Torture Dungeon and The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! in horror-movie books. To get up to speed for when Milligan’s obscurities came oozing out of Bad Movie Bingo I read Jimmy McDonough’s biography The Ghastly One: The Sex-Gore Netherworld of Filmmaker Andy Milligan. It was exceptional—a fascinating, repulsive, and painstaking re-creation of a misanthropic, misogynistic masochist.

Born in 1929, to a mother he grew to hate, Milligan was a discharged sailor and a dressmaker before he became one of the pioneers of off-off-Broadway at New York’s Caffe Cino and La Mama Experimental Theatre Club. He briefly made avant-garde films about the gay scene before devoting himself to horror period pieces shot in and around his house on Staten Island that were but platforms for his ultragrim outlook on humanity. In his latter years, he moved to California, where McDonough befriended him and, later, nursed him through his agonizing death from AIDS in 1991. These passages in the book humanize the man but McDonough never varnishes who he was.

As for Milligan’s movies, which were made on budgets from $8,000 to $30,000 and indifferent to story, pacing, sound, and picture control? “When Andy’s movies are bad, there’s nothing—nothing...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• January
• February
• March
• April
• May
• June
• July
• August
• September
• October
• November
• December
• Epilogue
• Deleted Scenes
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher