bedsitter23

Showgirls, Teen Wolves, and Astro Zombies: A Film Critic's Year-Long Quest to Find the Worst Movie Ever Made by Michael Adams

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is for movie buffs. For a good period of my life that was me. I wonder what my average movie viewing was in College. It had to get close to averaging four a week, I would have to guess.

This has the feel of an AJ Jacobs book with author Adams dedicating a year to watching bad movies every day to determine the worst movie of all time. He used critics lists but then added user review sites to compile the worst of the worst.

There’s plenty of reasons a movie can be bad- blockbuster budgets that flop, low budget movies that wish they were good but aren’t, shock value movies, just plain boring movies and so on.

He categorizes these as the title says- you have sexplotation, horror and so on. Adams has a good sense of humor and though there’s a certain element that may make you want to watch bad movies, you are generally glad that he did it for you

He largely summarizes plots and why they are bad movies in an engaging manner. There’s Ed Wood and Reefer Madness and Pia Zadora and Police Academy 3 and all the usual suspects. He also talks to different directors and asks their favorite bad movies.

While I doubt diehards will find it definitive, I did appreciate the deep dive in those B movie directors that might fly under the radar.

If you truly like bad movies, then you will enjoy this. You can relate to the ones you saw and may add those to your viewing list based on your tastes.

There definitely a market for bad movies in the late 90s/early 00s. Adams does a fairly good job of trying to disqualify some movies for time or content (no porn for example) but as he digs deep into these recent zero budget films towards the end of the book, it does start to bog down.

Moving from well known films like Manos: Hands of Fate or Sylvester Stallone’s notorious debut Party at Kitty and Studs to fare like The Maize movies and Rollergator- I think he does too deep of a dive and repetition kicks in

Still, I quite enjoyed this book and it seems a decent addition to the book shelf of a movie buff

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