Joe Queenan: The Worst Movies Ever Made Aren't What They Used to Be

Phil Nugent — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Professional cranky bastard Joe Queenan surveys the current contenders for the title of worst movie ever made and finds them lacking. He is appalled that a walking answer to a trivia-quiz lightning round like Paris Hilton can take a few weeks off from doing nothing to doing nothing in front of a camera crew, and that the results can be used to scare people away from theaters for a weekend or two in the late winter season, and this gets called the worst movie ever made, as if enough work had gone into it for it to qualify as a movie, let alone the worst anything. "That is not fair," he grrumbles. "It is not fair to Kevin Costner, it is not fair to Jennifer Lopez, and it is certainly not fair to Madonna. Though it is a natural impulse to believe that the excruciating film one is watching today is on a par with the excruciating films of yesterday, this is a slight to those who have worked long and hard to make movies so moronic that the public will still be talking about them decades later. Anyone can make a bad movie; Kate Hudson and Adam Sandler make them by the fistful." Queenan saves his lowest accolades for movies that are shown real misguided imagination and daring in their very conception. As examples, he cites Futz!, a 1969 hippie extravaganza based on an Off-Broadway play, written in verse, about a farmer whose very close relationship with his pig meets with the disapproval of his neighbors. Though made by the same people who worked on the theatrical production, the fil adaptation trumped the live version because they were able to use a real pig, causing many reviewers to remark that seeing the movie put the viewer in the unusual position of seeing a blameless pig robbed of its dignity. (I have never seen Futz! myself, and not for lack of trying. I sometimes wonder if there is a single remaining print out there somewhere, and if so, if cast member Sally Kirkland might not be hiding it under her bed.)

Queenan also cites Pier Paolo Pasolini's final film, Salo, "the lighthearted Holocaust-era comedy Life Is Beautiful", and The Way We Were, which differs from those pictures in that it doesn't have any Nazis in it, though I'm not sure I'd argue that it doesn't belong. In the end, though, he takes the practical-minded position that a real contender has to have practical consequences: he's looking for "a movie that destroys a studio, wrecks careers, bankrupts investors, and turns everyone connected with it into a laughing stock..." Yes, he's giving the title to old-school favorite Heaven's Gate, the one that took down United Artists. "This is a movie about Harvard-educated gunslingers who face off against eastern European sodbusters in an epic struggle for the soul of America. This is a movie that stars Isabelle Huppert as a shotgun-toting cowgirl. This is a movie in which Jeff Bridges pukes while mounted on roller skates. This is a movie that has five minutes of uninterrupted fiddle-playing by a fiddler who is also mounted on roller skates." I'm pretty sure that the "mounted on roller skates" theme is one that even Futz! let slip through its fingers, but again, I haven't seen it and can only guess. Queenan reports that he knew someone who worked for the public relations company that handled the picture: "He told me that when the 220-minute extravaganza debuted at the Toronto film festival, the reaction was so thermonuclear that the stars and the film-maker had to immediately be flown back to Hollywood, perhaps out of fear for their lives. No one at the studio wanted to go out and greet them upon their return; no one wanted to be seen in that particular hearse. My friend eventually agreed to man the limo that would meet the children of the damned on the airport tarmac and whisk them to safety, but only provided he was given free use of the vehicle for the next three days. After he dropped off the halt and the lame at suitable safe houses and hiding places, he went to Mexico for the weekend." Of course, that was then and this is now, and while it seems unlikely that it'll ever start smoking The Godfather in the AFI polls, Heaven's Gate now has a hardy band of deeply committed, easily riled defenders, every one of whom I know in my heart is a superior person who dresses better than I do. That, too, is part of the charm of a true worst movie--enough vision, talent, and passion should have gone into it that someone will see grounds for its defense in there. I do no forsee a day in which there will be a ravening cult sticking up for The Hottie and the Nottie, but if that does ever happen, I'd keep an eye out for the other three horsemen.

Vanishing Act: Mark Borchardt

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 16:00:00 GMT

One of the great films of the 1990s was American Movie, Chris Smith’s documentary about working class Wisconsin filmmaker Mark Borchardt and his efforts to complete Coven, a short horror movie about an alcoholic writer. Smith’s film was both a hilarious look at the pitfalls of no-budget filmmaking (as in the signature scene of Borchardt shoving an actor’s head through a non-breakaway cabinet door) and a poignant depiction of economically deprived Middle America. A star was born in the person of Borchardt’s gentle burnout sidekick Mike Schank, who stole every scene in which he appeared.

The American Movie DVD featured the completed Coven, which offered the sort of amateurish performances and unintentional laughs you might expect, but also revealed surprising flashes of wit and an eye for bleak compositions and grim, bare-bones settings. Borchardt’s ostensible reason for making the short was to sell 3000 video copies of it, in order to finance his dream feature film project, Northwestern. He sold at least 5000 via the American Movie website, so it wasn’t out of the question that Northwestern would get made sooner than later.

Nine years later, history seems to be repeating itself. On the one hand, things have certainly improved for Borchardt since his days of delivering newspapers and vacuuming crypts. He has an acting career of sorts; you may have seen him as “Skeeter” in The Godfather of Green Bay or “Al the drunk at the bar” in Zombie Island, and he has four roles lined up for 2008, including one in Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever. He’s still hoping to make Northwestern, but in the meantime he’s working on another horror film about an alcoholic writer, this one called Scare Me. And as you may not be surprised to learn, it has been in production for quite some time now.

An entry from Borchardt’s long-since abandoned American Movie diary notes that shooting began in early 2003. An undated Premiere blurb finds Borchardt in the midst of auditions, and reports that “funding is no longer an insurmountable problem. Local businesses have pitched in everything from props to locations, including the Elks Lodge and a former roller-skating rink.” A 2005 release was targeted, according to this profile, but in the interview clip below dated February 2007 he admits, “I don’t know when we last shot it or did anything.” IMDb optimistically claims Scare Me will be released next month; if that happens, we’ll be sure to let you know.

The Screengrab : the godfather of green bay

Joe Queenan: The Worst Movies Ever Made Aren't What They Used to Be

Vanishing Act: Mark Borchardt