Michael Adams

Bad Movies We Love

astro_zombies_cover.jpgThis week marks the publication of Showgirls, Teen Wolves, and Astro Zombies: A Film Critic’s Year-Long Quest to Find the Worst Movie Ever Made, a rollicking new tome by Movieline’s “Bad Movies We Love” guru Michael Adams. Part comic memoir, part grueling critical experiment, Adams’s book chronicles his journey through more than 350 of the most obscure, confounding, surprising, and yes, appalling cinema known to man. In this Movieline exclusive excerpt, Adams unearths not only one of the very worst films, but one of the worst genres as well.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, whenever we’d go to visit my grandfather in his leafy suburban abode, my younger brother David would race out into the old man’s garden to capture little lizards basking in the morning sun. Once we’d tired of our catch-and-release program, we’d spend the afternoon luxuriating in the spare room that contained decadence beyond compare in the form of a second TV, free of parental interference. On such days, there was one show that unfailingly made our world a bigger, more fascinating place: In Search of… Part National Geographic documentary, part Twilight Zone, it was narrated by Star Trek’s Leonard Nimoy with the cool detachment of his half-Vulcan science officer. While his investigations into killer bees, ancient astronauts and Stonehenge were, quite frankly, f*cking awesome, it was Bigfoot who always stood head and shoulders above the rest.

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Bad Movies We Foresee

Movieline Predicts 10 Bad Movies We'll Love in 2010

Written by Michael Adams | 12 Jan 2010, 10:40 AM | 14 comments

“Looks good!” Those words, from my 4-year-old daughter, don’t usually inspire horror, especially in this age of sublime children’s movies, from Up! and Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs to Fantastic Mr. Fox and Coraline. But when they’re uttered in response to The Rock sprouting wings in the name of kiddie comedy, my only recourse is a silent resolution: We’ll catch the Tooth Fairy when Ava’s much, much older; when she’s 50 and I’m sucking food through a straw and no longer able to summon the mental energy to use the Neural Changer on my old Sony Holograph. And glancing further down the list of coming “attractions,” there are 10 more titles in 2010 I plan on avoiding as long as I can until, bad-movies sucker that I am, my curiosity gets the better of me. (Find conveniently, refreshingly brief trailers where available.)

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The Movieline Nine

9 Ways James Cameron Will Make Fantastic Voyage More Fantastic

Written by Michael Adams | 22 Dec 2009, 9:15 AM | 3 comments

Usually my instinctive reaction to any remake news is to scoff and ask, “Why?” Not so with the recent announcement that James Cameron will be producing another go at the 1966 non-classic Fantastic Voyage. That’s because I revisited this childhood favorite five years ago and found it sorely lacking. Another more recent, post-Avatar viewing just confirmed that the King Of The World is the perfect person to take the terrific concept — an Abyss/Titanic style submarine miniaturized and injected into the Aliens/Avatar-like alien-landscape of the human body — and make it, you know, actually fantastic. Here’s how he’ll do it.

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The Cold Case

The Cold Case: Bite Into Kristen Stewart's Little-Seen Best Performance

Written by Michael Adams | 16 Dec 2009, 9:15 AM | Comment

cake_eaters_cc_top.jpgFanboys will be delighted this week when Avatar finally kills off New Moon’s waning box office. Die, vampire, die! Semper fi, space marines! Hoo-ha. But where does that leave the Twi-hards? Sure, they’ll get in line, like everyone else, to see The Movie The Changes Everything, but after that it’s about 195 coffin-sleeps until Eclipse. The only solution? The Cold Case, which this week looks back at one Twilight star’s even more indelible (if sadly underseen) performance from 2007.

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Movieline Gift Guide

Bad Movies We Love on DVD: The Movieline Gift Guide

Written by Michael Adams | 10 Dec 2009, 2:40 PM | 3 comments

A couple years back, I set myself the task of watching a really, really bad film every day for a year in order to decide for myself what really is the worst movie ever made. You can read what that hilarious/hellish 365 days was like in Showgirls, Teen Wolves, And Astro Zombies (It! Books), which is published next month. But until then, I’d like to share five so-bad-they’re-awesome flicks that are sure-fire Yuletide stocking stuffers for any schlock-lover who already has Showgirls, Plan 9 From Outer Space and The Room on his or her shelf. Bad Movies We Love — they’re gifts that keep on giving, especially when combined with liberal amounts of eggnog.

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Bad Movies We Love

James Cameron's Piranha Part Two: Where Avatar Began?

Written by Michael Adams | 07 Dec 2009, 8:15 AM | 4 comments

Artists of all stripes repeat themselves, whether through themes, motifs or hues, and James Cameron is no exception. So the question I’ve been asking myself as I count down the days to Avatar’s debut is this: just how much of the long-awaited 3-D space blockbuster was predicted by the man’s inauspicious debut, 1981’s Piranha Part Two: The Spawning?

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Bad Movies We Love

9 B-Movie Vampire Tips to Boost Edward Cullen's Sex Appeal Even More

Written by Michael Adams | 18 Nov 2009, 8:00 AM | 1 comment

For a certain percentage of the population, Robert Pattinson as Edward Cullen is the Sexiest Man (Kinda) Alive. For the rest of us, he’s much too emo to get worked up about. But all is not lost! With Extreme Makeover tips from even the crappiest vampire-themed flicks, he might sparkle for everyone yet!

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Bad Movies We Love

day_world_ended_poster.jpgThis weekend sees a planetary alignment that even the ancient Mayans couldn’t have predicted. First, their misinterpreted calendar becomes the “basis” for 2012, which will surely sweep the box office like a five-mile tsunami over the Himalayas. Second, the high priest of Hollywood schlock, Roger Corman, will be inducted into the Academy pantheon with his very own honorary Oscar. When he’s formulating the outline for his putative TV follow-up, 2013, Roland Emmerich could do well to pay heed to this synchronicity — and then send himself off to mine Corman’s first take on the apocalypse, 1955’s Day The World Ended.

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Bad Movies We Love

10 Disaster Films Even More Crapocalyptic Than 2012

Written by Michael Adams | 04 Nov 2009, 7:40 AM | 7 comments

In 2012 — a definite Bad Movie We Love — the Earth is being superheated by “mutant neutrinos” supposedly linked to a planetary alignment predicted by the Mayans. First, Gaia explodes in a fiery rain of molten B-movie cheese, and then a magnetic pole switcheroo causes a tectonic boogaloo that unleashes tsunamis big enough to inundate the Himalayas. It’s the very best in schlock science and mysticism from Roland Emmerich, whose last picture, 10,000 B.C., had it that the mammoths built the pyramids. But while 2012 shamelessly appropriates sequences and tropes from just about every major disaster movie of the past, oh, forever, there are still a few crapocalypses too silly for even Emmerich to pilfer. Or maybe… just maybe… he’s saving them for 2013?

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Bad Movies We Love

godmonster_of_indian_flats.jpgLooking for a new movie accompaniment to Halloween, I recently unearthed a $10 second-hand VHS of Godmonster Of Indian Flats. It’s an ultra-obscurity, made in 1973 in Nevada, and putatively about a mutant killer sheep. I’d caught a clip about a year ago, and I thought if I liked the actual movie well enough I might sling a couple of old car-seat covers over me and be the Godmonster this Halloween. Easy — and he’s proven at freaking out the kids.

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