Michael Adams

Bad Movies We Love

silent_rage_bmwl_top.jpgWhile it’s right and just that B-movie aficionados everywhere today celebrate the 70th birthday of Chuck Norris, it’d be tough to argue that any of the conservative chop-socky master’s efforts actually belong on any list devoted to the best — or worst — cinema has to offer. The exception is 1982’s Silent Rage, which even three decades on stands as a strong contender for the most bizarre tagline in Hollywood history. It’s not so much a marketing blurb as a short synopsis that also manages to blur actor and character. And like the poster, the trailer leads us to think it’s all about Chuck.

Continued

Bad Movies We Love

Remembering 1966's The Oscar: Just As Cheese-Filled As the Real Thing

Written by Michael Adams | 05 Mar 2010, 8:35 AM | Comment

bmwl_the_oscar_top.jpgThere are just two sleeps to go to the big night! The odds have been calculated and the prognostications made! The votes are in and now can’t even be changed by Harvey’s semitic signage, Nicolas’s nincompoop e-natterings or James revealing that the Na’vi aren’t actually CG but real genetic freaks he cooked up in his garage. Yet we can’t keep having the same conversations for the next 48 hours. What we need is something to feed the appetite and stoke the fever — something that’s of the Academy Awards but not about their 82nd iteration. And The Oscar is that filmic fondue, a cauldron of cheese cooked up by director Russell Rouse, writer Harlan Ellison, stars Stephen Boyd and Tony Bennett, and a who’s who of Hollywood donating cameos.

Continued

The Cold Case

gone_pope_top.jpgThe joy of cruising the movie margins is that one thing leads to another. So, a few years back, after I’d suffered through the 1952 Poverty Row comedy Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla for my bad-movie book, I couldn’t help but get Googling to find out what happened to its leads, Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo, whose comic act in the movie aped Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis to the very limits of copyright infringement. Turned out that Sammy did not much moviewise after that (he died last year), but Duke burned bright in the last years of his life. Mitchell’s first film as writer-director was 1974’s Massacre Mafia Style, aka The Executioner. While it didn’t make him a household name or set the box office aflame, in 1975 Mitchell set about making a second flick, then called Kiss The Ring, later given the awesome title of Gone With The Pope. One viewing of the trailer on YouTube (embedded after the jump) had my jaw on the floor.

Continued

Bad Movies We Love

9 Islands Schlockier Than Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island

Written by Michael Adams | 18 Feb 2010, 7:00 AM | 10 comments

As you read this, audiences are going to be of, um, two minds about Shutter Island. Is Martin Scorsese’s thriller a rollicking example of an A-list filmmaker having fun with B-movie conventions? Or is it a bloated waste of time and talent that hinges on a switcheroo we could see coming back when Engor met Oomo? Either way, there’s no doubt that you can do a lot worse with island-set schlock. I know, I’ve visited those grim shores — read on for a guided tour.

Continued

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.

Continued

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.)

Continued

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.

Continued

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.

Continued

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.

Continued

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?

Continued