Over the years, many readers have expressed great fondness for my highly negative reviews of highly bad movies. They are fun to write, and I’m glad people like them. They help heal the pain inflicted by the films themselves.
The problem is, sometimes we’ll go for weeks at a stretch without a new F-grade movie being released, and negative-review-loving readers feel deprived.
The solution? Start going after the bombs I missed the first time around.
Today I am delighted to introduce “Eric’s Bad Movies,” a new weekly Film.com feature devoted to the contemplation and evisceration of Hollywood’s terrible mistakes. Every Thursday I will watch and review something awful that I have not seen or reviewed before. The inaugural edition: “Super Mario Bros.” (1993), the very first video-game-based movie, and a frightful omen of things to come.
Longtime readers might recall that I wrote a similar column years ago for the online literary journal White Shoe Irregular. That column was called “In the Dark” (I eventually chose that title to encompass all of my reviews), and “Eric’s Bad Movies” is its natural successor. I’ve been wanting to do something like this for a long time, and I’m grateful that my Film.com overlords have given me the opportunity (not to mention money, which justifies the time and energy involved).
I welcome suggestions for films that should be addressed in future editions of “Eric’s Bad Movies.” The only criteria are that they need to be films I have not already reviewed; they need to be awful; and they need to be available on DVD. I’m trying to avoid obvious “worst movie ever” selections like “Plan 9 from Outer Space” and “Showgirls,” as those have been written about too much already. Feel free to post or e-mail your suggestions.
In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the new column!
UPDATE: Another stipulation: I want to stick to movies that readers will generally have at least heard of, if not actually seen. Trolling the video store for obscure films would no doubt yield some awful movies, but where’s the fun in that? I want to go after films that a major studio actually expected people to pay to see. In my worldview, underground titles, straight-to-DVD flicks, and made-for-TV movies don’t deserve quite the same punishment that, say, “Kazaam” does.
