Showgirls, Teen Wolves and Astro Zombies – Michael Adams : Interview
February 12, 2010 by Tony Montana
Filed under Featured, Interviews, Movies
Bad movies have a new champion. Film buff, one time Movie Show host and editor at Empire magazine Michael Adams spent a year of his life watching the best of the worst that cinema has to offer and turned the results into Showgirls, Teen Wolves and Astro Zombies, a book that gleefully ignores the giddy heights in favour of the dizzying lows and gets a lot of laughs in the process.
Watch Out For | Movies dragged Michael away from a repeat screening of 1972’s The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! to answer a few questions…
Showgirls, Teen Wolves and Astro Zombies
Why would you put yourself through a year’s worth of the worst movies ever made? Don’t you get enough bad movies in your day job?
The question “What’s the worst movie ever?” made struck me – as it would – after watching Material Girls, a shitty little tween comedy starring the Duff sisters and produced by Madonna’s company. That’s because at that time it was #1 on the IMDB’s ‘Bottom 100′. I agreed it was terrible, but was it really worse than something like Plan 9 From Outer Space or Alone In The Dark or Glitter?
There hadn’t been an intensive bad-movie survey since the 1980 book The Golden Turkey Awards and a lot of cinematic sewage had flowed under the bridge since then. So, fool that I am, I dove in, chiefly to satisfy my own curiosity. I also thought it’d be fun.
As for bad movies in my day job as a reviewer, for some reason they feel like more of a chore because you’re not there by choice. Really letting loose and laughing your head off at crap like Knowing or Fast & Furious also risks the ire of some other critics, who seem determined to stroke their chins thoughtfully, no matter when it’s Liv Ullman up there angsting for Bergman or Vin Diesel grunting his way through dialogue with all the range and sensitivity of a 350 Block Chevy.
Was your year of bad movies always going to be a book? It’s a lot of work and while bad movies might be their own reward I’m guessing you’d have liked to get something more out of it.
I sure hoped so. I spent thousands of bucks of my own money buying these crappy DVDs and VHS tapes on Amazon or eBay, so I really hoped I’d at least recoup those expenses with a book deal. But that didn’t happen until long after the year had finished, so I had to accept the possibility that I’d done it and was writing it and that the result would end up in the bottom drawer.
Happily that wasn’t the case.
Was there ever a point where you felt like you were losing your bearings? If you’re mostly watching only bad movies, does there come a point where bad starts to look good to you? And were you worried that it might affect your day job? “Sure, All About Steve is bad, but it’s no Green River Killer.”
I didn’t feel like I was losing my bearings but I did think about bad movies a lot for that year. When I wasn’t watching them, I was reading about them, making notes, and so on. So it was pretty obsessive. And that was a little isolating because there aren’t too many people who’ve seen The Weird World Of LSD or The Black Gestapo and who can share your enthusiasm or disbelief.
It’s good that there are so many clips on YouTube because I could at least share a bit of the love and people didn’t have to commit to watching Death Bed: The Bed That Eats from start to finish to ‘get’ what I was talking about. I was worried at first it might taint me and cause me to see only the bad stuff in good films. But actually it panned out the opposite.
I did the quest through 2007 and that was a magnificent year for cinema. No Country For Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, The Diving Bell & The Butterfly, After The Wedding, Hairspray – the great and very good movies just kept coming. So it was really the best and worst of times.
That said, though, there often times when I would genuinely find myself watching some big-budget bore and I’d be thinking, Wow, I wonder how Blood Of Ghastly Horror would look projected on a massive screen and with Dolby stereo. So, that was weird, I guess.
How did your wife feel about your year-long commitment to bad movies? There’s a few sections where she seems to get into the experience, and then sometimes she’d clearly rather have you doing something else with your spare time.
Clare was great – really supportive from the get-go. Of course, she got frustrated because I’d talk about it so much and every night I’d be up ’till all hours with the likes of Ed Wood or Uwe Boll. But I did ensure that it interfered as little as possible with family time and with work. Had I not, I suspect it would’ve been more fractious.
Clare didn’t watch many of the movies with me, but the ones that she did, she tended to enjoy – or respond to in highly amusing fashion, as was the case when she got suckered into watching Robot Monster.
How hard was it to track down all the bad movies, considering many of them only exist on VHS?
Amazon and eBay are pretty amazing. Usually, if it’s been released, it’ll be out there somewhere. It was more the expense – back then the Australian dollar was about 15 cents to the greenback so that, plus shipping from the four corners of the Earth, nailed me. It doesn’t mean they’ll always be there, but if you come back to those sites often enough you’ll usually find what you’re after.
How hard was it to strike the right balance between simply laughing at these movies and treating them with (some) respect? Because clearly you’re not just doing this for cheap laughs – though there are cheap laughs to be found here.
It’s tempting to just crack wise at the expense of these flicks, but that’s also the obvious thing to do. I was determined to try to look beyond the obvious limitations of the films and into the personalities involved and what they intended.
My approach was also to try to find something, anything, that was actually of value. It might be a good performance, a funny line, an artfully composed shot, that lifted the film off the very bottom of the barrel. Usually, you can find something.
For instance, I Woke Up Early The Day I Died, the 1998 movie based on an Ed Wood script, is ambitious but pretty bad, which, along with legal issues, is why it’s only ever been released on DVD in Spain – and in Spanish. But it’s a trip to see all these name actors – Christina Ricci, Ron Perlman, Andrew McCarthy, John Ritter, Billy Zane – working from a silent screenplay that was so important to Ed Wood it was one of the only things he rescued from his burning apartment. It was through that movie’s use of “Jesus I Was Evil” that I discovered Darcy Clay, the tragic Kiwi singer.
It was amazing how frequently I’d scratch the surface and there’d be these odd, weird, sad or triumphant stories behind the movies, from Tom Graeff, the suicidal and delusional auteur behind Teenagers From Outer Space, to Megan Timothy, star of The Mighty Gorga who made the most remarkable recovery from a massive stroke.
There’s a lot more to your book than just the bad movies you watch – you’ve got a whole life going on outside (and inbetween) watching bad movies. We even get some background about your “troubled teen” phase. How important was it to you to write a book that went beyond just a list of bad movies?
I wanted to make the book about the journey, which is why it’s a personal narrative, rather than just a series of reviews. There’s so much you can riff off when it comes to movies, it just seemed kinda natural.
Plus, I thought people would be wondering ‘why’, ‘how’, etc, and that in itself would make for an entertaining read. At least I hope so.
Are you going to keep up-to-date with bad movies from here on in?
I’m trying but it’s not possible to see everything, naturally. I’ve got a stack to get through, and then I’m getting a lot of awesome suggestions from readers. I hope they keep coming. I like that it’s a two-way process. I’m hoping the book will send people out to experience the joy of The Room or Road House or Invasion Of The Bee Girls, just as reader suggestions such as Wing Commander and Creepshow 3 have me making a note to see those one day.
And then, of course, there’s the crap you just stumble into.
The last one I had the happy misfortune to see was Management, with Jennifer Aniston and Steve Zahn. Watched it with Clare and her friend Mandy and we were howling with laughter and how incredibly creepy and misjudged this supposed romantic comedy was. Then I checked and found it got a bunch of decent reviews. I’m not sure which cut those critics saw.
But there you go: one man’s trash really is another’s treasure. Oops, cliche alert!
How has your life changed now that you’re a bad movie expert?
I wouldn’t consider myself a bad-movie expert. More like an enthusiast. I reckon there are a lot of people out there who’ve seen a lot more crappy flicks than I have. Just maybe not in such a compressed period. I’m not sure yet how it’s changed my life.
The quest aspect I think is a great discipline. I’m a couple of months into another one that’ll hopefully result in a second book. It’s a lot further out of my comfort zone that bad movies for a year was. I think setting a particular goal over a prescribed time frame, really trying to stick to it, and recording what happens, the ups and downs, is a very interesting way to open new doors for yourself and test your preconceptions and your abilities.
Put it this way, I take my New Year’s resolutions a lot more seriously now.
How do you sleep at night after dismissing the first Punisher film in your “deleted scenes” chapter? Chasing down that remote-controlled car with a bottle of whiskey in the back is some of Barry Otto’s best work!
I know! I thought The Punisher was fun. And there were a number of scenes that I think inspired Quentin Tarantino when he did Kill Bill Vol. 1. The problem was that after watching 406 bad movies in 365 days, I had 500,000 words of notes. I thought I could write a book that’d clock in at 180,000 words.
My publishers smartly pointed out that while I thought a four-page potted history of Barbara Payton’s tragic demise was essential, it might not be absolutely necessary and a telephone-book sized tome might kinda alienate a lot of readers – or bore them. So I wound up having to be obey William Faulkner’s “kill you darlings” dictum, which is always a good move because when you’re forced to cut what’s left gets better.
My compromise was to include any excised film in capsule reviews in the “Deleted Scenes”. That said, I could probably write a whole other book on those movies alone.
