I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie

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. . . who liked to ask, “Is this movie better than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?”

Introduction

The purpose of a movie critic is to encourage good films and discourage bad ones. Of course, there is much disagreement about which is which. The films in this book, however, have few defenders. The degree of their badness ranges from those that are deplorable to others that are merely hilariously misguided. Some of them are even fun, although not so much fun you would want to see them twice.

For years I had a law that I would give the zero star rating only to films I believed were immoral in one way or another. Any other movie, however wretched, would get at least a half-star. In making this selection I find that I have not always adhered to that rule. While everyone would agree that Jaws the Revenge or Little Indian, Big City are very bad movies, for example, few would find them evil—unless it is evil to waste two hours in the lives of unsuspecting ticketbuyers, which it may well be. Other films are in the zero-star category as a sort of default; any star rating at all seems irrelevant to John Waters’ Pink Flamingos, which exists outside critical terms, like the weather.

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