Michael Adams: Showgirls, Teen Wolves and Astro-Zombies: Millers Point: Pier 9: 2010.

 Australian movie reviewer Mike Adams spent virtually all of 2008 trying to work his ways through the worst movies known to humanity.

What makes a movie kitsch, as opposed to camp (in which case, it has some redeeming qualities?) Bad acting? Really low production values? Bad set design? Poor ‘continuity’ and plot undevelopment? Ghastly scriptwriting and incoherent ‘dialogue?’ Infantile plots? Gratuitous sponsor product placement? Or all or some combination of the above?

What are my personal picks after having read this tome? Fifties and seventies ’sci-fi’ (”skiffy”- even real SF fans loath it) are justifiably lambasted, as are contemporary musicals (ie Xanadu in the eighties), most Japanese fifties to seventies monster movies, blaxploitation and some direr examples of contemporary hiphop cinema, Ed Wood, Larry Buchanan, martial arts manque, John Travolta and the Scientologioid Battlefield Earth,  tacky superhero flicks, Adam Sandler, the Joan Crawford posthumous anti-biopic Mommie Dearest, badly made Australian movies, cannibal beds, Bo and John Derek, Pia Zadora, serial killer ’splatsploitation’ ‘true-crime’ (…) films, gigantic seventies anthropoids, lambada and thirties to fifties antidrug campstravaganzas.

And did you really think all of the directors here were straight? Well, nope. Sorry.  David de Coteros is an openly gay director, which means that The Journey: Absolution (1997) contains ample guy candy for the intrigued gay male spectator.  As for Ben and Arthur (2002), imagine same-sex marriage pitted against a villainous psychochristian younger brother, Victor. Oh, and for feminist aficionados of bad films, there are apparently movies in which a rampaging heavily breasted woman smothers vile agents of the patriarchy. Right on, sister!

This is a work of true love and individual strength, perserverance and an industrial-strength digestive tract. The author excels in a field that cannot be easy to catalogue in this much detail without evoking groans or helpless abject laughter. Strongly recommended.