Now, a trio of what could charitably be called “rock ‘n’ roll films” for Worst or “Worst”. It’s gonna get weird.

You gotta love a movie that tells you what you are getting in its first second. Here, that would be a robotic text visible on the screen that reads something like the tiny village of, ahem, “Fleu de Coup”.

What an awful joke, and furthermore, what a nonsensical one. The clear implication is that our heroes, the titular Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band (played, with performative anonymity at that, by Peter Frampton and the then ubiquitous Bee Gees), are to leave their small town for corporate fun-time and fame, before they, you know, return and save the day and all that. But if everyone else stays in the village – necessitated by the fact that it is still a functional village after they leave, and thus something that needs to be saved in the first place – the name couldn’t be further from the truth. And I know what you are thinking; no, this film is not remotely clever. It does not have one clever bone in its body, and the irony is not intentional.
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Update mid-2018: The Exorcist II remains truly singular: spellbindingly hedonistic, unabashedly oneiric, and deliciously overwrought, an unapologetic product of John Boorman’s supremely monomaniacal ego as well as an apotheosis of his lunacy. Too many films, good and bad alike, evoke the polished, prefabricated air of professionalization, the hand of a skilled but acquiescent artisan. Boorman’s picture has, instead, the unholy eye of a demonic cinematic fanatic, a director for whom every idea and shot quivers with thematic weight and cinematic possibility. The film does not always, or mostly, fulfill this possibility, so watch at your own risk, but, for good or ill, I still consider it essential cinema. 

Original Review:

Ah, but John Boorman was not done with the world after Zardoz. Failure, after all, was nothing to kill a human of such vision as he. And with his sequel to The Exorcist, one of the most well-received horror films ever made and an instant popular hit upon its release in 1973, vision is what he had. It is all he had, of course, but he had it in spades. Concept is not the failing of The Heretic, not by any means. In fact, Boorman was somewhat onto something. He had a vast interest in critiquing and expanding the first film in confrontational new ways. It is exactly this desire that drove him to the script of William Goodhart, hired to create a small, tight recreation of the first film and perhaps a work to quietly make a quick buck on the side. And it is exactly this desire which drove him to essentially re-write the script until it fit only his vision of what The Exorcist ought to be. He had a point, at that, as the first Exorcist has always had a slight puritanical must about it, as though it was designed more to shock than to induce proper dread or a lingering crawl of dysfunction and fear. What Boorman attempted to do with Goodhart’s script was to accentuate its more exploratory qualities, and to flip the first film on its head, invest its energies in the larger, broader mythology of the characters while also growing still deeper and tighter with character introspection and psychological depth.
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May is my birthday month, and I have decided to treat myself in fine style with a month composed of some of my favorite kinds of movies: the worst ones. Naturally, this will include a cornucopia of films that endear me like few others, as well as some fascinatingly bad films I’d like to take on in writing, and it will no doubt incorporate a few “first timers” that I have heard so much about I cannot but run from any longer. All of which serves no primary goal other than me indulging in the kind of film that doesn’t usually find enough of a place in my blog (where I tend to house my “respectable” opinions, and not my swelling love for awful cinema). Really, it is just happy birthday to me, and I cannot wait.

Most of these films, although not all, will be of the genre-fried, “old school” awful variety, the sort of horrid, putrescent midnight cinema you hear about in your nightmares, and thus the normal Midnight Screenings postings will be suspended for the month, since not a single one of these films I have planned for this feature would qualify over there, so you are getting more than the safe limit for the month anyway. Not all of them will be exploitation films or proper B-movies, but we’ve always taken a broad, all-inclusive definition of “Midnight” around here, and we aren’t about to stop now.

In addition, there will be two scores, each between one and five, for each review. The first will be akin to my normal scoring, rating in terms of artistic merit and skill (with 0 being the most inept), and the second will relate to its value as deliciously bad entertainment (with 5 being the ideal score for any  bad movie connoisseur).

First up, a duo of stupendously silly films notable because they come from the mind of John Boorman, and as I hope to reveal with these two reviews, that is a most special mind indeed.

Ladies and gentlemen, our show…

It is always a great present when a film announces its totality in the first scene, as Zardoz does. A floating head clad in vague blanket garb anonymously moves around the screen, all hand-drawn goateed and self-serious, and we are informed in one of the most wonderfully supercilious soliloquies ever to grace the silver screen that God with a capital-G is in show business, that we are all muckish, pointless creatures still serving our base-whims and reptilian brains, and that the world and the human species is nothing but the playground for immortals who sit above us and who would call us subjects. Soon after ward, the infamous “the gun is good, the penis is evil” monologue, delivered by a floating, seemingly constipated rock head in the sky, graces the screen, and the insanity continues. But that opening soliloquy, head arbitrarily moving around an empty black screen as if looking for a resting place, tells us all we need to know about Zardoz before Zardoz even knows what to do with itself. It tells us, rather simply, that we are in for a stupendously kitschy and zany roller-coaster fun-house of galvanized nonsense and passionately inept storytelling. That is what it tells us, and the film does not disappoint.
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