Michael Adams (8)

The author spends a year watching bad movies to determine which is the worst. He details month by month the movies he watches, and gives them each a rating on a scale of 1/100. He has a light, amusing tone, and the book is an easy and enjoyable read. The one main complaint I have about it is that I think way too many of the movies seem to be soft core porn as he describes them, and he specifically rejected soft (and hard) core porn as a category. So if these movies were not porn, he should explain why his description of various extreme sexual acts doesn't count as porn, and the movies were left in. Or why he left some soft core porn in while disqualifying others, which by their description sounded similar in focus to the ones he considered. This is the main weakness of the book, and kudos for his interviews with various directors and stars of the bad movies, as well as Kevin Murphy and Mike Nelson of MST3K. Also, congratulations on being able to talk about parenting woes with his toddler without becoming boring, predictable, or diverting everything to that. The family in the background, his employment woes, etc, did not take over the book as so often these sorts of things do. Recommended for fans of bad movies (as well as for fans of good movies who can't figure out what people see in bad movies).… (mere)

A great read for lovers of B-to-Z movie fare. Michael Adams injects personal stories, background and an on-going dialogue with other people for "what's the worst movie ever?", giving it a nice human touch and letting you know the personality behind the critic. Sometimes the ties humanize the bad shlock, and you can really see how he manages to get the "so-bad-it's-good" mentality many movie lovers have.

The downside of this memoir-quality is that it doesn't really work as a non-fiction guide to bad movies. His rating system is vague and only mentioned in half of the entries, sometimes the movies transition into each other without clear definition. There is no index to look up titles on their own, or a chart of his rated movies like you would see in any other movie omnibus. Most of the recaps are hilarious, but some things he picks up on, such as the accents of certain actors as they recite stilted dialogue, loses impact on the written page. Also, while I am sure much of the book was fact checked, when I noticed a misspelling of one character's name (Kaiba from Yu-Gi-Oh! is written as Kaiber) that's easily corrected by a trip to IMDb or reading the credit list of the movie, I would not suggest reading it as an academically rigorous book.

That said, it's very enjoyable and sets out to do what it said it would. For fans of MST3K, Ed Wood, off-Hollywood trivia, and movies in general it delivers well. I laughed at many of the recaps and boggled at what people paid thousands of dollars to put on screen.… (mere)