So Bad It’s Good Movie Contest (2) Winner

November 30th, 2008

After a few weeks of pain, there is a winner to the second So Bad It’s Good movie contest where I watched terrible movies that become entertaining in their badness. This time out, the entries were Brain Of Blood, Exorcist II: The Heretic, Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte, and Stray Dogs.

Each was horrid / entertaining in its own way, but the edge goes to Exorcist II: The Heretic, for a few reasons:

• Fits in a category I have some fascination toward of horrid movie sequels — see Superman IV: The Quest For Peace, The Next Karate Kid, and Rocky V. The pain is all the more intense knowing its predecessor The Exorcist is a very good and darned frightening movie.
• All the well-known, talented names attached to this project: John Boorman, Enrico Morricone, James Earl Jones, Richard Burton, Louise Fletcher, Max von Sydow — that together, all failed at a basic level of coherence.
• Witness the failure of a child star — Linda Blair — in a role totally beyond her talents — well, let me just quote myself: “Linda Blair, the little girl Regan from The Exorcist, is an appealingly daffy young teenager, but in that rough child star mode — over-compensating in the acting department as if to demonstrate she has talent. She looks a bit like Carrie Fisher mashed with Chevy Chase’s daughter in National Lampoon’s European Vacation. Ultimately, Blair’s most notable contribution is a coat hanger for some really inventive seventies fashions.”

So yeah — the winner of this contest is Sprauge D, who writes a great blog called Diary Of A Rat. He’s getting a $50 Amazon gift certificate. Maybe he’ll use it to purchase the much superior Boorman film Zardoz?

Meanwhile, if you’re at all curious, despite my warnings — this trailer is all you need to see.