We don't get a lot of emails here. But when we do, half of them are to complain about our unjustly criticising and/or lambasting a favourite film. The other half are a combination of "Why don't you review so-and-so" and "How could you POSSIBLY like so-and-so??" As far as the first group goes, there's never any accounting for taste.
A while back, someone wrote to take issue with this page: Rish Outfield's Worst Movies Reviewed on the Site. I may even still have the letter. I explained to him how out of date it was, and gave him the old chestnut of one man's Children Should Play With Dead Things is another man's Bride of Frankenstein. Or maybe it was the opposite. Regardless, I think I wrote up this list way back in mid-1999, when the site was turning a year old. Now, it's going on a decade old, so I told him I'd get right on a new, updated list.
So I did. Then I lost it (which tyranist seemed to find sick delight in hearing). It didn't bother me much to have a hopelessly out of date website, but when movies like Legion of the Dead exist, I feel pretty embarrassed to have Sleepaway Camp on my Worst Of list.
So here I am doing it again. With my first attempt (well, second, actually, as I've explained), I looked over the old list and new list and don't find a lot of the same entries. Part of the reason for this is that it's been so long that I frankly don't remember how bad some older reviewed movies were. If I saw Jack-O today, I might think it had a certain charm or notice positive qualities I missed the first time around (I originally said Friday the 13th 3-D was as awful as it gets, but I now rank it above installments 5-9). Another reason is that there are more bad horror movies out there than good ones, and every time a Scary Movie 2 comes out, it moves Children of the Corn 2 farther down (or off) the list.
I don't really make a list of the worst of the worst as we rent movies and review them sometime later (what would be the point, other than to use it right now?), so it was hard to figure out what to put on here. I didn't want to read through one or two hundred of my old reviews either to see what deserves this honour. So I've tried to cobble these together from my admittedly-faulty memory, and I'm sure I'm missing something.
And here we go, a new (and probably already out of date) Rish Outfield's Worst Films on the Horror Film Compendium! In alphabetical order:
1. The Astro-ZombiesThere were a couple I considered listing, such as The Clown At Midnight, Troll 2, the aforementioned Jack-O, The Omen 4, Lost Souls, and Bloody Murder, that were really bad, but I didn't think they were the worst of the worst. And I saw Lost Souls at a test screening, and it's possible they fixed parts, so that disqualified it. Troll 2, as awful as it is, was just too entertaining to be placed on this list. Hell, Mutant Man is too, I'll take it off the list right now, bringing us to an even twenty (and a half). Oh, and lastly, Manos, the Hands of Fate really SHOULD be here, front and center . . . but I never even reviewed that sucker.
So, there you go. I'm sure people will have problems with this list, but I hope it's for its content and not its outdatedness.
Rish Roger Ebert Outfield
Summer 2007