Really Awful Movies

Songbird Celine Dion warbling the 5,000th performance of My Heart Will Go On. That’s Dr. George Hardy’s analogy for the endless flogging of Troll 2 on the festival and movie convention circuit.

The documentary Best Worst Movie focuses on Hardy, a charming Alabama dentist who flirted with the periphery of show business when he starred as Michael Waits in the notorious Utah-lensed horror clunker Troll 2.

A natural ham, as comfortable in the limelight as he is capping molars, Hardy is the focus of the documentary made by his Troll 2 co-star, Michael Stephenson, the self-described “obnoxious Mormon kid.”

Stephenson was the child star, who in the movie kept having tete-a-tetes with a beyond the grave grandpa. Hardy played the family patriarch in what he gleefully describes to bemused patients, the bulk of whom have never seen the film, as “the worst movie ever made.”

When Troll 2 revival screenings start to sell out across North America, Hardy delights audiences with his rendering of the film’s most infamous moment, comparable to Tommy Wiseau upturning Jimmy Dean in his grave with “You’re tearing me apart, Lisa.” In Troll 2, it’s “You can’t piss on hospitality!”

He’s soon doing the line again and again, and then like Bart Simpson the “‘I didn’t do it’ boy,” it all comes to a halt when he flies to a festival in Birmingham and meets total indifference. As Krusty the Klown put it, “That’s show business for you: one day you’re the most important guy that ever lived, the next day you’re some shmoe working in a box factory.”

Luckily this schmoe has something to fall back on – a career in dentistry.

Best Worst Movie is a heart-wrenching yet oddly affecting cautionary showbiz tale.

While starring in a turd is a fun curiosity for an endearing dentist, it’s certainly not the case for one of the film’s stars, who found her Troll 2 resume bullet to be a professional hindrance.

For the lovely Connie Young (Holly Waits), it’s kinda the equivalent of having spinach between your teeth on a date. Here, Young describes the exact moment she knows she’s not getting a part. That is, when a casting director finds the Troll 2 bad movie skeleton in her closet.

For the most part though, the film’s stars are happy to finally get the recognition they (may or may not) deserve. Audiences overwhelmingly respond to Troll 2’s sincerity, which overrides its copious technical / aesthetic failures.

Best Worst Movie’s most discomfiting moments come from director Claudio Fragasso, the prickly Italian who’s contemptuous of actors and finds it difficult to come to terms with the film’s recent resurgence. Like Tommy Wiseau, he thinks audiences have misinterpreted his grand artistic vision. They haven’t, and we’re all the better for it.

***1/2 (out of 5)

PLEASE SEE OUR LIST OF THE TOP GOOD BAD MOVIES

Countless forests have been felled to produce JFK assassination books; similarly, no trees are safe from “Ripperology,” with new hypotheses coming out annually and showing no signs of abating.

Murder by Decree is a 1979 thriller about the Jack the Ripper killings, directed by the legendary Bob Clark (Black Christmas). It has Masonic elements, a la the highly-touted book They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper, by of all people, Bruce Robinson, the guy who directed the excellent Withnail and I. Robinson told The Guardian newspaper that Jack the Ripper’s mutilation MO was inspired by a foundational Masonic myth associated with the temple: the ritual punishment of three Jewish craftsmen – Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum – condemned to death by Solomon.

Murder by Decree touches on the infamous graffito found on Goulston Street, right by one of the crime scenes, which read: “The Juwes [sic] are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.”

The mystery surrounding this cryptic phrase has been hotly debated. In this film account, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s inseparable creations Sherlock Holmes and Watson are the “damn consulting detectives” (as one Scotland Yard honcho puts it), wading into the investigation surrounding who butchered Whitechapel prostitutes in 1888.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, as this is director Bob Clark, we get some Black Christmas-style POV shots from Jack’s perspective. Sherlock Holmes, played by a casually charming Christopher Plummer, is called into action by a mysterious Citizens’ Committee on Jack the Ripper’s trail who suggest “if it was rich women who’d struck his fancy,” the case would’ve drawn more interest. This cynical sentiment carries on right into present day with a Canadian example being the Highway of Tears murders.

Holmes is ever a jokester, gently ribbing Watson (the redoubtable James Mason) over the old codger’s supposed ways with the ladies.

Also here, Donald Sutherland as oddball spiritualist medium (and historical footnote) Robert Lees, who as a teen once claimed to have relayed posthumous messages from Prince Albert to Queen Victoria!

Sutherland’s wonderfully over-the-top, sporting a giant walrus mustache and conveying messages to Holmes and his bemused sidekick about his “visions” regarding who’d perpetrated the gruesome killings.

Murder by Decree is a fun period-accurate procedural with nice suspense.

It’s also the first film that scared the pants off this reviewer, so it was a joy to revisit. Murder by Decree has across-the-board fine performances and choice lines (“We’re grappling with a dark intention”) and is well worth a look.

***1/2 (out of 5)

[CHECK OUT EPISODE 6 OF THE REALLY AWFUL MOVIES PODCAST, WHY WE LOVE HORROR MOVIES FOR FURTHER DISCUSSION ABOUT MURDER BY DECREE]