So we gave up and turned to Prime Video, which is where we came across a documentary titled “The 50 Worst Movies Ever Made.” I figured it was merely a list of Elvis flicks, but his, it turns out, were Shakespearean in comparison.
What else can you say about a list in which “They Saved Hitler’s Brain” was only considered to be the 39th worst movie ever made? That came out in 1968, the same year “Hillbillies in a Haunted House” was released. Or escaped.
No. 12 on the list was “The Crippled Masters” (1982), which sensitively explored the question, “Would a kung fu fighter with no arms defeat a kung fu fighter with no legs?” How could there possibly have been eleven movies worse than that?
Movies about women — most of them running around screaming and wearing tight sweaters — were prominent in the ‘50s. “Voodoo Woman,” “The Wild Women of Wongo” and “Mesa of Lost Women,” which involved a mad scientist creating superwomen, spiders and “giant dwarfs.” ( I’m still researching to learn how large a giant dwarf would be). But we had to wait until 1976 to be treated to “Bloodsucking Freaks,” which, according to its promos, featured “women who ate ears” and “crazed midgets”
Monstrous confrontations filled the list. “Dracula vs. Frankenstein,” “The Robot vs. the Aztec
Mummy,” “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians,” “Frankenstein Conquers the World” and “Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla.” Inexplicably, Hollywood never got around to “Crippled Masters vs. Crazed Midgets and Giant Dwarfs. "
According to the documentary, the worst movie of all time was “The Unworldly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-up Zombies.” Which clearly was the worst movie title of all time.
But my vote for worst movie would have gone to “The Thing With Two Heads,” a 1972 classic involving an arthritic white bigot having his head surgically attached to the body of a healthy Black, convict. How bad was it? Well, the flick’s publicity warned that viewers might incur “cere ral hemorrhages, cardiac seizures or fainting spells.”
I probably would have just died laughing,
Contact this columnist at dlstew_2000@yahoo.com.
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