These boards are a joke.

Point well-taken and overdue. The real issue here is that a generation or two of would-be film fans/buffs have been indoctrinated into the Bad is Good, rush to the bottom mentality -largely popularized by the pernicious books by the Medved Bros.: Golden Turkey Awards. There has always been in entertainment the notion of "camp" and of course camp followers, now relegated to the Gay Community but always there. At my local theater in Chelsea, they show perfectly good older movies one night a week with a Drag Queen host, leading the audience in catcalls trashing the movie. I feel cheated because some of these movies are well worth attending (if the audience would keep the noise down, that is): they had the Pam Grier classic Foxy Brown and Irwin Allen's The Poseidon Adventure recently. Both have obvious camp content, but are fine movies in their own right. Making fun of movies rather than letting them stand (or fall) on the merits is a fool's mission. {Here's a telling personal anecdote: at the NYC press screening for one of Frank Sinatra's latterday films THE FIRST DEADLY SIN (nearly 30 years ago) I remember having to actually attempt to shush Harry Shearer, because the popular satirist, pre-SPINAL TAP, was loudly yelling out sarcastic remarks at every scene, in anticipation of the invention of such shows as Mystery Science -but he wasn't letting any of us critics in attendance watch the film.}

John Waters is probably the most famous current "camp" filmmaker -he loves camp from the '30s and '40s, and created his own version of it over the past 40 years. That is all well & good, but what I find alarming is the trend, amplified on a website like IMDb -even sporting a Bottom 100 category to throw gasolene on the flames - to actively seek out the WORST. Thousands of young fans are wasting their time, and I'm talking about tens of thousands of hours in front of the DVD screen, watching what they have been told is disreputable entertainment, the lousier the better. It might be softcore sex films (take your pick from Column A reading Joe D'Amato and Jess Franco or column B featuring Joe Sarno and the Something Weird brigade) or horror films (same guys plus the hundreds of no-budget videomakers and their favorite low-rent scream queens). But they are missing the point.

We older film buffs (and I admit to plenty of mileage) were ALWAYS attracted to unusual/exotic/B movies. I mean real Bs -the second half of a double bill, analogous to the B-side on a 45rpm single, not the way the term is misused today to mean simply cheapjack, standalone indie movies. But the difference is, and it is a MAJOR distinction, that film buffs from the '30s through '70s (PRE-VHS, PRE-BETA, PRE-DVD, PRE-BLU-RAY) paid our dues. We traveled to remote or disreputable cinemas to catch rare films. We sifted through miles of celluloid in search of a GREAT, UNSUNG movie, not to find the worst. The "worst" is a term thrown around endlessly on IMDb by ignorant louts who haven't even given the subject any serious thought (I'll get back to that issue in a minute).

There was plenty of junk to watch, but a brilliant B movie (think DETOUR or GUN CRAZY if you want a famous one) was always lurking there to be discovered and discussed. I don't recall wasting much of my time arguing the demerits of crap or making fun of it the way Ghoulardi or other chiller theater horror hosts used to do, or parasitically making one's own programming out of it as MST3K did.

Back to THE WORST. What IMDb youngsters keep saying has "got to be the worst film ever made", over and over, is simply a mindless recognition of mediocrity. Yes Virginia, there are several 100,000 mediocre feature films out there, many of them lost. To put things in perspective, as a professional film critic I used to see many, many films that never got released, barely made it out of the lab, or were accorded just a single "film festival" screening, and never shown again. The late Richard Schwarz, owner of the Thalia Theater on the Upper Westside, used to show unreleased, random films late night on Fridays and I saw plenty of rarities in that fashion. These films are not even listed at all on IMDb, since unlike today, when anything & everything gets a posting, these were made before IMDb was invented in 1990. The unreleased films weren't necessarily terrible movies, but were often just made-on-spec (no distributor) fledgling efforts, mediocre in the sense of repeating what we've seen over and over again before, but not as good as their forerunners. So no one bought them and no one ever distributed them. A few (THE MOVING FINGER is an example) will emerge decades later thanks to Something Weird, but most are just lost films.

I've done some sampling recently, but if you took the time to actually sift through IMDb on titles produced from 1995 to date you will find THOUSANDS of English-language films that similarly never got released, never found a distributor, only played publicly at the usual herd of hard-up film festivals or had the most token of brief video exposure. This is because the economic bubbles of recent years have encouraged the production of tens of thousands of indie films, few of which rise to the surface and get a decent exposure to audiences.

When the worst is really addressed you have to think about the hundreds of thousands of hardcore porn titles (or UNTITLED), short and feature-length, a mountain of junk that has been cranked out worldwide dating back to early 20th Century stag films and now since 1969 an impossible to catalogue roster of XXX garbage made both professionally and more recently by amateurs, and then recycled with an endless array of compilations. The IMDb lists 47,000 titles in the Adult category, just scratching the surface. To paraphrase sci-fi author Theodore Sturgeon, 99% of this is crud, though in the porn world I daresay that 99.999% of hardcore porn is crud. Amongst these 200,000 or so titles you will find perhaps 50,000 candidates for the WORST movie (or video) ever made, to which conventional films, in the unblocked section of IMDb's roster, are ALL superior. (Just look at the porn fans' comments on IMDb -they are constantly lamenting the "lack of a plot" in today's porn, and those 50,000 I'm alluding to are of the all-sex, plotless variety.) That's why it is so nonsensical to pretend that this or that mediocre Larry Buchanan or Ed Wood film is the worst or any sort of discovery. It's a fool's errand and impossible quest. And remember, the term "most mediocre" is an oxymoron -it's like saying "most moderate" in a political or any other sense.