Friday, September 26, 2008
By: MrDisgusting
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Earlier today we came across a horror website called Schlock Around The Clock, what we didn't know was that the owner, Michael Adams, is now only reviewer over at Empire Magazine, but also a writer prepping his first horror book -- also titled SCHLOCK AROUND THE CLOCK. What the "project" is about will definitely interest the lot of you, read on for the skinny.
SCHLOCK AND AWE
In her seminal essay Trash, Art And The Movies, legendary film critic Pauline Kael said that part of the romance of film was meeting other fans who felt as you did.
“You know each other at once because you talk less about good movies than about what you love in bad movies,” she wrote.
Empire magazine critic Michael Adams has taken that notion to the extreme with a project he calls Schlock Around The Clock.
After having to watch the Duff sisters’ Material Girls in the line of reviewing duty in December 2006, Adams was shocked to then discover that the movie was at the Number 1 spot on the IMDB’s Bottom 100.
“Sure it was crap,” Adams says. “Utter, utter crap – but was it the worst movie ever made? I couldn’t shake the question.”
An obsession was born, to answer for himself: “What’s the worst movie ever made?”
Starting on New Year’s Day 2007, he set himself the task of watching at least one terrible movie every day for the entire year – while also balancing two jobs, his own scriptwriting ambitions and raising a new baby daughter.
He looked at the IMDB’s most hated, Razzie winners, infamous flops, grindhouse slime, A-list vanity projects and took on the CVs of the likes of Ed Wood, Andy Milligan, Doris Wishman, Al Adamson and other schlockmeisters.
The result is a book called Schlock Around The Clock, which traces Adams’ quest to tackle a mountain of tapes and discs, all bought by running his Visa card waaaay into the red.
And, adding to the degree of difficulty, Adams watched the schlock in the order dictated by a hand-cranked “Bad Movie Bingo” machine, meaning he’d never know whether he was going to get a Robot Monster or a Showgirl next.
“It was funny, frustrating and almost always freaky,” says Adams of the never-ending plasma-screen parade of martial arts morons, bouncing bimbos, reefer madmen, breakdancers, juvenile delinquents and megalomaniacal disembodied brains he witnessed.
“And what you forget is how many big stars and filmmakers have slipped into utter dross – or have learned by starting out in trash and working their way up. You know, like J.J. Abrams doing the sound effects and music for Don Dohler’s Nightbeast when he was 16, or John Travolta as a melting bit player in The Devil’s Rain. No-one in Hollywood’s immune from a bit of schlock now, then... or again.”
Over his year of schlock, Adams’ day jobs saw him go face-to-face with the likes of Matt Damon, Michael Bay, Seth Rogen and The Rock, but his real excitement came from speaking to other bad-film aficionados, cats like Joe Dante, John Landis, Eli Roth and Edgar Wright, who gave him their recommendations for the movies that just had to be on his list.
So, what’s the worst movie ever made? Adams is pretty sure he’s found it, but he’s not saying for now.
“Put it this way, the criteria was to find a movie that was less stimulating, less enjoyable, than watching a blank screen for two hours. It was a pretty funny process getting there because, inadvertently or otherwise, a lot of movies have something worthwhile, some glimmer of entertainment or comic value. But towards the end I found one that I just could not believe had been made. And believe me, you’d rather watch paint dry than see this sucker.”
Adams is now putting the finishing touches on his tome and is in the process of finding a publisher for his comic-memoir epic.
In the meantime, he’s proving he’s nothing if not a glutton for punishment by continuing to watch bad movies, talk to filmmakers and writers about their guiltiest pleasures, and generally wax lyrical about trash at his very cool blog, also called Schlock Around The Clock.
He has recently talked to George A. Romero, David Koepp, Brian Trenchard-Smith and reviewed the likes of Space Chimps, Zombie Strippers and Snakes On A Train. But be warned – he is also the man who gave the world its first Beverly Hills Chihuahua review… and gave it a thumbs up (something Aint-It-Cool-News talkbacker can’t yet forgive).
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