Other than a mistake about what happened to the airliner in the first Airport (see below for a plot spoiler if you’ve not yet seen that 1970 potboiler), Phil Hall’s book is a fun chunk of opinions on one hundred classic and not so classic flicks he’s seen and is worth checking out for his thoughts on 100 movies including some consider better than the “bad” label he slaps them with. Let’s just say if you REALLY liked Mystic River, Hall’s dissection of it will make your eyebrows crisp up but good from the lasers shooting from your eye sockets.

The author carefully notes early on that not everyone will like his picks and that yes, there are a ton of films that I wish would have made the cut in this volume. Amazing junk such as R.O.T.O.R. (in my mind, the “best” worst rip-off of The Terminator ever made) or the epically stupid A*P*E would have been superior to Gamera in terms of classic badness and hell, I’d have dropped the student film version of A Streetcar Named Desire in favor of a Moontrap, The Hidden II or even the Walter Matthau-directed Gangster Story, a film so awful I thought I was dreaming when I finally saw it very early one morning on TCM…

Still, when Hall shoots, he often scores. Ever since paying good money to see Starcrash, Alien Contamination, Hercules and Treasure of the Four Crowns, I’ve always thought Luigi Cozzi (or Lewis Coates, as he’s credited) deserved an a chapter in a bigger book devoted to his mangling of the horror, fantasy and sci-fi genres and I think Hall should be the one to write it. His Starcrash review made me laugh out loud because I lived in an area where that clunker was the ONLY alternative at the movies when Star Wars was sold out during its second run and I recall a lot of people got suckered into buying tickets because they hadn’t seen the better film and thought they were the same thing. Boy, were they wrong by a few Kessel Runs…

He even covers a few silent films here, there’s an infamous porn flick (which I never want to see based on the description) as well as Andy Warhol’s art film, Empire (which I managed to watch a two hour chunk of some years back without keeling over) and a few of the usual suspects get trotted out and given a fresh look. Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space gets a nice defense of the wacky bits that actually work in favor of it, The Conqueror emerges as the tragic waste of money and lives it will always be remembered as and yes, Manos, the Hand of Fate, Mommie Dearest and Santa Claus Conquers the Martians are trotted out for more public floggings. Even if you’ve seen most or all of these flicks previously, Hall’s writing makes you want to sit down with them again and drag some friends along with you on your trips to memory lane littered with stale popcorn and “what the hell is that sticky stuff on the floor?”.

Another solid thing is how Hall doesn’t make this a total ego-fest, pointing to other reviewers of different eras who also savaged many of the films he writes about. As he also notes, this isn’t a “be-all, end-all” work at all and yes, anyone who reads it will have their own personal list of awful classics. Still, the book is a breezy read (I actually went through it in a single sitting – thank goodness for snappy writing!), and definitely worth toting around if you’ve got fellow movie-heads to debate your own least favorite “best bad” flicks with. If there’s a second volume in the oven (and there should be), it would be pretty cool to find out which films didn’t make the cut here as well as what new terrors await in those pages.

Yeah – that’s a recommendation, folks.

Oh yeah, Spoiler Theater time (skip this if you haven’t seen the movie yet!):

In Airport, Vah Heflin’s D.O. Guerrero doesn’t “destroy” Trans Global Airlines Flight Two at all. When it’s discovered he’s brought a homemade bomb on board, he panics and runs into the rear restroom with it and after a few seconds, sets off the device, which kills him instantly, blows a Guerrero-sized hole in the plane and critically injures the pretty stewardess (Jacqueline Bisset) knocking on the door. The plane is then forced to make an emergency landing back at Lincoln International Airport, arcing back into the part of the story about another plane stuck in the deep snow on the main runway that now needs to be moved in a bigger hurry lest Flight Two collide with it when it arrives… SUSPENSE!