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Lights ... camera ... yeecchh!!!
Gomez, left, from "The Addams Family," and Tor from "Plan Nine from Outer Space," a k a John Javna and Ed Polish, want to start a Rogue Valley bad film society. Find bad films a guilty pleasure? There might be a group for you By Bill Varble Ed Polish is looking for people who like bad movies. Really bad movies. "Ishtar," "Mars Needs Women," "Plan Nine From Outer Space" kind of bad. Hold your nose and hurl wisecracks at the screen kind of bad. Polish and fellow bad film lover John Javna want to start a Bad Film Society. The group‘s members would get together to watch, nay, wallow in, such fare. "It might be considered a support group," says Polish, who operates Ephemera, a Phoenix wholesale mail-order business. "We would get together and make fun of the movies." The way the men envision it, cheesy-cinemaphiles would gather for pot-luck and socializing and then sink happily to the level of a picture like "Blood Sucking Freaks," "Rock ‘n’ Roll High School" or "Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band." "It would be sort of like ‘Mystery Science Theatre 3000,’ " Polish says. The premise of that recently departed TV series, known to fans as MST3K, was that actor and writer Michael J. Nelson and his robot pals, Crow and Tom Servo, were trapped in space where they were forced by an evil gal to watch cheesy movies — the worst that she could find. The characters commented hilariously from the bottom of the screen, where they showed up in silhouette hurling the bons mots you wish you’d thought of. "‘Mystery Science Theater 3000’ is a guidepost," Polish says. Both Polish and Javna are businessmen. Ephemera, Polish’s business in Talent, sells buttons, magnets and a motley array of wacky, pop-culture paraphernalia. Javna recently sold his publishing company that put out the wildly successful "Uncle John’s Reader" series of trivia/history/pop culture books sold nationally. "We’ve been fans of offbeat culture, weird monsters and stuff," Polish says. "The point is to get like-minded people together for fun." "We’ve wanted to do this for years," Javna says. "It’s a way to have a sense of community. We get together and eat and say we all love the same thing here. The climax is to watch something truly horrible." There’s no venue as yet. "It depends on the response we get," Polish says. "If there are enough people, maybe we could get a public place." The men have a 16-millimeter film projector and a projection TV at the ready. The project is strictly for fun, not business. "We are doing it for the love of it," Polish says. He and Javna say they’d like to hear from anybody who has a bad movie collection. Lovers of cinematic bombs can drop an e-mail to ephemera@mind.net, or call Polish at 488-5117 . They’d consider working with a movie theater that would show classic stinkers or have special bad film nights for current bad films. What are the criteria for true cinematic awfulness? "My definition is very broad," Polish says. "It includes weird sequels like ‘Airport ‘75,’ the worst of Drew Barrymore and Christina Ricci, the later films of Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, things like ‘Shakes the Clown’ with Bobcat Goldthwait. There are zombie pictures, blacksploitation flicks ... " He mentions the films of George Romero, Roger Corman, Ray Harryhausen, Jerry Lewis, Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr., much of Quentin Tarrantino and David Cronenberg. There are the "Bollywood" films from India, ’60s spy flicks like "In Like Flint" and "The Silencers." "The Brain that Wouldn’t Die." The worst of Ed Wood. Anything with a title that starts with the words "Invasion of the" or "I Was a Teen-Age." There’s "The Tingler," which was shown in 1958 with about three seats in each theater rigged for a mild electric charge to coincide with a scorpion-like monster. What about all those things with Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez, the entire oeuvre of Pamela Anderson-Lee? So many movies, so little time. |
