* The Most Unerotic Concept in Pornography * The Worst Performance by an Animal * The Biggest Ripoff in Hollywood History * The Worst Performance by an Actor as Jesus Christ * The Most Ridiculous Monster in Screen History
These are just some of the categories you'll find in the first "reverse" awards ceremony to honor the all-time horrors in Hollywood History. Here is a celebration (illustrated in glorious black and white) of the best of the worst cinematic catastrophes -- the shimmering stars, the dreadful directors, and the dubious dialogue that made these movies so abysmal.
Remember John Travolta as a melting monster in The Devil's Rain? Henry Fonda as a fearless bee battler in The Swarm? Mary Tyler Moore as a heartsick nun in love with Elvis Presley in Change of Habit? How about Scuttlebutt the Talking Duck in Everything's Ducky?
See if you can guess the winners in each of the 30 award categories -- from The Most Obnoxious Child Performer of All Time to the Life Achievement Awards: Worst Actor, Actress, and Director. Applaud the winner in a national poll for The (very) Worst Film of All Time and The Worst Films Compendium, an annotated index of the best of the unbelievable baddies.
MC'd by the Brothers Medved--Harry, author of The Fifty Worst Films of All Time, and Michael, author of What Really Happened to the Class of '65? -- The Golden Turkey Awards is a cornucopia of cinemediocrity.
WARNING: Over 425 actual films are described in this book, but one is a complete hoax. Can you find it?
American radio show host, author, political commentator, and film critic.
MICHAEL MEDVED’s daily three-hour radio program, The Michael Medved Show, reaches five million listeners on more than three hundred stations coast to coast.
He is the author of twelve other books, including the bestsellers The 10 Big Lies About America, Hollywood vs. America, Hospital, and What Really Happened to the Class of ’65?
He is a member of USA Today’s board of contributors, is a former chief film critic for the New York Post, and, for more than a decade, cohosted Sneak Previews, the weekly movie-review show on PBS. Medved is an honors graduate of Yale with departmental honors in American history. He lives with his family in the Seattle area.
I've owned my copy of 'The Golden turkey Awards' for somewhere in the region of almost 40 years and it is still a bedrock text for anyone interested in bad movies. Before there were the Razzies, before there were countless blogs and podcasts that discussed how crap 'Robot Monster' was, before Tim Burton made his brilliant film 'Ed Wood', there were the Medveds and their series of books that included this title. In fact one could argue that the Medveds effectively created the foundations for bad film appreciation. So this book comes with a lot of residual power as an expression of pop culture.
With that in mind it must be said that in some respects 'The Golden Turkey Awards' now comes with some problems that are more noticeable as time moves on. Some of these are stylistic concerns that were inbuilt into the book, Others are related to the age and timing of the work. These issues don't damage the book too badly, but they might be of some concern to readers of today. Plus, and this must be noted, the underpinning concept of the Medved's is wonderful. There is a lot going on here that readers can and will enjoy.
Taking the problems with 'The Golden Turkey Awards' first, it must be said that there are times in the book when the Medveds' criticisms of the films fall flat. Yes, that may be due to the fact that they are trying to describe scenes or elements of a movie, and one really can only understand the subjective value of said film, performance etc if one sees it. It's very easy to talk about how bad (for example) 'At Long Last Love' was as a musical, but it really takes watching the movie to get a true understanding of it's status as a 'Golden Turkey'.
However there are times when the Medveds' criticisms of their selections come across as snide, hollow and built around a cheap gag or two. One can accept that as part of the appeal of their approach, however at the end of the day film criticism that becomes supercillious or condescending is in danger of becoming worthless. 'The Golden Turkeys' sometimes veers a little over this line as the authors try and share their opinions on bad movies.
Another problem with this book is that it old, and the selections made by the Medveds' reflect their cultural and contemporary bias. There is an overabundance of focus on Grade Z schlock from Hollywood during the forty years preceding the book's publication, with a nod to Japanese monster flicks and the occassional big budget mainstream studio production. The result is most of the movies and associated cinematic failures come from the fifties, sixties and seventies, and are thus highly unlikely to be seen today. One can't fault the Medveds for writing a book that was based on their (at the time) considerable knowledge of bad cinema per se but one can raise this as a concern for any current reader who is looking for more recent and more diverse 'turkeys'.
To some extent this problem is also an opportunity for the modern reader; one can find many of the schlock films referenced by the authors on YouTube and other internet platforms, and it is rewarding to find footage that at explains or supports the Medved's opinions. For example, there is plenty of film available now from the work of Ed Wood and Herschell Gordomn Lewis. Crap films ranging from 'The Thing With Two Heads' to 'Teahouse of the August Moon' can be found either in part or in full with a simple Google search. There is certainly a frisson of pleasure when one finally sees why 'The Brain from Planet Arous' is listed herein.
Going back to my earlier points regarding how this book helped establish the cult of bad film appreciation, 'The Golden Turkey Awards' can be attributed with the honour of putting Ed Wood Jnr into the pantheon of iconic Hollywood film makers. Yes, he made shockingly bad films, yet as demonstrated in books like 'A Nightmare of Ecstasy' and the aforementioned Tim Burton biopic he was also a fascinating individual. The Medveds did cinema culture a service by reminding people of the man behind 'Glen or Glenda' and 'Plan Nine from Outer Space'.
Since 'The Golden Turkey Awards' was published a veritable cornucopeia of shit movies, performances, scripts etc has emerged. Just recently the train wreck that was 'Cats' got a release, and I am sure that if the Medveds were to update this book it would consider such criminal acts of cinema. At the end of the day this is a relatively light hearted and entertaining book that has had an impact deeper and longer than its authors probably considered. Anyone with a love of film will find something to enjoy if they read this book.
It was 1977. We were sitting around Bob Beasley's apartment, eating pizza and watching Fritz the Night Owl on WBNS TV. Fritz was running this movie, this amazingly awful, ludicrous movie called "Plan 9 From Outer Space." How could any movie be this bad and still get distributed, we all wondered?
Some years later, a promo copy of "The Golden Turkey Awards" arrived at the TV station where I worked. It was laying on a desk, and a friend and I began flipping it. "I'll bet they've never heard of "Plan 9 From Outer Space," we said to ourselves.
Spoilers! It's the grand prize winner, and this is the book that made it famous, and reintroduced Ed Wood to the world.
I'm sure the book is out of date now, as other reviewers have noted. There have probably been many more turkeys made since the original publication. But it's still funny and the movies it covers are still very bad!
Very bad, very old movies, organized into crazy categories such as "The Most Ridiculous Monster in Screen History", "The Most Badly Bumbled Bee Movie of All Time", and "The Worst Two-Headed Transplant Movie Ever Made" by film critic Michael Medved and his brother Harry. If you like old, bad movies, you'll love this book. I wish someone would update it!
Dated and somewhat flawed but still very interesting book. Full of black and white photos.
The main part of the book is divided into different categories (such as Most Brainless Brain Movie, Worst Vegetable Movie, Worst Title, etc.). Each category contains a handful of bad films with a description of what makes them so bad. Some categories cover "Worst Actor" or "Worst Director". Since the book is restricted to such categories, many bad films are not covered. Most of the films discussed date from the mid-fifties to the late seventies. Only a handful are from before 1955.
The authors conducted a poll to find the worst films and published the results in a back-of-the-book list. The poll results skew heavily towards 1970s movies with a sprinkling of 1960s and late 1950s films. Some of the choices seem very odd. Is Plan Nine From Outer Space truly worse than Robot Monster? (At least you can laugh at Plan Nine. There's nothing redeeming about Robot Monster). And I don't think I saw a single mention of Coleman Francis anywhere. That seems a glaring omission for a book about bad movies.
I recommend this book with the caveat that it was published in 1980. Many terrible films have been released since then. But if you like reading about bad films, you'll probably enjoy this book. I'd argue that the chapter on Ed Wood alone is worth the price of admission. At times sad and pathetic, at other times hilarious, the revelation that Wood claimed every time Tor Johnson came over for a visit he broke Woods' toilet seat has left me with a mental image I will never be able to forget.
I spent many childhood hours laughing about the films described in this book. This was in the days before most of us had videotape players, much less somewhere to rent the movies, so I never actually saw any of them unless they happened to come on late-night tv-- which rarely happened. But the descriptions were so much fun that reading about them was probably a better experience than seeing them would have been. Years later, when I eventually was able to see most of Ed Wood's films, it was almost as though I was reconnecting with old friends.
This book is very dated at this point, of course. I would love to see a sequel that bring us into the 21st century!
This book was a relic of my youth (library check outs), yet I had never owned a copy until now...a very fine "First Perigee Printing," 1980 paperback for a mere $1.50 procured at Nashville's mega-mammoth bookstore warehouse, McKay's -- a.k.a., my second home.
Taking some its bad movie award categories to heart, let us make our own, in the style of the book: "Best bad-movie book written by a once-cool dude who 'got it' but later became a smooth-talking disinformation agent for Fox News..." And the winner is: ... Michael Medved. But hey, lots of once-cool dudes seem to have succumbed to the perks of being Fox disinformation agents. I hear the pay is good, and you get invited to exclusive functions. The free groping is passe, though ... ah, the good ole days ...
As fun as the book is, though, I always thought of it as something a bit too frivolous for my 'serious' film library, but there are several reasons my attitude has changed on that, which I will further elaborate. The real clincher that forced my purchase, though was this (somewhat edited) passage describing the Medved brothers' journey in the early 1970s to the Arcade, a sleazy skid-row LA movie house to see Scream, Blacula, Scream, a film they eventually bestowed with one of their golden turkeys:
"...Our tickets were taken by a hulking security guard nearly seven feet tall. His presence no doubt helped to ensure a restful evening for the audience members. The most enthusiastic spectator the night we paid our visit was a large rat who ran down an aisle to the front of the theater to get a better view of the action on screen."
Not only do we get the grindhouse atmosphere in this and the following passages (in which a small riot nearly starts because of a disruptive elderly cougher), but we have a very sly comment on the quality of the film: a rat wanted a better view of it.
Needless to say, because of its vintage, the book's overview encompasses films that are all now considered ancient, and to its credit it reaches all the way back to the silent cinema in its march forward to the late '70s. I offer a little perspective for all of those who call the book "dated": the movies had been around for 90 years when this book was published, producing vastly more than has been produced in the last 35 years. Keep that in mind.
Would an update be fun? Maybe. But the book would no longer be seen as terribly unique in light of all the relatively trivial grindhouse/psychotronic/exploitation/bad movie books (and even Ebert's Your Movie Sucks) that have been published in the intervening years.
What this book (and its sequel, Son of...) deserves credit for is starting the whole genre of psychotronic film publishing. The Medved brothers take it from a snarky, satirical, sarcastic angle, to be sure -- in contrast to many of the latter-day books that seem to have a genuine respect and affection for putrid cinematic effluvia. The difference in tone is that the Medveds believed bad movies should be called out and shamed, while the newer aficionados (even when snarky) celebrate the fare's sleaze, cheapness and cheesiness, and wear their checklists of crap like badges of honor.
One of the good things about this fallout is that camp has gotten the respect it deserves. We now can unashamedly declare Bette Davis' Beyond the Forest a cinematic masterpiece, revel in the repressed turmoil and undercurrents in the hysterical Douglas Sirk melodramas of the 1950s, respect the style, gusto, flamboyance, and possibly unintended subversiveness of Russ Meyer and his grindhouse kin.
This book came out as the midnite movie was taking hold across the country, and deserves some credit, too, for helping fuel that phenomenon. While in college I attended a bad movie marathon week at the Oriental Landmark Theatre in Milwaukee that was pretty much a reiteration of titles in this book (Plan 9 From Outer Space, The Terror of Tiny Town, and so on.)
It was coincidence, of course, that this book was published the same year as New York film enthusiast Michael J. Weldon published his first issues of Psychotronic Video, a handmade homage to exploitation and cheesy sci-fi, but in terms of the zeitgeist there was no coincidence at all.
The theaters where we once saw these bad entertainments are largely gone, but it lives on in video formats and the new places that hipsters gather to celebrate same, the Comic-Cons and the like.
As for the book itself, I won't review its content, which is consistently hilarious. I plan to read it in small bits, particularly at times when things get bad. I can smile at something worse than my own lot.
It is film geekery's urtext, and can be appreciated as part of this complete breakfast
And Michael Medved has graduated from bad movies to bad politics. Oh but for the days of the more fun Medved; those days before Fox News and its ilk have made things a lot less fun for us all.
Back when this book came out it was the only way to learn about any of these movies. I had never heard of most of them and this became my checklist of movies I wanted to see. This is basically the book that spawned MST3K.
I guess this book would be considered outdated, but that also gives in some sort of historical interest.
Anywho, this is one of those fun reads that can be read in rather than straight through - and reading reviews of awful movies is arguably more fun than reading reviews of good movies - although folks who don't agree with that claim would probably not enjoy this one as much as moiself.
It's certainly dated (it was written in 1980), God knows there have certainly been some spectacularly awful films made in the last 27-odd years (Troll 2 comes to mind as being worse than anything in this book), but still, it's pretty amusing.
Hilarious. A tribute the world of dud movies, and there are an astonishing range of them out there. Out of print for years but well worth tracking down. See also The Fifty Worst Movies of All Time.
It's fun for one reading, but going back to it too many times really dilutes its entertainment. Get in a bargain bin, it's not something you'll keep and treasure.