It Came from Hollywood (1982)

"I want my money back."

“In no other art form but film is garbage recognized as garbage and loved so dearly as such,” said Michael Spies in the opening salvo of his review for the theatrical release of It Came from Hollywood (1982). But as his review in the Corpus Christi Times (November 8, 1982) spools out from there, it becomes readily apparent this really wasn’t a “review” but more of a mental meltdown by way of an existential crisis as Spies tried to get his head around the recent incursion of the glorification of the worst films ever made, which kinda reached its preliminary zenith with the release of It Came from Hollywood in 1982, which itself was inspired by the ringleaders of this current surge, Harry and Michael Medved, whose book, The Fifty Worst Films of All Time (1978), was such a surprise hit upon its release it merited a sequel, The Golden Turkey Awards (1980), which added even more fuel to this particular craze -- a “public outcry for the preservation of our precious bad movie heritage,” Spies opined. “It’s nostalgia as parody.” 

 “Pulp fiction may still give some sort of narrative pleasure. Kitschy art may still serve some decorative function. Cheap music may have a potent sentimental pull. A dreadful play calls on our powers of politeness. But 12th-rate movies do none of these things and are still enjoyed, merely for being hopelessly inept or idiotic,” added Spies from his ink-stained pulpit. “They are admired for failing, without honor, without respectability, without any redeeming qualities. Music, photography, writing, acting, directing all go down the drain and we cheer this nightmare. The impossible has happened. Everything has gone wrong. If all efforts have been wasted, a bad movie is merely depressing. [But] if no effort appears to have been made, then we’re talking [about the] unspeakable, appalling pleasure known only to moviegoers.”

To be fair, this phenomenon was neither new nor unique to this era as fringe cinephiles had been struggling for mainstream legitimacy for the cinematically-challenged since the first motion picture camera rolled. For example, way back in 1926, British critic Iris Barry made this observation in The Spectator, “I recommend the smaller and obscurer of the picture houses to the film lover’s attention. They teach one how incredibly bad the worst films can be. There is a sort of perverse pleasure to be [gotten] out of a really unspeakable film. Joys unknown to the casual frequenter of picture houses are open to habitues who note with glee how many famous stars are shockingly inept.”

Not quite 60-years later, in that same review/therapy session for It Came from Hollywood, Spies also noted how he was equally baffled by a couple of these very same habitues sitting behind him in the darkened theater, who easily identified nearly every piece of low-rent schlock that appeared onscreen as the film reels expired -- from The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) to Zombies of the Stratosphere (1952).

Fair or not, it was usually these types of z-grade Creature Features or spit ‘n’ bailing-wire Sci-Fi misfires, and other genre fare, both foreign and domestic, that usually took the brunt of this kinda ‘worst of the worst’ shellacking. But a whole new generation of Monster Kids were raised on these B-Pictures and Bottom Bills with syndicated Shock packages back in the 1950s, which started another uniquely American phenomenon of the Horror Host, scattered all over the TV dial, who served as curators and tour guides to all kinds of crap connoisseurs, including director Joe Dante -- Piranha (1978), Gremlins (1984), who, like a lot of kids of his age-strata, began to realize they weren’t as alone as they thought in their populist passions thanks to fanzines like Famous Monsters of Filmland and Castle of Frankenstein.

“When Famous Monsters came out, it united a world of geekdom whose members were surprised and reassured that there were others like themselves -- and lots of them,” said Dante in an interview with Matt Patches for The Dissolve (June 19, 2014). And, “The badge of honor was to somehow get your name printed in the magazine -- a validation of your existence!”

And to those ends, Dante sent letter after schmoozing letter to Forrest J. Ackerman -- the founder, writer, and managing editor of Famous Monsters, about his love of monster movies in general and Famous Monsters’ coverage of the same, his viewing habits, and what he thought were the best films the genre had to offer, which netted him bupkus. In fact, strangely enough, young Dante got no response at all until he regrouped and tried again; only this time, he sent in a list of what he felt were the 50 worst horror films of all time. But his reward for this latest effort wasn’t his name in the magazine -- at least not yet, but a phone call from the Ackermansion by the Ackermonster himself!

Seems Uncle Forry didn’t want to print his letter but wanted permission to expand it into a full blown, credited article. Young Dante eagerly agreed, and several months later a package arrived with a complimentary copy of the newly minted Famous Monsters of Filmland #18 (July, 1962); and inside, under the banner of Dante’s Inferno, was his letter, now article, spread over 10-pages.

Now, this wasn’t a countdown from the worst to the absolute worst. No. Even though each entry was assigned a number, the list was simply presented in alphabetical order, ranging from Adventure Island (1947) to Zombies on Broadway (1945). The usual dreck-drenched suspects were all present and accounted for -- Ed Wood, Jerry Warren and Roger Corman. And while films like Fire Maidens from Outer Space (1955), Frankenstein’s Daughter (1958) and Missile to the Moon (1959) are genuinely pretty terrible, others, well, maybe not. I mean, I kinda liked The Smiling Ghost (1941) and Cry of the Werewolf (1944), and will rabidly defend Rodan (1957) and Gigantis, the Fire Monster -- better known these days as Godzilla Raids Again (1959).

And Dante, who was all of 13 when he made this list, can be forgiven for some of these choices and might even take back some of them as tastes mature and evolve, and many of them have aged into a certain respectability -- Devil Girl from Mars (1955), I was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), Invasion of the Saucer-Men (1957) and The Blob (1958), which are now considered classics. But, that’s the fun thing about lists of this nature; the passionate arguments that ensue over them.

But the reaction to this article wasn’t necessarily positive nor fun. Even though Ackerman added a footnote to the article, saying it was all in jest, and felt no one would take it seriously, his publisher, Jim Warren, was not amused. At all. Apparently, James Nicholson, president of American International Pictures -- whose studio was well represented on the list, was royally pissed off over this exposé. And fearing if they continued to critically pan the films they were supposed to be celebrating, producers and studios like Nicholson and AIP would no longer cooperate with them, meaning no access, promotions, or stills. And with no more access or stills, there was no more magazine. And so, to prevent that from ever happening again, Warren basically forbade Ackerman from negatively criticizing any picture within the pages of Famous Monsters from that point forward.

Now, jump ahead to the 1970s, where, like Dante before him, Harry Medved was also becoming obsessed with low-rent Monster Movies. See, when his family moved from San Diego to Los Angeles in the mid-1960s, young Medved was soon glued to the tube for whatever Larry “Seymour” Vincent might’ve been showing on Fright Night for KHJ-TV and later on Seymour’s Monster Rally on KTLA. And around 1976, as the apocryphal story goes, while watching a broadcast of Del Tenney’s The Horror of Party Beach (1964), the 15-year old, fringe-film-addled fan barely took his eyes away from those kooky pigeon-toed, knock-kneed, google-eyed and bratwurst-bogarting radioactive boogeymen as they sloshed across the screen to the thundering chords of the Del-Aires to acknowledge his older brother’s new girlfriend when he tried to introduce her.

Now, putting politics and intelligent design quackery aside, Harry’s older brother, Michael Medved, was already an established author at the time of this incident with the best-seller, What Really Happened to the Class of ‘65, which was a follow-up on a Time magazine article on the aspirations of the Palisades High School’s senior class of ‘65 in suburban Los Angeles, which Michael and his co-author, David Wallechinsky, attended at the time. The book was later optioned by MCA/Universal and turned into a TV-series that ran for one, 14-episode season on NBC (1977-1978).

Now, as much as Harry was obsessed over these “terrible” films, Michael was just as interested in what made people like his brother devote that kind of time and passion on films without any perceptible redeeming qualities. And it was this nugget of a notion from which their book, The 50 Worst Films of All Time (and How They Got That Way) came into being.

“Ever since I was eight years old, I've just always been fascinated by bad movies,” confessed Harry Medved to Kris Gilpin in an interview for a Canadian fanzine called Yeech! (April, 1980). “I noticed that people usually have more fun laughing together over the bad films that they despise than trying to extol the virtues of the great cinema classics.”

Still, as proclaimed in the introduction for the book, “Why would anyone in their right mind write a book about bad movies?” Here, the co-author confirmed his love of this stuff, but contends he was not alone. For, “How else can you possibly explain the continued popularity of TV’s Late Late Shows unless you assume there are hundreds of thousands of people who take a perverse pleasure in some particularly ludicrous entertainments? The determined little cults that surround artistic films cannot compare in stubbornness or passion to these hooting cliques that continually boost such atrocities as Myra Breckinridge (1970) and Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964).” And in conclusion, “For too long, Hollywood has been sweeping its most embarrassing disasters under the rug. It’s time these wretched films received the public recognition they deserve as breathtaking achievements in their own right.”

But even if they wrote such a dubious tribute, would anybody actually read it? Well, first, they had to find a publisher who would buy into what they were selling. Here, they kinda ran into a wall. For who would pay good money for a book to read about films so bad that no one would ever pay to watch them in the first place? They finally got a nibble from Popular Library; and then, two years and 2000 screened films later, the finished book was published in 1978.

And to their credit, the Medveds decided to spread around their passive / aggressive criticism of these clunkers a bit, and went well beyond the usual fare, knee-capping several big studio sacred cows along with the usual one-lung productions of Poverty Row by breaking them down into several categories: Big Budget Flops -- Lost Horizon (1972), At Long Last Love (1975); Grade “Z” Atrocities -- Robot Monster (1953), Eegah! (1964); Overrated Art Films -- Ivan the Terrible I & II (1944), Last Year at Marienbad (1961); Implausible Oddities -- The Terror of Tiny Town (1938), The Last Movie (1971); Popular Triumphs -- Valley of the Dolls (1967), The Omen (1976); Egregious Genre Examples -- Twilight on the Rio Grande (1947), Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster (1972); Tarnished Stars -- John Wayne in The Conqueror (1956), Shirley Temple in That Hagen Girl (1947); and Oldies But Baddies -- Abraham Lincoln (1930), The Goldwyn Follies (1938), Jamaica Inn (1939).

Harry Medved and Randy Dreyfuss.

And while the work is credited to Harry Medved and Randy Dreyfuss, the book was at least partially or totally ghost-written by Michael Medved -- depending on which “cold feet” source you consult, who had his name removed right before it went to press, finding it slightly embarrassing and feared it might hurt his chances of becoming a “serious” writer. For the book’s press tour, the company line seemed to be that while the older Medved got the ball rolling he soon washed-out and couldn’t take the toll of watching all that garbage. And his younger brother appeared to relish telling anyone who’d listen that these films gave his older brother a bad case of diarrhea.

Thus, despite this misdirection, Michael did the writing while Harry handled the research, tapping into sources like the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences, the Museum of Modern Art, several studio libraries -- including American International, who had lightened up considerably since 1962, and the film archives at USC and UCLA, where he screened hundreds of films up for consideration on the list. And as far as I can tell, Dreyfuss’ main contribution to the book was driving the younger Medved around, who hadn’t gotten his driver’s license yet, to seedy theaters filled with vagrants and skidrow bums looking for a quiet place to nap and use the restroom without leaving their seats.

Like with Dante, the Medved's list was not a countdown and the films are once again presented in alphabetical order. And each entry was broken down thusly: a cast and crew listing; a Critic’s Rave segment, which quotes what reviewers were saying during the film’s initial release (-- my favorite part); a plot summary; a performance review; a spotlight on the immortal dialogue; a behind the scenes look at the production; and the overall balance sheet.

And to everyone’s surprise, the compendium sold remarkably well and, judging by the positive reviews, feedback, and a massive response in the mail from fans of the book and bad films in general, a movement had started and a sequel was in order. See, in the back of The 50 Worst Films of All Time, right before the appendix, the Medveds included a ballot that could be clipped out and mailed to them, where a person could list what they felt was the worst film ever made that the authors might’ve overlooked, with a promise these nominees would be tabulated and the results published in a possible future volume. This grassroots response was overwhelming.

“After screening some 2000 cinema turkeys in preparation for his droll collection, one would expect that [Harry Medved] had plenty of reason to seek blood,” said Howard Pousner for the Atlanta Constitution (December 23, 1978). “Instead, he celebrates with delirious relish his list of movieland disasters.” And the United Press (UPI) felt the book “gives a better insight into Hollywood’s past than many more serious books because it gives the story behind the making of each film. As bad as they were they began mostly as serious projects, many with top stars … The authors don’t seem to take Hollywood seriously, which may show either the shortcomings of youth, or exceptional perception.” And Gene Siskel added for the Chicago Tribune (October 29, 1982), “The book held these awful pictures up as indicative of some basic truth about what people go to the movies for.” And it should be noted, at the time of the book's publication, a "Dog of the Week" segment was added to the syndicated TV-show, Sneak Previews, where Siskel and fellow critic Roger Ebert spotlighted something terrible they'd recently unearthed.

But not everyone was so positive in their assessment. In his critique for Films in Review magazine (January, 1979), William Everson kinda took the Medveds behind the woodshed, saying, “This moronic excuse for film history/criticism would not be worth reviewing but for interesting questions it raises on value judgments. Although designed purely as a campy exercise in perverse nostalgia, a book on the worst movies of all time could have considerable interest, and would certainly be a far more difficult book to write than one on the greatest movies. After all, relatively few movies achieve real greatness, and any author with the temerity to select them, at least has the advantage of being able to overlook -- safely -- an enormous body of routine work.

“But nobody sets out deliberately to make a BAD film,” Everson continues. “The circumstances that push films into an awfulness, often beyond belief, range from too much interference from too many quarters, money running out at a critical juncture, legal and censorship problems, miscasting, totally wrong directors or writers, and many other factors. What causes a film to go wrong is far more fascinating (and critically important) than a sarcastic write-off of the end result. If nothing else, The 50 Worst Movies Of All Time unquestionably qualifies as ‘The Worst Movie Book Of All Time’ -- and in view of the mediocrity being spewed forth these days, that in itself is a monumental achievement.”

Thus and so, love ‘em or hate ‘em, let's face it, the Medveds were kinda responsible for the birth of the ‘So Bad it's Good Movement’ when it came to film fandom. Or as Frank Moraes said in his essay, The Unfortunate Beginning of Psychotronic Film, “It’s clear that the Medved brothers had opened a niche in film criticism. The fact that they did it in a grotesque way doesn’t really matter.” And this notion was cemented further with the release of The Golden Turkey Awards, whose main reason for existence was due to over half of those mail-in ballots taking them to task for overlooking Edward D. Wood Jr.’s Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) as the worst movie ever made and for omitting things like The Creeping Terror (1964) and The Exorcist II: The Heritic (1977).

According to that Matt Patches article for The Dissolve, which traced the history of how Plan 9 became the de facto Worst Film Ever Made through Dante’s article and the Medved books -- even though it really isn’t, and I will gladly tell you why at the Old Bloggo, Bruce Akiyama, “a constant source of wisdom for the Medved’s bad movie research,” introduced Harry Medved to Plan 9. And when fellow film-buff Bennet Yellin showed him a copy of Wood’s Glen or Glenda (1953), “Harry’s mind was officially blown.” He also made the critical decision to end The Golden Turkey Awards with a kitchen-sink analysis of Wood’s film, including an extensive oral history on the making of it by interviewing all the surviving cast and crew members. (Somewhat ironically, Wood died the year the first book was published.) These interviews and leads would later serve as the basis for Rudolph Grey’s biography of Ed Wood, Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992), which in turn served as the basis for Tim Burton’s Ed Wood (1994), making everything that came before this totally worth it in my book.

Now, by this time, with all the positive press, Michael Medved eagerly added his name to the second book, which became a best-seller. All the while, the brothers became a bit of a cause célèbre on the talk show circuit, with clips in tow, leading to a bit of a dust-up on The Merv Griffin Show in December, 1978, where Bert Reynolds took the younger Medved to task, calling him a vicious hack for saying he “sang like Dean Martin with adenoids and danced like a drunk killing cockroaches” in At Long Last Love. Apparently, the first book was also delayed for nearly a year due to several threatened libel suits. But, “They were resolved pre-publication,” said Michael Medved to Abe Peek of the Chicago Sun Times (October 31, 1978). “Primarily it was because of directors who had gotten wind of the project, and the legal department at the publisher. We told them the truth is an absolute defense for libel, but they didn’t accept that.”

Then, in April of 1980, the Medveds started a barnstorming tour of the country with The World's Worst Film Festival, which featured 21 films, including Plan 9, the all midget-western, The Terror of Tiny Town, They Saved Hitler’s Brain (1968) and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (1977), which brought that film back from the dead -- and with this signal boost the film spawned three sequels and a cartoon series.

Meanwhile, Paramount Pictures acquired the film rights to The Golden Turkey Awards with the notion of cashing-in with a compilation film, which would showcase “the worst achievements in Hollywood history.” And to pull this off, the studio hired Malcom Leo and Andrew Solt -- a couple of “youthful experts at making something big out of little pieces,” according to Bob Thomas for the Associated Press (November 1, 1982). And it had to be a quick turnaround, too, as the duo was given the assignment in May with a release date set for October 29, 1982.

Solt and Leo were a couple of documentary filmmakers, who wrote and produced Heroes of Rock and Roll (1979), which was narrated by Jeff Bridges, and consisted mostly of clips and rare footage of performances stitched together, and then followed that up with This is Elvis (1981), which chronicled the life and times and the rise and fall of Elvis Presley through home movies, concert footage and a few dramatizations. But It Came from Hollywood would be slightly different and yet strangely familiar.

“You might call it ‘The other Side of That’s Entertainment,’” said Leo in that Thomas article, referencing MGM’s That’s Entertainment (1974); a highlight clip-show / ‘they sure don’t make ‘em this way anymore’ circle-jerk, which rolled out the likes of Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Bing Crosby and Debbie Reynolds as tour guides through the studio’s back catalog of musical numbers. And to serve as hosts for their lowlight clips, the studio decided to go with a group of popular comedians, Dan Akyroyd, John Candy, Gilda Radner, Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong for their masters of ceremony.

“We had to review 400 movies to find what we needed,” said Leo, who was specifically looking for a certain kind of bad. “Sure, these films are among the most ridiculous and absurd ever made. But there is good-bad and there is bad-bad. The movies we selected were good-bad -- gems of filmmaking that should be preserved.”

Solt, who was raised in South Africa, didn’t get to see many of these movies while growing up. “Even pictures like Jailhouse Rock (1957) were banned,” he said. “But I made up for it when I moved here (-- Solt was a UCLA film school graduate). I haunted the Pix Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, which played them all.” Meantime, a native of Los Angeles, and a University of California, Santa Barbara grad, Leo managed to catch most of them over the years at the El Portal Theater in North Hollywood.

“Once we had seen the films, they started to fall into subject categories,” said Solt. As to who would host which interwoven segment, according to Leo, “Their attitudes determined the subject matter for them to do. Radner wanted to do something physical, so she was a natural for the gorilla section.”

Along with the Gorillas, Radner also handled Musical Memories and Monsters; Aykroyd tackled Alien Invaders, Troubled Teenagers, and The Brain (Eek! A brain!); meanwhile, Cheech and Chong misguided us through a tour of Giants and Tiny People, the Animal Kingdom Gone Berserk and, of course, highlighting films about Getting High in the Movies; and then John Candy does a touching tribute to Ed Wood’s Plan 9, Glen or Glenda, and Bride of the Monster (1955), some wonderfully demented Previews of Coming Attractions, and a segment on the minor Technical Triumphs of these budget-strapped epics.

Both Harry and Michael Medved were listed as consultants on the film. Originally, they had hoped It Came from Hollywood would be hosted by someone with the gravitas of an Alistair Cooke or Laurence Olivier, who would deadpan their way through the host segments and let the clips fend for themselves. Instead, they got a bunch of skits and riffs written by Dana Olson -- whose only other screen credits appears to be Goin’ Berserk (1983) and The ‘Burbs (1989). Some work. Some don’t. Overall, these consultants found the comedy bits intrusive and counterproductive. Even I’ll admit trying to be funny while making fun of something that is unintentionally funny is like walking on a tightrope made out of razor-wire suspended over a minefield, and only adds another bullet to a critic’s arsenal.

“Even bad movies deserve a bit more respect than that,” said Stephen Hunter as a case-in-point for the Baltimore Sun (November, 1982). “More to the point, the voice-overs are irritating -- they interfere with our ability to enjoy some of the sublimely delirious, loony moments in movie history, and they seem self-serving, gratuitous and almost always witless.” Or as critic Desmond Ryan so eloquently put it, “It Came from Hollywood and it can go straight back.”

Other reviews were a little kinder, including Joe Baltake for the Philadelphia Daily News (November 1, 1982), who said, “It is ostensibly a compendium of the worst moments from the worst films but I question the word, ‘worst.’ The movie moments conjured up here are corny, tacky, stupid, innocent and deliriously overdone, but they aren’t really bad. Film clips that can keep me smiling -- and with tears in my eyes, tears of affection -- for 75-minutes, can’t be bad.” And the only thing Gene Siskel didn’t like about the film was that the majority of the clips weren’t properly identified, saying, “That’s not fair to an audience that you know is going to be constantly asking, ‘What’s that from?’”

Honestly, most of the printed reviews I dug up for It Came from Hollywood leaned toward the positive with the majority of the complaints lying with the film’s slapped ‘n’ dashed presentation of content. However, audiences, perhaps misled by a horrible and totally misleading promotional campaign, failed to show up and the film barely made back half of its production budget -- $2.6 million versus $5 million. Or as Variety proclaimed, “It Came from Hollywood … and it went.”

When the film bombed, the Medveds quickly distanced themselves from it AND the irony of contributing to a “bad movie” themselves. And then they kind of moved on from the whole scene altogether with the diminishing returns of their two follow up books, The Hollywood Hall of Shame (1984) -- which took a big potshot at It Came from Hollywood, and The Son of Golden Turkey Awards (1986). From there, Harry went back to school, and in 1984, Michael was able to use the notoriety generated by these books to leverage his way into being a co-host on Sneak Previews with Jeffrey Lyons after Siskel and Ebert left the show.

Which, I guess, leaves us with the burning question of, What did I think of It Came from Hollywood? And the answer to that is kinda complicated and will once more involve, like all of my kitchen sink reviews, some historical context, paragraphs of asides, personal anecdotes to nowhere, and minutia piled upon piddling details. Still with me? OK, here goes: It Came from Hollywood was a formative film for me and I love it unconditionally. The end.

No. Wait. See, as a Monster Kid myself, growing up in the 1970s in the middle of nowhere, Nebraska, unlike Dante or Harry Medved, I was deprived as there was a bit of a vacuum when it came to these kinds of films. The local Creature Features and their Fright and Shock packages were long, long gone in my neck of the woods, replaced by national programming like Saturday Night Live.

And so, for me, and a good chunk of my generation, we only experienced these films by word of mouth or by what we discovered in the Horror and Sci-Fi movie anthologies we scrounged in the library or bookmobile, including the gold mine that was the Crestwood House monster series (-- that turned into erroneous pyrite in retrospect, but still treasured), or magazine stands, where fanzines were also drying up except for Famous Monsters, which was still chugging along but was featuring more of the big-budget blockbusters like Star Wars (1977) instead of Space-Master X-7 (1958).

Thus and so, from these we gained all our genre knowledge, and from the pictures and stills found therein we tried to imagine what these monsters -- the true heroes of the picture, looked like in motion, making ginormous lists of films to someday, somehow, and by some means, see. At the time, it seemed impossible, what with the four TV-stations you could tune in with the rabbit-ears on the old family Zenith -- the three major affiliates and PBS. (Hell, we didn’t even have a color TV-set until I was four. And as the youngest of five, I was the remote control.) And every single one of them went off the air at midnight.

Back in the day, I remember combing over the back-pages of Famous Monsters, or Creepy and Eerie magazines, again and again, where offers of projectors and Super-8mm condensed versions of these films you were dying to see lurked and teased, and you hoped to someday convince your parents to let you order something. And then you would see everything. Alas, a dream that never reached fruition.

Once an eon you’d might get lucky and something relevant would show up on the CBS Late Movie -- I recall seeing the Vincent Price vehicle The Bat (1959) this way. Or perhaps on a rare weekend afternoon when one of the affiliates wouldn’t pony up for the Game of the Week and dumpster-dived into their syndication archives instead -- our NBC station had access to a bizarre package of dubbed Italian movies, which first introduced me to Mario Bava with What? -- better known as The Whip and the Body (1963), Yeti: Giant of the 20th Century (1977), and a ton of Spaghetti Westerns well off the Leone and Corbucci trail.

And so, things started to trickle in, like the time you caught Bride of Frankenstein (1935) while staying at a hotel in Omaha while your siblings all hit the pool; or the time Island of Lost Souls (1932) showed up on PBS’ Matinee at the Bijou. Theatrically, it was just as meagerly, though I did manage to see one of those Go Ape marathons that included the entire Planet of the Apes (1968) franchise; and there was that revival of Jason and the Argonauts (1963); the pure, gonzo joy of Infra-Man (1975); and a couple of kaiju-epics, Godzilla vs the Cosmic Monster / Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (1974), and Godzilla on Monster Island / Godzilla vs, Gigan (1972).

All well and good, but it wasn’t enough as the 1970s gave way to the ‘80s. And then, just when you felt on the verge of possibly growing out of it all, there it was, It Came from Hollywood -- and it was coming soon to a theater near me! Here, finally, I was able to see all those monsters, robots and aliens that I was only able to read about for so long up on the big screen, admittedly in brief clips, alive, and on the move, and it was ah-mazing, and I was hooked all over again! Hard.

Now, I know this film has taken a lot of grief over the years and been overly-maligned in some sectors for daring to befoul the reputations of the featured films or for having the temerity to lump in some bona fide classics like The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), War of the Worlds (1954), Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) and The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) amongst the bottom feeders. These are the same type of people who took a dump on Mystery Science Theater 3000: the Movie (1996) for taking potshots at This Island Earth (1955). I really have no patience for that kind of nonsense. And I sure as hell never felt films should be treated as museum pieces, to be preserved under glass, kept at arm’s length, and analyzed reverently from afar. Nope. I see movies as sandboxes that you should dive into, feet first, like a goddamned wrecking ball.

Candy’s segments seem the most sincere, including the one that officially introduced me to Ed Wood. (Haven’t been the same since.) Aykroyd’s Troubled Teen tribute was probably his best with that Broderick Crawford impersonation. Cheech and Chong are the most consistent with their segments and riffs -- “It’s the Attack of the 50ft Chicken Wing!” never fails to crack me up, and the bit with the giant paper chicken in The Weird World of LSD (1967) is worth a watch all on its own.

But I think my absolute favorite bit in the entire movie had nothing to do with monsters or aliens but Radner’s look at oddball musicals. From Kumi Mizuno’s nonsensical serenade in Mantango (1963), to the Everly Brothers other brothers, to the grand display of “synchronized” dancing during the banana ripening number in Sunny Side Up (1929), the one clip that I can never quite shake is the downright disturbing, historical context be damned, “Going to Heaven on a Mule” musical number from Wonder Bar (1934), where Al Jolson and many others perform in blackface and reinforce some glaring stereotypes. As Radner so exasperatedly quipped, ‘This, too, we owe to Hollywood.” And a hi-de-ho, indeed. Wow.

But aside from that one moment of cringe, I know I laughed through nearly all of It Came from Hollywood on my first encounter -- and the second, and the third; for this was no pillory but a celebration long due. And I remember sticking around through the credits on a hunch to see if all the films featured were listed -- they were; 90 films in 75-minutes. And once again, I vowed to see all of them.

Of course, this got a lot easier with the proliferation of home video, where, after a brief but bitter affair with a Betamax player, the first five VHS tapes I ever bought were King Kong (1933), The Thing from Another World (1951), The Blob, Earth vs the Flying Saucers (1956) and Fiend Without a Face (1958); all chopped and murky but I did not give one single shit, which paved the way for Laser Discs and DVDs and the digital streaming services of today, where a person can watch Son of Godzilla (1967), in its original aspect ratio, and in the original Japanese with subtitles, or where prestige boutique labels like Arrow, Severin, Vinegar Syndrome or, hell, even Criterion makes these things readily available to the masses. I mean, noodle all of that for a bit, and then one can really and truly appreciate what we now have and how far the practice of film fandom has advanced in my lifetime.

The 90s and the 00s also saw a return of the Horror Host with the likes of Elvira and Joe Bob Briggs -- and Svengoolie went national, and shows like Mystery Science Theater 3000, Monstervision, 100% Weird, Saturday Nightmares, and USA’s Up All Night providing showcases for the bad and the bizarre and the downright wonderful. And would any of this have been possible without the Medved’s books paving the way? Who can say for sure.

Of course, at the same time, the World Wide Web replaced fanzines for uniting the B-Movie Brethren. And whether that is a good or bad thing is a conversation for another day. And with this access, I personally got involved with this beloved nonsense in 1999 when I started publishing my first reviews on Geocities. It was a heady time, where you got to share the latest treasure you managed to unearth, saying, “You guys won’t believe what I just watched. Listen to this…” But with everything seemingly available all over now, there’s been a bit of a fundamental shift, where it’s now, “You guys won’t believe what I just saw. Here’s where you can see it.” And with that, some of the fun has been lost.

And I know this may sound weird and a tad disingenuous coming from a guy who’s entire online existence was based on how much beer it would take to make it to the end of whatever he was reviewing, but, I do love and respect these films -- some of them very dearly. And if you’ve read my reviews from the beginning, I think that affection shows through and drowns out the snark that was later phased out and abandoned. Here, I think I was lucky that Danny Peary’s Cult Movie books -- Volume I (1981), Volume 2 (1983), and Volume 3 (1988) -- got to me before the Medveds did (-- I was well aware of them, but didn’t actually read any of their books until about three years ago), along with The Phantom’s Ultimate Video Guide (1989), John Stanley’s Creature Features (1994), Michael Weldon’s Psychotronic Video Guide (1996), and Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford’s indispensable The Sleazoid Express (2002) and a ton of websites like Stomp Tokyo, Badmovies.org, and The Bad Movie Report, which helped to define what you’re reading here today.

All well and good, but the question remains. Why do we love these kinds of films? Is it the cheap sets? The bad acting, costumes and props? The continuity errors, or Swiss Cheese plots with holes big enough that you can drive a semi-truck through them? Who knows. Probably all of the above. Now, the ones I truly enjoy are where the creators -- despite budget limitations, or a general lack of any discernible talent -- manage to turn out a decent, and yes, sometimes a spectacular film. As long as it's earnest with its intentions, if not in the execution, then that’s good enough for me. I honestly don’t care how gawd-stinking awful a film is by normal standards, if some form of genuine entertainment can be wrung from it then press play already. However, let it be known that even I have my limits. Don’t get me wrong. I love the ineptitude, and the more idiotic the better. It can be terrible, hilarious -- intended or not, or even inspiring, but the one thing it can’t be is boring.

Look, what I'm trying to say is there is nothing wrong with a bad film, but everything is wrong with a boring film. There’s a difference. Trust me. And while you may consider It Came from Hollywood and the films it featured to be bad, none of them are boring. I know another early VHS purchase was It Came from Hollywood -- which made it a lot easier to write down all the films involved and put a title to a clip as I tracked them down over the years. I still have that VHS tape, too, because, sadly, odds are good the film will never make the digital leap. It almost did back in 2002. In fact, I’m pretty sure stock was ready to move to the shelves, but some last minute copyright claims officially torpedoed the release, leading Paramount to recall all of the copies. However, at last check, a VHS-rip of the film is currently streaming on several YouTube channels.

By no means the seed from which my fandom sprung, sure, but, It Came from Hollywood definitely helped in the germination process, which took an eager Monster Maniac sapling and turned him into a mighty, B-Movie lovin’ oak. And as I wrapped up this retrospective, I once more found myself going through the list of films poked and prodded along by that gaggle of comedians way back when, and ticked off the ones I’ve seen since that first encounter. I’m still working on it, as some remain stubbornly elusive even in this day and age, but I am happy to report that what once seemed impossible is now possible and the number of films I haven’t seen yet can be counted on one hand. 

Originally published on March 3, 2000, at 3B Theater. 

It Came from Hollywood (1982) Paramount Pictures / EP: Malcom Leo, Andrew Solt / P: Susan Strausberg, Jeff Stein / AP: Jim Milio, Susan Walker / D: Malcom Leo, Andrew Solt / W: Dana Olson / C: Fred Koenekamp / E: Janice Hampton, Sarah Legon, Bert Lovitt / S: Dan Aykroyd, John Candy, Gilda Radner, Cheech Marin, Tommy Chong