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It Came …and Went, crackedVariety, and the film is now all but forgotten.
(It can only be seen online, at least for the time being,via YouTube.)
Bad movies are now often celebrated unironically as earnest expressions of fringe sensibilities.
Many receive lavish 4K restorations and high-minded analytical essays.
(Elvira, Mistress of the Dark was the Ur-example of the form.)
Harry Medveds introduction to bad movies came via Los Angeles late-night host Larry Seymour Vincent.
His agent took it out and sold it immediately.
J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaums essential bookMidnight Movieshit shelves in 1983, the year afterIt Came From Hollywoods release.
I was there for it, recalls Bill Corbett, who would go on to co-hostMystery Science Theater 3000.
They were on mainstream talk shows and television shows promoting the books.
At the same time, he recalls, the possibilities for bad movie exploration were expanding.
And so, ironically enough, Hollywood called on the Medveds.
The studios idea was simple, if somewhat derivative.
Paramount also had a large library, with a lot of the films featured in the Medveds books.
What if it made theThats Entertainmentof bad movies?
They wanted us to be the research directors on this project, Harry recalls.
Michael said, Look, I dont really have time to get involved.
He wants to be a filmmaker.
I was 19 years old.
The original cut of the film, I thought, was brilliant, Harry says.
It had no narration.
It started off with monsters from outer space, you know, invading your local theater.
And then all these cheesy superheroes like Commando Cody would go off and have a go at fight them.
Paramount executives were, to put it mildly, not as taken with the picture as Harry was.
Unfortunately, they werent the only ones.
It just didnt work for the audience, Harry recalls.
The studio, of course, had a solution: People cannot understand what this movie is about.
If it is aThats Entertainmentstyle movie, what madeThats Entertainmentwork?
You got to see Liz Taylor and Gene Kelly, so lets bring out comedians.
Get them to tell people this is funny, because people didnt know that they could laugh at this.
And they said, Okay, good-bye, Jeff, Harry recalls.
These guys were guns for hire, Harry says.
Lets face it, they werent known for their love of bad movies.
It was not like this was something where, you know, it was in their blood.
The original team, we lived and breathed bad movies for a year and a half in New York.
But it was frustrating.
They added a lot of good movies to the mix, he says.
I said, You guys.
like dont put inThe Incredible Shrinking Man.
Its not a bad movie.
And theyre saying, Harry?The Incredible Shrinking Manis a good movie?
Have you seen it?
(The Incredible Shrinking Man, by the way, wasrecently addedto the Criterion Collection.)
It was basically like a bunch of stand-up comedians were bombing, says Michael.
And the fact is, the films themselves are inherently funny.
[The comedians] upstage the movies and you cannot upstageRobot Monster.
It is a classic on its own.
To add insult to injury, the studio attempted to minimize the Medveds contributions toIt Came From Hollywood.
That was in the contract that we signed, Harry says.
And we thought, okay, this will really help sell those books.
Why would I pay money?
They still were afraid of it.
The brothers reluctantly agreed (We were trying to be nice guys.
We thought it would help the movie).
(Its especially striking in Cheech & Chongs segments.
Theyre set entirely in a movie theater, where the pair quite literally talk back to the screen.)
Hollywoodcertainly didnt introduce the idea if anything, talking back started in the audience.
My first exposure to it was in the 70s, Conniff says.
Those audiences could be very vocal, and in a really funny way that added to the entertainment value.
I had forgotten or I just didnt log the fact that there was proto-riffing in it.
We just act like apes over it.
But theres a fine line when it comes to riffing.
Which I think comes across in our books I hope comes across in our books.
Yet that spirit can be hard to translate.
I do feel like we have learned over the years, Corbett says.
Dont just go with your knee-jerk complaint about the movie.
No ones forcing you to be here!
Youre here to be funny.
And no one wants to hear three old men throwing brickbats at the TV.
Conniff, for his part, delineates riffing from conventional critique.
I enjoy good film criticism.
I enjoy reading Pauline Kael and Manny Farber.
But critics should never take cues from shows likeMST3K, he says.
I think that kind of criticism, where its just snarky put-downs, is the worst kind.
Have tastes just changed?
Why do movies that used to be accepted as objectively bad now have such genuine, enthusiastic fans?
I think the ultimate critic weighs in, which is history, Conniff says.
… Theater was respected, opera was respected, and movies were the low form.
I think all of the great entertainment and art out of America began as disreputable.
And if something is disreputable, you gotta pay attention to it.
That, of course, is kind of lacking today.
One of the films Im going to be reviewing isBlack Adam.
And yeah, I dont think its a very good film.
Like, this is bad in a whole different way.
Its not a fun way!
People realize no one sets out to make a bad movie, Harry Medved says, shrugging.
But when it happens, lets celebrate and have fun with it.
You know, it makes us all feel human.
We all make mistakes!
But its kind of fun to see the demigods of Hollywood brought down to our size.
Ill just say that I never thought the bad-movie craze would get this big, he continues.
But I dont regret a thing.
Im just happy to see that people are still taking an interest in this.
